Blood of the Fold

"Zedd! Hurry!"

When Kahlan looked down in the sudden, harsh illumination, she saw the extent of the problem, and felt a wave of nausea surge up like a hot hammer.

Zedd's calm, hazel eyes glided over the scene in quick appraisal as he knelt on the other side of Stephens.

"The wagon grazed a piling timber holding back the scree," she explained.

The trail was narrow and treacherous, and in the darkness, on the curve, they hadn't seen the piling in the snow. The timber must have been old and rotted. When the hub bumped it, the timber snapped, and the beam it had supported tumbled down, allowing a sluice of rock to come down on them.

As the rock drove the back of the wagon sideways, the iron rim of the rear wheel caught in a frozen rut beneath the snow and the spokes of the rear wheel snapped. The hub knocked Stephens from his feet and came down atop him.

Kahlan could now see in the light that one of the splintered spokes jutting from the hub canted at the end of the broken axle had impaled the young man. When they tried to hoist the wagon, it lifted him by that spoke driven at an angle up under his ribs.

"I'm sorry, Kahlan," Zedd said.

"What do you mean you're sorry? You must…"

Kahlan realized that although her hand still throbbed, the grip on it had gone slack. She looked down and saw the mask of death. He was now in the spirits' hands.

The pall of death sent a shudder through her. She knew what it was to feel the touch of death. She felt it now. She felt it every waking moment. In sleep it saturated her dreams with its numb touch. Her icy fingers reflexively brushed at her face, trying to wipe away the ever-present tingle, almost like a hair tickling her flesh, but there was never anything there to brush away. It was the teasing touch of magic, of the death spell, that she felt.

Zedd stood, letting the flame float to a torch that a man nearby was holding out, igniting it into wavering flame. While Zedd held one hand out as if in command to the wagon, he motioned the men away with his other. They cautiously took their shoulders away, but remained poised to catch the wagon if it suddenly fell again. Zedd turned his palm up and, in harmony with his arm's movement, the wagon obediently rose into the air another couple of feet.

"Pull him out," Zedd ordered in a somber tone.

The men seized Stephens by his shoulders and hauled him off the spoke. When he was out from under the axle, Zedd turned his hand over and allowed the wagon to settle to the ground.

A man fell to his knees beside Kahlan. "It's my fault," he cried in anguish. "I'm sorry. Oh, dear spirits, it's my fault."

Kahlan gripped the driver's coat and urged him to his feet. "If it's anyone's fault, then I'm to blame. I shouldn't have been trying to make distance in the dark. I should have… It's not your fault. It was an accident, that's all."

She turned away, closing her eyes, still hearing the phantoms of his screams. As was their routine, they hadn't used torches so as not to reveal their presence. There was no telling what eyes might see a force of men moving through the passes. While there was no evidence of pursuit, it was foolhardy to be overconfident. Stealth was life.

"Bury him as best you can," Kahlan told the men. There would be no digging in the frozen ground, but at least they could use the rock from the scree to cover him. His soul was with the spirits, and safe, now. His suffering was over.

Zedd asked the officers to get the trail cleared and then went with the men to find a place to lay Stephens to rest.

Amid the mounting noise and activity, Kahlan suddenly remembered Cyrilla, and climbed back into the wagon bed. Her half sister was wrapped in a heavy layer of blankets and nestled among piles of gear. Most of the rock had fallen in the back of the wagon, missing her, and the blanket had protected her from the smaller stones the pile of gear didn't stop. It was a wonder that no one had been crushed by one of the larger boulders that had crashed down in the darkness.

They had put Cyrilla in the wagon instead of the coach because she was still unconscious, and they thought that in the wagon they could lay her down so she would be more comfortable. The wagon was probably beyond repair. They would have to put her in the coach, now, but it wasn't far.

In the bottleneck in the trail, men started gathering, some squeezing past at officers' instructions and moving on into the night, while others brought out axes to cut trees and repair die support wall, while still others were told to throw the small stones and roll the larger rocks from the trail so diey could get the coach through.

Kahlan was relieved to see that Cyrilla was unhurt by any of the rocks, and relieved, too, that she was still in her near constant stupor, They didn't need Cyrilla's screams and cries of terror at the moment; there was work to be done.