“I have to go,” she said. “We need to make this hole big enough to pull you out.”
Richard felt too weak to answer, so he didn’t. Vika huffed as she worked her way back out of the tight hole. As soon as she was back out, the work resumed. He could hear people shouting and groaning with effort as they worked.
Richard took another drink, then had to rest again with the half-empty waterskin on his chest. It moved slowly up and down with his shallow breathing. The pull of the darkness was too great, and it gently took him again.
He was awakened by hands gripping his shirt and pulling on him. He cried out as they tugged, because his legs were trapped and it hurt when they tried to pull him. A wiry man wormed his way in under the slab beside Richard. His head was facing Richard’s feet.
“Hold on, Lord Rahl. Let me see if I can free up your legs so we can pull you out.”
He worked as quickly as he could, pulling the tightly packed rock and rubble out from around Richard’s legs. He found a shallow place to the side where he could push some of it. For some he had to wiggle his way back out, pulling larger chunks along with him. He was soon back to continue the excavation.
After working at it for a time, Richard was finally able to move his legs.
“All right,” the man said, “I think we have you clear. We’ll go easy. Let us know if you are still stuck, but we need to get you out. There’s no telling if the rest of what’s above you might shift and come down all of a sudden.”
“What’s your name?” Richard asked.
The man seemed surprised by the question. “I’m just a nobody, Lord Rahl.”
Richard smiled. “You are not a nobody. Right now, you are a very important somebody to me.”
“I am Toby, Lord Rahl,” he said in a gentle voice.
“Thank you for coming for me, Toby.”
Toby patted Richard’s shoulder as he backed out. “I’d do anything for the man what rid us of that cursed witch. Now you lie still, Lord Rahl, and let us do the work.”
The man squirmed the rest of the way back out of the shaft they had made. Once again thick fingers gripped Richard’s shirt. He felt himself beginning to move, and then they stopped pulling.
“Is everything free now, Lord Rahl?” Toby asked. “Nothing hurting when we pull?”
“I seem to be free. You can go ahead and give it another try. I’ll let you know if I’m having a problem.”
Once he was out a little farther, to the more open part of the little cave, other hands were able to reach in under his arms to help pull. Because they were on their stomachs, it was an awkward angle to pull from. They would pause and then someone would count down and say, “Pull.”
They kept repeating the coordinated tugging. Inch by inch Richard was gradually worked out of his tomb and back through a jagged tunnel of what he judged to be a jumble of unstable debris. At one point, his boot dislodged a rock and the narrow tunnel back where he had been under the slab collapsed with a roar that pushed out a cloud of dust.
That made them pull all the harder and faster. The farther they drew him out, the more hands they could get on him to help. Richard finally emerged to see dirty, grimy faces in torchlight all around him.
Berdine rushed in to give him a quick hug. Legs in red leather were all around him. He saw that it was now night. Some people had torches, while others had lanterns. The sea of faces in the flickering torchlight was an eerie, but welcome sight.
An older woman pushed the Mord-Sith back out of the way and worked herself in through the tight crowd while holding out a lantern in one hand. With bony but strong fingers, she turned his head one way to have a look, then the other.
“He needs help,” she announced back over her shoulder. “Lift him onto that litter and get him across the way and into the healing house so we can tend to him.”
People rushed to do as the old woman said, lifting him by his arms and legs just enough to slide a litter under him. Four big men lifted the litter.
Trying to be as gentle as they could, they carried him down off the sloping rubble pile and into the narrow streets. Richard bounced up and down in the litter as they trotted along, all the while the old woman urging them to hurry. Looking up, Richard could see by the torchlight that they went around corners and down narrow alleyways until they crossed the pass road that divided the town, over to the side where Richard and his group of nine hadn’t been.
They finally went through a doorway into one of the stone buildings and set him down on a raised platform.
The red leather reappeared around him; someone laid a hand on him as if to reassure themselves that he was alive. As they did, Richard’s mind went back into darkness.
27
When Richard woke, there was daylight streaming in through a small window. He was about to sit up when he realized that he didn’t have any clothes on. When he looked down, he saw that there was at least a towel covering his groin.
He sniffed the air, seeming to recognize an aroma, trying to place it. Finally, he remembered. It was the smell of an aum plant, something from back in his home of Hartland. It seemed like forever since he had smelled it. It was a difficult plant to find, but Zedd had taught him where to look for it. It usually grew in the deep shade of the forest under a nannyberry tree, which was easier to find first because of its thick crop of dark blue berries.
He reached up and pulled something wet off his head and held it out to look at it. It was a big leaf from an aum plant that had been crushed to make it pliable and conform to the contours of his head. That was what he had smelled. Aum both eased pain and, importantly, helped wounds to heal quickly.
Vika shot to her feet when she saw that he was awake.
“He’s awake,” she called out to the old woman.
The old woman turned away from what she was doing at a table against the wall and smiled down at him. “There you are. You are looking much better.”
The room with stone walls wasn’t large, but it was filled with tables, a long stone bench against one wall, and standing cabinets all across another wall.
The old woman picked up a stone bowl from one of the tables. She used the pestle in the bowl to crush and stir the contents, then tapped it on the side, removed it, and set it aside. She came close and lifted his head as she put the bowl to his mouth.
“Drink this. It will help you to clear your head.”
Richard glanced at Vika. She gave him a reassuring nod, so he drank it. It had some pungent herbs in it, but it mostly tasted of honey diluted in tea.
When he was finished, she patted his shoulder. “I’ll go get the others.”
Shortly after the woman left, the rest of the Mord-Sith rushed into the room.
“Lord Rahl!” Berdine squealed. “You look so much better!”
Richard squinted up at the faces leaning in, looking at him. “Where are my clothes?”
“Your clothes?” Cassia asked.
“Yes, my clothes.”
Nyda gestured. “They’re over there. They were positively filthy with all that stone dust and dirt, so we had to wash them.”
Richard frowned up at the faces leaning in over him. “Well, who took them off me?”
The faces all smiled.
Richard rolled his eyes.
“You were really dirty, too, from all that dirt and grime,” Berdine said. She grinned. “So we had to wash you, too.”
Richard could feel his face turning red.
The old woman rushed back in with half a dozen more old women, all of them in similar long, dark dresses with ample skirts. Richard was glad to have them interrupt the Mord-Sith.
The original woman who had given him the drink held her hand out to the others. “Lord Rahl, we are Bindamoon healers. We have all been seeing to your care. I’m Rita.”