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But the bodies at the bottom only served to bring into stark relief the dangers of the height.
Richard looked back down the face of the cliff from time to time to check on Kahlan and the rest of them. Each time he looked down, he couldn’t help noticing the sprawled, tangled remains of the people of Stroyza. He felt profoundly sorry for these simple people living out in the middle of the Dark Lands. They had lived successfully in a dangerous land for generation after generation. He wished he knew who had thrown them off the cliff.… Or made them jump.
These were the people who were the sentries meant to be the ones to alert everyone else of the threat from the third kingdom once the barrier was breached. They had never been able to send out that alert. As a result, they had somehow fallen victim to that threat escaping from the north.
He remembered the walking corpses that had attacked not long after Kahlan had been rescued and first taken to Stroyza by the villagers. Had he not been there with his sword, these people might very well have all died at that time. He wondered if more of those walking dead had returned to finish what they had not been able to accomplish the first time. Even if that had been the case, lookouts perched high above should have been able to simply knock any attackers off the wall. It was possible, he supposed, that anything the villagers could have thrown at such beings powered by occult magic might not have been enough.
Other than that possibility, what had happened didn’t make sense to him.
When Richard finally made it up to the top and stepped into the naturally formed, broad cavity, he could see that it was dark down all of the cavelike passageways and tunnels going deeper back into the mountain. Within short order, everyone behind him made it onto the safe ground of the cavern floor. In the natural light coming in through the broad cliff opening, the men rushed to collect torches standing in baskets to the sides so that they could light their way for a search deeper into the caves.
After Nicci used her gift to light them, the men held up the torches, allowing them to peer into dark passageways. Richard led them all a short distance into one of the broader passageways. There were a number of rooms built into natural clefts and crags along the way back into the cavern.
Many more of the rooms and the network of tunnels had been excavated from the semisoft rock. Lumps of granite, anywhere from fist-sized to pieces so enormous that there was no telling how big they might be, were embedded in the softer rock. Much of the ceiling was composed of the massive slabs of granite. Those ledges helped form a strong and stable ceiling. The caves were excavated from the amalgam of different rock under that harder stone.
When the cave village had been hollowed out from the mountain, the tunnels and passageways had to be dug mostly through the natural veins of softer rock. Richard remembered how that left a tangled network of passageways. It was easy to get lost back in those caverns.
The fronts of some of the hollowed-out rooms had mortared stone walls filling in the gaps. Some openings had simple wooden doors, while others were covered with animal skins. The rooms created a community of small homes.
Richard cupped a hand to the side of his mouth and yelled into the darkness. “Is anyone here? It’s Richard! I’ve come back!”
His voice echoed back from the darkness, and when that echo died out, the caves were dead silent. He couldn’t say that he was surprised. He thought by the number of bodies at the bottom that it looked like all the people of Stroyza were dead.
Richard turned back to the men and pointed in several places with his sword at the dwellings honeycombed throughout the warren of passages.
“Check in all the rooms. See if anyone is still alive.”
Richard suspected, because of the degree of decomposition of the bodies, that whatever or whoever had killed the people of Stroyza, the threat was probably long gone. But he kept his sword out, anyway.
“Do you sense anything alive back there?” Richard quietly asked Nicci as she came up beside him.
She gazed silently down the passageways for a moment. “It’s hard to tell. The network of caverns causes reflections that make it difficult to say for sure, but I don’t think there is anything down there for me to sense.”
Richard took a torch from one of the men, motioning for him to go retrieve another. “Maybe if we go farther in,” he told Nicci, “you will be able to tell better.”
Nicci went with him to one side, Kahlan staying close on the other side. The three Mord-Sith, each with a torch, stepped out in front to light the way and check for threat. They left the men behind, checking rooms, as Richard and the women moved deeper into the broad cavern. He could see that it would funnel them into a smaller passageway. Intersections branched off to the sides as they cautiously went deeper. The three Mord-Sith momentarily held their torches out toward the branching passageways, checking, but they saw no one.
The soldiers were conducting a more thorough search, taking the time to do a thorough check of each room. The Mord-Sith threw back the hanging over a doorway to their left to take a quick look inside, making sure everything was clear and that there was no threat. Richard saw pillows used as seating in the rooms, but he saw no people.
Behind them a thunderous roar suddenly shook the ground, nearly knocking them from their feet.
A blinding flash of light lit the walls all around.
CHAPTER
36
Richard and the five women with him spun just in time to see the intense flash send an expanding wall of dust and dirt blasting through the cave. The bodies of all the soldiers came apart in midair among the ignition of light before the remains were blown out the cave opening along with bits of rock and rolling dust.
Richard spread his arms as he scooped up the others and slammed them back against the wall out of the way of the blast. Dust and debris thundered past them on its way back into the caves.
None of the men had cried out. They were all dead before they knew what had hit them. What was left of them fell through space to the rocks below to join the rest of the human remains rotting out in the rain.
Richard took quick appraisal of the women with him. They were all panting and wide-eyed from the force of the unexpected explosion but otherwise looked unharmed. With his finger and thumb he pulled what looked like a long bloody splinter of bone from Kahlan’s hair and tossed it aside. Seeing that they were all right, he turned, sword in hand, rage thundering through him, and snatched a quick look back around the curve in the tunnel, back toward the cave entrance.
He blinked and stuck his head back out for a longer look at what he had seen, and knew then that he had been right the first time. Someone small was standing silhouetted against the light coming in the cavern opening. Richard knew instantly who it was.
Samantha, wearing a dark cloak with the hood containing her mass of dark hair, stepped farther out of an intersection to the side between Richard and where the men of the First File had been.
Now, those men were all dead. It had happened in a blink. The shape of the cavern had directed most of the force of the blast out the large opening and had taken the men with it. That had lessened the force of the blast back in the smaller passageways where Richard and the others were.
As soon as he spotted Samantha, Richard hooked an arm around Kahlan’s middle and pulled her farther back in a passageway to the side. At the same time he used his sword arm to shove back the three Mord-Sith. Nicci dove in after them just in time as a crackling bolt of lightning shot past to shatter rock off the wall farther down the tunnel. Pieces of rock and rubble tumbled and bounced down the passageway. The floor everywhere was now littered with debris. Some of it bloody.
Without pause, Nicci immediately returned the attack. A deafening, twisting ignition of both Additive and Subtractive Magic exploded into being at the ends of her outstretched hands, arcing its way across the cave toward Samantha. Richard had seen that kind of fused power cut through steel.
Rock ripped off the walls where the blinding bolt of power hit, but to Rich
ard’s surprise–and Nicci’s–Samantha merely lifted an arm, casually brushing aside the deadly lightning as if it were a petty nuisance.
“Samantha!” Richard screamed. “What are you doing!”
“What needs to be done,” she said in a strangely calm voice.
“You said you hate me, but you are killing innocent people! You’ve killed the people you grew up with! You killed the people of your own village!”
Nicci turned and rammed her fist into Richard’s chest, driving him back around a curve in a side tunnel just in time as a bolt of crackling lightning from Samantha thundered through the cave, shattering rock and filling the cave with billowing clouds of dust. The intensity of the light was blinding and left an afterglow in his vision that made it hard to see. Some of the others coughed and choked on the dust.
As destructive as it was, he knew she was only toying with him. She wouldn’t want him to die that quickly or that easily.
Richard looked back around the corner and saw Samantha walking purposefully toward them. He saw serious scratches on her skinny arms. The scratches looked like they were from cat claws.
It was then, as the light and shadow changed in the way it played across her, that Richard again saw the same faint shape of something in her face that he had seen before when she had attacked him in the field outside the citadel.
As she stepped out of the light and into a deep shadow, even though she was in partial darkness, he saw it more clearly. It was darker than the shadow, darker than black, darker than the blackest night.
Staring in astonishment as she backed through the cave along with the rest of them, Kahlan apparently saw it, too. “What is that? It looks familiar.”
When he saw the shape twist and tighten as if an extension of Samantha’s dark mood, Richard recognized it then. That same dark shape had once enveloped him, tightened around him. But this time, it had been accepted willingly.
Now he understood the burned cats and the scratches on Samantha’s arms. Cats were creatures that could sometimes see spirits in this world.
