Severed Souls (42 page)

Since they were moving so swiftly, the scouts hadn't been able to push beyond this point, but Richard had grown up in the woods, scouting trackless woods and picking passages through rugged country. He studied the lay of the land ahead, looking for possible routes and making mental notes of what to avoid.

“What do you think?” Kahlan asked. “It doesn't look promising to me. Do you see a way?”

“It may not look promising, but we have to go in this direction. We don't have a choice.” Richard pointed to where two mountains met, creating folds and rugged canyons. “We need to get down there. I can't see what's down in between all those twisting chasms, but that's the way we need to go.”

“What about that way,” Nicci asked as she pointed a little more to the left. “It looks easier without all those bends and turns in the chasms. It looks sketchy down in there. Going more to the left avoids that.”

“It only looks easy from this distance.” Richard leaned close to her and pointed, letting her sight down his arm. “See that there? If we go that way the ground drops away in sheer cliffs. They don't look that bad from here, but I can tell you they are impassable. Trying to climb down is harder than climbing up, and that's a nasty descent. I wouldn't try it, and I know what I'm doing.”

Nicci let out a frustrated sigh. “Looks like the chasms, then.”

“What about that spot?” Kahlan asked, pointing. “The land is gentler off that way.”

“It is,” Richard said, gesturing, “until you get to that scree slide. We'd never be able to climb that. It's so eroded that it wouldn't take much for it all to come down on us, or take us down with it. Follow the skirt of it with your eye and see what happens when you try to go around.”

“Oh,” Kahlan said as she squinted into the distance. “That's nasty.”

“It is. Worse, if we got down that far we'd find ourselves in a dead end and then we would have to backtrack and go around on a different route. We would lose half a day, at least, maybe more. We can't afford to make mistakes. We have to get it right the first time.”

Kahlan sighed. “So, do you see a way?”

Ricard nodded. “There is a way, but it isn't going to be easy. It's easier than wasting extra days going around, though. Our best route is to push on and get through the area down in those chasms.”

He was worried about making it to the citadel in time. He couldn't afford to make a mistake in finding a way through the wilderness ahead. In a way, he didn't care. The world seemed empty. He was in the mood to give up and wait for the blackness to take him.

But that same blackness would come for Kahlan. In his numb pain at the loss of his grandfather, the one thing that really mattered to him was Kahlan. He wanted more than anything for her to be safe. He couldn't stand the thought of losing her, too. He would do whatever it took to keep her safe and make sure she was healed.

Zedd had told him that living for those you love was the best part of living. Richard clung to that idea. He cared that Kahlan lived, and he would do whatever it took to protect her.

Richard's gaze followed a few streams down lower, mentally testing the lay of the land, looking at where they led.

“I can't believe it's this hard to get to the place,” Commander Fister said.

“Nothing is ever easy,” Richard said, Zedd's frequent words coming to mind.

“We're coming in from the wrong direction,” one of the men said. “This is the back door, you might say.”

Richard nodded his agreement. “From what Irena knows and what Ned was able to tell us before he left for the palace, there are roads and trails that are well used by traders and merchants coming and going between other cities and towns in Fajin Province and then beyond to the rest of D'Hara. The problem is, none of those roads and trails head off in this direction because there is no real civilization back where we came from—that's why the barrier was placed there in ancient times. The people back in the great war wanted to put evil in the most remote, deserted place they could find.”

Saavedra was located in a hook of a river, and Richard knew that they were headed in the right direction, so he knew that the easiest way to get to the city would be to get through the wilderness to the streams and then follow those tributaries downstream to the river. When they got close enough they would finally encounter roads and trails. Either the river or a road would lead them to Saavedra and the citadel. He knew where to go; it was getting there that was going to be the problem.

“So, do you see the way we need to go?” the commander asked.

“I do,” Richard said.

As Commander Fister and a number of the men leaned close, Richard pointed out the route, explaining the crossovers, the walls of rock they needed to follow, and the impractical, dangerous climbs and descents they needed to avoid. The scouts all nodded their agreement as Richard explained the plan.

“There are some things down there we still can't see,” one of the men said. “We might get down there and find out we can't make it through.”

Richard heaved a sigh. “I know. But I don't see any other way. Sometimes there is only one pass through mountains without going a long distance to find another. As far as I can see, that area down there is the best chance to make it through. Even so, the difficulty is likely the reason there are no trails.” He looked back at all the men studying the lay of the land. “If anyone has a better suggestion, speak up.”

All the men, eyes scanning the land below, shook their heads. They all saw the same problems he did with going any other way.

“Far as I can see,” one of the scouts said, frowning as he studied the chasms, “you're right that this is the only pass. We either get through this way or we have to spend extra days getting around those peaks over there.”

“I've scouted that direction,” another man said. “You hit the skirt of those mountains and have to keep pushing in the wrong direction, hoping to finally be able to make the turn. It would likely take an extra half a dozen days.”

“We don't have any extra days,” Nicci told the men, wanting to bring a halt to them even considering it. “We don't have any extra hours.”

Her words were sobering to everyone.

The men all knew the consequences of not making it to the citadel in time. Commander Fister had given all the men a talk, explaining exactly what was at stake. These were men devoted to protecting the Lord Rahl. They had competed all their lives to be members of the First File. They were not about to entertain the possibility of failure.

Richard was even more committed, though, because it meant Kahlan's life, and nothing meant more to him than that. But they needed to get through a lot of rugged territory, first. They weren't going to make it that day, but Richard thought it might be possible, if they were able to cover enough ground, that they would reach Saavedra the next day.

Having the cure that close, yet so far, was tormenting.

Richard checked the sky for any sign of a threat. He saw birds, but none of them looked panicked. He didn't see anything more threatening than a red-tailed hawk.

“That's it, then,” one of the scouts said. “We will have to come in through the back door to Saavedra.”

“Have you heard the old adage advising to always grow oleanders at your back door?” Nicci asked.

The man frowned. “No. Why would you want oleanders at your back door?”

“For protection,” she said. “Oleanders are poisonous. Saavedra was probably in part established where it was for a very good reason—because this place guards its back.”

The men all shared looks.

“Let's get moving,” Richard told everyone.

Some of the scouts who had discussed the best route took the lead. Richard, Kahlan, Nicci, Irena, and Samantha, along with the rest of the men, followed behind as they plunged back into the woods.

 

CHAPTER

59

By late in the afternoon, as they worked their way ever downward through the dense, forested landscape, the ground became more rugged as fractures and rifts widened and deepened into wooded chasms. It wasn't long before they found themselves descending between soaring walls of gray granite. Low, heavy, wet clouds scudded by between the mountains soaring up overhead, conspiring with the close walls to make for a confining, gloomy journey. Drizzle dampened the walls and their faces.

Some of the horizontal sections of slick stone in the walls to the sides overhung the stacked slabs of rock below, so there was no hope of climbing out. They were going to have to follow the twisting course of the chasms if they were going to find a pass through the mountains. Richard knew from having seen the crooked canyons from above that it was going to be a confusing, difficult maze to traverse.

If there was ever a natural barrier guarding the back door of a city, this was it. He just hoped it wasn't also poisonous.

As they descended deeper into the main chasm leading them into the only possibility of passage through the mountains, they found it to be surprisingly broad. From up high on the distant prominence behind them it had been hard to tell precisely how big it really was down in the canyons. Now, Richard could see that in places the walls were hundreds, and in places thousands, of feet high. In some spots the floor of the twisting gorges broadened out, with the walls closed in closer overhead, almost touching, to create a murky, sometimes subterranean landscape of thick growth down below. In spots the rock bridged the walls high overhead.

Richard spotted flocks of small birds darting under the stone bridges. The walls probably provided relatively safe nesting spots for a variety of birds. The canyons were alive with small wildlife, everything from gnats and birds in the air, to centipedes and voles on the ground. He knew that where there was such wildlife, there would be predators.

The growth at the bottom of the chasms, while similar to the forests above, was denser. The daylight down in the bottom was limited by the towering walls, so the trees grew more slowly. Ancient, monarch spruce created brief areas where the forest floor at the bottom of the chasm was open among the massive trunks, so that they could see the walls off to either side. The thick beds of brown needles made for a spongy mat to walk on.

In other places, the space between the walls narrowed and smaller hardwoods and brush held sway. The maples made for a denser forest, with tangles of young saplings crowding the ground where older trees had fallen, providing some precious light. Soldiers pushed small, slender trunks over with their boots to make it easier for those following behind. The ground was deep in places with drifted leaves and debris that had accumulated between boulders and rocks, and because of how wet it was, it smelled of rot. In a few flat areas, the water standing in long, stagnant stretches was alive with bugs atop and under the water, and snails around the edges.

The walls above them seemed to continually weep water. Long green streaks of slime grew down the walls where it looked like water almost continually seeped down the rock face, staining it black. In other spots, where the rock walls higher up tilted inward, water dripped in thin rivulets from hundreds of feet overhead, splashing on the ground, creating either bare spots on the rock floor or in other places thick wonderlands of mosses growing in shapes like fuzzy, miniature cities. In a few spots the water fell from such towering height that it mostly turned to mist before reaching the bottom.

All of that water running and falling down the walls meant that travel along the bottom of the chasms was a wet, miserable trek either through a jungle of wet undergrowth or over stretches of sloping granite ledge with sheets of water running over a surface of slime that made it extremely slippery. At times the fall of water echoed, and at other times it roared.

Richard didn't like having to travel through the chasms. He knew that it was dangerous to be in such a confined space. They could usually deviate a little if need be, but in this case, down in the canyons, they had no choice but to get through or turn back and spend days going around.

Richard knew that he and Kahlan would not live long enough to go the long way around. He knew they were running out of time.

The thing he didn't like about having to go through such a place, though, was that if they needed to escape any kind of predator that hunted the canyons, they had nowhere to run and rarely anywhere to hide or seek cover. If they were killed by a predator they would be just as dead as dying from the poison. At least the thick growth in most places would prevent the flying predators they had encountered before from easily getting in at them.

Richard shielded his eyes from the falling drizzle of water to look ahead into the various fractured slivers of passageways, divided by thin walls of rock. Some of those slim walls had collapsed, leaving jumbles of boulders and debris filling the narrow canyons. As they made their way farther in, they saw that in places the thin rock walls had disintegrated, leaving holes going back and forth between adjoining canyons.

The farther in they went, the more immense those holes became. In some areas they formed shallow caves. In other places they led a short distance through darkness to mossy rocks at the bottoms of towering cliffs in adjacent chasms on the other side.

To be able to continue on, they had to make their way up and over stacks of granite slabs littering some of the canyon floors. Some of the huge pieces of stone had been worn down and rounded over by the continual fall of water. As the granite eroded over time, it crumbled away to create gravel beds. Mosses, ferns, and small shrubs grew thick and green in the maze of passageways and tunnels. Vines clung to rocks and climbed the walls, making some look more leaf than rock.

Richard snatched Kahlan's arm just before she stepped on a green snake stretched out along folds in the moss. She let out a sigh of relief as she went around the snake. The men passed word back to be careful of it. Richard didn't know if it was poisonous or not, but he and Kahlan already had enough poison in them and Richard wasn't about to test his luck.