The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 77

Kahlan woke with a start. She squinted out at the surrounding woods in the faint, first light of dawn. She didn’t see the hounds down on the ground, at least, not yet.

They always came back.

She knew that it was only a matter of time.

She’d gotten only a few hours of sleep, and it was neither good nor enough. At least she hadn’t fallen out of the tree. The lap of several branches had made a somewhat safe, if uncomfortable, place to rest.

The days of terror seemed endless and had blended one into another until she had completely lost track of time. She was exhausted from the relentless chase. Overwhelming fatigue was the only thing that brought on sleep.

At night, when it got dark enough, the hounds would seem to disappear for the night. She thought that maybe they went off at night to search for food and to rest. At first, she had entertained the hope that they had tired of the chase and had given up.

The first few nights after leaving the palace, when she had still been out on the Azrith Plain and the hounds had vanished at night, Kahlan had thought that it was her chance to escape, to put distance between her and her pursuers, but no matter how fast she ran, no matter how many hours, no matter if she rode all night without stopping, the hounds were always right there when day broke, and then they would come for her again.

Because the sun rose ahead and to the right and set behind her, she knew that she was headed roughly northeast. That told her the direction that the palace would be in. She had tried several times after the hounds had disappeared at night to circle around and head back, but doing so took her back into an ambush by the dogs. She had barely escaped with her life. As they came after her she had to turn back to the northeast, her only thought to outrun them, to put distance between her and her would-be assassins.

There were times when she had wanted to give up, to simply quit running and let it end. But the memory of Catherine’s gruesome end was too horrifying to allow Kahlan to surrender. She kept telling herself that if she could stay alive, if she could stay ahead of the pack of wild dogs, she had a chance. As long as she could outrun them she would stay alive. As long as she was alive, there was hope.

The thought of Richard also kept her from giving up. The thought of him finding her torn apart by the hounds was so crushingly heartbreaking that it made her fight all the harder to stay alive.

After she had left the Azrith Plain and had gotten into mountainous terrain, it had become, for the most part, impossible for her to run the horse at night. She was afraid of the animal breaking a leg in the dark. Without the horse, the dogs would easily catch her.

The horse was her lifeline. She took good care of it. At least, she took as good care of it as was possible. She knew that if she lost the horse, she would be dead in short order. On the other hand, if she didn’t push the horse hard enough, the hounds would pull her down.

Kahlan looked down from her place in the branches. The horse was tied to a nearby limb of the tree, but on a long rope so that it could graze on anything it could find close enough. If she needed the horse in a hurry she had the end of the rope at hand so that she could pull the animal in close and climb down onto it.

For some reason, the hounds ignored the horse. They wanted Kahlan, not the horse, and they never attacked it. She couldn’t understand it. The horse, though, was not comforted by their disinterest. Their mere presence set the horse into a panic.

Kahlan looked down, checking where the horse was. Despite how weary she was, she knew that she would have to leave soon lest the dogs arrive and terrify the horse. In its panic, the horse could be hurt. If it broke a leg, she would be done.

If she let the hounds somehow trap her up in the tree, she would have trouble getting the horse close enough to the growling, barking, snapping animals. She didn’t like the thought of being trapped and risking that the horse would break loose in the confusion and get away without her. Just as soon as there was enough light to see, she would leave.

She hadn’t eaten much other than some travel biscuits, a few nuts from time to time, and bit of dried meat she had in her pack. She still felt sick to her stomach and really didn’t want to eat anything at all, but she knew that she needed to keep up her strength, so she forced herself.

She had a fever, and her arm throbbed painfully. She was nauseous and constantly feared that she would have to throw up. She remembered waking back in the Garden of Life with the splitting headache and vomiting uncontrollably. While she knew that she had to eat or she would get sicker, she couldn’t afford to throw up, so she ate only as much as she thought she had to.

As she searched the surrounding area for any sign of the dogs, she thought she spotted something off among the trees.

It looked human.

Kahlan was about to call out to try to get some help, when she saw the way the thing moved. It didn’t walk, exactly. It was more like it glided along through the shadows.

She leaned out on the branch, trying to see better. Just then, the first rays of sunlight came through the treetops.

Kahlan saw then that what she had thought was a person was actually a dog— a big black dog. It was the leader of the pack, stalking out of the trees.

She couldn’t grasp how she could have thought it was a person. With the terror of seeing the pack leader, panic welled up in her and all she could think about was getting away.

Kahlan leaned down and pulled in the rope hand over hand as fast as she could, drawing the horse close to the tree before the hounds could come in close and spook it away.

When the horse was below her, she climbed down to a lower branch of the oak tree and then dropped onto the horse’s back.

Kahlan looked back and saw the pack of dogs coming through the trees. When they saw her they started in howling. Kahlan leaned forward over the horse’s withers as it bolted.

The chase was back on.