The Omen Machine

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.”

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.

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.