CHAPTER 19

      Commander Fister’s brows drew together as he put an elbow on his bent knee and leaned closer.

      “What?”

      “I’m the bait.”

      “Well, yes, we know that they want you. But we’re holding most of them back. Our lines will hold.”

      “I don’t want them to hold.”

      The man was confused, frustrated, but most of all alarmed by what he was hearing. “Lord Rahl, I think you had better let Samantha, here, heal you as best she can, let your head clear, and then we can talk. Right now I need to get back to my men.”

      As the man started to stand to rejoin the battle, Richard lifted his sword a few inches from the scabbard. Commander Fister could not help but notice. He paused. Richard didn’t look to have the strength to pull it the rest of the way. He sank back a little as he looked up at Kahlan.

      “Help me draw it.”

      Kahlan was not liking the sounds of his plan and she hadn’t even heard it yet, but she did as he asked of her. She suspected that he was counting on the sword, once it was out of its scabbard, inundating him with the full force of its power to give him strength. Kahlan thought that maybe when he had his sword out and finally had that strength, he would recognize the dire circumstances of the battle. Then maybe he would be able to think straight and see that the commander was doing all he could—the best he could—in a very difficult situation, and Richard was needed in that fight.

      As Kahlan glanced around at the furious battle raging mostly at the edge of their camp, she saw that there were also fights going on in some places inside their ranks. She wondered if maybe Richard wanted his sword out in order to join the fight. The men at the lines were hacking furiously at the Shun-tuk rushing in at them. Fresh enemy forces were continually pouring in. Such effort was tiring and couldn’t go on much longer before exhaustion caused the men to begin to lose their effectiveness.

      Zedd was casting some sort of conjuring but it didn’t look to be halting a lot of the enemy. He stopped and knelt at wounded men and helped where he could. Nicci was doing the same. Kahlan could see at least half a dozen of their men down.

      She didn’t see Irena. There were any number of places she could be where Kahlan wouldn’t see her. She hoped that Samantha’s mother hadn’t been taken by the Shun-tuk. Samantha had endured that once before and now that Irena was back with them, it had drawn Samantha even closer to her mother.

      Kahlan closed both of her hands tightly around Richard’s big hand on the hilt as she helped him pull. As the Sword of Truth finally slid all the way out, the blade sent its clear, distinctive ring of steel out across the scene of the battle. The sound of it caused a few men of the First File to pause for just an instant and look over. She knew that seeing Richard with his sword out rallied their spirits.

      Kahlan could see that having it fully drawn, his hand now firmly on the hilt, had ignited a storm of rage from the sword. She could see in his gray eyes that the power of that ancient weapon was now providing him needed strength. Still, the power of the sword was the twin to his, and that meant that it might have been providing strength, but it needed Richard’s strength to fully complete it, and at the moment Richard didn’t have sufficient strength of his own.

      When Richard held his other arm out, Commander Fister gripped it and helped pull him to his feet. Samantha tried her best to maintain contact with him, but to her frustration once he was standing she could no longer keep her hands on his head.

      With the sword in his fist, Richard didn’t need Samantha’s help. The sword’s power was far stronger than any strength she could give him, but she stayed close just in case.

      Once up, Richard quickly scanned the battle scene. “We can’t keep fighting by their rules or we are soon going to lose.”

      “It’s not like we have a lot of choice,” Commander Fister said, his exasperation barely contained.

      “Again, you are thinking of the problem, not the solution,” Richard told him, absently, as he carefully looked around, studying everything.

      Jake Fister assessed Richard’s face for a brief moment, as if trying to tell if he really was thinking clearly or maybe still suffering from a delusional fog from the sickness.

      Kahlan knew better. She knew the way Richard thought. While she didn’t know what he had in mind in this instance, she knew that he was not delusional—he was thinking like the Richard she knew so well. In a way, it heartened her. While everyone else was focused on the problem they faced, he was thinking of a solution.

      Richard looked off to the side, studying the darkness. Kahlan didn’t know what he was looking at, but she knew that he could see better in the dark than she could. Richard could see at night almost as well as a cat.

      “Casualties are irrelevant to them,” he said, “especially since those with occult powers are soon going to start reviving the dead. The more we kill, the bigger the supply of dead they have at hand to turn into those walking dead. Those unholy monsters are a lot harder to take down than the Shun-tuk. Our men are tiring. Matters can only get worse from this point on.”

      “These are men of the First File,” the commander insisted. “They will fight with all their heart and soul.”

      “The Shun-tuk don’t fight very well, though, or use weapons,” Richard added, mostly to himself, not seeming to really notice what the commander had said.

      “Our men are the best,” the commander again insisted. “You know that, Lord Rahl. They are the best fighters there are. The Shun-tuk aren’t quality fighters.”

      Richard finally refocused his attention on the commander. “Yes, but vast numbers have a quality all their own. They don’t care how many people they lose. We do.”

      The commander scratched an eyebrow, deciding against further argument. “You have something in mind, Lord Rahl?”

      Richard gestured with his sword. “This camp, set up the way it is with the cliff blocking the back side, is not the worst place to fight from. But it’s not the best, either, especially in this case because it works to their advantage. They can surround us from several directions and keep us pinned down. We can’t move easily, so they can keep us here and keep coming at us to wear us down.

      “We need to draw them into terrain that is to our advantage, not theirs. We need to flank them and get some men behind them.”

      Commander Fister scanned the battle, looking around at the open area and the dark forest beyond where Shun-tuk kept running in from every direction.

      “But how can we hope to do that? We’re out in the open. They’re scattered all throughout the woods. We have no idea where all of them are. How are we supposed to flank them?”

      “By changing the battle. We need to be able to come at them from both sides at once and crush them.”

      The commander lifted an eyebrow. “Lord Rahl, what you say makes sense—theoretically—but in this case it would be like trying to flank ants. They’re all over the place out there.”

      “Again, you’re telling me the problem. I already know the problem.” Richard pointed with his sword to the rock wall backing the encampment. “This cliff face, where it goes around over there, is formed by the side of a gorge coming down from higher ground. That ravine turns out here, in this cliff face, as the terrain broadens into this lower, flatter ground. Look there. See that brook over to the side, where we’ve been getting water? That brook comes down through that ravine.”

      “What of it?” the commander asked.

      “We need to draw the Shun-tuk in there. The terrain climbs from