Jagang’s royal guard strained, putting their backs into the struggle to hold back the mob to each side. An enraged emperor watched as a fierce battle broke out all around him. He made no move to retreat to safety. If anything, he looked like he wanted nothing more than to join the battle. His guards did their best to keep that battle as far away from him as possible.
Kahlan spotted Richard on the far side of the field. In the torchlight his red paint stood out like a warning that the underworld itself was about to open up and swallow them all. Behind him and the men of his team the entire hillside was in full riot. The drunken rampage, unleashed hatred, and hunger for blood ran unchecked.
Kahlan began to worry that the red paint Richard wore would mark him as a target of all the supporters of the emperor’s team. All those spectators knew very well who he was and what he had just done. He was the object of both adoration and hatred. She feared that what had started as a way to hide him would end up being the thing that made him easy to spot by those who wanted to kill him.
Taking appraisal of her half-dozen special guards in attendance and seeing that at the moment they were more wor
ried about protecting the life of the emperor than watching her, Kahlan quickly squatted down beside Jillian. Strings of blood lay across Nicci’s face. A line of welts from Jagang’s rings ran at an angle up the side of her cheek. She was dazed but seemed to be awakening.
“Nicci,” Kahlan whispered urgently as she gently lifted the woman’s shoulders and head, “are you badly hurt?”
Nicci’s blue eyes blinked, trying to make out Kahlan’s face. “What?”
“Are you hurt bad?” With a finger, Kahlan lifted a few strands of blond hair back from Nicci’s eyes. “Is anything broken?”
Nicci reached up and felt the side of her face. She moved her jaw side to side, testing how it worked.
“I think I’m all right.”
“You need to get up. I don’t think we’re going to be able to stay here for long. Richard started his war.”
Through obvious pain, Nicci smiled. She had never doubted that he would.
Kahlan stood, helping Jillian pull a still unsteady Nicci to her feet. Jillian put her arm around Nicci’s waist, helping steady her. Nicci draped an arm over the girl’s shoulders for support.
Jagang, glancing back at Kahlan, saw her helping Nicci up. He pointed at Kahlan with one hand while with the other seizing the shirt of one of the special guards. He shoved the man in Kahlan’s direction.
“Keep your eye on her,” he growled. “All of you!”
The men, the only ones there who could see her—besides Jagang and Richard—abandoned their efforts in helping to hold back the droves of brawling soldiers and scrambled to do the emperor’s bidding.
In the confusion and chaos, Jagang’s regular guards, along with a contingent of his ever-present personal bodyguards, were furiously fending off the churning, yelling, battling
throng all around them. Jagang’s guards were all big, muscular men, yet it was all they could do to try to keep the regular soldiers pushed back. Inch by inch, though, they were beginning to lose ground.
Those regular soldiers weren’t really interested in battling with Jagang’s guards, or with the emperor for that matter—they were fully occupied with fighting one another, lost to the passions of the drunken brawl—but that fight was nonetheless pressing steadily in toward the emperor.
Jagang shouted at his guards, angry that they were being too indulgent with men who clearly weren’t heeding commands. He ordered the guards to gut the men if they didn’t move back. Kahlan didn’t think that Jagang was at all worried about his safety. It was more a matter of indignation at their lack of veneration for their emperor.
The guards didn’t hesitate. Big, experienced men who had been busy pushing soldiers back switched instead to killing those who pressed in toward them. Jagang snatched up a short sword when one of his bodyguards, concerned that it might come to a matter of self-defense, offered it to him. Jagang vented his rage by hacking at men to either side. Over the roar of combat, their screams could hardly be heard.
It wasn’t so much that the nearby soldiers involved in the riot were deliberately disobeying the orders to move back—the reality was they had no real choice in the matter. They were being compressed by the weight of the hillside of men flowing downward. As the entire crowd was completely consumed in battle, the men at the bottom near the Ja’La field were caught in that downward crush and were being helplessly carried into the deadly blades of Jagang’s guards.
Kahlan glanced out at the riot on the Ja’La field. She blinked at what she saw.
Richard had a bow.
He already had an arrow nocked. He had a second arrow held at the ready in his teeth.
Jagang stood in the center of his guards, a bloody short sword gripped tightly in a fist hanging at his side as he shouted commands. He glared with black eyes at the soldiers out beyond, a great many of them belligerently drunk, as they fought and died over who had won Ja’La dh Jin. Jagang pointed with his free hand, yelling orders to his guards, directing individuals into gaps in the effort to keep the mob back.
Kahlan looked beyond and saw Richard with the bowstring drawn back to his cheek. In another blink, the arrow was away.
She held her breath as she watched the razor-sharp, steel-bladed arrow fly. Almost as fast as the first was away, another followed.
Just before the first could hit home, one of Jagang’s guards turned to urgent calls for assistance from other guards fighting back a knot of soldiers who had broken through their lines on the other side. The man dashed past in front of the emperor to help. As he ran past he took the first arrow meant for the emperor. It hit under his right arm, in the side of the chest, between the front and back plate of thick leather armor. The arrow penetrated deep enough to have reached his heart. Judging from the way the man faltered, it had.
In surprise, Jagang turned a little, taking a half a step back when the man gasped as he collapsed. That half step turned out to be enough to save the emperor’s life, because the second arrow hit Jagang in the right side of his chest. Had he not moved when the first man was hit, he would have taken the second arrow dead center in his heart.
Kahlan couldn’t believe that with such clamor, disorder, confusion, furious fighting, rage, fear, pain, and death all around, Richard could make such a shot.
At the same time she couldn’t imagine him missing.
With an arrow buried deep in his chest, Jagang staggered back. As he dropped to his knees, his guards frantically rushed to surround him and form a wall shielding him from the possibility of any more arrows finding their way in. Kahlan lost sight of the emperor behind the tight screen of bodyguards.
She used the moment of frozen shock on the faces of her special guards to slam the knife in her right hand into the right kidney of one of these guards as he watched Jagang’s fate unfolding. She thrust the blade in her left hand into the gut of a man to her left as he turned to her. She pulled the knife up, slicing him open. A third guard turned from the emperor’s struggle and charged toward her. Jillian tripped him as he rushed forward. Kahlan caught his throat with her knife as he fell past, and with one quick pull cut it open from ear to ear.
She turned and saw Richard across the field.
He had a sword.
As another guard stepped in, his hands reaching out to disarm her, Nicci slammed her knife into his back. He twisted around, crying out in shock as he reached back over his shoulder at the wound. She stabbed him twice in the chest—rapid, heavy blows. He stumbled and fell, trying to throw his arms around her to hold himself up, but couldn’t and toppled to the ground. For not being an expert in using knives, Nicci appeared to have worked it out.
A fifth man grabbed Jillian, intending to use her as a shield as he came for Kahlan. Kahlan slashed the forearm wrapped around Jillian’s neck, cutting through muscle and tendons down to bone. When he flinched with a cry of pain, Jillian swiftly pulled away from him. As he lunged at Kahlan, she used his forward momentum to impale him on the knife in her other hand. She jerked the blade upward until it hit ribs. His eyes opened wide in surprise. She stepped
aside as he fell past her, his insides spilling out when he hit the cold hard ground. In all the confusion she didn’t see the sixth special guard, but she knew there was one.
The mass of men on the slope behind Richard was continually slipping downward, flooding into the bowl of the Ja’La field. Clusters of soldiers, as they fought, swarmed out onto the flat field. Most of the men with bows had already been rolled under by the churning throng. Because many of the men with the torches had long since been plowed down as well by the battle descending on them, it was getting darker. It was becoming difficult to see.
The Ja’La field was being inundated with combatants. Men fought for their lives while others fought to take life. Yet others, drunk after a day of celebrating at Ja’La matches, fought for the sake of fighting. Men grievously injured littered the ground. Everywhere men who had been hurt screamed in pain. No one helped them.
There were soon so many men with their faces covered in red that it was becoming difficult to keep track of Richard. What only a brief time ago made him stand out now served to hide him. Only moments ago he was conspicuous; now he was a phantom among the chaos.
None of the soldiers appeared to be slowing down or holding back. They were enraged and in the mood to kill anyone and everyone. Men swinging axes took off arms, split skulls, and chopped chests open. Men with swords ran others through.
Despite how increasingly difficult it was, Kahlan kept Richard in sight as soldiers attacked him. For many, he was the object of their wrath. He was responsible for the blasphemy against the Imperial Order. He was the one who had dared to think he could defeat the emperor’s team.
He had accomplished the unthinkable. They hated him for it. They hated him for what they saw as his arrogance.
Kahlan supposed that they believed that he should have
failed—deliberately if he had to—and then everything would have been fine. Failure was a talisman for such men, a grudge they kept close. It brought out their hatred whenever someone succeeded at something, at anything. Success had to be crushed. These were the brutes of the Order, steeped in the Order’s teachings, being brutes. The beliefs of the Order, after all, needed brutes to enforce the faith.
As Richard steadily crossed the field, coming toward Kahlan, men continually attacked him. He cut them down with summary composure. He was methodical in the way he made his way across the field. Those who tried to stop him died.
“What should we do?” a frightened Jillian asked.
Kahlan glanced around. There was nowhere to escape. The Imperial Order Army was all around them. There was no route out. Kahlan, being invisible to most of them, could escape on her own, but she wasn’t about to leave Jillian and Nicci to fend for themselves among such brutes. Even if she wanted to, though, there was the matter of the collar around her neck.
“We need to stay here,” Nicci said.
Kahlan, knowing that there was no real way for them to get away, still puzzled at the woman. “Why?”
“Because Richard will have a difficult time finding us if we go far from this spot.”
Kahlan didn’t really think there was anything he could do. After all, she and Nicci both had collars around their necks. Jagang might have been hurt, but he was still conscious. If they tried to leave he would stop them with those collars—or worse. She was willing to test it, but not until she saw a worthwhile opportunity.
It was always possible that Richard would be able to finish off Jagang. Then they would have a chance—as long as Sister Ulicia or Armina didn’t show up in the meantime. Jagang was a dream walker. For all Kahlan knew, he might
have already used his control of their minds to bring them running to his aid.
Holding Jillian close, Kahlan glanced around. Nicci protected the girl from the other side. In every direction men were in a frenzy of killing.
Kahlan nodded. “For the moment we’re safer here, protected by Jagang’s guards. The way things are going, though, that may not last long.”
All around men fought on. Jagang was on his knees, in the center of his guards, clutching his chest. Some of the guards had knelt down beside him to support him in case they had to get him on his feet and fight their way out. Other men shouted urgent orders to get a Sister. Other royal guards savagely slashed at the soldiers who came within range, trying to keep the mob back. The ground all around the emperor’s observation area was becoming slick with blood and gore.
Kahlan stood transfixed, watching Richard.
Men from every side rushed in, trying to kill him. He moved among them as if he really were a phantom. In much the same way he had evaded blockers, he ducked aside when blades swung at him, sidestepped thrusts when he had to, slipping between men when they tried to wall him in. When he thrust his sword it was swift and sure and men died. He was a picture of economy of motion, never doing more than was necessary as he fought his way across the Ja’La field. All around tens of thousands of men fought in a noisy, tumultuous battle.
Richard was a point of serenity in the sea of chaos.
His sword flashed and men fell. He didn’t even bother to kill many, he simply shoved them out of his way after they had thrust or swung their swords at him. When a man charged in with a knife, Richard set his stance and with a lightning strike to the side took the attacker’s head off.
Kahlan watched spellbound.
She understood the way he used a blade.
It was completely unlike the way any of the men around them did. It was, in a way, like watching herself in the heat of battle. Even though the soldiers were taken by surprise, she often knew what Richard was going to do before he did it.
In some ways he fought differently from the way she fought, but in many ways there was much in common with the way she used a blade. He was stronger than she was, and so he used his strength when it was to his advantage, but he still had more in common with her than anyone she had ever seen.