The Third Kingdom

It suddenly dawned on him what she was getting at. “Oh. You mean the way they cut Kahlan and were bleeding her.”

“That’s right. You said they were draining her blood and collecting it in bowls and then feeding it to Jit.”

Richard half turned to her as he marched among the towering trees, his mood darkening. “Go on.”

“They were bleeding her, Lord Rahl. They would have done that to you had you not managed to kill Jit and escape. Jit was collecting and drinking the Mother Confessor’s blood, the same as she did with all her victims.”

Richard came to a stop. “What’s your point?”

“Remember what that man back at the brook said before you killed him? He said that he wanted to drink my warm blood. Naja spoke of them drinking every drop of blood, thinking that a soul might be in the blood and trying to escape. See what I mean? They think that the soul inhabits a living person and that it can escape. So, they drink people’s blood, hoping that they will capture the soul as it tries to escape.”

“So you’re wondering if the Shun-tuk, unlike the other half people you killed back in the forest, have evolved even more to think of blood as the ‘lifeblood’ of a person, that it’s the stuff of a person’s soul, and maybe they want captives in order to bleed them in an attempt to drain out the soul and drink it in themselves.”

Samantha shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. After all, Jit was from the third kingdom, so maybe what she was doing to the Mother Confessor tells us something about what the people there are like and how they think. That man seemed to feel that same way, even if the ones I killed back in the woods were more wild about wanting to eat us.”

Richard hadn’t thought of it that way. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“My mother said that she should have realized that Jit being in the swamp was a sign that she was one of the first to have escaped from behind the north wall. She said that she should have recognized it as one of the first indications that the north wall was failing.

“What if Jit is also a good indication of the way these half people think and what they do? What if the Shun-tuk wanted captives to keep for their blood, like we keep animals for their milk. What if they have those people imprisoned in order to drain them of their blood, thinking that fresh, warm blood is the way for them to gain their soul.”

“That does make some sense,” Richard said with a sigh, “but then why would they seem to be more interested in taking the gifted captive?”

Samantha didn’t have a ready answer.

“Unless they think the blood of the gifted has some special quality,” Richard said, following along with her line of reasoning. “Of course, they might have a more sinister reason for wanting to take the gifted captive.”

“A more sinister reason? Like what?”

Richard considered it in brooding silence as he made his way past branches and boughs on his way toward the gray light out ahead. “I don’t know. It could be something more complex. The main thing, though, is that the exact reason is really a secondary consideration. What really matters the most right now is the solution, not the problem. If the Shun-tuk do have them, and if our people are alive, we have to get them out of there. That’s what matters.”

Almost as soon as he said it, the forest began to grow lighter. In a few dozen more steps they emerged from the oppressive greenery on the edge of a small ridge that provided an opening in the forest, allowing them an expansive view.

They were face-to-face with an immense, towering wall.

CHAPTER

49

Richard put his arm out, stopping Samantha from stepping too far out of the woods into the open, where he feared they might be spotted. She stood beside him, silently gazing at the sight.

From the edge of the slight ridge they had a good view through the opening in the trees. The were looking down somewhat on a wall that rose up from the forest floor, up well past the tallest trees, so that they had to turn their heads up to see the top. The wall made the towering old-growth trees look like they were nothing more than saplings.

“From seeing it through the portal, I always knew it was big,” Samantha said, “but I still never realized that it was this big. Until you’re standing here in front of it, you don’t really know its true size.”

Richard understood what she meant. Sometimes, when the scale of something was so far out of the ordinary, or so far outside your frame of reference, so much larger than anything you’d ever seen before, and viewed from so far away, it was hard to comprehend its true size. Up close, such monumental sights often seemed even more incomprehensible.

The stone wall seemed impossibly high, even to Richard, and he had seen a number of spectacular sights, both natural and man-made. It made him a bit dizzy just looking at the size of the soaring stone face of the wall.