Page 80 of The Third Kingdom (Sword of Truth 13)

Out in the hall, Richard paused. When everyone started to talk at once, he held up his hand as he shushed them.

“Quiet. Half people are near and could hear you. We don’t want to have to fight them if we don’t have to, especially not down here.”

They instantly fell silent, many casting worried looks up and down the rocky tunnel.

Richard also needed quiet because he wanted to go within himself and feel the link to his sword’s power. He could feel that it was closer than it had been when he had been in his prison cell. As he closed his eyes and let the world around him fade into the background, it allowed him to embrace that faint inner sense.

He at last lifted his arm to point.

“That way.”

He raced down the tunnel winding its way through the pockmarked rock, at junctures of passageways taking the route where he could feel the strongest pull of the sword. He could feel himself getting closer to it all the time. He ran with a sense of urgent desperation to get his hands on it.

Along the way they encountered bones pushed to the edges of the passageway. There were were so many bones in places that they looked like debris that had been washed up in a flood. There were no large sections, such as intact spines, feet, or hands. All of the bones had been completely disjointed so that the individual small bits and pieces lay in dense mounds. All the skulls had been broken open so that the Shun-tuk could get at the brains, so that only fragments remained.

Richard, leading the silent group of soldiers and gifted, at last found the place where he felt his sword the strongest, where it felt near. He knew what it felt like to sense the sword and he could tell that it was only feet away beyond another underworld barrier. He dared not call it to hand, though. He feared that if he did, he might lose it in the void of the underworld.

He looked back for a brief moment at everyone’s tense expressions, and then he stepped through the boundary into the world of the dead.

Before the world even began to come back in around him, he already had his fingers around the hilt of the Sword of Truth. It was a huge relief to have the weapon back. He immediately slipped the baldric over his head and let the sword find its proper place at his left hip.

“Ben, get your men in here,” he called back through the opening where the green veil winked out of existence. He signaled with an urgent wave of his arms.

There were weapons—swords, axes, pikes, knives—stacked haphazardly in the room. The half people had thrown all the weapons they’d confiscated into the small chamber in the rock and covered it over with a wall of death.

The big men of the First File rushed in, all of them retrieving weapons as fast as they could, passing them back through the ranks to men outside in the corridor, crowded in close to the weapons cache. None of them bothered to try to find their own; they were just happy to get their hands on any weapon handed back to them. Richard understood the feeling. He felt that same sense of relief at having his own weapon back.

Out in the hall, as soon as they were once again armed, the crowd quickly gathered in close around him. Richard held up a hand before anyone could say anything.

“We have to get out of here,” he said as softly as possible, but loud enough so that they could all hear him. “We can talk later. Hannis Arc could be around here somewhere, along with a resurrected spirit of—”

“No, he’s not,” Samantha whispered.

Richard frowned at her. “What?”

“He left. Him and masses and masses of the Shun-tuk. There’s still a lot more left down here in these tunnels—hundreds and hundreds—but he and most of them have gone.”

Richard nodded, remembering that she had already told him that. “All right,” he said. “There are still hundreds of those flesh eaters about. For now, the important thing is that we get out of these caves before they catch us trying to escape, and then get away from here.”

Nicci ignored his urgency and placed two fingers against Richard’s forehead. “It’s worse,” she said quietly back over her shoulder to Zedd. He nodded knowingly.

“Richard, it’s important that we get you and Kahlan to the palace,” Nicci said, her face set with concern and urgency. “We have to heal you both of what you both have inside.”

Cara looked around. “Where is the Mother Confessor?”

Richard again shushed them all with a gesture. “Kahlan was unconscious,” he whispered. “I had to come alone to get you all out of here. She is undoubtedly awake by now back in Stroyza. She will be waiting for us. We’ll need to go get her before we head back to the palace. But first we need to get out of these caves and out of the third kingdom.”

“Come on,” Samantha said. “This way.”

CHAPTER

76

Without delay, the entire company raced off through the dark tunnel, following after Samantha. Holding her mother’s hand, she ran like her dress was on fire.

The tunnels were not really corridors, but rather a variety of natural openings through the rock. It was in part a cave system through hollow cavities, part natural channels created by floodwaters through the softer portions of the rock, and in part fissures in the more rugged stone.

In places the passageway ahead led them through long clefts where the rock had buckled and split. At other spots, they had to go through low passages under broad shelves of rock that were so low that all of them except Samantha had to bend at the waist so as not to hit their heads as they followed the steep ledge upward. In some places they had to climb up into pockmarked networks of holes.

After going under a series of flat shelves of stone, the openings found their way back into the cave system, which split into a confusing maze of jagged tunnels and rifts in the layers of what looked like melted stone. Some stone was sharp and jagged, while other openings they raced through had over great periods of time been rounded and smoothed by water. Many of the passageways had small streams running through them. In places they had to skirt pools of perfectly clear deep water. Other tunnels were crooked, cavernous passageways with many openings branching all throughout them.

The entire subterranean world was so riddled with holes, openings, and rifts that it felt to Richard like it all might lead to the underworld itself. The greenish veils of luminescence that floated sporadically through the caves only added to the illusion.

“Samantha, are you sure you know where you’re going?” Richard asked in a hushed voice as he followed close behind her.

“I grew up in caves,” she said. “I remember distinctive things about the rocks and openings through them.”

She seemed to think that was explanation enough. Richard supposed that maybe it was. As a woods guide he did much the same kind of thing when traveling through uncharted forests. He made mental notes of particular sights along the way so he could find his way back. She was more comfortable than he was underground, so he had to trust that this was her kind of world, and she was his guide through it.

Still, he did remember certain landmarks himself, and he wasn’t seeing them.

“This isn’t the way we came in,” he whispered urgently to her as they zigzagged among what looked like melted rock towers.

“I know,” she whispered back. “I had to find a way around all the unholy half dead.”

Richard was glad to hear that she had used her head to find a safe passage. The way she was taking them was a route that so far had been free of the Shun-tuk. But he knew that the half people would be patrolling the tunnels and could show up at any moment. Once they discovered that their prisoners were missing, all the Shun-tuk would be hunting them.

He didn’t know how much farther they had to go, but he knew he would be relieved once they finally reached the surface. He didn’t know if they would be any safer aboveground, but they certainly weren’t safe underground. If they were attacked in the caves it would be difficult to fight. They could be trapped by masses of Shun-tuk blocking their way from each end of a tunnel and then picked off one at a time.

H

e reminded himself that they now had gifted with them, and that would certainly even the odds. But he also knew from fighting half people that they didn’t fear for their lives and were unrelenting in coming after their victims.

If they had to fight off the Shun-Tuk, Richard could cut them down with his sword, but sooner or later their numbers would simply become too much. He would eventually tire and then they would have him. More troubling, though, was that he could only defend one spot, and they could come in at them from all directions.

It was much the same with the gift as with his sword, if all they faced were the half people and not the reanimated dead. The gifted, too, could kill vast numbers of an enemy, and Richard had certainly seen Zedd use wizard’s fire to take down hordes of enemy troops from the Old World, but even wizard’s fire had its limits. It had to be conjured and cast. Doing so was a great deal of effort and it quickly became tiring. If the enemy kept coming in vast numbers, getting closer all the time, then even a wizard could be overrun.

After all, they had been overrun and captured once, already.

And then there were the walking dead. The gift was of limited use against them. That was why, Richard imagined, the half people, like those in Sulachan’s time in the old war, used the dead. They were not only very effective on the front lines, they were also expendable and there was a virtually endless supply of them, so if nothing else, they could wear down any resistance.

Richard followed after Samantha as she made one twisting turn after another, following a convoluted route that only she knew back through rock riddled with passages, clefts, and a maze of intersections. She ran through the labyrinth like a rock rat, never letting go of her mother’s hand, never slowing to consider the way.

When they came to a particularly complex set of passages, Samantha stretched as she ran, looking back over the heads of some of the men to see Richard. She pointed and made a snaking gesture with her hand, indicating the turns they needed to make. Richard nodded when he saw what she meant and where they would need to go.

He grabbed Nicci’s arm and pulled her forward. “Help protect her. I want to make sure everyone else makes it through this part here and doesn’t get lost. I don’t want to have to come back in here looking for anyone who got separated.”

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