At the south wall, where huge oak doors crisscrossed with iron strapping had been, was a gaping hole through the stone, its edges melted and burned black. Kahlan stood staring at rock melted like wax from a candle that had guttered. She knew of only one power that could do that: wizard's fire.
Her mind fought to understand what she was seeing. She knew what the results of wizard's fire looked like, but there were no more wizards. Except Zedd and, she guessed, Richard. But this would not have been Zedd's deed.
Outside the walls, off to either side, headless corpses were heaped in huge, frozen mounds. Heads stared out from less orderly piles of their own. Swords and shields and spears were discarded to separate heaps, looking like great, dead, steel porcupines. This had been a mass execution, carried out at a number of stations at once to handle the numbers more efficiently. All were Galean soldiers.
As she stared in numb shock at the splayed limbs draped over their fellows under them, Kahlan spoke softly to the three men behind her. "The word you did not know to use to count this many is 'thousand'. There are perhaps five thousand dead men here."
Gently, Prindin planted the butt end of his spear in the snow, giving it an uneasy twist. "I did not know there was a word needed to count this many men." His fist twisted the spear again, and his voice lowered to a whisper. "This will be a bad place when the warm weather comes."
"It is a bad place now," his brother murmured to himself in his own tongue.
Kahlan knew this was the least of the dead. She knew the tactics of defense for Ebinissia. The walls were not secure fortifications, the way they had been in times long ago. As the city had grown in the prosperity of the Midland alliance, the older, stronger, fortified walls had been torn down, and the stone used to build these newer, more encompassing outer walls. But they had been built less secure than in the past. They were more a symbol of the size and pride of the crown city, than a strong defensible perimeter.
Under attack, the gates would have been closed, with the toughest, most experienced troops on the outside to stop the attackers before they had a chance to reach the walls. The real defense for Ebinissia was the surrounding mountains, whose narrow passes prevented a broad attack.
Under Darken Rahl's order, D'Haran forces had laid siege to Ebinissia for two months, but the defenders outside the walls where able to hold them back in the surrounding passes, pin them down, and harry them relentlessly until the attackers finally withdrew, licking their wounds, in search of easier prey. Though the Ebinissians had prevailed, it had been at a great cost of lives to the defenders. Had Darken Rahl been less concerned with finding the boxes, he could have sent greater numbers and maybe overrun the defenders in the passes, but he didn't. This time, someone had.
These headless men were a part of that outer defensive ring. Backs to the wall, they had been defeated and captured, and then executed before the walls were breached. Apparently, as a demonstration to those still inside, to terrorize them, to panic them into an inefficient defense. She knew that what was inside the walls would be worse. The dead women they had been finding told her that much.
Out of habit, and without even realizing it, she had put on the calm face that showed nothing: the face of a Confessor, as her mother had taught her.
"Prindin, Tossidin, I want you two to go around the outside of the walls. I want to know what else is on the outside. I want to know everything about what has happened here. I want to know when this was done, where the attackers came from, and where they went when they were finished. Chandalen and I will go inside. Meet us back here when you are finished."
The brothers went quickly at her direction, their heads close together as they whispered to one another while pointing, analyzing tracks and signs they understood with hardly more than a glance. Chandalen walked silently at her side, his bow, with an arrow nocked and tension to the string, at the ready as she stepped over rubble and moved on through the yawning hole.
None of the three men had objected to her instructions. They were, she knew, astonished at the size of the city, but more than that, they were overwhelmed at the enormity of what had happened here; they respected her obligation to the dead.
Chandalen's eyes ignored the bodies that lay everywhere and watched instead the shaded openings and alleyways among the small daub and wattle houses that were homes to the farmers and sheepherders that worked the land closer to the city. There were no fresh prints in the snow; nothing alive had been here recently.
Kahlan chose the proper streets and Chandalen stayed close at her right shoulder, half a step behind. She didn't stop to inspect the dead laying everywhere. All looked to have died the same way: killed in a fierce battle.
"These people were defeated by great numbers," Chandalen said in a quiet tone. "Many thousands, as you called it. They had no chance to win."
"Why do you say that?"
"They are bunched together between the buildings. This is a bad place to have to fight, but in a closed-in place like this, that is the only way. That is the way I would try to defend against a larger number—by blocking the enemy from spreading out behind me to trap me. Greater numbers would not be as much good in the small passageways. I would try to keep the enemy from spreading out, and come at them from all sides so they could not attack as they wished, but must be always in fear of where I would be next. You must not meet the enemy as they wish you to, especially when they greatly outnumber you.
"There are old men, and boys, among the soldiers. Boys and old men would not come to fight beside Chandalen unless they saw it was a war to the death, and I was greatly outnumbered. For these men to stand and fight against vastly greater numbers, they must have been brave. Men and boys would not have come to help such brave men if the enemy were not so great."
She knew Chandalen was right. Everyone had seen or heard the executions outside the walls. They knew defeat was death.
The bodies were felled like reeds before a great wind. As they ascended the rise to where the old city walls had stood, the dead were more numerous. It looked that they had fallen back, trying to make a stand from higher ground. It had done them no good; they had been overrun.
All the dead were defenders; none were the corpses of attackers. Kahlan knew that some believed leaving the dead where they fell in defeating an enemy augured ill luck in future battles, and further, that it abandoned their spirits to retribution by the spirits of those defeated. Likewise, they believed that if they left their dead at the site of a defeat, the spirits of their fallen comrades would live on to plague their enemies. Whoever had done this must have believed such, and dragged their own dead away from the bodies of those they had vanquished. Kahlan knew of several peoples who believed that the act of dying in battle could bring about such thaumaturgy. One nation, above all, sat at the head of her roster.
As they skirted an overturned wagon, its load of firewood spilled in a heap, Chandalen paused beneath a small wooden sign carved with a leafy plant next to a mortar and pestle. With a hand, he shielded his eyes from the sunlight and looked into the long, narrow shop set back a few feet from the buildings to each side. "What is this place."
Kahlan walked past him, through the splintered doorframe. "It is an herb shop." The counter was covered with broken glass jars and dried herbs, all scattered together in a useless mess. Only two glass lids remained unbroken among the pale green mess. "This is where people went to get herbs and remedies."
Behind the counter the wall cabinet which reached from floor to ceiling and almost the entire length of the narrow shop, had held hundreds of small wooden drawers, their patina darkened by the countless touches of fingers. The ones still left in place were smashed in with a mace. The drawers and their contents on the floor had been crushed underfoot. Chandalen squatted and pulled open the few drawers near the bottom that had remained untouched, inspecting briefly their stores before sliding each drawer closed again.
"Nissel would be... how do you say astonished?"
"Astonished," Kahlan answere
d.
"She would be astonished, to see this many healing plants. This is a crime, to destroy things that help people."
She watched him pull open drawers and then slide them closed. "A crime," she agreed.
He pulled open another drawer, and gasped. He squatted, motionless, for a moment, before reverently lifting a bundle of miniature plants, tied at their stems with a bit of string. The tiny, dry leaves were a dusky greenish brown with crimson veining.
A low whistle came from between his teeth. "Quassin Doe," he whispered.
Kahlan eyed the shadowed back of the shop as her vision adjusted to the darkness. She saw no bodies. The proprietor must have fled before he was killed, or maybe he was one who had stood with the army against the invaders. "What is Quassin Doe?"
Chandalen turned the bundle over in his palm, his eyes fixed unblinking on it. "Quassin Doe can save your life if you take ten-step poison by mistake, or, if you are quick enough, when shot by an arrow with the poison on it."
"How can you take it by mistake?"
"Many poison Bandu leaves must be chewed, for a long time, and made wet in your mouth, before being cooked until they become a thick paste. Sometimes, if you swallow some of the wetness in your mouth by accident, or chew too long, it can make you sick."
He opened a buckskin waist pouch and showed her a small, carved bone, lidded box. Inside was a dark paste. "This is ten-step poison we put on our arrows. We make it from the Bandu. If you ate a very little of this, it would make you sick. If you ate a little more you would be a long time to die. If you ate more, you would die quick. But no one would eat it after it is made and put in here." He slipped the box of poison back in his pouch.