The Omen Machine Page 26

  Richard seized the man’s jacket at the shoulder and pulled him back. “Let these men through. They have a ram, let them at the doors.”

  In a state flashing back and forth between anger and panic, King Philippe looked at Richard and then the men with the ram. He quickly moved to the side and gestured with an arm, urging them on.

  The men didn’t waste any time. With a grunt of effort, they rushed forward with the heavy ram. Gathering as much speed as they could in the confines of the corridor, they raced in. The ram crashed into the doors with a resounding thud. It felt to Kahlan like the entire wall shook with the impact, but the doors held tight.

  They backed across the corridor and came again, driving the ram into the doors, sending small splinters flying. Where it hit, the ram left an impression embossed into the carving of vines and a ring of splintered wood, but the doors remained intact. A third time was no more fruitful.

  Kahlan thought that it would be best if someone with the gift breached the doors. “Nicci, Nathan— can’t one of you do something?”

  Richard wasn’t in the mood to wait for that.

  “Move aside!” he impatiently yelled out when the men with the ram stepped back to gain room to make another attempt.

  As the men backed away, without wasting another moment, Richard gripped his sword with both hands and lifted it over his head. With a mighty swing the blade whistled through the air, arcing toward the doors. The Sword of Truth had been made thousands of years before and invested with great power. There was nothing it couldn’t cut through in the hands of the Seeker, except one thing: those he knew to be innocent.

  With an earsplitting crash the blade smashed through the heavy doors. Sharp wooden fragments sailed through the hallway, ricocheting off the walls. Everyone nearby ducked away, covering their faces with an arm. Only the briefest pause later, a second swing shattered another ragged swath down through the doors, sending huge splinters flying through the hall and skittering across the carpets. Kahlan could see that a heavy beam inside that had barred the doors had been shattered by the sword.

  Richard threw a powerful kick into the center of the two broken doors. They both ripped from their hinges and toppled into the room.

  As the heavy doors crashed to the ground and clouds of dust and debris billowed up, Richard dove through into the dark room.

  CHAPTER 46

  Kahlan tried to follow Richard into the room, but Cara, Agiel in hand and bent on protecting him, raced in ahead of her. Before Kahlan could follow, Nicci slipped in front of Kahlan and dashed in with Cara, both women worried about Richard diving headlong into trouble. Kahlan, no less concerned, cut in front of Benjamin and ran into the darkness after them.

  A frantic King Philippe tried to follow, but soldiers restrained him. Benjamin urged the king to let Lord Rahl and the rest of them find out what was going on, first.

  Inside, they came to a halt. The room was dead quiet.

  Kahlan held her breath against the stench of blood.

  Glancing back over her shoulder, she could see Benjamin silhouetted in the doorway, waiting to see if they needed reinforcements. On the opposite side of the room, to either side of double doors, sheer curtains billowed in a light breeze, looking like ghosts in the moonlight.

  “I can’t see a thing in here,” Cara whispered.

  Nicci ignited a flame that floated in midair above her palm. She quickly found a stand with a few candles still affixed to it and righted it, then sent the flame into the candles.

  As the level of light rose, Kahlan could at last see more than the mere hints of shapes in the moonlight coming through the open doors on the opposite side of the room.

  “Dear spirits,” she whispered into the terrible quiet.

  Nicci retrieved a few lamps from the rubble, lit them, and set them on a table that was still upright.

  In the lamplight they were finally able to see the full extent of the devastation. Splintered furniture lay overturned. Cushions were scattered. The leather chairs were slashed by what looked to be either claws or fangs, Kahlan didn’t know which.

  A nearby couch had been turned red with blood. Blood splatters crisscrossed the walls in swaths, as if flung there in terrible rage. The amount of it everywhere was shocking.

  At their feet Queen Catherine lay on her back. Her scalp had been partly peeled away. Gouges looking to be left by fangs raked across her exposed skull and cut through the upper part of her face. Her jaw was torn partially away. Her eyes, as if still filled with paralyzing shock, stared unseeing at the ceiling.

  Since the remnants were so completely soaked in blood, it was impossible to tell what color her dress had once been.

  Catherine’s entire middle was ripped open. She had nearly been torn in two. Her left thigh muscle, stripped off the bone, lay flopped out to the side. Long gouges, also appearing to be left by fangs, raked down the length of the bone.

  Viscera lay strewn out across the floor. It looked like a pack of wolves had been at her, their fangs ripping her open and pulling her apart. What was left hardly looked human.

  Kahlan’s knees felt weak. She could not help thinking about the woman who had murdered her children, the woman Kahlan had taken with her power. This was what the woman had predicted was going to happen to Kahlan.

  Then, among the organs and intestines, she saw an umbilical cord snaking its way across the floor.

  At the end of it were the bloody, pink remains of Catherine’s unborn child. Its little toes looked perfect. The top half of the body was gone.

  From what remained, Kahlan could see that it was a boy.

  A prince.

  With a scream of fury, King Philippe finally pulled away from soldiers reluctant to be too forceful with him. He bulled his way into the room. When he reached his wife he froze stiff.

  Then he screamed, a cold cry such as could only be brought forth by such a horrific sight, a cry that would have made the good spirits weep.

  Richard put an arm around the man’s shoulders and tried to gently pull him back and away from the sight.

  King Philippe jerked away and turned in fury toward Richard. “This is your fault!”

  Nathan lifted a hand in warning. “It was no such thing.”

  The king ignored him. He brought his sword up, pointing it at Richard’s face. “You could have prevented this!”

  Richard, his own sword still in his fist, its rage still in his eyes, slowly brought his blade up and used it to turn the point of King Philippe’s sword aside.

  “I can only imagine how you must feel,” Richard said in as calm a voice as he could muster with the sword in his hand and its rage pounding through his veins. The violent death at his feet only served to feed his own rage. “Your anger and hurt is entirely understandable,” Richard told him.

  “How would you know?” the king yelled. “You care nothing for your people, or you would have helped us by using prophecy to prevent this!”

  “Prophecy would not have prevented this,” Richard said.

  “You sent those three princes away because of prophecy! You knew! You could have prevented this! You wanted this to happen!”

  Nicci kept the king locked in her gaze. Any wrong move, and her power would crash into the king before he knew what had hit him. Kahlan didn’t think that the king even realized the mortal danger he was in, from Nicci, from Richard, from Nathan, and no less from Kahlan.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Nicci warned. “You are looking for guilt in the wrong place.”

  He turned the sword toward her. “I know perfectly well what I’m saying! I only just now learned of the prophecy saying that here in the palace a prince would fall to fangs on the full moon. Had Lord Rahl told us of this prophecy, we could have prevented this from happening!”

  “And had you not been out chasing prophecy,” Kahlan said in a deadly voice of her own, “you could have been here to save your wife and unborn son from this fate. They fell to fangs because you were off chasing prophecy, whe
n you should have been at their side protecting them. Now, you seek to shift blame away from yourself and onto others.”

  Richard gently put a hand out, touching Kahlan’s arm, as if to say to let the man be. She was right, of course, but it would do no good at the moment to press the issue.

  Richard’s sympathy did not register with the king. He again turned his sword toward Richard. Richard’s eyes remained focused on the man, but he didn’t move to knock the sword aside. Despite what the king might think, Kahlan knew that he would not be fast enough. When he wished it, the blade Richard held could move like lightning and strike just as hard.

  “You have failed in your duty to protect your people,” the king growled.

  “He’s been doing everything he can to protect everyone,” Kahlan said, ready to reach out and take the king with her own power if necessary.

  His glare turned toward her. “Really? Then why has he not told us that he found an omen machine.”

  Richard blinked. “What?”

  King Philippe swept his sword back, indicating those outside. “We all know of it. The question is, why would you keep such a machine secret, and the warnings it has given— prophecy that could only come from the Creator Himself?”

  “We don’t know anything about the machine, much less if it is meant to help us or harm us,” Richard said. “We can’t put our trust in words coming from a source we know nothing about. That’s why—”

  “Just where do your loyalties lie, Lord Rahl? With life or with death itself? Who do you really serve?”

  Cara lifted her Agiel, pointing it at the king’s face. “You are now treading on very dangerous ground. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I suggest that you take greater care to make sure you don’t say something you would come to greatly regret.”

  Richard gently lowered Cara’s arm. “I would have done anything to prevent this,” he said to the king.

  “Anything but tell us the truth.” His gaze left Cara and moved to Richard. “There have been rumors that you are afraid to sleep in your own bedchambers, now we know why. Yet you would not warn your people of the danger loose in the palace. You have failed in your duty to us!”

  Richard glared back, but didn’t answer. Kahlan knew that it was pointless to try to talk sense into the man at such an emotional moment, standing as they were over his murdered wife and unborn child.

  King Philippe gritted his teeth. “You are not fit to lead the D’Haran Empire.”

  “I swear to you,” Richard said, “I will find out who is responsible for this and see justice done.”

  “Justice? I know who is responsible.” The king straightened his shoulders and sheathed his sword. “I withdraw my land from loyalty to your rule. We no longer recognize you as the legitimate leader of the D’Haran Empire.”

  He looked down briefly at the remains of his wife on the floor before him, then closed his eyes for a moment as if fighting back tears or maybe a cry of anguish, or maybe an urge to pull his sword again.

  And then he turned and stormed away.

  CHAPTER 47

  His 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 footfal
ls 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.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Richard 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.