The Sword of the Truth, Book 12 - The Omen Machine (24 page)

H
is sword still gripped tightly in his hand, Richard circled his free arm around Kahlan’s shoulders. She gently rested a hand on his back, silently returning the understanding. No words were needed, or at that moment would have been adequate.

Without saying anything to the others watching him, Richard led her out of the room. Kahlan had seen violent deaths beyond counting, and to an extent had gotten used to it, built a shell to protect herself from feeling it, but that protective shell had slowly softened since the war had ended. Still, violent death was not something new to her. This death, though, more than most, seemed to have rocked her to her core.

Maybe it was because Catherine had been pregnant. Maybe seeing an unborn child that had been ripped from his mother and killed was what had gotten to her. Maybe it was because it reminded her of her own unborn child that had died because she had been savagely attacked when she had been pregnant. She held back a cry of anguish, and did her best to hold back tears, though she thought that in the absence of her husband to look after her remains as a final act of devotion, Catherine deserved at least tears.

Outside the room, Richard paused. The carpet over the white marble floor, where the blood ran under it, was rumpled up a bit, probably from the boots and effort of the men with the ram as they had tried to breach the door.

For some reason, Richard stood frozen, staring at it.

Puzzled, Kahlan looked more closely, and then she, too, saw something, some kind of mark, back in the dark fold under the carpet.

With the tip of his sword, Richard flipped the carpet back.

There, under where the carpet had lain, stained with Queen Catherine’s blood, with the unborn prince’s blood, was a symbol that had been scratched into the polished marble. The symbol was circular. It looked to Kahlan something like the designs drawn in the book
Regula
.

“Do you know what it says?” she asked.

Some of the color had left Richard’s face. “It says, ‘Watch them.’”

“‘Watch them’?” Nicci asked, looking down at the symbol. “Are you sure?”

Richard nodded, then turned to Benjamin. “General, please see to taking proper care of the queen. Before you have the room cleaned, inspect it carefully, inspect every splinter, look for footprints in the blood to see if this has been staged by men or if it was animals. Look for broken teeth. Animals sometimes lose teeth in a violent attack. Look for fur. See if you can learn anything that will help us to understand what happened here. I want to know if it was men or beasts that did this.”

“Of course, Lord Rahl.”

Richard pointed with his chin. “The doors at the back of the room are opened out onto the terrace. What ever or whoever did this undoubtedly got in there.”

General Meiffert glanced back through the broken doorway. “The room is close enough to the ground that something could have gotten in there, but I’ve never heard of wolves being up on the plateau. Dogs, occasionally, but not wolves.”

“Something was up here,” Richard said. “It could have been a pack of dogs. Dogs, even domesticated dogs, will kill people like this if they pack up.”

The general nodded as he glanced back through the doorway. “I’ll personally see to having the room carefully checked.”

“I have to go look into something,” Richard said. “Tell the other representatives that for now we have reason to believe that the queen was killed by animals— most likely wolves or dogs. Have them keep their exterior doors closed and locked. You should also station men outside to watch for anything suspicious. If you see anything on four legs running loose, kill it and inspect the contents of its stomach.”

When the general clapped a fist to his heart, Richard started off at a trot. Momentarily surprised, Kahlan and the others quickly followed behind as he ran off down the corridor. Guards backed out of the way when they saw him coming.

When they reached the people being kept back, the guards moved everyone out of the way so Richard and the rest of them could get through.

Representatives snatched at his sleeve, wanting to know what had happened and if there was danger about. Richard told them that there was, and that the soldiers would see to it, but he didn’t slow to explain or to discuss it.

Once finally away from the guest quarters, they went through doors that were always guarded, and into the private sections of the palace, the sections where the public wasn’t allowed. It was a relief to be away from people, to be away from their questions, from the accusations in their eyes. The small group took a shortcut through rooms that were lit only by a few lamps, and small libraries where the only light came from open doors at either end, or from low fires in a hearth.

“Where are we going?” Kahlan asked as she trotted along beside Richard once they were out into a wider corridor.

“To the last bedroom we stayed in.”

Kahlan thought about it for a moment as she listened to their footfalls echoing back from the distance.

“You mean the bedroom where we … saw something?”

“That’s right.”

Before long they reached a familiar hallway. The walls were paneled and at intervals had pedestals with crystal vases holding cut tulips. Partway down the hall was the bedroom Kahlan had found for them, the last bedroom they had stayed in before they had moved to the Garden of Life to sleep, not long after the woman who had tried to kill Kahlan predicted that she would be taken by the same thing as would have eaten her children. Dark things, the woman had said.

“Dark things stalking you, running you down. You won’t be able to escape them.”

When they reached the doorway to the bedroom, Richard kicked back the carpeting.

There, hidden under the carpet, scratched into the polished marble floor, was another symbol. It looked to Kahlan like the last one, the one stained with Catherine’s and her unborn child’s blood.

“It says the same thing,” Richard said as he stared down at the ancient design scratched into the floor. “‘Watch them.’”

“This was the last place where we felt someone watching us,” Kahlan said. “I wonder if Catherine felt someone watching her.”

“What I want to know is who put this here, and how is it that they weren’t seen.”

R
ichard stood alone, hands clasped behind his back, staring at the machine, trying to work out what could be going on. He had lain down with Kahlan for a long time up in the Garden of Life, holding her until her tears had ended, waiting until the tension had gone out of her body and her breathing had slowed. When she had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, he had come alone down to the room where the machine had been buried and forgotten for uncounted centuries.

He still didn’t know who had created the thing, or why. It would seem that it had been created to give prophecy. An omen machine, the king had called it.

Somehow, as inconceivable as that was, it still sounded too simple. The book, after all, called the machine Regula, and that meant so much more.

But the book
Regula
down in the library was merely a translation of the symbols, of the language of Creation, that the machine used to convey its predictions. The book only helped them to understand the omens that the Regula machine issued. It did not explain why it called the machine Regula. “
Regula
” meant to regulate with sovereign authority. What that had to do with omens Richard couldn’t imagine.

He supposed that in a way, through its prophecies, the machine actually was controlling what was happening. Or someone else was, and making them look like prophecies coming from the machine. It also seemed that the prophecies issued by the machine were not enough. Those same prophecies also came to light through various people in the palace, as if to insure that the messages could not be kept secret.

It could be, he imagined, that the machine was very much regulating— controlling—what was going on through its recent prophecies, so in that way the name Regula fit, although that seemed a stretch.

It seemed to Richard far more likely that the answers to the machine’s true purpose were in the part of the book that was missing, the part hidden away in the Temple of the Winds. What ever was in that part of the book had to be important, or else dangerous, to warrant being hidden away in the Temple of the Winds.

Richard didn’t relish the idea of again setting foot in that place. It would be far from simple and could easily create more problems than it solved.

He tried to push the troubling thoughts aside. He wanted to be up in the Garden of Life with Kahlan, to be in her arms, to have her tell him that everything would be all right … to tell him again that it wasn’t his fault. He knew that it wasn’t, but that still didn’t make him feel any better. It couldn’t undo what had happened.

He had to find out what was going on and put a stop to it.

He knew that the representatives would be in an uproar, not only over the murder of a queen while she was a guest of the palace, but even more so over King Philippe denouncing Richard as the ruler of the D’Haran Empire. It was a declaration driven by raw emotion, but even so, Richard knew that there were a number of people who would side with King Philippe and follow his lead. Richard wasn’t sure what he could do about it, but at the moment, he had bigger worries.

While the king and others found it convenient to blame Richard— and Richard blamed himself for failing to link the prophecy to an unborn prince— that didn’t get to the heart of what was going on. He needed to figure out what had really happened and why. Something, or someone, had been in that room and had killed Queen Catherine.

He was convinced that someone was behind it, that it was deliberate. After all, someone had set about watching the queen. Someone had scratched that symbol in the floor outside her room. Someone was watching and when she had been alone they had struck. At least, that was the way it seemed to him. He had to admit that as incriminating as the symbol was, the murder might not actually be connected to it. He couldn’t let himself become locked into only one possibility.

He was even more puzzled as to how someone could have gotten into the Lord Rahl’s quarters, past all the guards, and then, unseen, scratch that same symbol in the floor outside their bedroom door.

As much as he wanted to be with Kahlan, he needed to think things through. More than that, though, he needed to be alone.

Somehow, it seemed certain to him that the machine, a machine that could issue omens, had to be at the heart of the the darkness that had settled over the palace.

Richard remembered what the sick boy down in the market, the boy who had scratched Richard and Kahlan, had said. He’d said there was darkness in the palace. Darkness seeking darkness.

Richard no longer doubted that there was darkness in the palace. It had descended on them all.

He reached out and placed a hand on the machine.

“What are you?” he whispered, wondering out loud to himself. “Why are you doing this?”

As if in response, a low rumble came from the machine as the gears began turning against one another. It wasn’t like in the past, though. In the past it had always started with a jolt that shook the ground.

This time it began softly, the shafts and gears slowly beginning to move, to gather momentum. In the past it had always been a sudden, thunderous initiation of movement. It had always started at full speed.

This time, it was very different. It was a quiet beginning that was building toward that eventual mechanical mayhem.

Richard leaned over, looking into the slit of a window. He saw the light inside gradually intensify as the slowly turning gears picked up speed with the machine’s awakening. The same symbol projected up onto the ceiling as in the past, though this time instead of igniting at full intensity, it gradually grew in strength.

Before long, though, the inner workings of the machine were in full motion. The ground around it rumbled. The light burning up from deep inside steadily grew brighter. The symbol on the ceiling rotating above his head glowed.

A latch on a rotating wheel popped up beneath the stack of strips on the other side of the machine and pushed a strip partway out from under the stack. Pincers then plucked the blank metal strip from the bottom of the stack.

As the strip was pulled onward through the interior mechanism, the light from below intensified again, narrowing and closing down into a beam that burned lines and symbols into the underside of the strip. As the light inscribed the underneath side of the strip, it caused hot spots to glow through onto the top of the metal.

After passing over the beam of light, the strip moved along the same as he had seen others move through the machine in the past to finally make it all the way across and drop into the slot near the small window.

Richard licked his fingers and plucked the strip from the slot where it rested. He tossed it onto the top of the machine to cool.

He blinked in surprise when he realized that the strip had not been hot at all. He reached out and touched it, testing. It was cool to the touch.

Frowning, he pulled it close. There were symbols burned into the metal as before, but for some reason this time the process hadn’t left it hot. He couldn’t imagine why not.

Richard turned the strip around so he could read it. He bent closer to the light of a proximity sphere and deciphered the unique collection of elements assembled into a single emblem that made a phrase in the language of Creation.

I have had dreams.

Richard stood frozen, staring at it. He thought that he must have read it wrong. He rotated the metal strip around, looking at each element in the circle, as he worked out the translation again to make sure he had it right and then spoke it aloud.

“I have had dreams.”

He took a step back from the machine.

It had always given a warning in the past, an omen, some kind of prophecy. This didn’t make any sense, and it didn’t sound at all like prophecy.

It sounded as if the machine had … said something about itself.

As he stood staring, Regula paused momentarily as shafts disengaged and gears slowed; then the gears interlocked and picked up speed again. The machine drew another strip from the stack on the other side and pulled it through the inner mechanism, in the process passing it over the focused beam of light to engrave a new message on the second strip.

When it dropped into the tray, Richard stood looking at it for a long time before he finally pulled it out. The second strip was as cool to the touch as the first had been. He held it up in the light, looking at the unique organization of symbols that made up the two emblems burned into the metal.

Hardly able to believe what he was seeing, he read it aloud.

“Why have I had dreams?”

The machine seemed to be asking him a question. If it was, he had no idea how to answer it.

Richard remembered then having heard before what was now written in the language of Creation on both strips. It had been the boy down in the market, Henrik, who had said “
I have had dreams.
” Richard and Kahlan hadn’t been able to understand why he’d said it. They had thought he was sick and delirious. He had then asked “
Why have I had dreams?
”

Now the machine had just asked the very same thing.

The boy hadn’t been delirious.

It had been the machine speaking through him.

The boy had also asked if the sky was still blue. And it had asked why they had all left it alone. Only it had said “me”— why had they left “me” all alone in the cold and dark. It had said it was alone, so alone.

The machine was asking why it had been buried alive.

It had also said
He will find me, I know he will
.

Richard wondered if that was a prophecy … an omen.

Or was the machine expressing a fear?