The Omen Machine

Zedd shrugged. “I may have heard of them when I was a boy, but I didn’t hear much. I also heard Richard ask the abbot about them, but I don’t really know anything about them. Why?”

Cara looked like she wanted to kill someone and she wasn’t all that particular about who it was going to be. “I’d like to know that myself.”

Nicci gestured back down the slope to the dense swamp where the structure had been that the boy, Henrik, had told them about. They might never have found it in time to save Richard and Kahlan had it not been for the boy. He had led them to where Richard and Kahlan were imprisoned.

Zedd had used wizard’s fire to destroy the place, along with all its contents, including the unidentifiable, bloody remains of the Hedge Maid. There wasn’t so much as a stick left.

“It is said that the sound made by a Hedge Maid, were she allowed to open her mouth all the way, is the sound of the Keeper himself and that it will pull the person making the sound and anyone who hears it into the underworld. The full scream of a Hedge Maid is death, even to herself, so at a young age Hedge Maids have their lips sewn shut by their mothers, before they can fully develop a voice.”

“And the father just lets the mother sew their child’s mouth shut?” Cara asked.

Nicci glanced up. “Hedge Maids, like some spiders, subdue and then suck the blood out of the male after they’ve mated.”

“Lovely,” Cara said under her breath.

“How do you know all this?” Zedd asked.

Nicci arched an eyebrow at the wizard. “I was once a Sister of the Dark, remember? Sisters of the Dark serve the Keeper of the underworld. We know a lot about the world of the dead and those who are devoted to it.”

Zedd scratched his jaw and changed the subject. “So, you think that Richard and Kahlan are alive because they stuffed those wads of cloth in their ears?”

Nicci leaned in the low wagon and touched two fingers to Kahlan’s head. “Here, see for yourself.”

Zedd added his first two fingers to Kahlan’s forehead.

“What do you feel?” Nicci asked as she watched his eyes.

Zedd was frowning. “I don’t know. Some kind of … darkness.” He suddenly looked up at her. “It’s the same thing I felt the last time I tried to heal her.”

Nicci nodded. She was pleased that the wizard recognized it. It would make what they had to do easier.

“That’s the touch of death that a Hedge Maid carries.”

Cara looked suddenly more than alarmed. “You mean to say that they have death in them— that they’re going to die?”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Nicci said. “They were touched not only by the Hedge Maid’s occult conjuring, but more importantly by her scream, touched by death itself.”

“But you can heal them,” Cara said.

It was not a question, but Nicci treated it as such. “I’m pretty sure that I can, now that the Hedge Maid is dead and has no connection to them.” She took a deep breath. “Richard must have cut the leather strips sewing the Hedge Maid’s mouth shut. Fortunately, he was smart enough to plug his and Kahlan’s ears, first. It didn’t stop the sound from getting in, death from getting in, but it blunted it.”

“So they were touched by death from the Hedge Maid,” Zedd said. “And that’s what I’m feeling in her?”

Nicci finally nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“But you can heal them,” Zedd said, sounding a lot like Cara had.

“I think so,” she said. “I was a Sister of the Dark. This is the kind of thing I know about. But I can’t do it here. I need to do it in a containment field.”

“The Garden of Life,” Cara said at once. “That’s a containment field.”

Nicci smiled at Cara and then signaled to Benjamin. The wagon started moving with a jolt. “That’s why I want to get them back there as soon as possible. Zedd and I can keep them alive for a while, and heal their wounds, but we need to get them back to the Garden of Life to fully heal them, to get the touch of death out of them.” She gestured up at Henrik, on the seat by the soldier driving the wagon. “He was touched by the Hedge Maid’s powers and will need to be healed as well, but it’s not as serious with him. He did not hear death’s call.”

The line of cavalry brought their horses in protectively around the wagon as it rolled through the gloom among the towering trees. The steel gray clouds were so low they stole through the treetops, as if escorting the intruders away from the Dark Lands.

Having thought it over, Cara still didn’t look satisfied. “Why can’t you heal them now,” she wanted to know. “Why do you have to wait until you get back to the Garden of Life?”

“They have been touched by death. We need a containment field to shield them while we do what we need to do. We need to heal them, but to do so we must also remove that touch of death that is lodged within them. If we try to do that here, that touch of death will call the Keeper of the dead to them, and they will die. So, we must wait until we can do it in a containment field, in the Garden of Life.”

“Oh,” Cara said. “I guess that makes sense.”

“The omen machine is in that containment field as well,” Zedd reminded her.