“I know,” Richard said. “I feel it too. Stay behind, and out of the way of my sword. If I can get close enough, I intend to separate Michec’s head from the rest of him.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to simply go in there?” Kahlan asked.
“Not really, but I doubt he is going to come out and surrender. I don’t know how else we will have any chance of eliminating him other than going in there after him. Since he conjured fire, that means he can defend against it, so I can’t burn him out.”
With Kahlan and Shale following close on his heels, Richard came out from around the corner and moved carefully but swiftly down the hallway. He looked back from time to time, as did the other two, checking for any threat from the rear. He didn’t see the witch man anywhere, but he couldn’t yet see into the room. It was likely he was hiding inside.
As they reached the broad opening of the vast room, lit from within, they found what Richard feared he had seen.
The five Mord-Sith were lined up on their knees just in front of the broad entrance, each with both hands held out, their Agiel resting in their upturned palms.
Keeping an eye on the room beyond, Richard touched Berdine’s shoulder, the first of the five kneeling side by side in a row. She didn’t react. He urgently whispered her name as he waved his hand in front of her eyes. She didn’t so much as blink. He shook her shoulder; she didn’t react.
“Any idea what he’s done to them?” he asked Shale.
Shale knelt in front of Berdine and placed her hands to either side of her head. Berdine stared ahead without seeing, without blinking, without moving. After bowing her head a moment, Shale finally stood and let out a troubled sigh.
“Nothing. I sense nothing. They might as well be statues.”
“How is that even possible?” Richard frowned at her. “What does it mean?”
Shale regretfully shook her head. “He has somehow blanked them out. That’s the only way I can explain it. Berdine doesn’t give off any sign of life. I can see that they are alive, but I can feel no sign of life in her. Despite their eyes being open, they are not conscious.”
Kahlan gently shook Berdine’s shoulder. There was no reaction from the Mord-Sith.
“The only way you are going to get them back is if you can get Michec to release them,” Shale told them. “They are captives of his power.”
“What if I simply kill him?”
Shale shrugged. “That would work.”
Richard couldn’t imagine what the witch man could have done to make the five Mord-Sith kneel and offer their Agiel.
He really didn’t want Kahlan coming with him, but there was little choice—he judged it more dangerous to leave her behind. Michec would probably love to catch her alone and capture her. That would give him even more power over Richard.
“Can you do anything to block what he can do?” he asked Shale.
Her hopeless look told him all there was to know.
“If I can get close enough, I can use my Confessor’s power on him,” Kahlan said. “That would render him harmless.”
“With his ability, he’d likely incapacitate you the way he did the Mord-Sith,” Shale told her. “I don’t know if it would even work on him, but you would never get the chance to try.”
“Just stay clear of my sword,” Richard said as he made his way past the five unmoving, kneeling Mord-Sith. “Shale, if you can do anything to slow him or hinder his ability, please do.”
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.