Terry Goodkind - Chainfire - Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

With as little sleep as he knew Nicci and Cara had gotten over the previous three days, and in his own weakened condition, Richard recognized that they needed a dry, warm place to get some rest or they would all be in trouble. He couldn’t allow anything to slow him down.

For the whole of the afternoon and evening they had set a steady, rapid pace on their march toward Altur’Rang. After the brutal slaughter of the men, the four of them hadn’t been particularly hungry, but they knew that they had to eat if they were to have the strength for the journey, so they nibbled on dried meats and travel biscuits as they made their way through the trackless wilderness.

Richard was so exhausted he could hardly stand. Both to cut the distance and to avoid being spotted by anyone, he had guided the others through dense forest, most of it tough going and all of it well off any trails. It had been a grueling day’s travel. His head ached. His back ached. His legs ached. If they started early and kept up the strenuous pace, though, they might be able to reach Altur’Rang in one more day’s travel. After they got horses, the going would be easier as well as swifter.

He wished he didn’t need to go so far, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t spend forever searching the vast forests all around, on the off chance he would find another rock that had been disturbed so that he then might have an idea of which direction Kahlan had gone. He might never find another such rock, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe that if he kept going in that direction he would find Kahlan. Whoever took her might change direction without ever again disturbing a rock in a way that he would find it.

Their regular tracks were gone. Richard knew no way to track someone when magic had made their tracks vanish. Nicci’s gift wasn’t able to help. Wandering around aimlessly wasn’t going to solve anything. As reluctant as he was to leave the area where he had last seen Kahlan, Richard didn’t think that he had any other choice but to go for help.

He went through the motions of building the shelter without giving the work much thought. In the failing light, Cara, concerned for his well-being, kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she expected him to fall over at any moment and if he did she intended to catch him.

As he worked, Richard mulled over the remote but real possibility that Imperial Order soldiers might be searching the woods for them. At the same time he fretted about what could have killed all of Victor’s men—and might now be chasing them. He considered what other precautions he might take, and he deliberated over how he would fight whatever could have done such violence.

Through it all, he kept trying to think of where Kahlan might be. He went over everything he could remember. He brooded over whether or not she was hurt. He agonized over what he might have done wrong. He imagined that she must be filled with fear and doubt, wondering why he wasn’t coming to help her escape, why he hadn’t yet found her, and if he ever would before her captors killed her.

He struggled to banish from his mind the gnawing fear that she might already be dead.

He tried not to think about what might be done to her as a captive that could be infinitely more gruesome than a simple execution. Jagang had ample reason to want her to live a good long time; only the living could feel pain.

From the beginning, Kahlan had been there to frustrate Jagang’s ambitions and sometimes even reverse his success. The Imperial Order’s very first expeditionary force in the New World, among other things, slaughtered all the inhabitants of the great Galean city of Ebinissia. Kahlan came upon the grisly sight shortly after a troop of young Galean recruits had discovered it. In their blind rage, despite being outnumbered ten to one, those young men had been bent on the glory of vengeance and victory, on meeting upon the battlefield the soldiers who had tortured, raped, and murdered all of their loved ones.

Kahlan came across those recruits, led by Captain Bradley Ryan, just before they were about to march into a textbook battle that she realized would be their death. In their bold inexperience, they were convinced that they could make such tactics work and snatch victory, despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered.

Kahlan knew how the experienced Imperial Order soldiers fought. She knew that if she allowed those young recruits to do as they planned, they would be marching into a merciless meat grinder and all of them would die. The results of their shortsighted notions of the righteous glory of combat would be that those Imperial Order soldiers would then go on, unopposed, to other cities and continue to murder and plunder innocent people.

Kahlan took command of the young recruits and set about dissuading them of their ignorant notions of a fair fight. She brought them to fully understand that their only goal was killing the invaders. It didn’t matter how the Galeans came to stand over the corpses of those brutes, it only mattered that they did. In that undertaking of killing, there was no glory, there was simply survival. They were killing so that there could be life. Kahlan taught those recruits what they needed to know about fighting a force that greatly outnumbered them, and she shaped them into men who could accomplish the grim task.

The night before leading those young men into combat, Kahlan went alone into the enemy camp and killed their wizard along with some of the officers. The next day, those five thousand young men fought at her side, followed her instructions, learned from her, and along the way took terrible casualties, but they eventually killed every last one of the Imperial Order’s fifty-thousand-man advance force. It had been an accomplishment rarely equaled in history.

That had been the first of many blows Kahlan struck against Jagang. In answer, he sent assassins after her. They failed.

In Richard’s absence, after Nicci had taken him away to the heart of the Old World, Kahlan had gone to join Zedd and the D’Haran Empire forces. She found them dispirited and on the run after having lost a three-day battle. In Richard’s place, carrying the Sword of Truth, the Mother Confessor pulled the army back onto its feet and immediately counterattacked, surprising the enemy and bloodying them. She brought backbone and fire to the D’Haran forces. She inspired them to the challenge. Captain Ryan’s men arrived to join with her in the fight against Jagang’s invading horde. For nearly a year, Kahlan led the D’Haran Empire forces as they frustrated Jagang’s efforts to swiftly subdue the New World. She harried and harassed him without pause. She helped direct plans that resulted in Jagang’s army losing hundreds of thousands of men.

Kahlan had bled the Imperial Order army, and helped grind them to a halt outside Aydindril. In winter, she had evacuated the people of Aydindril, and had the army take them over the passes into D’Hara. The D’Haran forces then sealed off those passes and, for the time being, held the Imperial Order at bay short of their final objective of conquering D’Hara and finally bringing the New World under the brutal rule of the Fellowship of Order.

Jagang’s hatred for Kahlan was exceeded only by his hatred for Richard. Most recently, the dream walker had sent an extremely dangerous wizard named Nicholas after them. Richard and Kahlan had only narrowly escaped capture.

Richard knew that the Order relished seeing to it that captured foes suffered monstrous abuse, and there was no one, other than Richard, whom Emperor Jagang wanted to put to torture more than the Mother Confessor.

There were no lengths to which he would not go to get his hands on her. Emperor Jagang would reserve for Kahlan the most unspeakable torture.