Richard had thought that it would be a long time before he ever needed to draw this ancient weapon again. As had so often happened, that time had come sooner than he expected, but in a way, it was profoundly gratifying to be joined with the sword’s magic once more, to know that it was still there, to feel it rise to his call.
With a cry of fury, holding the weapon in both hands, Richard unleashed a mighty swing. The tip of the blade whistled as it arced through the air. The sword cut an explosive swath through both the massive oak door and the stone walls to either side as if they were no more than mere gossamer. In the relatively confined space, the sound of rock and oak shattering was deafening. Chips of stone, both large and small, as well as a shower of oak splinters, rained down on everyone. The table was covered in crumbles of stone debris. One of the broken iron strap hinges skittered off down the hallway.
As large stone blocks tumbled across the black and white marble floor, the top half of the door let out a groan and then dropped heavily to the ground with a loud thud. Richard kicked over the bottom half and dove sword-first through the billowing dust into darkness.
The room was dark as pitch, with only the meager light of the reflector lamps on the walls in the outer room spilling in through the blasted opening to light a small area of the floor directly inside. It wasn’t much.
In that weak light, Richard saw the Estorian at the end of the room to the left, racing back and forth, crashing into one wall only to rebound and race toward the other, where he leaped up, landed his feet on the stone wall, then bounded back to crash a shoulder into the opposite wall. Back and forth he went at a frantic pace, screaming, howling, and shrieking the whole time. Richard could hardly believe that the rotund man could move with such speed and power.
In between the howls and smacking into walls, the battered Nolo paused briefly to throw his head back and bark like a dog. He seemed oblivious to anyone else being in the room. A mask of blood from crashing into the stone walls covered his face. A large scrap of scalp hung down, exposing bone. Blood ran in rivulets down around his ear. His once-white robes were now wet and red.
All of his wounds and broken bones didn’t seem to bother him or slow him down in the least. He was apparently being driven by some frantic internal need. With his head split open and all the blood he had lost, it was a wonder he was still conscious, much less alive.
Richard frantically peered around the room, trying to see in the dusty darkness.
“Get some light in here!” he yelled back out through the ravaged doorway at the soldiers.
As he did, other big men ran in to capture the howling consul general. Four of them tackled him. Despite their combined weight and strength, they had trouble controlling him. In his frenzy he pushed all four men back, their feet sliding on the floor. They pounced again. With a howl from Nolo, the whole lot of them tumbled to the floor. The man’s arms flailed as he struggled to get free of all the powerful men grappling with him.
Shale rushed into the chaos and squatted, squeezing herself in between the soldiers struggling to hold the howling man down. She placed her hand, her fingers spread, over his face. He shook violently beneath it. He froze abruptly, blinked, and then his eyes rolled up in his head. He finally slumped into an unconscious heap.
Men with torches finally raced into the gloomy room, providing light, but the dust swirling around in the air still drastically cut the visibility. In the illumination provided by the sputtering flames of the torches, Richard was able to see that most of the furniture in the room had been smashed. Splinters from the broken furniture lay scattered all over the floor. A table on its side and a badly misshapen wardrobe were the only things mostly intact.
Richard could see light leaking in through cracks in the outer wall where some of the limestone blocks had been displaced. Those cracks allowed slivers of daylight to show through from outside. Kahlan’s power unleashed in such a confined space had apparently buckled the blocks outward. She must have unleashed everything she had to have nearly blown out the stone walls.
Richard hunted frantically through the dusty darkness, upending the table that lay on its side, flipping over a tented rug, kicking a night table out of his way, searching. He finally spotted Kahlan in a far corner on the opposite side of the room to the right, behind the broken, overturned wardrobe. In the murky light he couldn’t tell if she was all right, or hurt, or even alive.
Richard grabbed a stubby leg of the wardrobe and heaved it back out of his way as he dove in close and knelt down in front of Kahlan. The wardrobe crashed to the ground and broke apart. The Mord-Sith rifled through the murky darkness, looking for any sign of threat.
Slumped back in the corner, Kahlan stared blankly out at nothing. Tears ran down her cheeks as she panted in pain. Men with torches came in close behind Richard to provide more light.
The left sleeve of Kahlan’s dress had been completely torn off at the top of her shoulder. There were three long, deep claw marks starting at her shoulder and running down her arm to the bend in her elbow. The muscle had been laid open down to bone. Nolo wouldn’t have been able to do that. It looked more like she had been mauled by a bear. As horrific as it looked, it at least didn’t appear to have torn open an artery.
Richard, his heart hammering, fought his rising sense of panic as he saw, then, that there was a knife, its handle covered in blood like her white dress, buried to the hilt in the upper left side of her chest, near the top of her breast. There was also a deep, slashing knife wound across the right side of her rib cage from her armpit to her abdomen. The tatters of her dress, soaked with blood, were no longer remotely white. The gash had been deeply sliced open, the knife leaving nicks in each rib it crossed. There was so much blood he couldn’t tell what other injuries she might have.
Kahlan was shaking and panting uncontrollably.
“It’s all right, Kahlan. I’m here,” he said as he gently pulled her toward him with his arm, sitting her up a little, holding her head to his shoulder while in one swift pull he yanked the knife out of her chest then quickly pressed his hand over her breast as he let his gift begin to flow into the wound to staunch the heavy flow of blood.
She let out a sob of pain.
“It’s all right. I’ve got you.”
“Did you see him?” she asked in a quavering voice as he laid her back. “Did you see him?”
“See who?” he asked as he was busy lifting parts of her torn dress aside to appraise her other wounds.
When she didn’t answer, he looked up. She was staring off at nothing.
“See who?” he asked again.
She suddenly looked back at him, gripped his shirt at his throat in her good hand, and pulled herself close. Her green eyes were wild.
“The scribbly man… did you see him?”
Richard didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and right then and there it didn’t really matter to him. No one had come out of the room, and he knew for a fact that there was no one else in there with them besides Nolo, soldiers, Mord-Sith, and Shale. She was probably delirious from loss of blood.
Shale knelt in beside Richard to help. Vika grabbed her arm to pull her back away.
Richard seized Vika’s wrist. “Leave her be,” he growled. “If not for Shale we wouldn’t have gotten here in time to save Kahlan’s life.”
Vika nodded then, realizing he was right, and released her grip on Shale. “Sorry.”
Shale quickly nodded, as if to say she understood how protective the Mord-Sith were.