Severed Souls (60 page)

He had traded his life for hers, so that she might live.

In so doing he had also been able to draw all the demons with him into the dark eternity below. They could no longer shadow her in death. When it was her time, she would rest forever in the Light.

Even as he felt his own spirit become insubstantial as it faded away into an eternity of darkness, he felt joy.

It had been worth it to him.

Kahlan would live.

 

CHAPTER

87

Kahlan gasped as she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. She desperately gasped again, trying to get enough air.

Nicci cried out, jumping back as if she had seen a ghost.

Kahlan was only dimly aware of the warm colors of the strange room, the rust-colored carpeting, the heavy, blue-green fabric draped overhead and down around the bedposts. Almost her entire focus was on urgently drawing life and air into her lungs.

On desperately drawing her severed soul back into her worldly self.

None of it really made any sense. Everything was a jumble. She couldn't quite put all the images and events together into a coherent concept.

“Kahlan!” Nicci cried out as she rushed in close to take up Kahlan's hand. “You're alive!”

Kahlan looked down at her own hand in Nicci's. It did not look to her the way she thought it should look. It didn't look like it belonged to her, or like it could possibly be hers.

It should be light, luminescent.

It should be without form. It should be insubstantial.

But this was substantial. It had form. It was not made of light. It was flesh and bone. She could feel blood pumping through her, she could feel life coursing through her, she could feel weight, touch. She could feel herself whole again.

She still gasped for air, still struggled to get enough, to catch her breath, but she was beginning to feel like she was finally getting it under control.

“Where am I?” she asked, gulping for air.

Nicci was crying for some reason. “In one of the bedrooms in the citadel.”

“No, I mean where am I?”

Nicci frowned through her tears. “I don't understand.”

“Is this … death? It's all wrong. It doesn't make sense. Something isn't right. Where am I?”

“You died,” Nicci said through her tears. “You were murdered. But you have both life and death in you, and that life sustained you for a bit while you were in the underworld.

“But now you are back, Kahlan. You're alive. Dear spirits, you're alive.”

Kahlan felt euphoric. She had been murdered, but now she was alive. She understood what it meant that she was going to live. Life, wonderful life, wasn't over. She couldn't stop smiling as she looked around. She was going to live.

“Where's Richard?”

Nicci's face went ashen.

Kahlan followed the woman's stricken gaze and saw that someone lay beside her.

It was Richard.

Her heart jumped with a flash of joy at seeing him.

But as soon as she saw him, she knew that something was terribly wrong.

He was too still.

He wasn't breathing.

He stared up at nothing with dead eyes.

Kahlan screamed when she realized the awful truth.

The instantaneous joy she had felt at seeing him, turned to horror.

She fell on him, throwing an arm over his chest, over his sword's hilt clutched in his fists resting over his heart.

“No! Dear spirits, no! Don't bring me back to this! Please, don't do this to me!”

Nicci rushed to draw Kahlan back, pulling her arms from him, turning her away from Richard to take her up in her arms.

“What's happening?” Kahlan wept against Nicci's shoulder.

Nicci swallowed back her own sobs. “I'm so sorry, Kahlan. Richard gave up his life to go after you, to bring you back to life. He has only been gone a moment.”

Kahlan looked over at the horrifyingly still body of the man she loved, her everything. “But why isn't he here? If I was able to return because I still had that third kingdom spark of life in me, then why didn't he…”

She remembered, then.

It all flooded back in like a terrible, dark, profoundly troubling dream seeping back into your memory after you woke, a dream that left a sickening feeling behind in you that you couldn't escape no matter how hard you tried.

“What?” Nicci asked, seeing the look on Kahlan's face. “Do you remember?”

Kahlan nodded. “Richard's spirit found me. In all that darkness, in all that eternity of nothing, Richard found me. I was lost in darkness and yet he found me.”

“Then what?” Nicci asked when Kahlan fell silent, staring off into the nightmare.

“Then he pulled the dark ones off me, drawing them away to chase after him, instead. I tried to stop him—I didn't want him to do that to himself—but he was stronger and tore them away from me. He somehow pushed me back into the glowing lines of the Grace. I had no control. I wanted to stay with him, but I couldn't. Those glowing lines pulled me back. I don't know how.”

“Because you still had life in you,” Nicci said. “The Grace was healing itself, putting you back to where you belonged on that line of the gift coming from Creation.”

Kahlan gazed at Nicci in desperation. “Then why didn't it do the same for Richard? Why didn't he return with me?”

“He couldn't. He went there to save you from Sulachan's dark demons, and he did. He did what only Richard could do. He pushed you back toward life. But now, there is no one to save him, no one to help him get back to the light, to his lifeline.”

Kahlan looked over at him lying next to where she had lain. He had his sword clutched in his dead hands. His eyes no longer saw the world of life. Now, he was lost in a world of darkness.

To see Richard so still, without life in him, was beyond any kind of agony she had ever known.

“How did he die?” Her own voice sounded like someone else asking the unimaginable.

She looked back at Nicci when she heard the sorceress softly sobbing.

“Nicci, how did he die? What happened?”

She finally looked up with torment in her blue eyes.

“He asked me to stop his heart.”

Kahlan's eyes widened. “You killed Richard?”

Nicci nodded, but couldn't find the words as she wept with the horror at what she had done. It was a torture she would always have to bear.

“Nicci, how could you kill Richard? How could you possibly do such a thing? You, of all people. After all he has done for you, how could you have done such a thing to him?”

Nicci sniffled to get herself under control so that she could explain.

“Because not to have done so, not to have let him have his deepest wish to go after you to try to save you, would have been worse. It would have been saving his life but killing his soul.”

It was obvious what such a burden was doing to the woman. She looked ready to end her own life.

Kahlan reached out and cupped Nicci's face. “Dear spirits, I understand. I'm so sorry, Nicci, that it had to be you to do such a thing. You, of all people.”

“I'm so sorry, Kahlan,” Nicci wept. “I'm so sorry.”

A spark of an idea, a spark of hope, came to her, then.

“Nicci, you stopped his heart. Can't you start it again? You said you did it only a moment ago. Can't you start his heart and let life come back into him, the way it came back into me?”

“No.”

That single word had a world of finality to it.

Kahlan touched her chest where she remembered the knife slamming into her. She remembered the pain, the helpless terror.

“But I was stabbed through my heart. How is it working now? I don't understand. Why can't you do that for him?”

“Richard had me heal the damage to you before he went … But I couldn't bring back your life, and I can't bring back his. I don't have the power. Your heart started spontaneously when your soul returned, when Richard sent you back. Even if I could start his heart beating again, there is no soul there, nothing to keep it going. I can't pull his soul back from the world of the dead.”

Tears ran down Kahlan's face as she stared at Richard lying there still as stone. She had fought countless battles, seen death more times than she cared to contemplate. She recognized that terrible stillness that existed only in death, when, after the last breath of life had faded away, the soul had left the body to journey beyond the veil.

It was a kind of stillness that was beyond redemption.

Richard was gone. It didn't seem like it could be real, and yet, she knew it was.

Kahlan lay down against Richard's dead body as she gave in to the agony and lost control.

All she could think was that he had come for her, traded places with her in death, and now there was no one to save him.

 

CHAPTER

88

Even as she wept against Richard's body, the words kept echoing around in her mind.
No one to save him.

Kahlan sat up suddenly. She sucked back the sobs and wiped the tears back from her face as she scooted to the edge of the bed and hopped down onto the floor.

“Where are Cassia, Laurin, and Vale?”

Nicci gestured. “Standing watch outside the doors.”

Kahlan raced to the doors and flung them open. The three Mord-Sith turned and gasped when they saw her.

“Mother Confessor!” Cassia cried. “How—I mean—I don't—”

“Richard traded places with me in the world of the dead so he could send me back,” she said in a rush.

Their eyes widened, stricken with horror. “Lord Rahl is dead?” Vale asked in a shaky whisper.

“I'll explain it later. Listen to me. Cassia, go get Commander Fister.”

She pointed to a hallway branching off not far down the corridor. “He is waiting right down there, not far but out of the way, along with a number of the men.”

“Good. Tell him to bring a few dozen men. At least half of them archers. Laurin, Vale, you two go down in the dungeon and get Dreier. That collar he is wearing keeps his powers contained, so you will be able to handle him.”

Although shocked to see her alive and at a loss to understand what she could be thinking, they nodded earnestly.

“What do you want me to do?” Cassia asked. “I mean, after I give the commander your instructions?”

“I want you to go get Mohler and bring him back here. We need his keys.”

They looked confused. Or maybe it was just that they thought she might be a ghost, or a good spirit.

“Go! Hurry!” Kahlan said. “If we are to have any chance of saving Richard's life, we have to hurry!”

Cassia blinked. “You mean, there is a chance to save his life?”

“Yes!”

All three turned and raced away to do as they had been asked.

Kahlan rushed back inside. She thought there was a chance. She had to believe that there was. She forced her grief aside so that she could act. Now was not the time to grieve. Richard would tell her to think of the solution.

“Dreier has abilities we can't even imagine,” she told Nicci.

Nicci turned away from staring at Richard's lifeless corpse stretched out on the bed. “What of it?”

“What if he could bring life back into Richard?”

Nicci wiped back her tears as she frowned. “Bring back life? What are you talking about? What do you mean, bring life back into him? You can't do such a thing to—”

She closed her mouth. She looked like she had been about to say “to the dead.” She didn't want to refer to Richard that way.

“Sulachan and Hannis Arc can,” Kahlan said. “Even those half-people soul trackers could wake the dead, remember?”

A horrified look twisted Nicci's face. “You want to … what? Have Ludwig Dreier turn Richard into one of those walking dead? You want the man to use his power to reanimate Richard's dead body? Kahlan, you can't, you wouldn't. He wouldn't really be alive. He would just be another of those monstrous corpses that moves, but he wouldn't be alive. It wouldn't be Richard.

“Kahlan, Richard is gone. His life force, his spirit, his soul has left him and gone beyond the veil.”

Kahlan paced for a moment, thinking, refusing to allow herself to give up. “Nicci, I'm just trying to think of how to do what he did.”

“What he did? What do you mean?”

“Richard had you heal my body—the wound and my heart—so that my body would be ready for my spirit to return.”

Nicci was frowning at her. “So you are suggesting that we get Dreier to make his body alive again, like some kind of mutant half person without a soul?”

Kahlan paced to the window and back along the thick, rust-colored carpet. “No—I don't know. I'm just trying to think of a way to help him. We have to help him.”

Nicci cocked her head. “Help him … what?”

“Well, you remember when he saw those people who snuck up on him—back right before all those half-people spirit trackers attacked us.”

“Yes, I remember. But they weren't there. They vanished, somehow.”

Kahlan nodded. “Richard said that the souls of the half people Sulachan created were ripped from them, and also that in order to animate the dead, part of that process involved ripping the dead person's spirit from the underworld—disconnecting them from where they belonged. Those spirits were lost, they were severed souls.”

Nicci folded her arms, frowning as she tried to follow what Kahlan was getting at. “All right.…”

“What did Richard say they said to him? ‘Bring us our dead.' He said that they expected him to reunite them with their dead bodies.”

Nicci rubbed her eyes for a moment. “You mean, you think that maybe Richard's spirit could be reunited with his dead body? How?”

Kahlan lifted her arms in a gesture of frustration. “I don't know, Nicci. All I'm saying is that if there is any chance for Richard to ever return, it has to be soon, and he has to have his body ready for his soul to return to.”