Severed Souls. Terry Goodkind

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       CHAPTER 13

      What’s your name?” Richard asked the man on his knees.

      The Shun-tuk glared without answering.

      “Do you even have a name? Do any of your people use names?”

      The man maintained his silent glare.

      Richard clasped his hands as he looked down at the prisoner. “No name, no soul.”

      “We will have souls,” the man said in a low growl filled with hate. Richard had touched a nerve. “We will have all of your souls for ourselves. They will be ours.”

      “It’s foolish to even imagine you can get a soul by eating the flesh of people who have them. There is only one way to get a soul.”

      The man’s brow twitched with the slightest bit of interest, but he would not ask.

      “You can only get a soul,” Richard finally said in answer to the unspoken question, “by being born with one. It is forged into a person at their creation. It’s an inherent part of them, a living connection to everything in this world and the next as shown in the lines of the Grace. It’s their link to existence.

      “Good or bad, kind or cruel, for better or worse, whether they want it or not, the soul they were born with is theirs from the instant of the ignition of that spark at their creation, through life, and on into the world of the dead. In the most basic sense, it is the sum of who they are, the distillation of everything they are. They can neither give it away or lose it or have it stolen from them. That soul is a part of them and can’t be separated from them, either willingly or unwillingly.”

      The man smiled. “If that were true, then how do you explain the existence of the half people?”

      “You were born without souls.”

      “Not in the beginning. In the beginning the half people started life as you did, as people born with souls. Their souls were ripped out of them to create weapons, to create the half people—those without souls.”

      “Yes, but that was done thousands of years ago by Emperor Sulachan and his wizards, wizards who had powers none of us today have or can fully envision.”

      “But they did it. They took souls from people who had them.”

      Richard gestured to the south, toward the Old World, where Sulachan had originally ruled. “Sulachan’s violation of the nature of life was depraved. It was not a simple plucking of soul from someone. It entailed great effort of many wizards with long-lost powers and dedicated to Sulachan’s perverted task.

      “None of those original half people could give their offspring a soul because they no longer had one. They had lost their connection to the Grace. Their offspring were born without a soul and can only bear offspring of their own without a soul.

      “The only soul those original half people could ever have would have been their own, if Sulachan were to somehow reunite them. But those people are long dead and gone. Their descendants, like you, can’t ever gain a soul by any means because none ever belonged to you.”

      “As those with souls die,” the man said with confidence, “that soul flees the body as it begins its journey to the world of the dead. After all, the bodies that rot in the ground no longer have souls. Their souls left them. So, souls can flee the body of their host.”

      “That part of them that is their soul leaves them at death to go through the veil as the Grace shows,” Richard said.

      “And we can capture the soul by eating the living flesh that the soul is still bound into. If we consume the living, then at just the right instant, while their soul still resides in their flesh and blood, as they die we will have that warm flesh and blood inside us at the exact instant the soul departs the dying flesh of that host. Since we are living that soul that is within us will bind to us. It will have found a new, living host and we will then possess that soul.”

      Kahlan shared a troubled look with Zedd. It was about as sick a belief as she had ever heard.

      Richard СКАЧАТЬ