Wasteland

23

As he moved between the five Mord-Sith and through the opening, the glass spheres inside brightened enough to reveal what was in the room. As he took in what he was seeing, it felt like Richard’s heart came up in his throat.

The room was a central complex in the complication spell. Because of that, it was huge. But that was not what was so terrifying about the room.

In a gridwork pattern about eight or ten feet apart, throughout a large portion of the room, in row after row, bodies hung on chains by manacles on their wrists. In the ghostly green glow from spheres around the room, it almost looked like a forest in an eerie fog; the bodies resembled tree trunks. The silence was haunting.

Besides the gagging stench, it was clear from their condition that the people hanging from chains hooked to the beamed ceiling were long dead. Some of the bodies were charred a bubbled black from head to foot. Most, though, had been skinned alive, their flesh in a bloody pile beneath their feet. The heads, from the neck up, still had their skin, presumably to preserve the expressions of stark terror and pain frozen on their faces. Their hands, held by manacles around their wrists, also had skin, making it look like they were wearing pale gloves. Everything else had been carefully skinned, even the toes. With the red muscles and white tendons exposed, the figures all looked grotesquely naked.

Her face contorted in disgust, Kahlan held a hand over her mouth and nose, the same as Shale. The stench of death was overpowering.

Richard’s rage relegated the smell to a distant distraction.

All those bodies hanging motionless above bloody piles of their skin, a mist drifting among them in the near darkness, with the faint green light from all the light spheres filtering among the carcasses and casting multiple fingers of shadow across the floor, was just about the creepiest thing Richard had ever seen. This had obviously been done by a deranged person who very much enjoyed the grisly work.

As Richard moved into the kill room, through the forest of motionless, hanging bodies, he spotted a faint movement in the distance. He wove his way quietly among the hanging corpses, sword held in both hands, ready to kill Michec.

As Richard came around one of the stiff corpses, he suddenly came face-to-face with Vika. His breath caught and he froze in his tracks.

She was naked, hanging in manacles hooked by a chain to a bolt in one of the beams of the ceiling. Her red leather had been thrown aside. Unlike all the others hanging in the room, she was still alive, if barely, and still had her skin. Her brow tightly bunched, her eyes tracked him as he moved in among the corpses.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, blood down her chin.

She had obviously been beaten to within an inch of her life, but far worse, there was a knife slit that had opened a wound in her belly. A long length of intestine had been pulled out of that incision. It hung down in front, along one bloody leg, some of it at the end coiled on the floor in a puddle of blood beneath her feet.

The end of Vika’s Agiel was sticking out of the open wound in her belly, the fine gold chain hanging down from the end.

Had Richard not been so enraged at what had been done to her, he might have thrown up.

“Please,” she whispered, hardly loud enough to be heard. “Please, Lord Rahl … kill me. Please …”

He stepped close. “Stay with me, Vika. I’m going to take care of you.”

Her whole body shook slightly, partly from the beating and the open wound in her belly, but mostly from the pain her Agiel was giving her. It had been pushed into the wound, into her exposed insides, to add unrelenting agony to everything else he had done to her.

Through her pain, she managed to whisper, “Lord Rahl … run …”

Richard started to reach for the Agiel, to pull it out and at least stop that much of her pain, but he stepped back when he heard a soft chuckling. With a hand, he urgently shepherded both Kahlan and Shale around behind him, backing them up to give himself room to use his sword.

He couldn’t tell where the chuckling was coming from. It seemed to echo out from everywhere. As he looked all around for the threat, dark smoke, clinging low to the floor, glided in under the hanging corpses. It snaked slightly as it moved among the bloody piles of skin. It seemed almost alive, the way it moved.

As it came close, it gathered into a thick, greenish-gray cloud. That increasing mass of murky smoke rose up, so heavy it obscured everything beyond it.

Richard took a mighty swing with the sword through the smoke. Wisps of it curled away when the blade passed through and disturbed the air, but there was nothing solid in it.

He heard the soft chuckling again. He gripped his sword tighter as he stepped back from the tall, hazy mass of smoke.

The smoke seemed caught up in a sudden wind, and with a swirl, as if something had passed close by, it spun as it faded away into the air.

When it was gone, there was Moravaska Michec standing before them.

He was a big, barrel-chested man past his middle years. His face was coarse, as if made up of chunky blocks of clay that had hardened together before being refined into proper features. His heavy brow nearly obscured dark eyes peering out from narrowed eyes. A dark, pockmarked complexion scarred his cheeks and bulbous nose.

He wore what had once been white robes, similar to the white robes Richard remembered Darken Rahl always wearing. But Michec’s white robes were stained with what looked like years of blood and gore, as if they had never been washed. Richard could understand why Nyda said that he was called the Butcher. It looked much like he was wearing a butcher’s apron.

Richard could easily understand the other reason, hanging all around the room, he was called Michec the Butcher.

There was a cloth stole, such as a priest would wear, around the back of his neck and draped down over the front of his shoulders. It was embroidered with layers of designs in golds and purples. Richard guessed that it had denoted his high rank back when Darken Rahl ruled. But like his robes, it was soiled with blood and dark stains.

The man’s full head of short hair was salt-and-pepper, and stuck up from his scalp in greasy spikes. The thick mass of his beard, confined for the most part to the rim of his broad jaw and chin, had been braided into dozens of long, fat strands hanging to mid-chest. They looked like nothing so much as snakes hanging from the rim of his face.

His fat fingers, ending with jagged, broken nails, were stained with messy black muck under the nails and in the crevices and wrinkles, obviously from many years of his sadistic fixations.

His sly smile conveyed abject cruelty.

“So tell me,” he said as he gestured all around. “Really, was this your plan? To simply walk in here and kill me? That was your plan? You think yourself that powerful? Powerful enough to rule, to protect those loyal to you?” He clucked his tongue with amusement. “My, my. Such arrogance.”

Richard didn’t answer. His mind was spinning with a thousand thoughts. For some reason, though, it felt like he couldn’t connect those fragments of thoughts, couldn’t make his mind work.

The man’s cunning smile widened. “You all are probably are wondering why your meager abilities aren’t working. Well, I must confess: I spelled this room. And you simply walked right in here, distracted by my collection of pretty people. So you see, like the Mord-Sith, you three aren’t as powerful as you imagine yourselves to be, because in here, even what powers you do have are blocked.” He lifted his heavy brow. “Just like all your pretty little Mord-Sith. Not even your bond protected them.”

Richard tried to summon the gift he knew was there, somewhere, deep inside, but it simply didn’t respond. By the look on Shale’s face, she was having the same problem.

Michec gestured to Vika. “She’s mine, you know. Darken Rahl himself assigned her to me for training. After that, she was given to me. I only loaned her to Hannis Arc. He was supposed to return her. When he died—because of you—she was obligated to come back to me. An inviolable duty she chose to ignore.” A dark look came over his features. “I am seeing to it that she fully regrets her disobedience.” He reached out and with the tip of his first finger pushed the Agiel a little deeper into the gaping belly wound.

Vika’s eyes rolling back in her head; her chin quivered as a shudder of agony went through her.

“I will similarly deal with her equally disloyal sister Mord-Sith.” He glanced toward the opening into the room where they were kneeling before looking back at Richard. He smiled with menace. “Once I deal with you and your lovely wife.”

He lifted a hand as he walked off a few paces, then turned back. “Once I do, I will be richly rewarded. You see, the Golden Goddess has become … annoyed, shall we say, by your stubborn resistance.” He stepped closer. “I assured her I could handle the situation. We came to … an arrangement.”

Richard was horrified to learn that Michec was working with the Goddess. Even though he was filled with rage, he couldn’t make his gift respond to that fury. Try as he might to call it forth, it felt like there was nothing there. Whatever kind of spell the witch man had used, besides blocking his gift, it also made Richard’s thinking foggy.

Michec swept a hand around in a grand fashion, as if proudly showing off his years of dedicated labor.

“As you can see, my work continues. It was interrupted by you, Richard Cypher, the pretend Lord Rahl. For that, you will suffer, I can assure you.

“But the goddess, you see”—he smiled with meaning at Richard as he pointed a finger toward Kahlan—“wants more than anything to hold the bloody remains of the two children growing in her belly. I assured her she will have her wish.”

Richard came unhinged.

With a cry of rage, he abandoned his attempt to use his gift and instead went for the man, sword-first.