The Omen Machine

As the strip was pulled onward through the interior mechanism, the light from below intensified again, narrowing and closing down into a beam that burned lines and symbols into the underside of the strip. As the light inscribed the underneath side of the strip, it caused hot spots to glow through onto the top of the metal.

After passing over the beam of light, the strip moved along the same as he had seen others move through the machine in the past to finally make it all the way across and drop into the slot near the small window.

Richard licked his fingers and plucked the strip from the slot where it rested. He tossed it onto the top of the machine to cool.

He blinked in surprise when he realized that the strip had not been hot at all. He reached out and touched it, testing. It was cool to the touch.

Frowning, he pulled it close. There were symbols burned into the metal as before, but for some reason this time the process hadn’t left it hot. He couldn’t imagine why not.

Richard turned the strip around so he could read it. He bent closer to the light of a proximity sphere and deciphered the unique collection of elements assembled into a single emblem that made a phrase in the language of Creation.

I have had dreams.

Richard stood frozen, staring at it. He thought that he must have read it wrong. He rotated the metal strip around, looking at each element in the circle, as he worked out the translation again to make sure he had it right and then spoke it aloud.

“I have had dreams.”

He took a step back from the machine.

It had always given a warning in the past, an omen, some kind of prophecy. This didn’t make any sense, and it didn’t sound at all like prophecy.

It sounded as if the machine had … said something about itself.

As he stood staring, Regula paused momentarily as shafts disengaged and gears slowed; then the gears interlocked and picked up speed again. The machine drew another strip from the stack on the other side and pulled it through the inner mechanism, in the process passing it over the focused beam of light to engrave a new message on the second strip.

When it dropped into the tray, Richard stood looking at it for a long time before he finally pulled it out. The second strip was as cool to the touch as the first had been. He held it up in the light, looking at the unique organization of symbols that made up the two emblems burned into the metal.

Hardly able to believe what he was seeing, he read it aloud.

“Why have I had dreams?”

The machine seemed to be asking him a question. If it was, he had no idea how to answer it.

Richard remembered then having heard before what was now written in the language of Creation on both strips. It had been the boy down in the market, Henrik, who had said “I have had dreams.” Richard and Kahlan hadn’t been able to understand why he’d said it. They had thought he was sick and delirious. He had then asked “Why have I had dreams?”

Now the machine had just asked the very same thing.

The boy hadn’t been delirious.

It had been the machine speaking through him.

The boy had also asked if the sky was still blue. And it had asked why they had all left it alone. Only it had said “me”— why had they left “me” all alone in the cold and dark. It had said it was alone, so alone.

The machine was asking why it had been buried alive.

It had also said He will find me, I know he will.

Richard wondered if that was a prophecy … an omen.

Or was the machine expressing a fear?

CHAPTER 49

Henrik lifted his head from gulping water out of the brook to look back through the trees into the deep shadows. He could hear the hounds coming. They crashed through brush, snarling and barking as they came.

With the back of his fist, Henrik wiped fresh tears of terror from his cheeks. The hounds were going to catch him, he knew they were. They wouldn’t stop until they had him. Ever since that day at the People’s Palace, when they had showed up outside the tent, sniffing and growling, they kept coming for him.

His only chance was to keep running.

He stuck his foot into the stirrup and hooked his wrist over the horn of the saddle to help pull himself back up onto the horse’s back. He spun the reins around his wrists, locked them to his fisted hands with his thumbs, and then thumped the mare’s belly with his heels, urging it into an easy gallop.

He had hoped to take an extra moment to eat something more than a biscuit and a single piece of dried meat. He was starving. He was thirsty as well, but he’d only had time to lie on his belly and gulp a few swallows of water from the brook before he had sprung up and run back to his horse.

He had desperately wanted to eat more, to drink more.

But there was no time. The hounds were too close.

He had to keep running, keep ahead of them. If they got to him they would tear him apart.