Terry Goodkind - Phantom - Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

The soldier behind him laughed. That was what he had wanted to hear.

Richard was choking on the sob welling up in his throat. He couldn’t breathe past it. Tears ran down his face along with the rain. She was the only woman he had ever loved, the one person who meant everything to him, meant more than life itself to him.

Without Kahlan there was no life, there was only existence. She was his world.

Without Kahlan life was empty.

Without him, he knew, Kahlan’s life would be just as empty.

He saw other women not far from Kahlan, all being held by soldiers, all screaming for their men. He saw them saying things much like the things Kahlan was saying, offering the same words of love, the same calls for someone to save them. The soldiers taunted the men kneeling in the mud with vile oaths.

Seeing the women in the hands of the soldiers, one of the kneeling men to Richard’s right struggled hard enough to earn himself a lightning-quick stab to the gut. It didn’t kill him, but it was enough to keep him from fighting while he was made to wait his turn. As he knelt stiff and still, his wide eyes stared down at his own pink, glistening insides slowly bulging out of the gash. The screams of the man’s wife seemed like they could have split the clouds above.

The man immediately to Richard’s left gasped his last breath, thrashing in uncoordinated movements as the soldier holding up the man’s head sawed the large knife back and forth across the victim’s exposed throat. When finished, the soldier growled with the effort of heaving the dead weight back into the open pit. Richard heard the body thud down in the bottom of the open grave atop other bodies. He could hear gurgling gasps coming from the dark hole.

“Your turn,” the soldier holding Richard said as he stepped around behind him to assume the role of executioner. The man leaned close. His breath stank of ale and sausage. “I need to finish this. I’ve a meeting with your lovely wife as soon as I’m done with you. Kahlan, isn’t it? Yes, that’s right—one of the other women confessed that your wife’s name was Kahlan. Don’t you worry, lad, I won’t give Kahlan much of a chance to grieve, reminiscing about you. I’ll have her full attention—I can promise you that. After I’ve had my satisfaction from her, others will have their turn on her.”

Richard wanted to break the man’s neck.

“Think about that as your wicked soul slides into the dark, eternal agony of the underworld, as you fall into the cold, merciless grasp of the Keeper. That’s where all your kind goes—to the justice of eternal suffering—and that’s as it should be, seeing as how we’ve all sacrificed everything to come up here to this forsaken land so we can bring divine Light and the law of the Order to all you selfish heathens. Your sinful way of life, your mere existence, offends the Creator—and it offends those of us who bow to Him.”

The man was working himself up into a righteous rage.

“Do you have any idea what I’ve sacrificed for the salvation of the souls of your people? My family went hungry, went without—sacrificed—so that they could send everything to our courageous troops. My brother and I gave ourselves over to the fight for our cause and everything we believe in. We both came north to do our duty to our emperor and our Creator. We both devoted our lives to the cause of bringing goodness to you people. We fought in countless bloody battles against those who resist our efforts on behalf of what is right and just. We saw countless of our brethren die in those battles.

“I saw the glory of our army of the Order continue on in the fight for salvation while your people sent the wicked gifted against us. Those gifted conjured evil made of magic. My brother was blinded by some of that magic. He screamed in agony as that magic bloodied his eyes and burned his lungs. The infections that swiftly befell him made his whole head swell, his sightless eyes bulge. He could only moan in agony. We left him to die alone, so that we could move on in our noble struggle, as was only right.

“Your wife and those like her will now sacrifice themselves to give us a small diversion in this miserable life as we labor in that noble struggle. It’s her small payment on a debt of gratitude for what we have given over for our fellow man in order to bring the word of the Order to those who would otherwise turn away from their duty to faith.

“Someday your sinful wife will join you there in the darkness of the underworld, but not until after we’re finished with her. Just don’t expect her to be joining you any time soon, as I expect she’ll be whoring for the brave soldiers of the Order for some time to come, what with how the men like to get their hands on a good-looking woman like her in order to take their minds off the drudgery of their honorable work. I expect she’ll be kept good and busy, since there is so much honorable work to do”—he waggled his knife before Richard’s eyes—“like this business here. With the relief us men get from her, we’ll have the strength to redouble our determination to eliminate all those who will not submit to the ways of the Order.”

It was insanity. Richard could hardly believe that there were men this irrational, this devoted to such mindless beliefs, but there were. They seemed to emerge everywhere, multiplying like maggots, devoted to destroying anything joyful and beneficial to life.

He choked back his words, his rage. Nothing angered men like this as much as reason or truth or life or goodness. Such qualities only incited such men to destroy. Because Richard knew that anything he said would only provoke the man and make it worse for Kahlan, he kept quiet. That was all he could do for her, now.

Seeing that he had not goaded Richard into an appeal, the soldier laughed again and threw a kiss toward Kahlan. “Be with you shortly, love—soon as I’m done divorcing you from your worthless husband, here.”

He was a monster, shortly to be headed for the woman Richard loved, toward a defenseless, terrified woman who was only beginning to suffer at the hands of these brutes.

Monster.

Could this be what Shota had meant?

The witch woman had once said that if Richard and Kahlan ever married and lay together, she would conceive a monster. They had always assumed that Shota had meant that if they conceived a child, then their child would be a monster because that child would have Richard’s gift and Kahlan’s Confessor power.

But maybe that was not at all the real meaning behind Shota’s foretelling.

After all, nothing Shota warned them about ever turned out the way she had made it seem, even the way she herself believed. Shota’s warnings and predictions always seemed to come about in a completely unforeseen manner, in a way that they had never even imagined, but at the same time Shota’s predictions had always turned out to be true.

Was this what Shota’s prediction had really meant? Was this the complex set of events finally reaching the climax of her prophecy? Shota had warned them emphatically not to marry or Kahlan would bear a monster child. They had married. Could this be how Shota’s prophecy unfolded? Could this have all along been the real meaning behind her warning? Were these monsters to sire a monster?

Richard was choking on his tears. His death would not be the worst of it. Kahlan would suffer the worst of it, suffer a living death at the hands of those brutes, mother their monster.

“Richard, you know I love you! That’s all that matters, Richard—that I love you!”

“Kahlan, I love you, too!”

He couldn’t think of anything more to say—anything more meaningful. He guessed that there was nothing more meaningful, nothing more important to him. Those simple words spoke a whole life’s worth of meaning, a whole universe of meaning.