The Sword of the Truth, Book 12 - The Omen Machine (15 page)

A
s they ducked, trying to avoid being hit by the debris flying in every direction, Richard and Kahlan both covered their ears against the deafening sound of thunder crashing and stone breaking. In the staccato flashes of lightning, Richard glanced back over his shoulder and saw the floor in the center of the room caving in.

Great granite blocks under the floor groaned as they twisted apart from one another and fell inward. Grass, dirt, and a thick bed of sand poured into the expanding hole, like the sands of an hourglass falling inward.

When the broken sections of glass finally stopped falling, Richard looked up to see in the flashes of lightning a jagged breach in the ceiling surrounded by twisted pieces of the heavy metal framework. Fortunately, most of the ceiling all around the room held in place. By the looks of the framework that Richard could see, the builders had overbuilt it for all but the rarest of events. It had, after all, stood for thousands of years. But the nearly inconceivable combination of snow made dangerously heavy by a cold rain, along with being struck by lightning, had been too much for the glass roof to withstand.

Wind whipped in through the opening, swirling sleet and snow down through the room and into the gaping hole in the center of the floor.

Keeping a wary eye skyward for any hanging pieces of glass that might come down on him, Richard pulled the shard of glass out of his leg and tossed it aside. He quickly retrieved a steel and flint from his pack and used them to light a torch in an iron stand not far away. Worried that people below the collapsed floor had been hurt or killed, he rushed toward the opening even as dirt and sand was still sliding down into the dark maw.

Kahlan clutched at his sleeve. “Richard! Stay back. The rest of the floor could fall in and you could go with it.”

He held the torch out, trying to see into the hole. The flame flapped in the gusts of wind that lashed down into the room from the break in the ceiling. He leaned down, peering under the edge on the opposite side of the opening in the floor. It looked like the floor of the Garden of Life was actually held up by a series of radiating arches of a vaulted ceiling underneath it.

“It seems to have stopped,” he said. “I think the lightning must have damaged the structure below that supports the room enough that the weight of all that falling snow broke open the weakened spot, but it looks like the rest of it is stable. See there? The lightning hit the thinnest place in the vault, between two heavy arches.”

Kahlan inched up close behind him. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.” Richard crouched down and held the torch out, trying to see what was down below. It wasn’t a room of the palace, as he expected.

“Look there,” he said, pointing inside the hole to the left. “There are stairs over there.”

Kahlan frowned as she leaned over a little more. “There wasn’t any opening for stairs up here.”

“You’re right. It looks like there used to be a stairway up to the Garden of Life, but it was covered over.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kahlan said. “This room was constructed very deliberately as a containment field. It doesn’t make any sense that it would have later been closed off from below. For that matter, being a containment field, it doesn’t make sense that there were ever stairs. The opening for them would have weakened the field.”

“May not make sense, but that’s what it looks like.”

“Unless what’s below is within the containment field,” she said, thinking out loud, “or used to be.”

Richard inched in closer. The rest of the floor, supported by the beams of an arch system under them, seemed stable. “The stairs may have once led up into the Garden of Life, but they end at a landing. See it, there? It no longer comes all the way up. I want to get down there.”

Kahlan shook her head. “The landing is too far down to jump.”

Richard stood, holding the torch out, looking. He pointed. “There’s the shed where the people who tend to the garden keep tools. These trees have to be kept trimmed to keep them from overgrowing and getting too big, so there must be a ladder.”

When he pulled open the shed door, Richard saw that there was indeed a wooden ladder inside. He handed Kahlan the torch. The ladder was heavy, but he was able to handle it by himself.

When he reached the hole he slid the ladder down the side until it rested on the landing. Enough of the ladder stuck up out of the hole for a good handhold.

Richard looked up through the jagged opening in the glass roof. Snowflakes drifted down, but the wind was slowing. He could see breaks in the clouds, and through the breaks, stars. The storm was ending.

“Why don’t you wait here,” he said as he started down.

“Right,” she said, “like that’s going to happen.”

“Well at least wait until I get down onto the landing and see if the steps are safe.”

Kahlan agreed to that much of it. She stood at the edge of the hole, foot braced on a freshly exposed stone block, torch in hand, peering down to watch him descend the ladder. When he looked up at her, the dislodged granite blocks at the edge of the hole reminded him of a line of crooked teeth, as if he were being swallowed down the gullet of a stone monster.

As he stepped off the ladder the area around him brightened with an eerie greenish light coming from a proximity sphere sitting in an iron bracket. Richard had seen the ancient devices before. They were used to illuminate various areas of the People’s Palace and the depths of the Wizard’s Keep, among other places. They looked like nothing more than a solid piece of glass, but they had been invested with ancient magic so that when someone gifted came near them they began to glow.

As he lifted the hefty glass sphere out of the bracket, the light it gave off warmed in color.

Kahlan stepped off the ladder beside him. “At least we don’t have to carry the torch.”

“Guess not,” Richard said as he squinted down into the darkness. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?”

He brushed cobwebs out of the way. “I would have thought there would have been a room or some area of the palace under here, but this looks like no one has been down here in a thousand years. Maybe longer.”

Kahlan glanced around at the thick gray layers of dust clinging to the walls. “A lot longer.”

As Richard started down the steps he carefully stepped around chunks of fallen stone and areas of sand and dirt that covered large parts of the stairs. Kahlan, a hand on his shoulder, followed him down, careful to also step around rubble.

At the bottom of the long flight of stairs they reached a walkway at the outer edge of a room. The walls were made up of granite blocks, and soaring arches created a vaulted ceiling, all supporting the center portion of the Garden of Life. The dark stone, its surface dirty and decayed, looked ancient. Richard didn’t think the place had seen the light of day for millennia.

Rather than being flat, the center portion of the floor rose up in a dome formed by fat stone ribs filled in between with simple stone blocks. The dome forced them to use the walkway around the outer edges of the room. A lot of debris from above covered the dome, but much of it had slid down to build up in the well against the wall that was the only walk-way. Richard started around the room, climbing over the rubble. Kahlan clambered over huge stone pieces fallen from above, going around in the opposite direction.

The room appeared to serve no purpose except possibly as an inspection area for the structure. There were other places in the palace that were intended only as inspection ports for the foundation, or hidden parts of the support columns, connections, and beams, so he didn’t find that much of it surprising.

Richard wondered why, though, if that was true, it had been closed off from the Garden of Life. The stairway above the landing where the ladder rested appeared to have been dismantled. Since that part of the garden’s floor had collapsed, there was no longer any way to know if there had ever been access up into the garden. He supposed that it could have been nothing more than a construction access that had been sealed over.

“Over here,” Kahlan called out. “There’s a spiral staircase over here in the corner that goes down to what’s below.”

R
ichard held the glowing sphere out ahead of him as he wound his way down the spiral of wedge-shaped stairs. There was no railing, making the descent into the darkness treacherous, especially since a lot of the sand and dirt from the floor of the Garden of Life that had fallen into the room above them had in turn poured down the spiral stairs. Richard had to pause in places to use the side of his boot to move dirt and debris aside so that they would have a safe place to step.

As they went ever lower into the blackness, the confining shaft for the spiral stairs opened up into a dark, dead still room. The light of the sphere Richard was holding cast only enough illumination into the distance to see that the simple, unadorned room was made of stone blocks. There were no doors or other openings that Richard could see. The room was empty except for what appeared to be a block of stone sitting in the middle.

“What in the world could this place be?” Kahlan asked.

Richard shook his head as he looked around. “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like much of anything. Maybe it’s just an old storage room.”

“It doesn’t make any sense that they would seal off a storage room the way this place has been sealed up.”

“I suppose not,” Richard conceded.

Kahlan was right. It didn’t appear that there had ever been any convenient access to the place.

As he moved into the gloomy room, proximity spheres set in wall brackets began to glow. By the time he made it around the perimeter of the room the four spheres, one on each wall, had all come to life, if weakly. Each sphere brightened as he came close and dimmed as he moved away. Even so, they cast sufficient light to banish enough of the blackness for them to see.

Looking around the room for any sign of what the place might have been used for, Richard only distantly noted the nondescript monolithic block sitting in the center of the room. He thought it might be a leftover block of stone used in the construction of the palace walls. The only thing that Richard thought was odd about it was that it sat square with the room, as if it had been carefully placed. It served no structural purpose as far as he could see.

Snowflakes drifted down from the stairwell and into the room to mix with the dust they had stirred up. Up above, the storm raged across the land, but the remnants of gusty wind could not make it this far down. Snowflakes floating by, catching the light of the proximity spheres, sparkled in the murky light.

A quick search around the perimeter confirmed that the room had no doors. There were no other stairs, or openings of any kind. There was no way out but the spiral stairs that had brought them down into the still grave of a room.

Richard wasn’t sure why, but the place was making the hair on the back of his neck stand out.

The still, silent room had the feel of a place deliberately built to be sealed over and forgotten. But why would anyone seal off and bury an empty room?

Kahlan inched in close to him. “Something about this place is creepy.”

“Maybe it’s because it’s a dead end. There’s no way out but the way we came in.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t like to get trapped down in here. No one would ever find you. Why would this place be sealed up like a tomb?”

Richard shook his head. He had no answer.

He half expected to see bones on the floor, but there were none. There were burial vaults in the lower reaches of the palace, but the Garden of Life was at the top of the palace, and besides, the tombs were grand places meant to revere the dead. None had the forsaken feel of this room.

As he looked around more carefully, Richard spotted something low against the far wall. He thought it might be a narrow ledge in the stone, maybe a stone block sticking out a little more than the rest. He held the sphere out to see better as he leaned in. He brushed away a layer of dust and crumbled granite flakes from the surface and saw that it was individual, small strips of metal, piled in tight, neat, orderly stacks.

He picked a strip of metal off one of the stacks and turned it in the light, trying to figure out what it was, or its purpose. Each was only a little longer than his longest finger, and soft enough that he could easily bend it. All the strips looked to be identical. Stacked tightly and evenly as they were, and covered in dust and dirt, the mass of them looked like part of the wall, like a ledge in the stone.

Kahlan bent close, trying to see it better. “What do you think they are?”

Richard straightened the strip of metal and set it back in its resting place atop one of the stacks. “They don’t have any markings on them. They seem to be nothing more than simple strips of metal.”

Kahlan’s gaze swept along the wall. “They’re stacked all around the edge of the room. There must be tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. What could they be for, and why are they buried in here?”

“It seems like they were left and forgotten. Or it could be they were hidden away.”

Kahlan’s nose wrinkled. “Why hide plain strips of metal?”

Richard could only shrug as he looked around, trying to see if the room held any other clues to its purpose. The place didn’t seem to make any sense. He scuffed the side of his boot across the floor. It was stone, covered with what was probably thousands of years of dust and crumbled, decayed granite from the surface of the walls. Even though he knew from being above the room that it had a vaulted ceiling above, the ceiling down inside the room was flat, a false ceiling, probably plastered over but now the same dark, dingy color as the walls.

All in all, other than the stacks of metal and the odd block of stone in the center, it was an unremarkable room. Except, perhaps, that it led to nowhere. Had the floor of the Garden of Life not collapsed, there would have been no way into the buried room. If not for the roof falling in, the room could easily have remained undiscovered for a few thousand more years.

As Kahlan trailed her fingers along the wall, looking for any hint of writing carved into the stone, or possibly a hidden passageway, Richard turned his attention to the square block that sat in the center of the dingy room. Oddly enough, the stone floor stopped short of the block, leaving a narrow gutter of dirt all the way around it. The block was slightly more than waist high. If he and Kahlan would have reached across from opposite sides, they wouldn’t have been able to touch their fingers.

He couldn’t imagine what it could be, or what it was doing there.

With snowflakes drifting past, he squatted down, holding out the glowing sphere to see better, and brushed the flat of his hand along the surface of the side.

He was surprised to realize that the surface was not stone, as he had thought, but thick, heavy metal.

He rubbed away at the dust and grime of ages, trying to see it better. The surface of the metal was corroded and dirty, making it look like the stone in the room, but there could be no doubt, it was metal. Beneath the filth where he wiped his hand across the surface, metal glinted in the light of the sphere.

“Look at this,” Richard said.

Kahlan glanced back over her shoulder. “What is it?”

Richard thumped his fist against it. Even though it seemed to be extraordinarily heavy, he could just barely tell from the sound that it was hollow.

“This thing is made of metal. And look at this, here.”

He held the sphere out so she could see better as she came up next to him. There was a small slot, starting in the top and cut down into one side of the thing. Some of the curious strips of metal were stacked in the slot.

Kahlan removed one of the metal strips, inspecting it. As far as Richard could tell it was devoid of any markings, the same as all the others stacked against the wall.

He rubbed more of the dirt and debris off the side. “There’s some kind of emblem or something on the side. Kind of hard to tell what it is.”

With a heavy thud that shook the ground and made both of them flinch, light shot up from the center of the top. Dirt in the space between the metal monolith and the stone floor, disturbed by the thump, lifted into the still air.

As one, Richard and Kahlan took a step back.

“What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I was brushing it with my hand to clean away the dirt to see what’s on the side.”

A deep mechanical groan started within the thing. Metal moved against metal, giving off grating sounds. The sound, like heavy gears turning, grew louder as if the whole thing came to life. Richard and Kahlan backed away a little more, not knowing what to do.

Abruptly, the light that had shot up from the center of the top changed to an amber color.

Richard leaned in and saw that there was a small hole in the center of the top where the light was coming out.

That was when he saw a hint of more light coming from a small opening on the other side of the thing. He rushed around and brushed dirt from the top surface of the metal box. A slit, two hand-widths wide but narrow, was filled with a piece of heavy glass, making a small window that was flush with the surface of the top.

The glass was thick and wavy, but with the aid of the light coming from somewhere down inside he was able to look in through the window, down into the interior of the metal box. He could see that the entire box was filled with gears, wheels, levers, and moving parts all fit together into a complex machine that was all in motion at once.

Some of the trip levers and shafts holding the smaller parts were small, only as thick as his little finger. But some of the fat mounting blocks holding the bigger shafts had to weigh thousands of pounds, with the larger gears they held probably weighing a great deal more. The diameter of some of the gears exceeded his height, with teeth more than a hand-width wide. The heavy framework holding it all together was enormous not only in size but in complexity.

The surfaces of all the massive pieces of machinery down inside were rusted and pitted. As the gears turned and the interlocking teeth engaged against each other, the surface of those teeth was abraded so that the metal, where it slid together, was polished to a high luster. Reddish dust from countless centuries of inaction was being grated and worn away so that it began to float through the interior of the metal box, making it look like a rusty fog down inside.

As Richard tried to see down through the floating dust inside, he couldn’t see a bottom. It was hard to see past all the intricate, complex workings, bulky levers, wrist-thick shafts, and massive geared wheels, but he was able to see glimpses of yet more mechanical parts down lower, down to a great depth inside, until the layers of inner workings obscured the view of the lower reaches. The haze of stirred-up dirt and rust made the inside of the machine look as if it were filled with smoke.

Richard moved over so Kahlan could take a look through the narrow window. As he moved aside, he discovered another opening in the side of the machine not far to the left below the window. He bent down, holding the glowing sphere close. The opening was nothing more than a narrow channel. A few pieces of the same metal strips lay stacked in the channel.

Kahlan pointed at the ceiling. “Richard, look.”

The light coming from the tiny hole in the center of the top of the machine was projecting a symbol onto the ceiling. The design drawn in lines of light slowly rotated as the gears within turned.

Looking through the window, Richard could see wheels and gears line up holes in metal plates over the beam of light in order to project a collection of emblematic elements into the single unified symbol appearing on the ceiling above, while yet other gears turned the whole assembly, rotating the projected image.

“That’s the same emblem that’s on the side.”

“What’s making the light?” Kahlan asked.

“It looks to be something like the light coming from the proximity spheres.”

Richard moved around the machine, brushing away the crust of its long sleep. Each side had the same emblem— the same symbol that was projected onto the ceiling, rotating above their heads.

Richard stared up at the projection as recognition washed over him.

“Dear spirits,” he whispered under his breath.