The Omen Machine

One of the familiars, missing a hand, he noticed, leaned toward him.

“Jit says that she is pleased to see you again, boy.”

Henrik swallowed. He couldn’t bring himself to say he was pleased to see her again as well.

Jit, her head bobbing, let out a low-pitched grating screech, punctuated with a few clicks of her tongue against the top of her mouth.

“Jit wants to know if you brought it,” the familiar said.

Henrik’s mouth felt stuck closed. He couldn’t make himself speak. Fearing what she would do if he didn’t somehow answer, he held out his fisted hands. He didn’t think that, after all this time, he could open them if he tried.

The Hedge Maid let out a soft raspy sound— half pule, half screech.

“Come closer,” the familiar said. “Jit says to come closer so that she may see for herself.”

Somewhere behind, there was a sound that made all the familiars pause and turn to look. The Hedge Maid’s black eyes turned up to focus into the distance behind him. Henrik looked back over his shoulder to see what had caught their attention.

In the distance, there was some kind of disturbance. Something was making its way up the hall that led into the chambers.

Candle flames wavered, their light flickering, and then they went out.

What ever it was brought darkness with it.

As it passed, the candles nearby all around it went dark. When it was beyond them, the extinguished flames slowly returned to life until they were once more fully lit.

It made it seem as if darkness itself were stalking through the tunnel of a hall, coming for them all.

As it came closer, pulling that darkness with it, extinguishing candles all around as it passed, the familiars cowered back behind Jit. Henrik could see the one without a hand trembling slightly.

Jit let out a long, low squeal and a few clicks. Two of the familiars gathered in close about her, leaning in, whispering. They nodded to more clicks and soft, grating sounds from deep in the Hedge Maid’s throat.

When the form finally swept into the room, bringing darkness with it, Henrik saw at last that it was a man.

The man paused before Jit, not far from Henrik. The candles’ flames in the hall behind him and those nearby in the room slowly came back to life, showing at last the man before them.

When he finally got a good look at the man, Henrik froze stiff, unable to draw a breath.

CHAPTER 53

The man glanced down at the warm, wet place growing on the front of Henrik’s pants and smiled to himself.

“This is the boy?” he asked in a deep, iron-hard voice that made Henrik have to remind himself to blink and caused the seven familiars to drift back up ever so slightly more behind Jit, as if they weren’t aware that his voice alone had bulled them back.

The Hedge Maid let out a short, grating, clicking sound.

“Yes, this is him, Bishop Arc,” the handless familiar said for her mistress after watching her speak in the strange voice.

Bishop Arc glared at Jit for a moment. His gaze lowered deliberately to take in her mouth sewn closed; then he again turned his terrible eyes on Henrik.

The whites of the man’s eyes were not white. Not at all.

They had been tattooed a bright blood red.

The dark iris and pupil in the field of blood red made his eyes seem as if they were looking out from some other world, a world of fire and flame— or perhaps from the underworld itself.

But even as frightening as the bishop’s eyes were, that was not the most disturbing aspect of the man. The most ghastly thing about him, the thing that made Henrik unable to look away, unable to stop his heart from hammering, unable to draw more than short, shallow breaths, was the man’s flesh.

Every bit of Bishop Arc was covered with tattooed symbols. Not simply covered, but layered over countless times so that the skin looked something other than human. There was no place that Henrik could see that was not tattooed with some part or element of strange circular designs, each one randomly laid over another over another and over yet another, all layer upon layer so that there was no untouched skin visible anywhere. Not one speck.

The top layers were the darkest, with those under them lighter, the ones under those lighter yet, and so on, as if they continually absorbed down into his flesh and new ones were constantly being added over the top of those already there. They had an endless, bottomless depth to them, a tangled complexity that was dizzying, as if the symbols were continually seething up from somewhere dark.

Looking down through the ever-deeper levels of designs gave the man’s skin a three-dimensional appearance. Because the layers made it hard to tell just where the surface of the skin actually was in all the floating elements, it gave Bishop Arc a shadowy, somewhat hazy, somewhat ghostly appearance. Henrik felt sure that if the man wished it, he could vanish at will into the fog of floating symbols.