“Look,” she said, pointing.
Richard took the light sphere closer. He bent over at the waist to look, then straightened.
“Just bones. Did you see something?”
“I saw them move,” she said.
“Did you see what Kahlan saw?”
Shale shook her head. “I didn’t see them until she said to look.”
“Might have been a trick of the light. The light the spheres give off can be strange at times.”
Richard turned back and with the toe of a boot pushed at the bones. They collapsed inward with a hollow clacking sound. The skull toppled off the spine and rolled a short distance. Richard used his boot to push it back toward the rest of the remains. After it stopped, facedown, it slowly rolled back over, as if to look up at him.
“Whatever did that, we don’t have time to worry about it,” he said as he left the room. “We need to get to the Mord-Sith.”
Kahlan knew she had been right about the bones moving, and the way the skull had rolled back over was creepy, but she was more worried about getting to the Mord-Sith before Michec did. He had already captured Vika, so he obviously had the gifted ability to deal with Mord-Sith.
As they took a turn at an intersection and rushed onward down yet another gloomy, filthy stone corridor, Richard abruptly stopped. Kahlan noticed a room to the right. The door was closed, but Richard hadn’t stopped to look in the room.
He instead stood frozen, staring ahead at something.
“What is it?” Shale asked from behind his left shoulder.
“I thought I heard something …”
All of a sudden, Kahlan heard a roar from somewhere off down the corridor. Blinding light ignited in the distance and rushed out from around a corner.
Richard drew his sword. The sound of the steel being freed from the scabbard was drowned out by the wail of the fearsome fireball as it grew in size and speed.
Richard dropped to his left knee. Holding the sword’s hilt in his right fist, he grabbed the tip of the blade with his left hand.
“Get behind me!” he screamed at them. “Get behind me!”
As he was saying it a second time, the corridor out ahead filled with a bigger explosion of expanding, whirling fire. The yellow-orange flames boiled up as the blaze spilled over the top of itself in its reckless, onward rush. The fire completely filled the corridor as it raced toward them.
Kahlan could feel the heat given off by the inferno. Black smoke swirled in great swaths with the flames breaking through as the fire erupted and rolled toward them down the hallway.
Richard held the sword up like a shield. “Get behind!”
Kahlan crouched down behind him. She had seen Richard use the sword very effectively as a shield against conjured fire.
Shale obviously had not.
As Richard again yelled for them to get behind him, Shale charged at Kahlan, ramming a shoulder into her middle, colliding with such force that it lifted Kahlan from her feet and drove them both into the closed door to the side. Their combined weight smashed the door off his hinges. It fell out ahead of them as together they both flew through the doorway.
Rather than hitting the floor, Kahlan felt herself falling through space.
She realized as she saw the yellow-orange light through the doorway far above her that there was no floor in the room.
Kahlan had just started to scream when she hit the water.
19
Hitting the water was an icy shock that helped drive out what little air Kahlan still had in her lungs from Shale crashing into her.
Shale still had her shoulder in Kahlan’s middle with an arm around her waist as they plummeted down underwater. Shale had thought she was saving Kahlan from the blast of conjured fire. Instead she had driven them both into the unknown.
As they hit the water, Kahlan heard Shale’s head hit something hard. It made a terrible clonk of skull bone on something just as hard.
As Shale went unconscious, she lost her grip on Kahlan. Kahlan tumbled under the water, unable to get a breath, and lost track of up and down. She panicked with complete disorientation, not knowing which way was up toward the air. She thrashed at the water but, being underwater, her arms couldn’t move very fast.
She felt something slimy slide past her arm.
She was desperate to pull in a breath, but she knew that if she tried to breathe, her lungs would only fill with water and she would drown. Her throat had clamped closed with the terror of being underwater. She didn’t know which way to swim to get to the surface.
Thrashing wildly, blind, desperate for air, Kahlan thought suddenly of her two babies. Were they to die in this forsaken place? Was she to be yet another corpse left for good in this awful place? Were her two babies to die before they had a chance at life?
As her mind started going black, her arms and legs lost their power and slowly stopped their frantic thrashing. As her body went still, she finally bobbed to the surface. When the air hit her face, she gasped it in. She was horrified by what else she gasped in. Coughing, she had to spit out a mouthful of bugs. The surface was covered with floating mats of beetles. They crawled up onto her face as she struggled to keep her head above water.
As she swiped the fat bugs off her face, she saw that light came from the doorway, but it was up above her. It was too high up for her to reach for the threshold. She could feel the legs of the beetles getting tangled in her hair as it floated out on top of the water. They clung to her floating hair as if it were a raft.
Kahlan gasped and gulped air as she struggled to tread water enough to keep her head above the surface. Big, glossy, hard-backed bugs swam into her mouth. She spat them out and tilted her head back to get a breath. The surface of the water was covered with the beetles. More scrambled up on her face as soon as she swiped them off.
Overhead, she saw fire roaring past the doorway, sending flickering red, orange, and yellow light down into the dark place where she struggled to keep her head above the choppy surface of the water. She couldn’t seem to stop the beetles from crawling over her eyes. They tried to burrow into her nose.
As she got more air and was able to think more clearly, she jerked around, left, then right, looking for Shale. The raft of black bugs floated over her face on waves she stirred up. She didn’t see the sorceress anywhere. She knew that as soon as the fire above stopped, it would be pitch black.
Fearing to lose a second of the light, Kahlan upended herself and dove under the water to try to find Shale. The water was murky, so she couldn’t see far, but at least it got most of the bugs off her. With her eyes open under the water, even though the visibility was poor, she could see that the water was full of all kinds of debris. She had to push things aside as she searched.
Kahlan had to surface, gasping in air for a moment, more beetles trying to cling to her face when she came up; then she upended and returned to searching underwater. She swam down and down, thinking the sorceress might have sunk to the bottom, but she didn’t have enough air to reach the bottom and she didn’t have any idea how deep the water really was. She desperately raced up to the surface again and gasped in some more air, swiping the clinging bugs from her face before getting a big breath and then going back down.
As she pushed the underwater debris aside, she saw that some of it was the handle and hinges of the door they had broken through, slowly sinking with wood still attached.
Then, when she grasped something to get it out of her way, she suddenly realized that she had her fingers in the eye sockets of a partly decomposed skull. She pushed it away as forcefully as she could.
As she did, something long and dark slid through the water close by.