Page 53 of The Third Kingdom (Sword of Truth 13)

When he died, he told himself, he would have all eternity to rest. If he wanted to live, if he wanted others to live, it was going to take effort.

As they came to the top of each new rise he wished that he could see through the dense green leaves, pine boughs, and dark shadows among the endless tree trunks to what lay beyond. He wished he could get to a vantage point so he could see how much farther, but there was no such vantage point in the endless, dark, forbidding forest.

As he walked, he glanced up at a tree, thinking that if he climbed up high, he might possibly get a view of what was ahead. But he didn’t have the energy to spare, much less the time, to go climbing trees. He supposed that he knew where he was going, and he knew that they were going in the right direction, so he simply needed to put one foot in front of another and they would eventually get there. Looking out from a high vantage point wouldn’t get them there any faster.

As the day wore on, he realized it was getting a little brighter. At first he thought the overcast might be breaking up, but then, coming over a rise, through an opening in the thick layers of limbs, he finally saw a patch of light.

He trotted toward a narrow opening in the trees and in the misty distance was rewarded with his first glimpse of the barrier. He had been impatient to get to it for days, and now, suddenly seeing it, he was stunned. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared. Samantha stood beside him, staring as well.

CHAPTER

48

Richard and Samantha stood with their backs to the dark woods, staring out into the gray light of a heavily overcast day at the enormity of the structure standing before them.

There was no way to see the ancient power invested in this wall to make it a barrier keeping evil contained. But what he could see—the wall itself—was a physical barrier of staggering proportions. It had looked big when he had seen it through the viewing port back at Stroyza, but seeing it up closer, seeing the sheer size of it, was bone-chilling.

Despite the strength and size of the physical barrier itself, and the power of spells cast by wizards with abilities Richard couldn’t entirely imagine, whatever was on the other side had still managed to escape.

From where they stood in a small clearing among a bed of cinnamon ferns and scraggly holly oak that gave them a broken view off through the pines standing guard at the edge of the forest, Richard could see that they were still some distance off to the side of where the opening would be, which was what he had wanted so as not to encounter any half people coming south through those gates from the third kingdom beyond. He wanted to remain hidden to give him an opportunity to survey the area.

“Come on,” he said to Samantha as he started out again.

He moved more quickly now that he knew for sure that they had finally reached the wall. Samantha had to trot to keep up with his long strides. Even as he put more effort into moving quickly, he still kept a wary eye on the surrounding countryside for any sign of trouble. He didn’t want to be surprised and find himself unexpectedly having to fight off a forest full of half people.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” Samantha asked, breathless from the effort of keeping up with him.

“I’m not exactly sure, yet. First, we have to get through the gates. After that we need to keep heading north until we find the land of the Shun-tuk.”

“Then what?”

Richard frowned back over his shoulder. “Then we rescue our people being held captive there.”

“How are we going to do that?”

Richard carefully danced across rocks to cross a small, slow-moving stream. “I wish I knew. We’ll have to look over the situation once we get there, then we can start to figure out a plan.”

“Maybe I can use magic to help somehow. You know, create a distraction, or something.”

“Or something,” Richard said.

At first animated now that they were close, Samantha fell to silent worry. She finally got around to the heart of her concern.

“Lord Rahl, you know the way Jit held you captive?”

Richard pushed a low pine bough aside, holding it out of the way to let her pass. “You mean the way she had us bound up in all those thorny vines?”

Samantha nodded as she ducked under the bough he held out of her way. “Well, what if they’re doing that to all the people we’re going in there to save?”

Richard’s brow drew together. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. Do you mean what will we do if they have all of them tangled up in thorn vines?”

“Not exactly.” She peeked around her mat of black hair to look over at him. “You know what they were doing to the Mother Confessor? What they were going to do to you?”

It suddenly dawned on him what she was getting at. “Oh. You mean the way they cut Kahlan and were bleeding her.”

“That’s right. You said they were draining her blood and collecting it in bowls and then feeding it to Jit.”

Richard half turned to her as he marched among the towering trees, his mood darkening. “Go on.”

“They were bleeding her, Lord Rahl. They would have done that to you had you not managed to kill Jit and escape. Jit was collecting and drinking the Mother Confessor’s blood, the same as she did with all her victims.”

Richard came to a stop. “What’s your point?”

“Remember what that man back at the brook said before you killed him? He said that he wanted to drink my warm blood. Naja spoke of them drinking every drop of blood, thinking that a soul might be in the blood and trying to escape. See what I mean? They think that the soul inhabits a living person and that it can escape. So, they drink people’s blood, hoping that they will capture the soul as it tries to escape.”

“So you’re wondering if the Shun-tuk, unlike the other half people you killed back in the forest, have evolved even more to think of blood as the ‘lifeblood’ of a person, that it’s the stuff of a person’s soul, and maybe they want captives in order to bleed them in an attempt to drain out the soul and drink it in themselves.”

Samantha shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. After all, Jit was from the third kingdom, so maybe what she was doing to the Mother Confessor tells us something about what the people there are like and how they think. That man seemed to feel that same way, even if the ones I killed back in the woods were more wild about wanting to eat us.”

Richard hadn’t thought of it that way. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“My mother said that she should have realized that Jit being in the swamp was a sign that she was one of the first to have escaped from behind the north wall. She said that she should have recognized it as one of the first indications that the north wall was failing.

“What if Jit is also a good indication of the way these half people think and what they do? What if the Shun-tuk wanted captives to keep for their blood, like we keep animals for their milk. What if they have those people imprisoned in order to drain them of their blood, thinking that fresh, warm blood is the way for them to gain their soul.”

“That does make some sense,” Richard said with a sigh, “but then why would they seem to be more interested in taking the gifted captive?”

Samantha didn’t have a ready answer.

“Unless they think the blood of the gifted has some special quality,” Richard said, following along with her line of reasoning. “Of course, they might have a more sinister reason for wanting to take the gifted captive.”

“A more sinister reason? Like what?”

R

ichard considered it in brooding silence as he made his way past branches and boughs on his way toward the gray light out ahead. “I don’t know. It could be something more complex. The main thing, though, is that the exact reason is really a secondary consideration. What really matters the most right now is the solution, not the problem. If the Shun-tuk do have them, and if our people are alive, we have to get them out of there. That’s what matters.”

Almost as soon as he said it, the forest began to grow lighter. In a few dozen more steps they emerged from the oppressive greenery on the edge of a small ridge that provided an opening in the forest, allowing them an expansive view.

They were face-to-face with an immense, towering wall.

CHAPTER

49

Richard put his arm out, stopping Samantha from stepping too far out of the woods into the open, where he feared they might be spotted. She stood beside him, silently gazing at the sight.

From the edge of the slight ridge they had a good view through the opening in the trees. The were looking down somewhat on a wall that rose up from the forest floor, up well past the tallest trees, so that they had to turn their heads up to see the top. The wall made the towering old-growth trees look like they were nothing more than saplings.

“From seeing it through the portal, I always knew it was big,” Samantha said, “but I still never realized that it was this big. Until you’re standing here in front of it, you don’t really know its true size.”

Richard understood what she meant. Sometimes, when the scale of something was so far out of the ordinary, or so far outside your frame of reference, so much larger than anything you’d ever seen before, and viewed from so far away, it was hard to comprehend its true size. Up close, such monumental sights often seemed even more incomprehensible.

The stone wall seemed impossibly high, even to Richard, and he had seen a number of spectacular sights, both natural and man-made. It made him a bit dizzy just looking at the size of the soaring stone face of the wall.

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