Terry Goodkind - Phantom - Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

“I know, my love,” she said with a brief spark of a smile that flashed for an instant in her beautiful eyes. “I know.”

Richard saw a blade sweep around before his face. He instinctively backed away. The man straddling his legs was ready and jammed a knee between Richard’s shoulder blades, stopping him from falling back, then pulled his head up by his hair.

Kahlan, seeing what was happening, screamed again, flailing at the men holding her. “Don’t pay any attention to them, Richard! Just look at me! Richard! Look at me! Think about me! Think of how much I love you!”

Richard knew what she was doing.

“Remember the day we were married? I remember it now, Richard. I remember it always.”

She was trying to give him the last gift of a pleasant, loving thought.

“I remember the day you asked me to be your wife. I love you, Richard. Remember our wedding? Remember the spirit house?”

She was also trying to distract him, to keep him from thinking about what was happening. Instead, it only reminded him of Shota’s warning that if he married her she would conceive a monster.

“Touching,” the soldier behind him said. “It’s the passionate ones like her who are good in the sack, don’t you think?”

Richard wanted to rip the man’s head off, but he said nothing. The man wanted him to say something, to beg, to protest, to wail in agony. As a last act of defiance against such men, Richard denied him the satisfaction.

Kahlan cried out her love, and that she wanted him to remember the first time she had kissed him.

Despite everything, that made him smile.

At the moment, she didn’t care what was going to happen to her, she just wanted to distract him, to ease the pain and terror of his last moments of life.

His last moments.

It was all ending. It was all over. There was no more.

Life was over. His time with the woman he loved was over. There would be no more.

The world was ending.

“Richard! Richard! I love you so much! Look at me, Richard! I love you! Look at me! That’s right, look at me! You’re the only one I ever loved! Only you, Richard! Only you! That’s all that matters—that I love you. Do you love me? Tell me, please, Richard. Tell me. Tell me now.”

He felt the blade catch on the thin veneer of flesh covering his throat.

“I love you, Kahlan. You alone. Always.”

“Touching,” the soldier growled in his ear as he held the blade against Richard’s throat. “While you’re down in the pit, bleeding out, I’ll have my hands all over her. I’m going to rape your pretty little wife. You’ll be dead by then, but before you die, I want you to know exactly what I’m going to do to her, and that there’s nothing you can do to stop it, because it’s the Creator’s will being done.

“You should have long ago bowed to the ways of the Order, but instead you’ve fought to keep to your sinful ways, your selfish ways, and turned away from everything right and just. For your crimes against your fellow man you will not only die, but you will suffer for all eternity at the hands of the Keeper of the underworld. Suffer greatly.

“As you go to the dark afterlife, I want you to go there knowing that if your precious Kahlan lives, it will only be as a whore for us. If she lives long enough, and she has a boy child, he will grow up to be a great soldier of the Order, and to hate your kind. We’ll see to it that he comes here someday to spit on your grave, to spit on you and those like you who would have raised him in your wicked ways, raised him to turn away from serving his fellow man and the Creator.

“You think on that as your spirit is being sucked down into darkness. As your body grows cold, I’ll be with the nice warm body of your love, giving it to her good. I want to make sure you know that before you die.”

Richard was already dead inside. It was over, life and the world were ended. So much lost. Everything lost. For nothing but a mindless hatred of every value, of life itself, by those who chose instead to embrace the emptiness of death.

“I love you now and always, with all my heart,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You’ve made my life a joy.”

He saw Kahlan nodding that she’d heard him, and her lips mouthing her love for him.

She was so beautiful.

More than anything, he hated to see her inconsolable grief.

They stared into one another’s eyes, frozen in that instant that would be the last instant that the world existed.

Richard gasped in a cry of terror, anguish, and sudden sharp pain as he felt the blade bite flesh, felt it slice mortally deep into his throat.

It was the end of everything.

“Stop it,” Nicci growled.

Richard blinked. His mind reeled in confusion. Nicci had Shota’s wrist in an iron grip, holding her hand away from him. But Shota still had an arm around his waist.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Nicci said in a tone so dangerous he thought that surely Shota would shrink back in fear, “but you will stop it.”

Shota did not shrink back, nor did she look the least bit fearful. “I am doing what needs to be done.”

Nicci was having none of it. “Back away from him, or I will kill you where you stand.”

Cara, Agiel in hand and looking even more displeased than Nicci, stood close on the other side of the witch woman, blocking her in. Before Shota could return the threat in kind, Richard collapsed heavily to the marble bench surrounding the fountain.

He was panting, gasping, and in a state of ragged terror. In his mind’s eye he could still see Kahlan in the hands of those thugs, still feel the sharp blade slicing deep into him. His fingers lightly brushed across his throat, but there was no gaping wound, no blood. He desperately didn’t want to let go of the sight of Kahlan, but at the same time it was so horrifying a glimpse of her hopeless dread that he wanted nothing so much as to forever wipe it from his mind.

He wasn’t completely sure where he was. He wasn’t sure exactly what was happening. It wasn’t at all clear to him what was real and what wasn’t.

He wondered if he was on the cusp of death and this was some confusing death-dream before all his lifeblood drained out of him, some final delusion to torture his mind as he passed from existence. He groped, trying to feel for other bodies there with him in the pit.

While Cara stood protectively before him, shielding him from the witch woman, Nicci immediately abandoned her altercation with Shota to sit beside him. She circled an arm around his shoulders.

“Richard, are you all right?” she leaned down, looking into his eyes. “You look like you’ve seen the walking dead.”

Ignoring Cara, Shota folded her arms as she stood over them, watching Richard.

In his mind, the sound of Kahlan’s screams still echoed, the sight of her as she cried out his name still tore at his heart. It had been so long since he had seen her. To see her again so suddenly, and like that, was devastating.

“Richard, it’s all right,” Nicci said. “You’re right here, with me, with all of us.”

Richard pressed a hand to his forehead. “How long was I gone?”

Nicci’s brow twitched. “Gone?”

“I think Shota did something. How long was she . . . doing whatever she did?”

“I didn’t let her do anything—I stopped her before she could begin. The instant she touched you under your chin I stopped her. She didn’t have enough time to do anything.”

Richard could still see Kahlan in his mind’s eye, still see her screaming for him as the grimy hands of Imperial Order soldiers held her back.

He ran his trembling fingers back through his hair. “She had enough time.”

“I’m so sorry,” Nicci whispered. “I thought I stopped her soon enough.”