The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 11

“How is she?” Zedd asked when Richard closed the door behind himself.

“She’s fine.” Richard flicked a hand to dismiss his grandfather’s concern. “She just needs to rest.”

Zedd nodded. As a wizard who’d once worked with Confessors, he probably understood better than anyone that a Confessor needed time to recover after unleashing her power, but none of them could recover as quickly as Kahlan. In the past, when the situation called for it, she had sometimes for-gone resting at all.

Kahlan was stronger than the others had been in a number of ways. For those reasons her sister Confessors had chosen her as their leader, the Mother Confessor. Now all those others were dead.

Still, using her power was exhausting, not only physically but emotionally. It was near to the equivalent of carrying out an execution.

Yet that wasn’t really the worst of it. The real core of her weariness this time was the knowledge that something sinister was going on and it had taken innocent lives. Kahlan didn’t believe, any more than Richard did, that this was one lone individual acting on a delusional vision she’d had. There was something more to all of it. That, on top of using her power, and it coming during such a joyful celebration in front of guests, was what had really left Kahlan drained.

Zedd looked up at Richard with one of those looks Richard knew all too well. “It’s rather peculiar that the woman dropped dead.”

Richard nodded. “That’s been bothering me, too.”

“A person touched by a Confessor’s power is concerned with nothing other than pleasing the Confessor who touched them.” Zedd arched an eyebrow. “They can’t very well please her if they’re dead. Unless, of course, she tells them that they can please her by dying, and Kahlan didn’t do that.”

Apparently, his grandfather had been thinking along the same lines as Richard. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he agreed. “People don’t just drop dead from a Confessor’s touch. Something else is going on.”

Zedd rubbed a bony finger back and forth along his jaw. “Could be that the woman understood how utterly repulsed Kahlan was by her killing her children and so she thought that Kahlan would want her dead.”

“I don’t know, Zedd. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The whole purpose of a Confessor is to obtain confessions from killers, to find out the truth of what happened, of what terrible things they’ve done. They aren’t repulsed by confessing their crimes. On the contrary, they’re usually overjoyed that they can please a Confessor by telling her the truth when she asks for it. They want to live so that they can please her.”

Cara folded her arms. “Well, I’m not moving from this spot until the Mother Confessor is recovered and on her feet again.”

Richard laid a hand gently on Cara’s shoulder. “Thanks, Cara.”

Richard’s mind was already on to other things, on to putting the pieces together. When the woman with the knife had tried to kill Kahlan, as frightening as it must have looked to the people there, she’d actually had no real chance of success. No knife attack was fast enough to beat a Confessor releasing her power. Cara standing in the way could not have stopped the woman as effectively as Kahlan was capable of doing herself. No single attacker had a chance against a Confessor.

But she couldn’t use her power again until she recovered. Richard was more than happy to have Cara watch over Kahlan in the meantime.

He turned to Benjamin. “General, would you please post men at either end of the hall?”

Benjamin gestured up the corridor. “Already done, Lord Rahl.”

Richard saw then the contingent of the First File off in the distance. It was enough men to fight a war. “Why don’t you stay here with Cara. Keep her company. Kahlan needs to rest for a couple hours.”

“Of course, Lord Rahl.” Benjamin cleared his throat. “While you were in there with the Mother Confessor, we found the woman’s two children. Their throats had been cut, just as she said.”

Richard nodded. He hadn’t doubted the woman. Someone touched by a Confessor couldn’t lie. Still, the news left him feeling sick at heart.

“Please do something else for me, General. Send someone to find Nicci. I haven’t seen her since yesterday at your wedding. Tell her I need to see her.”

Benjamin lightly tapped his right fist to his heart in salute. “I’ll send someone right away, Lord Rahl.”

Richard turned to the prophet. “Nathan, I’d like you to take me to see the woman you spoke about. The one you said could see things. The one who claims to have a message for me.”

Nathan nodded. “Lauretta.”

Zedd and Richard both followed behind Nathan. A group of guards stayed with them but at a distance. Rikka, in her red leather, took the lead in front of them.

Nathan took a slightly longer route through the private corridors, rather than the public passageways, to get to the area where staff and other workers lived. Richard was glad to avoid the public areas. People would undoubtedly want to stop him to talk with him. He didn’t feel like talking about trade issues or petty matters of squabbles over authority to set rules. Or prophecy. Richard had more important things on his mind.

At the top of the list was what the dead woman had said about her vision. She had called the threat “dark things.” She had said that those dark things were stalking Kahlan.

The boy down in the market earlier that morning had said that there was darkness in the palace.

Richard wondered if he was putting things together too easily, things that didn’t really belong together and only sounded like they did because they shared the word “dark.” He wondered if he was letting his imagination get the best of him.

As he marched along beside Zedd, with Nathan leading the way, he glanced down at the book Nathan was holding and remembered the lines in the book that matched what he’d heard that day about there being darkness in the palace, and decided that he wasn’t overreacting.

The corridor they passed through was paneled with mahogany that had mellowed with age to a dark, rich tone. Small paintings of country scenes hung in each of the raised panels along the hall. The limestone floor was covered with carpet runners of deep blue and gold.

Before long they made their way into the connecting service passageways that provided workers with access to the Lord Rahl’s private areas within the palace. The halls were simpler, with plastered, whitewashed walls. In places the hall ran along the outside wall of the palace to their left. Those outside walls were made of tightly fit granite blocks. At regular intervals deep-set windows in the stone wall provided light. They also let in a little of the frigid air each time a gust rattled the panes.

Out those windows Richard saw heavy, dark clouds scudding across the sky, brushing towers in the distance. The greenish gray clouds told him that he was right about the coming storm.

Snowflakes danced and darted in the gusty wind. He was sure that it wouldn’t be long before the Azrith Plain was in the grip of a spring blizzard. They were going to have guests at the palace for a while.

“Down this way,” Nathan said as he gestured through a double set of doors to the right. They led out of the private areas and into the service passageways used by workers and those who lived at the palace.

People in the halls, workers of every sort, moved to the side as they encountered the procession. Everyone, it seemed, gave Richard and the two wizards with him worried looks. No doubt the word of the trouble had already been to every corner of the vast palace and back three times over. Everyone would know about it.

By the looks on the somber faces he saw, people were no longer in a celebratory mood. Someone had tried to kill the Mother Confessor, Lord Rahl’s wife. Everyone loved Kahlan.

Well, he thought, not everyone.

But most people sincerely cared about her. They would be horrified by what had happened.

Now that peace had returned, people had come to feel an expectant joy about what the future might hold. There was a growing sense of optimism. It seemed like everything was possible and that better days were ahead.

This new fixation on prophecy threatened to destroy all that. It had already ended the lives of two children.

Richard recalled Zedd’s words that there was nothing as dangerous as peacetime. He hoped his grandfather was wrong.