Page 17 of The Third Kingdom (Sword of Truth 13)

Richard nodded his thanks to the man who had tried to help by stabbing the attacker through the neck. Now back on his feet, the man stood wide-eyed at all that had just happened.

Panting from the effort and repulsed by the nauseating smell, Richard covered his mouth as he turned to the group of men who had been throwing rocks to try to stop the attack.

He took his hand away from his mouth. “What happened? Why wasn’t anyone watching? Didn’t you see these men coming up to your home?”

The men blinked in surprise and confusion, still clearly startled from the unexpected attack and stupefied by the bloody consequences.

“I’m sorry, Lord Rahl,” the man with the knife said. “We do keep a watch, but I guess not a very good one. With as dark as it is, and the rain, and with the dark clothing the men were wearing, we didn’t see them coming or even realize they were here until we heard the screams. Some of us came out to see what the trouble was but by then they were among us and it was already too late. That’s when we found ourselves in the middle of a fight for our lives.”

Richard clenched his jaw with the anger of the sword raging through him. He supposed that with the darkness and rain it would have been difficult to have seen the men or hear them coming.

“If someone had done a better job of standing watch,” he said, “all they would have had to do would have been to put a boot to these men as they tried to climb into here and that would have sent them crashing down the mountain.”

With sheepish expressions their gazes sank to the ground.

“You’re right, Lord Rahl,” another man said. “But nothing like this has ever happened before. I’m afraid that we weren’t expecting such an attack.”

Richard pointed his sword out into the night. “With that attack earlier tonight that Henrik came here and told you about, you should have been alert for trouble. Nothing like that has happened, either. You should have known that something was going on and been prepared, or at least on alert.”

The men hung their heads but said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Richard said as he took a deep breath and tried to cool his anger. “I shouldn’t blame the victims.”

Some of the men nodded before moving off to help those who were down.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before, Lord Rahl,” the man with the knife said. He looked grief-stricken. “We just weren’t…” He swallowed back his heartache as his eyes wandered among the dead and injured.

With one hand, Richard gripped the man’s shoulder in sympathy. “I know. I’m sorry to sound so angry. These dead men were obviously being driven by some sort of occult conjuring. It could even be that whatever magic was animating them hid them from you so they could get up here. But you need to be on the alert and ready next time.”

The men brightened a bit at Richard’s suggestion that the attackers might have been hidden at first by magic.

The man with the knife used it to gesture toward the cavern opening. “I’ll make sure that there is a watch from now on, Lord Rahl. It won’t happen again.” His haunted gaze swept over the carnage. “I promise, we at least won’t be caught unaware again.”

Richard nodded as he turned back to the dead and injured, making sure that people who could be helped, were being helped.

He spotted an arm of one of the dead attackers nearby. The fingers were still moving, closing and opening, as if still trying to get hold of someone, still trying to attack.

Richard picked up the still-moving, desiccated arm and tossed it into the fire pit, where flames flared up as it caught fire.

As he looked around, it occurred to Richard that with so many people injured, Sammie was going to need to help them before tending to Richard and Kahlan. A number of people were dead. While a few weren’t badly hurt, some of the others had been seriously injured. They needed to be healed by a gifted person, and Sammie was the only one around.

He hoped the girl was up to the challenge. He knew that it would be difficult work even for an experienced sorceress.

As he was about to sheath his sword, he heard screaming break out farther back in the passageways.

When he heard the roar, he realized that there had been more than two invaders come to attack the village of Stroyza.

CHAPTER

17

Richard stood stock-still for an instant, appraising which direction the sounds were coming from. Once he had the direction and approximate distance fixed in his mind, he raced into a passageway, following the sound of the screams. At least a dozen men followed close on his heels.

This time the men all had their knives out instead of bringing rocks. This time they would have a better understanding of what they faced and what they would need to do. Nothing less than hacking the attacker to pieces was going to stop him.

Richard knew that he was going in the right direction because the screams were getting steadily louder. Yet as he ran through the hallways, he occasionally had to pause briefly at intersections to listen again. The tricky way that sound echoed through the passageways made it difficult to tell right away which he needed to take. He ran as fast as he could through the confining, honeycombed network of rooms and passageways, knowing that any delay meant that more people would be hurt or killed. It was frustrating to have to stop at intersections to check for the sound of cries for help so that he could be sure to go in the right direction.

As he got closer to the screams, he realized that they were coming from the direction of where he had left Kahlan.

That realization would have spurred him to run even faster, but he was already going as fast as possible, racing with wild abandon down halls and flashing through intersections without slowing.

Coming around a dark corner, he ran squa

re into a big man. He was as hard as an oak tree and barely moved when Richard crashed into him. Richard hadn’t seen him because he was dark and dried-out like the first of the two dead men he had fought. He stank of death like the others. The walking corpse was so blackened with decay that he blended right into the shadows.

As he staggered back, Richard saw that he had interrupted the invader as he was strangling a woman. As the lanterns from the men coming up from behind threw light on the attacker and his victim, Richard saw that the woman’s face was blue and her wide eyes were fixed and still. She would do no more screaming.

The attacker had both hands around the woman’s throat, holding her off the ground as he crushed her throat. Bone and dried tissue cracked and popped as his head turned. He glared at Richard with glowing red eyes as he bellowed in threat.

As Richard’s sword came down, the powerful blow severed both of the man’s arms at the crook in his elbows. The woman dropped to the ground like a sack of grain, slumping in a lifeless heap. The man roared again as he charged Richard, the stumps of arms held up, his jaws open wide, prepared to attack with his teeth since most of his arms were gone.

A swift blow cut the man’s head in half right across his open mouth. The skull shattered into fragments. Sinew and flesh crumbled under the powerful blow. Two more swings of the sword chopped the man apart. Richard saw the fingers of the disembodied arms on the floor grasping, trying to attack but unable to find or reach a victim.

Richard, still hot with rage from his sword, turned back to the men. “You need to burn all the pieces of these men to ashes. Collect it all and burn it.”

The men looked down, watching the fingers of one of the hands trying to pull its way across the floor toward Richard.

Richard crushed the still-moving hand under a boot heel, grinding the fingers to dust.

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