The Omen Machine

She lifted it, turning it to show him. There was only a faint red mark left where it had been swollen and inflamed.

Kahlan flashed a smile at Richard’s grandfather. “Despite the difficulty of using his gift in the palace, Zedd was able to heal it. Quite the accomplishment, I’d say.”

Zedd waved off the flattery. “Not all that difficult, healing a scratch. Just don’t ask me to reattach your head or anything demanding.”

Richard was relieved that it was taken care of. It was one less thing to worry about. He turned his attention once more to the general.

“Were you able to map where this thing goes down through the palace?”

“With my help,” Cara said as she dragged a finger along the top of the machine in imitation of Zedd, as if tempting the sleeping menace.

“So how many floors down does it go?”

General Meiffert shifted his weight to his other foot. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that, Lord Rahl. We haven’t been able to find the bottom, yet.”

“I thought you said that you had the palace under here mapped out.”

“We do. We were able to determine that the machine goes all the way down through the palace.”

Richard was more than a little surprised. The Garden of Life was one of the highest places in the palace. There were a lot of floors below them down in the palace.

“All the way? It’s that big?”

“It’s worse than that, Richard,” Kahlan said in a troubled voice.

“I’m afraid that the Mother Confessor is right. Once we had a diagram of the palace below here drawn out and we could see how it went down through the core of the palace, we went down into the foundation inspection tunnels below the lowest floor. We opened up a small hole in a foundation wall and behind it we found solid metal”— with his knuckles Benjamin rapped the side of the metal box—“just like the sides of this machine, here, and just like behind the wall in the library.”

Richard stared at the silent machine lit in the glow of the proximity spheres. It didn’t seem all that tall. He had to lean over to look in the little window. But he had been able to tell from looking down into it that it went much deeper than it appeared, much deeper than the floor where they stood.

“If it goes down through the palace foundation and into the plateau, then there’s no telling how deep it goes.”

No one spoke into the uneasy silence. Richard looked from one grim expression to another.

“Tell him,” Nicci finally prompted.

“Well,” Benjamin said with an uneasy sigh, “we actually did find more of the machine down lower.”

“Down lower? You mean in the passageways up through the plateau?”

“Not exactly,” Cara said, apparently unhappy with the slow pace of the explanation. “We kept mapping downward, since we had the pattern of how the machine went through the palace and the way the rooms and stairways were placed around it. Nathan and Zedd helped with that pattern. It creates such a complex layout in the palace that we’ve been unaware all this time that there was something that big hidden away behind the walls of various rooms and stairwells.”

“We’ve always known that the palace is laid out in the shape of a spell-form.” Nathan gestured toward what was above them. “The Garden of Life is the central node of the spell-form, giving it power as a containment field.”

Richard frowned at the prophet. “You mean, you think that because the Garden of Life is a containment field, that hid the machine within the central node?”

“In a way, but not exactly,” Nathan said. “The central node made it hard to know the machine was there simply because of its location within that central part of the spell-form. For the spell-form to work, the central node can’t be breached from the sides, or from beneath, so the stairwells and passage-ways below are laid out in the same shape that the spell-form dictates. That’s why the rooms and passageways go around the machine. They are actually avoiding breaching the node, not avoiding the machine or trying to hide it.”

Richard was lost in thought, contemplating the design of the spell-form. Spell-forms were emblematic. He understood those designs. He understood how this one worked— in theory, anyway.

“Of course,” he said, thinking out loud. “You can’t breach the axis of the form. A spell’s web isn’t two-dimensional, it’s three-dimensional. Something below would breach the axial confluence the same way that a hallway running right through the center of the Garden of Life would ruin the containment field.” He looked up at the gifted people watching him. “The central part of the spell-form is walled off by the rooms and passageways below in order to protect the node.”

“That’s right,” Nicci said. “And beyond those walls just happens to lie this machine.”

The staggering implications were beginning to dawn on him. “Such an axial convergence in the spell-form is fed from below.” He was taken aback by the realization. “That’s why the passageways and stairs coming up to the palace, to this central node, through the plateau below, all spiral upward.”