The Omen Machine Page 36

  “There is the one about it having dreams,” Nicci offered.

  Richard turned to her. “But is that really joyous? And even if it is, is it really a prophecy? I don’t think it’s either.”

  “Then what was it?” she asked.

  Richard thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think it’s prophecy. To me it sounds more like the machine is asking a question about itself. I’ve had dreams … why have I had dreams? That’s what it asked.”

  He turned back to Zedd. “But the prophecies of suffering and death that it has been issuing are all the same ominous predictions. They have no balance.”

  Zedd looked truly puzzled. “What’s your point, my boy?”

  “My point is that I’m not sure that these are really legitimate prophecies.”

  Nicci looked skeptical. “What else could they be, then?”

  “I think it’s possible that someone is planting these omens and then carrying them out to make it look like real prophecy coming true. They want us to think they’re prophecy. It would be like if I said that I’d had a premonition last night that I was going to draw my sword and touch your shoulder with it, and then I did just that to give the prediction validity. That may sound like I had given prophecy and it came true, but it wasn’t really prophecy.”

  “You think someone may be sending these prophecies, or made-up prophecies, through the machine?” Zedd poked a bony finger through his unruly thatch of white hair and scratched his scalp. “Richard, I can’t begin to imagine how such a thing could be done, much less know if it’s even possible.”

  Richard threw up his arm. “I don’t care. Just because I can’t figure out if someone really is doing this, or how, doesn’t mean that I should keep letting them get away with it.”

  “But to destroy such a thing without knowing anything about it seems—”

  “We do know something about it,” Richard said, cutting him off. He fisted his hands. “It has been predicting terrible things and they have come true. I want these murders to stop. I want Kahlan to be safe. I want this thing silenced.”

  Exasperated, Zedd looked at Nicci.

  “I’m afraid that I don’t have an argument against it,” she said in answer to Zedd’s unspoken question. “There’s something about this machine that has had me worried since the first moment I saw it. It was buried for a reason. Richard may have a point. Nothing good has come from it since it was discovered.”

  Zedd looked from Nicci to Richard. “What of the rest of the book, Regula, that is hidden away in the Temple of the Winds?”

  Richard gestured vaguely into the distance. “Like you said, it’s in the Temple of the Winds. Even if we travel there, getting in won’t be easy. Even if we get in, the place is immense. There’s no telling how long it will take us to find the rest of the book, if it’s still there and if it isn’t hidden. There’s no telling if it would even be of any use to us. We have a problem, and it’s right here, right now, in this room.”

  Zedd took a deep breath and then sighed as he considered it.

  “Well,” he finally said, “you may have a point. I have to admit, I haven’t liked this thing from the moment it was discovered. As Nicci says, it was buried for a reason. No one goes to this much trouble to bury and hide the existence of something unless it was causing big problems.”

  “Then let’s stop wasting time,” Richard said. “We need to put a stop to it now.”

  Resigned, Zedd motioned for them to step back, ushering Richard and Nicci into the protected landing of the spiral stairs where Cara stood guard.

  Without further fuss, Zedd turned back to the machine and ignited wizard’s fire between his outstretched palms.

  The room lit with rolling ribbons of orange and yellow light that played off the stone walls. Zedd’s white hair was made orange in the light coming from the sinister inferno, which he turned over and over between his hands, working it into a lethal servant. The boiling ball of fire built in intensity, hissing and popping with purpose.

  Satisfied that it was compacted the way he wanted it, Zedd finally flung the glowing sphere of liquid fire toward the square metal box sitting in the center of the room. The tempestuous inferno cast flickering light across the floor, walls, and ceiling as it flew, all the while hissing with deadly menace.

  Richard felt the powerful concussion in his chest as the sphere of liquid flame exploded against the unyielding machine. The liquid wizard’s fire, one of the most feared substances in existence because it burned so violently, engulfed the machine, crackling as it poured down the sides, burning with white-hot intensity.

  Wizard’s fire unleashed in a confined space was extraordinarily intense and profoundly dangerous. Even though Richard, Nicci, and Cara turned their faces away from the inferno, they still had to put hands up to shield themselves against the brutal heat and light from the concentrated conflagration. The burning roar was thunderous.

  It felt as if the entire world were being consumed.

  CHAPTER 69

  When the violence of the wizard’s fire at last subsided, Richard was finally able to open his eyes and take his hand away from his face. As the last glowing clots of conjured conflagration dripped onto the floor and extinguished with a steamy hiss, and the smoke cleared away, Richard expected to see Regula reduced to a puddle of molten metal.

  It was not.

  He saw that the machine was still sitting in the center of the room, looking exactly the same as the first time he had seen it. It looked untouched.

  He was certain that the outer walls of the machine would be scorching hot, but as he approached it he felt no residual heat radiating from the metal. Richard cautiously reached out, carefully testing, then tentatively touching the metal surface. It was cool to the touch.

  Richard had seen some of the terrible damage done by wizard’s fire, yet it had done nothing to the machine. It hadn’t even scoured the patina of corrosion off the surface. The symbols on the sides, the same symbols that appeared in the book Regula, were still in perfect condition.

  If he hadn’t seen the wizard’s fire engulfing it with his own eyes, he might not have believed that anything had happened, much less that it had been the target of some of the most powerful conjured magic in existence.

  Nicci, standing beside Richard, tested the surface with her fingers.

  “Well, Additive Magic obviously didn’t work. Maybe it’s time to try something a little more destructive.” She motioned for the rest of them to move back.

  Richard shepherded Zedd and Cara back into the protection of the stairwell. He knew what Nicci was going to do. He could see the aura of power crackling around the sorceress. It gave her a kind of glowing, otherworldly appearance, almost as if she were only there in spirit.

  The sorceress lifted her hands out toward the machine. The sizzling aura around her flickered with intensity. He knew that others couldn’t see it, but he had always sensed the field of power around certain people. No aura he had ever seen was as strong as Nicci’s.

  Black lightning— Subtractive Magic— ignited in the room with a thunderous thump. Dust lifted from the floor. The proximity spheres instantly went dark.

  The black lightning twisted together with a blindingly bright sudden discharge of Additive Magic. The rope of Subtractive Magic was so dark that it was like looking through a crack in the world of life into the underworld itself.

  In a way, it was.

  The inky black lightning connected with the machine. The end played over the surface, flickering up and down it. The rest of it, between Nicci and the machine, whipped wildly about the room as it crackled and popped where the two flows of power, impossible darkness and blinding light, touched. The air of the room smelled like burning sulfur and vibrated with the power of the conflicting forces fighting each other. Both dark and light twisted with savage effort to dominate the other, to occupy the same place at the same time. The machine was bathed in the hot glow of the Additive Magic, only to then vanish into the void of Subtract
ive Magic.

  It was a terrifying display of incompatible powers focused with destructive intent on the omen machine.

  As abruptly as it started, it stopped.

  The sudden quiet made Richard’s ears throb. The proximity spheres brightened, but slowly.

  “It isn’t working,” Nicci said as her hands dropped to her sides. The aura around her calmed and then extinguished.

  Richard stepped out of the stairwell. “How could it not work? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve never felt anything like it before.” Nicci ran her hand over the top of the machine as if trying to perceive its inner secrets through that light caress. “I could sense that it simply wasn’t connecting.”

  “What do you mean it wasn’t connecting?”

  Nicci shook her head in disbelief as she stared at the machine. “I create a node at the other end, at the target. The flow of power then fills the void between me and the target. The node is there to create a link for the power to seek, a route to follow. Once the connection is established, the two flows of energy are released into the node, destroying what it’s attached to. It happens instinctively and almost instantaneously.

  “This time, as I cast my ability outward, the node just couldn’t find the target, wouldn’t settle where I intended, almost as if the object wasn’t there. Because of that, my power couldn’t connect with the object.” She turned to look up at Richard. “I’m sorry, Richard. I tried. It should have been utterly destroyed, but I couldn’t even scratch the metal of the outer shell.”

  Richard wasn’t satisfied. “There has to be a way.”

  “This is something the likes of which none of us has ever seen before.” Nicci shook her head. “No wonder they buried it.”

  Richard knew something that would cut any metal.

  As he drew the Sword of Truth, the unique ring of steel filled the gloomy room.

  With the floodgates to the sword’s magic opened, its magic inundated him. He gave himself over to it, letting the storm of power thunder through him. He let it rage for a time, letting it seep into every fiber of his being.

  The others in the room, recognizing all too well what he intended to do, backed away.

  Filled with the fury of the sword’s magic mixing with his own, Richard slowly lifted the gleaming blade and touched the steel to his forehead.

  He let his own anger at the danger Kahlan was in surge through him, interlacing with the sword’s righteous wrath.

  Eyes closed, he gave himself over to the volatile fusing of magic.

  “Blade,” he whispered, “be true this day.”

  With both hands, Richard lifted the sword high over his head. Without pause and with all his might and fury, he drove the blade down toward the machine.

  The sword’s tip whistled as it sliced through the air.

  Richard screamed with the power of the magic coursing through him, with the power of his rage. The blade arced around and down toward the machine with lightning speed.

  A hairsbreadth from touching the machine, the blade stopped cold in midair.

  Richard was taken by surprise. He hadn’t expected the blade to stop the way it had. His muscles ached with the expected release that didn’t happen.

  The sword’s magic worked by intent. If the one wielding the sword believed that what he was attacking was the enemy, or evil, the sword would cut through it, cut through anything. If the Seeker believed the person evil, there was no defense against the blade, not even a wall of steel.

  But if the Seeker, somewhere deep inside, in the darkest corner of his mind, believed that the adversary was innocent, then the blade would not cut through even paper to harm them.

  Richard stood with the sword tightly gripped in both fists, the blade motionless in midair just above the top of the machine, a trail of sweat running down his temple.

  And then the machine began to wake.

  Shafts slowly started turning, gears engaged, and yet more of the mechanism began to gather momentum.

  CHAPTER 70

  Well isn’t that something,” Zedd said as he stepped out of the stairwell. “Seems that none of us has it in us to destroy the machine.”

  Richard wondered why.

  He staggered back from the machine as its internal mechanism gradually came to life, the internal parts progressively gathering momentum.

  He stood silently staring at the waking machine, stunned that the sword had halted so abruptly. He hadn’t expected it to.

  He’d had the same experience before, when somewhere deep down inside he’d had a glimmer of doubt. This time, as well, some part of him didn’t think the machine was at fault for the things that had happened. Some part of him thought that it was wrong to blame the machine for the terrible things that had happened.

  If he hadn’t had those doubts, he knew, the sword would have shattered the machine.

  Even so, he had fully committed himself. It was disorienting to come back from that lethal brink.

  The fact that doubts existed prevented the sword from doing harm. But that didn’t mean that those doubts were justified. It could very well be that the machine was the source of the deaths and they would need to destroy it.

  As the gears came up to speed, and the light from within projected the machine’s emblem up onto the ceiling, the room filled with the mechanical rumble of all the interior components at last in full motion.

  Richard didn’t have to look through the window. He knew what was happening. In a moment, a metal strip dropped into the tray. He slid his sword back into its scabbard and tested the strip briefly, finding it cool to the touch. He pulled it out and in his head started translating the message.

  “So,” Zedd asked impatiently, “what does it say?”

  “It says ‘You can destroy those who speak the truth, but you cannot destroy the truth itself.’”

  Zedd cast a dark look of suspicion at Regula. “So now the machine is spouting Wizard’s Rules?”

  “So it would seem,” Richard said. He laid his hands on the top of the machine, leaning his weight on it, recovering from the experience of using the sword and having it stop cold, as he thought about what he should do next. “I’d still like to know how to destroy it if we have to.”

  “The thing is obviously shielded somehow,” Nicci said. “But I can’t detect its presence and it doesn’t work like any shield I’ve ever encountered. There are powers involved here that we don’t understand.”

  Zedd was nodding as she spoke. “It would appear that sometime in the past, someone else must have tried to destroy it as well. No one would have gone to this much trouble and effort to bury this thing unless it was the only option remaining to them.”

  “I wish I knew that story,” Nicci said.

  “We may one day end up having to bury it ourselves,” Richard said, “just like whoever buried it in the first place.”

  The machine, never entirely still since inscribing the strip with a Wizard’s Rule, spun back up to speed. In a moment another strip dropped into the tray. It was as cool to the touch as the one before. Richard pulled it out and translated for the others.

  “‘You would fault me for speaking truth?’”

  Richard recognized the words he himself had spoken to Ambassador Grandon. It was unnerving that the machine had just repeated them back to him.

  He realized, then, the reason the sword would not destroy the machine. He didn’t think, deep down inside himself, that the machine was actually the cause of the problems.

  “I guess I did,” he whispered aloud in answer to its question. He leaned on the machine. “All of this isn’t exactly your doing, is it?” he asked the machine. “You’re just the messenger.”

  The machine hardly slowed, and in a moment it was back at full speed, inscribing another strip. Richard pulled the cool metal out as it dropped into the slot and read it aloud.

  “‘When the messenger becomes the enemy, the enemy gets buried.’”

  Zedd, coming up beside Richard, also laid a ha
nd on the machine. “Isn’t that interesting.”

  Richard wondered exactly how, and why, the machine had managed to get itself unburied.

  Again the machine gradually spun up to full speed and then pulled another strip through the beam of light, burning symbols in the language of Creation onto it. When the strip dropped into the tray, Richard paused for a moment before pulling it out.

  “Well, come on,” Zedd said impatiently, “have a look.”

  Richard finally pulled the strip out and silently worked the translation. It was more complex than the previous ones, but he finally got it and read it aloud.

  “‘Darkness has found me. It will find you as well.’”

  CHAPTER 71

  Nicci stepped up beside Richard. “Darkness has found it?”

  “That’s what I had suspected,” Richard said. “I think it’s telling us that someone is using it, speaking through it. That’s the reason the sword wouldn’t harm it.

  “The morning after Cara and Ben’s wedding, the boy down in the market, Henrik, said that darkness was seeking darkness. He also asked why he’d had dreams. None of it made sense at the time, so we thought the boy was sick and delusional, but it had to be that the machine was somehow speaking through him, saying that it knew someone was trying to coopt it. Maybe when it began, the only way the machine could describe it was as darkness finding it and interpreted the experience of someone speaking through it as dreams.”

  Nicci’s brow tightened. “You mean you think that what the boy said was actually the machine? That it was a cry for help?”

  Richard shrugged. “Could be.”

  Zedd let out a noisy breath as he shook his head. “I don’t know, Richard. I think we have to be careful about letting ourselves act like this collection of gears and wheels and shafts can actually say anything as a result of conscious intellect. We’re all starting to act like this thing can think on its own, like it’s alive. It’s a machine. Machines can’t think.”