All the creatures drew back, murmuring to themselves at his puzzling behavior. The unexpected was frightening to them.
He again gave the Hedge Maid a very deliberate grin to let her know that he knew something she didn’t.
He, in fact, knew the truth.
The Hedge Maid, her expression darkening dangerously, glared at him.
He needed to get her closer.
“You have me,” he said as he smiled broadly. “Let Kahlan go and I’ll cooperate with what ever you want.”
One of the glowing forms, who was missing a hand, poked him with a finger. “We do not need your cooperation,” she said.
“Yes you do,” Richard said with absolute conviction while he smiled at the Hedge Maid. “You need to know the truth.”
The cowled figure frowned. “The truth?” She turned and spoke to Jit in her strange language.
The Hedge Maid frowned at her companion as she listened, and then stepped up to him. He towered over her, but she did not fear him.
She should have.
Jit smiled back with as evil a grin as he’d ever seen, her lips parting with the grin as much as the leather sewn through her lips would allow.
Richard used his free hand to draw his knife from the sheath at his belt. It felt good to have a blade in his hand. A blade meant salvation. This one was as razor-sharp as truth itself.
The Hedge Maid didn’t fear his knife, and with good reason. After all, his sword had proven impotent against her.
Richard knew that using a blade to try to cut Jit would be not merely futile, but a deadly mistake. Her aura of powers shielded her, protected her from being cut by him. She had proven that his sword could not harm her, so she certainly didn’t fear a mere knife.
She should have.
CHAPTER 85
In a blink, before the Hedge Maid could have second thoughts or guess what he intended, Richard whipped the knife past her face, carefully avoiding cutting her, or even the thought of it, so as not to trigger her occult protection. If he was sincerely not trying to cut her, her defenses would not react.
With deadly precision, he instead made the tip of the razor-sharp blade sweep in just between her parted lips … and sever the leather strips holding her mouth closed.
The Hedge Maid’s dark eyes went wide.
Her mouth also went wide, something it had never done before.
Her jaws opened wide. It looked decidedly involuntary.
And then came a scream of such power, such malevolence, such evil, that it seemed to rip through the very fabric of the world of life.
It was a scream born in the world of the dead.
Jars and bottles exploded. Their contents flew everywhere. Bony creatures covered their heads protectively with their gangly arms.
Broken glass, pottery, sticks, and pieces of vine began to move around the room in fits and starts, as if driven by gusts of wind, but then, with ever-growing speed, all the debris lifted into the air and began to circle the room. Even the bony creatures found themselves dragged into the building vortex, their arms and legs flailing as they orbited helplessly around the room among clouds of broken glass and pottery and all the things they had contained.
The deadly power of the scream went on unabated, catching all the creatures up in it, along with the mass of rubble.
The forms in the cowled cloaks covered their ears as they screamed in terror and pain. It did them no good. As Jit’s unleashed scream ripped through the room, they began to be drawn up in the growing tornado of sound and wreckage storming around the room.
Blood ran from the ears of those encased in the walls as they shook violently.
The bony creatures began to disintegrate, coming apart as if they had been cast of sand, dust, and dirt. Arms and legs fell apart, dissolving in the maelstrom, mixing in with the rest of the rubble circling the room. They shrieked and howled even as they were coming apart. Their terrified cries joined the cry of the endless scream coming from the Hedge Maid.
The glowing forms in the cowled capes began to elongate and rip apart in streams of glowing vapor as they were carried helplessly along in the power of the Hedge Maid’s scream.
Lightning flashed and flickered as it, too, was carried around the outside of the room. The very air roared and thundered.
In the center of it all, the Hedge Maid stood, head thrown back, jaws wide, as she screamed her life away.
The poison of who she was, of what she was, her wickedness, her corruption, her evil, her dedication to death and her contempt for life in any form, was escaping in a ripping scream that was the dead end of what she worshiped.
The scream was death itself.
Now that the truth of the dead soul within her was released, it was taking the life of its host.
She was seeing the truth of her dead inner self. Life, her life, was incompatible with the death she carried inside.
Death showed her no appreciation, and no mercy.
Her face began to melt as her own evil, the death at her core, escaped its prison. Blood veins broke, muscle ripped apart, and her skin split open until her bones were exposed. It all added power and force to her death shriek.
That scream, its power, its poison, lanced into Richard as well. The pain of it was more than he could stand. Every joint cried out in agony. Every nerve fiber vibrated with the torture of the sound escaping the Hedge Maid.
He, too, was being touched by death that had been freed.
As he began to lose consciousness, Richard realized that the plugs he had made for his ears, and for Kahlan’s ears, were not sufficient to stand up against the malevolence he had unleashed.
He had failed. He had failed Kahlan.
He felt a tear of grief for Kahlan, of his love for her, run down his face as the screaming, roaring, flashing world went slowly dark and silent.
CHAPTER 86
If he lives,” Cara said, “I’m going to kill him.”
Nicci smiled, but the thought of Richard dying sent a renewed spike of panic through her. It was too terrifying a thought to contemplate.
She laid a hand to his chest as somber soldiers gently laid his unconscious form beside Kahlan in the back of the wagon.
Blood seeped through the blankets Richard and Kahlan were both wrapped in. But Nicci could feel his heart beating, feel the breath of life in his lungs. Kahlan, thankfully, was alive as well. For now, the two of them were alive and that was what mattered most.
“He will live,” Nicci said. “Both of them will, if I have anything to say about it.”
By the looks of what had happened in the room where they had found them, it was perhaps surprising that they were both alive, much less in one piece. It had been frightening to have to pull them both out of the prison of thorn branches and vines they had been encased in.
“What’s this?” Zedd asked with a frown.
Nicci came out of her thoughts and took the little object from him. It looked to be a rolled-up wad of cloth.
“I don’t know. Where did you find it?”
“In his ear.” Zedd sounded astonished. He waved a finger, pointing. “Look, there’s another in his other ear.” He pulled it out and held it up to show her.
Nicci bent over the side of the wagon and checked Kahlan. She had them, too. Nicci pulled a little plug out of each of Kahlan’s ears and held them up to look at them.
She smiled, then, as she closed them in her fist.
“No wonder they’re alive.”
“What are you talking about?” Zedd asked.
“How much do you know about Hedge Maids?”
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 structu
re 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.