As soon as he was at the window, Nicci conjured a ball of wizard’s fire between her palms. It lit the room with harsh yellow-orange light as it ignited into being. The sphere of liquid flame tumbled and rolled obediently between her hands, hissing and bubbling with need.
Almost as soon as she had created it, Nicci cast it out. The lethal inferno howled as it raced across the bedroom, lighting everything in blinding yellow-orange light. It hit the man with a thud that Kahlan could feel in her chest.
The liquid flame exploded against the dead man, enveloping him in a sticky, white-hot blaze. The man erupted in flames that rolled up the wall and billowed across the ceiling.
Before it could set the entire room on fire, Nicci threw yet more fists of air, but this time the man, frantically concerned with the impossible effort of putting out the flames, didn’t see it coming. The compressed wall of air hit him hard. With a whoosh of swirling flame it knocked the dead man through the window. His burning body tumbled out and fell through the night, lighting the walls of the citadel. Kahlan heard the thud when he hit the ground.
Fire was one of the few ways to stop the walking dead men. As they turned back to the other one, yet another had joined him, so there were again two in the room, stalking the three women.
Kahlan knew that Nicci couldn’t do the same thing with the other two unless she also got them near the window. If not done carefully, as she had done with the first man, wizard’s fire unleashed inside the room could easily trap them in a burning inferno. It could set the whole place on fire and kill countless soldiers as well.
The sorceress lifted her hands and recalled the power from the wizard’s fire she had unleashed. With another gesture she extinguished the burning tapestry before it was too late.
“You were lucky with that other one and knocked him out the window,” Kahlan told the sorceress. “Be careful or you will catch the bed on fire. We might be able to run, but Richard can’t.”
It would be all too easy to accidentally turn the bed into Richard’s funeral pyre. It wouldn’t take much for it to go up in flames.
Kahlan danced one way and then the other, trying to get past the growling predators. She needed to get to the sword. Either one or the other of the two dead men matched every move she made, blocking her from getting to the sword. At the same time as they blocked her, they were advancing, moving the three women back toward a corner.
Out in the hallways Kahlan could see that a full-blown battle had erupted.
Half people howled as they attacked, and screamed as they were cut. Soldiers savagely fought the flood of half-naked bodies racing up the hallway.
CHAPTER 19
When Kahlan turned toward the bed, trying to dodge one way and then the other around the closest of the two dead men, he stepped to the side each time, matching her moves to block her. Up closer to him the gagging stench of his rotting corpse was overpowering, making it hard to draw a breath. The focus of his glowing red eyes stayed locked on her.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kahlan caught sight of the red leather of a Mord-Sith coming up behind the other man. Mord-Sith were quick, but the woman’s Agiel wasn’t going to stop this threat. Kahlan hoped that when she found that out she would be quick enough not to be caught and killed like the soldier lying sprawled up against the wall.
The second man, his focus also on Kahlan, swung an arm behind to brush away the Mord-Sith as if she were a petty nuisance. As Kahlan tried but failed to get past the closest man by feigning a move to her right and then her left, she caught a glimpse of the Mord-Sith ducking as the arm of the other man swept by over her head.
When the man missed catching her with his arm, the woman in red stood and rammed what Kahlan thought must have been her Agiel into the dead man’s back.
In that instant, the red glow in his eyes extinguished.
He briefly stood as still and stiff as a corpse before toppling forward and crashing to the floor. He was suddenly as dead as he had been before occult magic had pulled him from his grave.
Kahlan saw then that the Mord-Sith wasn’t holding an Agiel as she had thought, but instead had used a knife. This, though, was no ordinary knife. She had seen a knife like this before. It was one of the knives created by the half people to stop the living dead. Even though the gloomy light made it hard to see, she knew who had one of those knives.
When the Mord-Sith turned toward the light and looked up, their eyes met. Kahlan saw what she already knew. It was Cara.
Without pause, Cara raced up behind the other roaring dead man menacing Kahlan and rammed that occult weapon into the small of his back. She withdrew the knife and slammed it in two more times in quick succession just for good measure. Kahlan could hear the thuds of Cara’s fist hitting his back as the knife in her fist stabbed all the way in.
The red glow in his eyes went dark. His whole body stiffened. As his weight shifted over on the broken ankle, he toppled to his side, his dead weight landing with a heavy thud on the lines of the Grace drawn in blood on the wooden floor.
Kahlan ran to Cara, intending to throw her arms around the woman, but stopped short instead. There was something odd, something in a way distant about her. She looked the same as Kahlan remembered her always looking. She was muscular and tall, endowed with pure, graceful femininity. Her long blond hair was done in the traditional single braid of a Mord-Sith. On the surface she didn’t look any different than she had always looked.
But there was something strange and otherworldly about Cara’s blue eyes.
She had obviously fought her way into the citadel. She was covered in blood, now, but the red leather hid it well, and besides, being covered in blood was hardly strange for a Mord-Sith. Kahlan could see horrifically wounded bodies out in the hallway lying sprawled atop one another, all bleeding from gaping wounds of one kind or another. Most had been cut down by the soldiers. Some were missing arms, or legs, or even their heads. Some, though, Cara had stopped.
Kahlan saw flashes of steel down the dimly lit hallway as the soldiers still fought half people who raced in to join the frenzy. But there were less of them now than she had seen before.
“Cara,” Kahlan said as she stepped closer. “Dear spirits, I’ve missed you.” She couldn’t hold back her tears. “You don’t know how I’ve missed you, and all that’s happened.”
Cara stared back with that strange look in her eyes. “I know.”
Kahlan lifted an arm to point, sobs suddenly choking her words. “Cara … Richard is dead.”
Without looking where Kahlan pointed, Cara only looked into her eyes. “I know.”
“I’ve tried everything…”
“I know,” Cara said, her voice finally turning to gentle compassion.
“It hurts so much to be without him.”
“I know, Mother Confessor. I carry that same pain every moment. It makes life unbearable.”
Kahlan nodded. “I miss Ben, too.”
Kahlan wanted to hug the woman. She had missed her so. She wanted to tell her the whole story, explain what had happened and what they had done to try to get Richard back. But she could say none of it. Something about the look in Cara’s blue eyes made Kahlan keep her distance. It was Cara, and yet it wasn’t.
“Cara, are you all right?”
Cara smiled then, like the old Cara that Kahlan knew so well. It was a smile of knowing, of wisdom, of confidence softened with a glimmer of childlike mischief. It was the smile of a woman who had spent her adult life seeing things that no one should ever have to see, and yet still carried a spark of joy for life that had survived in some dark, distant corner of her tortured mind.