Severed Souls Read Online Free PDF

rather than from every direction. In that way, they would be able to continually reduce the number of enemy and eventually, hopefully, if there weren’t too many, wipe them out.
    Kahlan realized that she was falling, that one of the ghostly white figures had dropped from a tree onto her back, only when she felt the impact knock the wind from her lungs at the same time as she felt his teeth sink into the muscle at the side of her neck. She hit the ground hard, face-first, and went sprawling.

 
    CHAPTER
    5
    Gerald frowned as he straightened from his work of putting a sharp edge on his shovel. He let the ring of the file against metal fade away as he listened. He thought that he heard a strange, low rumbling sound.
    He paused, motionless for a moment after the ring of steel had faded, the file in his callused hands still in midair, as he cocked his head to listen. He could feel the rumble in the dirt floor beneath his feet more than he could hear it. It reminded him of distant thunder, but it was too even, too unwavering, too continual, for it to be thunder. Still, more than anything, that was what it reminded him of.
    He carefully laid the file down on the wooden workbench and went to the small window at the side that overlooked the graveyard. Beyond the far side of the sodden hayfields the woods that covered most of the Dark Lands rolled off into the distance, over ever-rising ground, toward imposing snowcapped mountains.
    Gerald didn’t especially like the woods. There were enough dangers in the Dark Lands without venturing too far into the woods. He had always thought that people were trouble enough without tempting fate with the things that lived in the woods.
    Rather than brave the mysterious dangers of the trackless forests of the Dark Lands for no good reason, he preferred to stick to his work of tending the graveyard and burying folks who could no longer bring about any harm to anyone. People in the town of Insley didn’t like coming out to where dead bodies rotted in the ground, so they left him alone, shunning him because he tended his garden of the dead, as he thought of it.
    The dead left him alone, too.
    The dead left everyone alone. People only feared them out of foolish superstition. There were plenty of real things to fear, like the dangers that lived in the forested wilderness of the Dark Lands. The dead never bothered anyone.
    The job of burying the dead didn’t pay well, but he had no family left and his needs were simple. Fortunately, most people were at least more than willing to pay him, even if it wasn’t much, to put their kin in the ground. It was enough to afford him a small room in town, safe at night among the townspeople, even if they averted their eyes when he passed. He knew he would always have a roof over his head, a bed, and enough to eat.
    One thing about his job, even if it didn’t pay well and left him mostly alone in the world, was he knew that as long as there were the living, there would always be need of gravediggers to dispose of the newly dead.
    It wasn’t that people so much objected to digging a hole themselves—it was that the dead gave them the shivers, so they didn’t want to dig a hole out in the graveyard and then have to handle the dead themselves. Gerald had long ago become numb to the dead. They meant he had steady work and they never gave him any trouble.
    Most of his adult life, Gerald had had the dreary duty of burying those folks he’d thought highly of, as well as the privilege of putting people in the ground he hadn’t much cared for in life. He’d often shed a tear over the passing of the first kind. The passing of the second kind brought him a grim smile as he went about the work of shoveling dirt over them.
    He never smiled too much, though, since he knew that one day he would be joining them all in the underworld. He didn’t want to give any of the souls there reason to bear a grudge against him. He tried to go