The Omen Machine (Sword of Truth 12)
CHAPTER 1
There is darkness,” the boy said.
Richard frowned, not sure that he had understood the whispered words. He glanced back over his shoulder at the concern on Kahlan’s face. She didn’t look to have understood the meaning any more than he had.
The boy lay on a tattered carpet placed on the bare ground just outside a tent covered with strings of colorful beads. The tightly packed market outside the palace had become a small city made up of thousands of tents, wagons, and stands. Throngs of people who had come from near and far for the grand wedding the day before flocked to the marketplace, buying everything from souvenirs and jewelry to fresh bread and cooked meats, to exotic drinks and potions, to colorful beads.
The boy’s chest rose a little with each shallow breath, but his eyes remained closed. Richard leaned down closer to the frail child. “Darkness?”
The boy nodded weakly. “There is darkness all around.”
There was, of course, no darkness. Streamers of morning sunlight played over the crowds of people coursing by the thousands through the haphazard streets between the tents and wagons. Richard didn’t think that the boy saw anything of the festive atmosphere all around.
The child’s words, on the surface so soft, carried some other meaning, something more, something grim, about another place entirely.
From the corner of his eye, Richard saw people slow as they passed, watching the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor stopped to see an ill boy and his mother. The market out beyond was filled with lilting music, conversation, laughter, and animated bargaining. For most of the people passing nearby, seeing the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor was a once-in-a-lifetime event, one of many over the last few days, that would be recounted back in their homelands for years to come.
Guards of the First File stood not far away, also watching attentively, but they mostly watched the nearby crowds shuffling through the market. The soldiers wanted to make sure that those crowds didn’t close in too tightly, even though there was no real reason to expect any sort of trouble.
Everyone was, after all, in a good mood. The years of war had ended. There was peace and growing prosperity. The wedding the day before seemed to mark a new beginning, a celebration of a world of possibilities never before imagined.
Set amid that sunlit exuberance, the boy’s words felt to Richard like a shadow that didn’t belong.
Kahlan squatted down beside him. Her satiny white dress, the iconic symbol of her standing as the Mother Confessor, seemed to glow under the early-spring sky, as if she were a good spirit come among them. Richard slipped his hand under the boy’s bony shoulders and sat him up a little as Kahlan lifted a waterskin up to the boy’s lips.
“Can you take just a sip?”
The boy didn’t seem to hear her. He ignored her offer and the waterskin. “I’m alone,” he said in a frail voice. “So alone.”
The words sounded so forlorn that they moved Kahlan to reach out in silent compassion and touch the boy’s knobby shoulder.
“You’re not alone,” Richard assured the boy in a voice meant to dispel the gloom of such words. “There are people here with you. Your mother is here.”
Behind closed eyelids, the boy’s eyes rolled and darted, as if looking for something in the darkness.
“Why have they all left me?”
Kahlan laid a hand gently on the boy’s heaving chest. “Left you?”
The boy, lost in some inner vision, moaned and whined. His head tossed from side to side. “Why have they left me alone in the cold and dark?”
“Who left you?” Richard asked, concentrating in an effort to be sure he could hear the boy’s soft words. “Where did they leave you?”
“I have had dreams,” the boy said, his voice a little brighter.
Richard frowned at the odd change of subject. “What kind of dreams?”
Disoriented confusion returned to haunt the boy’s words. “Why have I had dreams?”
The question sounded to Richard like it was directed inward and didn’t call for an answer. Kahlan tried anyway.
“We don’t—”
“Is the sky still blue?”
Kahlan shared a look with Richard. “Quite blue,” she assured the boy. He didn’t appear to hear that answer, either.
Richard didn’t think that there was any point in continuing to pester the boy for answers. He was obviously sick and didn’t know what he was saying. It was pointless to try to question the product of delirium.
The boy’s small hand suddenly grabbed Richard’s forearm.
Richard heard the sound of steel being drawn from scabbards. Without turning, he lifted his other hand in a silent command to the soldiers behind him to stand down.
“Why have they all left me?” the boy asked again.
Richard leaned in a little closer, hoping to calm him at least. “Where did they leave you?”
The boy’s eyes opened so abruptly that it startled both Richard and Kahlan. His gaze was fixed on Richard, as if trying to see into his soul. The grip of the thin fingers on Richard’s forearm was powerful beyond what Richard would have believed the boy capable of.
“There is darkness in the palace.”
A chill, fed by a cold breath of breeze, shivered across Richard’s flesh.
The boy’s eyelids slid closed as he sagged back.
Despite his intent to be gentle with the boy, Richard’s voice took on an edge.
“What are you talking about? What darkness in the palace?”
“Darkness … is seeking darkness,” he whispered as he drifted down into incoherent mumbling.
Richard’s brow drew tight as he tried to make some kind of sense of it. “What do you mean, darkness is seeking darkness?”
“He will find me, I know he will.”
The boy’s hand, as if too heavy to hold up, slipped off Richard’s arm. It was replaced by Kahlan’s as the two of them waited a moment to see if the boy would say any more. He seemed to finally have fallen silent for good.
They needed to get back to the palace. People would be waiting for them.
Besides, Richard didn’t think, even if the boy did say more, that it would be any more meaningful. He looked up at the boy’s mother, standing above him, dry-washing her hands.
The woman swallowed. “He scares me, he does, when he gets like this. I’m sorry, Lord Rahl, I didn’t mean to distract you from your business.” She looked to be a woman aged prematurely by worries.
“This is my business,” Richard said. “I came down here today to be among people who couldn’t make it up to the palace yesterday for the ceremony. Many of you have traveled a great distance. The Mother Confessor and I wanted to have a chance to show our appreciation to everyone who came for our friends’ wedding.
“I don’t like to see anyone in such obvious distress as you and your boy. We’ll see if we can get a healer to find out what’s wrong. Maybe they can give him something to help him.”
The woman was shaking her head. “I’ve tried healers. Healers can’t help him.”
“Are you sure?” Kahlan asked. “There are very talented people here who might be able to help.”
“I already took him to a woman of great powers, a Hedge Maid, all the way to Kharga Trace.”
Kahlan’s brow creased. “A Hedge Maid? What kind of healer is that?”