“Be careful,” Richard called back over his shoulder to those following behind. “The rock in this section is smooth and the drizzle makes it slippery along here. The people who lived here were familiar with the trail, but we aren’t. Pay attention to where you step and use these natural handholds along here, like I’m doing.”
In some places, where there were natural lifts of ledge, the path was wide enough to walk comfortably along. Even so, the path was still only wide enough for them to climb in single file. Some places were dangerously narrow and, even without the drizzle, quite treacherous. Fortunately, in those places there were iron bars pinned into the face of the rock so that particularly narrow spots didn’t feel so dangerous.
It might have been easier for Richard to climb the trail without having to hold his sword, but he didn’t want to put it away. Besides, he felt that he knew the trail well enough by now to manage with his sword out. Most of the men kept their swords out as well, so he kept an eye on them to make sure they were being careful. Some of them were as agile as mountain goats and had no difficulty. The people of Stroyza, using the trail all their lives, had been familiar enough with it to carry supplies up and down without much of a problem.
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.