The Sword of the Truth, Book 12 - The Omen Machine (27 page)

H
enrik feared to take a step toward the Hedge Maid. As she made a soft cooing sound while gesturing for him to come closer, he could only stare at the leather cord stitched through her lips keeping her mouth from opening more than a mere slit. Some of the holes where the leather thong penetrated her flesh oozed a pinkish fluid, as if the effort of calling him forward reinjured the wounds.

He wondered why her lips were stitched closed.

He realized that his feet were shuffling forward, even though he’d had no intention of moving. He found himself helpless to stop himself from inching ever closer to her, closer to her outstretched hands.

His own arms lifted of their own accord. No amount of strength on his part could have prevented it. His fists led the way as he moved toward her.

Her hands, stained dark— with what he feared to imagine— at last closed tight around his wrists. Closer in to her, he noticed that there was an odd smell about her, a kind of soft but sickening odor that he couldn’t identify, but it made his nose wrinkle and his throat try to close off so he couldn’t breathe it in.

Though she was a small woman, she had powerfully strong fingers. He tried to back away, but he couldn’t. He felt trapped in her grip. He had no control, no say in any of it.

Jit made another vibrating, clicking, squealing sound. As close as he was to her, Henrik could only stare into her intense black eyes with speechless fright, unable to think of what she wanted from him, what she was going to do to him.

She leaned toward him and made the same sound again. He didn’t know what she was saying. He only knew that she wanted something.

One of the familiars bent toward him over the Hedge Maid’s shoulder. “Open your fists,” she hissed impatiently.

His breaths coming in short, rapid pulls, he tried with all his might to do as he had been told. Despite his best efforts, his hands would not open. He’d held them tightly closed for so long they’d become frozen into tight knots. Despite how much he tried, how much he wanted to obey, he could not will his fingers to uncurl. He stared at them, trying frantically to make them open, fearing what she would do to him if he didn’t do as he’d been told.

Jit seemed unconcerned. Her strong fingers began peeling his fingers open one at a time. It hurt something fierce to have them move after all the time they been held fisted. Each one tingled with stabbing pains as it was pulled straight. Showing no sympathy for his cries of pain, she did not pause at her work.

Before long, she had all his fingers pried open. She flattened his hands out, pressing them between hers, one hand at a time, stroking them for a while as if to soothe away the stiffness and make certain they would remain open before she turned them over, palms down.

The Hedge Maid snapped a small twig from the woven mass beside her. He could see that there was a long, wickedly sharp thorn at the end. Not knowing what she intended, he again tried to pull away, but, with his left wrist caught in her iron grip, she easily pulled his hand closer. He felt like an animal in a trap about to be skinned.

Holding his hand steady, the Hedge Maid dragged the point of the thorn along the underside of the fingernail of his first finger. She turned the thorn in the light, carefully inspecting it. He couldn’t imagine what she was doing or what she was looking for.

Henrik saw one of the familiars, back at the wall, working at pulling a jar out of its snug place in the weave of branches. With effort, the jar finally came free. She brought it with her to Jit’s side and waited patiently as she watched her mistress at work.

The Hedge Maid dragged the point of the thorn under the nail of the second finger. She held it up. This time there was a small bit of something stuck on the point.

A sound came from deep in her throat that told him she was pleased. She held it up to show her companions. They cooed their satisfaction. Bishop Arc only glared when she showed him.

The familiar with the jar, after pulling off the lid, held it out for her mistress. Cockroaches poured out over the sides of the jar and down over the familiar’s hands. They made a rattling sound as they fell by the hundreds onto the floor, scattering in every direction before vanishing down into the weave of sticks and branches. In a moment they had all disappeared.

Jit, unconcerned, dunked the thorn in the filthy water and swished it around. She pulled it up and saw that what ever had been stuck on it had come off. Satisfied, she returned her attention to Henrik.

She repeated the careful cleaning under the nails of the last two fingers and thumb on his left hand. She found more of the tiny treasure she was searching for under the nails of his fingers, but not his thumb. Out of the corner of his eye, Henrik saw a smile come to Bishop Arc’s tattooed lips both times the Hedge Maid came up with a little scrap of something on the point of the thorn. Each time, she swished the thorn in the stinking liquid in the jar, leaving what ever it was to disappear down into the murky water.

Jit dropped his left hand and moved on to his right. After dragging the thorn under his first finger she brought it up close to her face for a look. There was nothing there. She cast a brief, furtive look up at the bishop and then dragged the thorn under the nail again, but it didn’t produce anything the second time, either.

She moved to the next finger and did a more careful cleaning under Henrik’s nail. The thorn found nothing. She repeated the search, then when it was fruitless, moved on to his third finger. It, too, didn’t have what she wanted. She focused on the little finger, as if it were her last hope.

When the thorn came up without anything but dirt, her hands dropped into her lap.

The symbols all over him seemed to churn as the man leaned down a little. “What’s wrong?”

The Hedge Maid made a few short sounds from deep in her throat.

“Jit says that we have the flesh of the woman,” the familiar at her side said. She hesitated before finishing the translation. “But we do not have the flesh of the man.”

The bishop straightened in a way that caused all seven of the familiars to back up.

One of them was not quick enough.

He snatched her by the throat and yanked her close. It looked to be a reflex driven purely by emotion. She cried out, thrashing like a snake in a snare, but she could not escape his grip. It was clear that the bishop was in a blind rage. She clawed at his tattooed hands around her throat, but it did her no good.

“Tell your mistress that I am not pleased,” he said to the others.

Several of them urgently leaned in, speaking to the Hedge Maid in her strange language.

When the bishop pulled the familiar in his fist close to his face and glared into her eyes, she cried out with a shriek of terrible agony.

“Back to the grave with you,” he said through gritted teeth.

As Henrik watched in frozen shock, the familiar lost the bluish glow they all had. Wisps of smoke curled up from under the cowl over her head. The whole creature writhed and withered as if everything was being sucked out of her. The skin on her hands and arms darkened as it drew in around the bones and knuckles until they looked skeletal. The flesh of her face boiled and bubbled and burned to a dark, leathery mask. Blackened skin smoldered as it shrank tighter and tighter around the skull. The eyes sunk back into their sockets. The jaw slackened and lips shriveled back, exposing the familiar’s fangs.

Bishop Arc tossed the withered remains aside.

Seething with anger, he paced back toward the tunnel where he had entered. The candles went out around him as he moved, as if he were dragging a veil of darkness with him. He growled in frustration and rage.

Abruptly, he stopped and turned back. He stared at the Hedge Maid a moment, then marched back toward her. The candles behind him came back to life as he moved away from them.

“You at least have the flesh of the woman, right?” he asked Jit.

With her dark eyes fixed on him, she nodded and then took the jar from the trembling familiar beside her. She held it up a little as if to show him.

He stroked the knuckle of his first finger along his gaunt cheek.

“Change of plans,” he said in a voice like ice.

A
s the Hedge Maid started out toward a shadowy opening at the back of the chamber, her familiars raced around the room, urgently pulling smaller jars from where they were stuck into the weave of the walls or picked up larger ones out of the diverse collections at the edges of the floor. The eyes of those people nearby encased in the walls, the ones who were still alive, watched in desolate agony.

Henrik wished he could help them, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even help himself.

Jit cradled the jar with the filthy brown water containing what had been under Henrik’s fingernails in the crook of her arm as she made her way back into the dark opening. The brown water sloshed around as she walked. The lid kept most but not all of the water from spilling over. Henrik saw big brown bugs emerge up out of the weave of the twigs and branches to feed at the drops that did escape, run down the jar, and drip onto the floor.

Bishop Arc glared with bloodred eyes as the familiars went about their work of finding the correct containers out of the hundreds hoarded throughout the room. The dark symbols covering his flesh made his obvious rage seem all the more dangerous. The six remaining familiars avoided meeting his gaze as they worked at finding what they needed and pulled them out of the wall or plucked them up from the floor.

Each of the familiars collected an unwieldy stash of jars clutched in the crook of their arms. The one without a hand couldn’t hold as many but she did the best she could. As soon as they had what they needed, they hurried with their cargo to catch up with their departing mistress.

For her part, Jit took a staff that was leaning against the wall as she carried the single jar in her other arm. She looked back over her shoulder at Henrik and let out a series of short commands in her strange, screeching, clicking language. The familiar without a hand circled back and shoved him into line behind the Hedge Maid and in front of the rest of the familiars.

“Jit says for you to hurry up and come along.” She glanced back briefly at the bishop and then leaned closer. “When this is through,” she said with venomous delight, “I am going to suck you dry and feed what’s left of you to the cockroaches.”

Henrik froze stiff in terror. With a soft cackle, she shoved him to get him moving again.

As he stumbled forward, he thought of how much he missed being with his mother. He wanted to be back with her in their tent making bead goods. He wished that she had never brought him to the Hedge Maid in the first place.

Ever since he had realized that he was being chased back into Kharga Trace and that the Hedge Maid was going to have him in her clutches again, he had feared that this time he might not be leaving.

The bishop took up a place at the end of the line as they followed the Hedge Maid along the dark passageway lined with hundreds of strips of leather holding everything from small dead animals to empty turtle shells, to the skulls of little creatures with sharp little teeth, all hanging from the walls in layers. Henrik saw the eyes of the people in projecting areas of buttress walls watching them as they passed. When Bishop Arc met their gazes they quickly looked away. Not a peep came from the people in the walls. Henrik imagined that if he was trapped in the walls he would have trouble not crying out for help.

But there was no one to help the poor souls trapped in this terrible place. There was no one to help him.

Making their way through the labyrinth that was the Hedge Maid’s lair, Henrik began to hear insects buzzing, birds calling, and other creatures whistling and chirping. As they reached an opening and emerged out into the night, the swamp creatures abruptly went dead silent.

The low clouds gliding swiftly by overhead were lit by the moon from somewhere above them so that they cast a faint glow. The ground all around was elevated enough in the midst of the dense, swampy forest to be bone-dry. The dark shapes of hulking trees surrounding them, trailing long curtains of moss, looked to Henrik like arms of the dead trailing burial shrouds as they gathered around the living.

As they crossed the clearing, he saw that the flat rocks lying here and there were not placed randomly, but arranged in circular patterns. Each stone was also placed atop slightly mounded dirt. The mounds with stones appeared to lead to the center of the open area, where the Hedge Maid set about making marks on the ground with her decorated staff. The marks she was scratching in the ground with the point of her staff were not unlike the tattooed designs all over Bishop Arc.

Iridescent blue feathers, orange and yellow beads, and a collection of coins with holes in the center hung on buckskin thongs from the middle of the Hedge Maid’s staff. Henrik wondered why the Hedge Maid would be so interested in coins that she would use them to adorn such an obviously important object. After all, what good would money do her out in Kharga Trace?

Then he realized that it actually wasn’t of any value to her as money, the way it was to other people. The coins must have been taken from those poor souls encased in the walls. To the Hedge Maid, shiny coins were merely decorations, like the shiny feathers. Both were tokens of the lives she had taken.

As the familiars went about arranging the jars on the ground around the Hedge Maid, Bishop Arc stood to the side, arms folded, his bloodred eyes glaring as he watched the preparations. Every once in a while one of the six familiars glanced his way. Jit did not. She went quietly about her work of drawing designs in the dirt in the center of the ring of jars.

At intervals in her drawing and soft chanting, she would open a jar, fish around in the dark liquid with her hand, and then throw what ever limp, slimy thing she had pulled out into the center of her drawing. All the while she continued making the soft buzzing, humming sound.

The Hedge Maid lifted her staff in one outstretched arm toward the low clouds drifting by overhead. She chanted a few clipped sounds, then bent and placed the staff across elements in the design she had drawn on the ground.

The design on the ground began to glow.

To Henrik’s astonishment, as the Hedge Maid continued her low, musical drone and lifted both arms skyward, the clouds overhead came to a halt.