The Omen Machine

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 hand 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.”

“Then how is it answering Lord Rahl’s questions?” Cara asked. They all turned and looked at her. She flicked a hand out at the machine. “How is it managing to tell us what we want to know, to fill in some of the blanks as we go along?”

“We might merely be reading more into it than is warranted,” Zedd told her.

Cara looked unconvinced. “It says what it says. We are not making up or imagining the things it says.”