Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Although there were not very many women among the dead, Kahlan didn't see one who was fully clothed. The ones she did see were either older or pretty young. Their treatment had been bestial beyond imagining and their deaths slow.

Kahlan swallowed back the lump in her throat as she wiped her eyes.

She wanted to scream. The three Sisters didn't seem to be particularly moved by the carnage in the city. They watched down the side streets and gazed at the surrounding hills, apparently concerned about any sign of a threat.

Kahlan had never been so happy to leave a place as she was when they finally made their way out of the city and took a road leading southeast.

The road turned out not to be the escape from the outrages of the city that she thought it would be. Along the way the ditches were here and there filled with the bodies of unarmed young men and older boys, probably executed for trying to escape, resisting the idea of slavery, as lessons to the others, or simply for the sport of murder.

Kahlan felt dizzy and hot. She feared she might be sick. The way she swayed in her saddle only made her nausea worse. The stench of death and charred flesh followed them in the bright sunshine as they rode among the hills on the far side of the city. The smell was so pervasive that it felt as if it had saturated her clothes and was even coming out in her sweat.

She doubted that she would ever again sleep without nightmares.

Kahlan didn't know what the name of the city had been, but it was no more. There hadn't been a single person left alive. Anything of any value had either been destroyed or looted. From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been, she knew that many of the city's inhabitants, mostly the women, the ones of the right age, anyway, had been taken as slaves. After seeing what had happened to the women left dead in the city, Kahlan could vividly imagine what would happen to the women taken away.

The broadening plane and the hills to either side for as far as Kahlan could see had been trampled by what had to be well beyond mere hundreds of thousands of men. The grasses had not simply been flattened by countless boots, hooves, and wagon wheels, but had been ground to dust under the weight of unthinkable numbers. The sight put into perspective the magnitude of the masses that had passed through the city, and in a way was more horrifying than the ghastly scenes of death. A force of men this huge bordered on a force of nature itself, like some terrible storm that cut a swath across the face of the land, mercilessly destroying everything in its path.

Later in the day, as they approached the crest of a hill, the Sisters carefully maneuvered into a position that put the sun low at their backs so that anyone ahead would have to stare into the sun to see them. Sister Ulicia slowed and stood in her stirrups, stretching for a careful look, then signaled the rest of them to dismount. They all tied their horses to the carcass of a scraggly old pine split in two by lightning. Sister Ulicia told Kahlan to stay close behind them.

At the edge of the hill, as they crouched silently in the weedy grass, they finally caught their first glimpse of what had come through the fallen city. In the dim distance, spread across the hazy horizon, was what at first appeared to be a muddy, brown sea, but was actually the dark taint of an army of such numbers that it was beyond counting. Carried on the wind, in the quiet, late-day air, Kahlan could just make out the distant, bloodcurdling sounds of howls, women's screams, and men's raucous laughter coming from the massive mob.

The sheer weight of such multitudes would have crushed the defenses of any city. Any armed opposition would hardly have been noticed by an army as vast as this one. Men gathered in such numbers could not be halted by anything.

But as much as this army seemed to be a mass, a mob, a thing, she knew that it was wrong to think of it in those terms; this was a group of individuals. These men had not been born monsters. Each had once been a helpless babe cradled in a mother's arms. Each had once been a child with fears, hopes, and dreams. While an occasional aberrant individual could, because of a sick mind, grow up to be a remorseless killer, this many individuals had not. Each was a killer by conviction to a cause, a killer by choice, all united under a banner of perverse beliefs that gave sanction to their savagery.

These were all individuals who when confronted with the choice had willfully cast away the inherent nobility of life, and chose instead to be servants of death.