The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 12

Richard and Zedd followed Nathan into a narrow hallway lit by a window at the end. It led them through a section of quarters where many of the palace staff lived. With its whitewashed, plastered walls and a wood plank floor that had been worn down from a millennium of traffic, the passageway was simpler than even the service hallways. Most doors, though, were decorated with painted flowers, or country scenes, or colorful designs, giving each place an individual, homey feel.

“Here,” Nathan said as he touched a door with a stylized sun painted on it. When Richard nodded, Nathan knocked.

No answer came in response. Nathan knocked harder. When that, too, received no answer he banged the side of his fist against the door.

“Lauretta, it’s Nathan. Please open the door?” He banged his fist on the door again. “I told Lord Rahl what you said, that you have a message for him. I brought him along. He wants to see you.”

The door opened a crack, just wide enough for one eye to peer out into the hallway. When she saw the three of them waiting she immediately opened the door all the way.

“Lord Rahl! You came!” She grinned as she licked her tongue out between missing front teeth.

Layers of clothes covered her short, heavyset form. From what Richard could see, she was wearing at least three sweaters over her dark blue dress. The buttons on the dingy, off-white sweater on the bottom strained to cover her girth. Over that sweater she had on a faded red sweater and a checkered flannel shirt with sleeves that were too long for her.

She pulled up a sleeve and then pushed stringy strands of sandy-colored hair back off her face. “Please, won’t you all come in?”

She waddled back into the dark depths of her home, grinning— giddy, apparently— to have company come to visit.

As strange as Lauretta was, it was her home that was strangest of all. In order to enter, since he was taller than she was, Richard had to hold aside yarn objects hanging just inside the door. Each of the dozens of yarn contraptions was different, but all of them had been constructed in roughly the same manner. Yarn of various colors had been wound around crossed sticks into designs that resembled spiderwebs. He couldn’t imagine what they were for. By no stretch of the imagination could they be considered attractive, so he didn’t think they were intended to be decorative.

When Zedd saw him frowning at them he leaned close to speak confidentially. “Meant to keep evil spirits from her door.”

Richard didn’t comment on the likelihood of evil spirits who had managed to make it this far on a journey from the dark depths of the underworld being stopped cold by sticks and yarn.

To each side of the entrance, papers, books, and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. There was a tunnel of sorts going back through the mess into the interior of her home. Lauretta just fit down the narrow aisle. It reminded him of a mole trundling down into its burrow. The rest of them followed in single file to reach a hollowed-out area in the main room where there was space for a small table and two chairs. A window not far away, visible through a narrow gap in the teetering piles, provided gloomy light.

A counter behind the table was stacked high with papers. The whole place looked like nothing so much as a lair carved into a midden heap. It smelled nearly as bad.

“Tea?” Lauretta asked back over her shoulder.

“No thank you,” Richard said. “I heard that you wanted to speak with me about something.”

Zedd held up a hand. “I wouldn’t mind some tea.”

“And some sweet crackers to go with it?” she asked, hopefully.

Zedd returned the grin in kind. “That would be nice.”

Nathan rolled his eyes. Richard shot his grandfather a look. Lauretta rooted behind a sloppy pile of papers.

While Zedd sat at the table, waiting to be served, Lauretta retrieved a pot from an iron stand on a counter to the side. The pot was kept warm by a candle beneath the iron stand. The stand was surrounded by disorderly stacks of papers. Richard was alarmed to see fire being used.

“Lauretta,” he said, trying to sound helpful. “It’s dangerous to have fire in here.”

She looked up from pouring Zedd’s tea. “Yes, I know. I’m very careful.”

“I’m sure you are, but it’s still very—”

“I have to be careful with my predictions.”

Richard looked around at the mountains of paper. Much of it was piled in loose stacks, but there were also wooden crates full of papers, and bindings overstuffed with yet more in among the paper towers.

Zedd waggled a finger at the rugged paper cliff to the side of him. “These are all your predictions, then? All of them?”

“Oh yes,” she said, sounding eager to tell them all about it. “You see, I’ve had foretellings come to me my whole life. My mother told me that one of the first things I said was a prediction. I said the word ‘fire.’ And don’t you know, that very day a flaming log rolled out of the hearth and set her skirt on fire. No great harm done, but it scared her something awful. From then on she would write down the things I said.”

Richard glanced around. “I suppose you still have all the things she wrote down.”

“Oh yes, of course.” Lauretta replaced the tea on the stand after she finished pouring herself some. She set a chipped white plate with sweet crackers on the table. “When I was old enough I started writing down my predictions myself.”

“Mmmm,” Zedd moaned in ecstasy, waving a sweet cracker, “cinnamon, my favorite. These are quite good.”

Lauretta flashed him a toothless grin. “Made them myself.”

Richard wondered where and how. “So,” he said, “why do you keep all of the things you write down?”

She turned a puzzled look on him. “Well, they’re my predictions.”

“Yes, you told us that,” Richard said, “but what is the purpose of keeping them?”

“To record them. I have so many predictions that I can’t remember them if I don’t write them down. But more importantly, they need to be kept, to be documented.”

Richard frowned, trying not to look exasperated. “What for?”

“Well,” she said, confounded by the question, as if it was almost too obvious to need an answer, “all prophets write down their prophecy.”

“Ah, well, yes, I suppose that—”

“And aren’t those prophecies kept? The ones prophets write down?”

Richard straightened. “You mean, like the books of prophecy?”

“That’s right,” she said patiently. “Those are prophecy written down, just like I write mine down, are they not? Then, because prophecy is important, they are all kept, aren’t they? Of course those are kept in libraries all over the palace. But I have no other place to store all of mine, so I must keep them all in here.” She swept an arm around. “This is my library.”

Zedd glanced around at Lauretta’s library as he munched on his sweet cracker.

“So you see, I’m very careful with fire because these are prophecy written down, and prophecy is important. I must protect them from harm.”

Richard was seeing prophecy in a new light— a less flattering light.

“That all makes sense,” Zedd said, seemingly disinterested in continuing the line of conversation. “And your sweet crackers really are some of the best I’ve ever had.”

She gave him another toothless grin. “Come back any time for more.”

“I may do that, kind lady.” Zedd picked up another and gestured with it. “Now, what of the prophecy you say you have for Lord Rahl?”

“Oh yes.” She put a finger to her lower lip as she looked around. “Now, where did I put them?”

“Them?” Richard asked. “You have more than one?”

“Oh yes. Several actually.”

Lauretta went to a wall of papers and randomly pulled out one of them. She peered at it briefly. “No, this isn’t it.” She stuck the paper back where she’d found it. She reached to the side, pulling out others, only to end up replacing them as well. She kept plucking papers from different places among the thousands and then replaced each after reading it.

Richard shared a look with Nathan.

“Maybe you could just tell Lord Rahl what your prediction was,” Zedd offered.

“Oh dear me no, I’m afraid that I couldn’t do that. I have too many predictions to remember them all. That’s why I have to write them down. If I write them down, then I always have them and they can’t be forgotten. Isn’t that the purpose of writing down prophecy? So that we will always have them? Prophecy is important, so it must be written down and kept.”

“Very true,” Nathan said, apparently eager not to upset her. “Maybe we could help you look? Where would you have put your recent prophecies?”

She blinked at him. “Why, where they belong.”

Nathan looked around. “How do you know where they belong?”

“By what they say.”

Nathan stared a moment. “Then, how do you find them? I mean, if you don’t remember what they say, then how do you know where they would have belonged in the first place and where you would have put them? How do you know where to look?”

She squinted as she gave serious consideration to the question. “You know, that very thing has always been the problem.” She took a deep breath. The buttons on her sweaters looked like they might burst before she let it out. “I can’t seem to come up with an answer to that quandary.”

From the confusion they had always had with the location of books in the libraries, seemingly placed there in no order, Richard thought that it appeared to be a common problem with written prophecy on what ever scale.

Zedd pulled a piece of paper from a stack and peered at it. He waved it in the air.

“This one only says ‘rain.’”

Lauretta looked up from the papers she had in her hand. “Yes, I wrote that down one day when I had a premonition that it was going to rain.”

“This is a waste of time,” Richard said in a confidential voice to Nathan.

“I cautioned you that it was likely nothing worthwhile.”

Richard sighed. “So you did.”

He turned to Lauretta. She had moved, pulling out another paper in another place near the bottom of a mountain of papers, boxes, and binders. Before he could say that they were leaving, she gasped.

“Here it is. I’ve found it. Right where it belonged.”

“So what does it say, then?” Richard asked.

She shuffled over to him, paper in hand. She tapped it with a finger as she gazed up at him. “It says, ‘People will die.’”

Richard studied her eager face a moment. “That happens all the time, Lauretta. Everyone dies, eventually.”

“Yes, so true,” she said with a chuckle as she returned to a teetering mound of paper to start her search anew.

Richard didn’t see any more use for her prophecy than he saw in most prophecy. “Well, thank you for—”

“Here’s another,” she said as she read a paper hanging out from a stack. She pulled it free. “It says, ‘The sky is going to fall in.’”

Richard frowned. “The sky?”

“Yes, that’s right, the sky.”

“Are you sure you didn’t mean that the roof was going to fall in?”

Lauretta consulted the paper in her hands. “No, it quite clearly says ‘sky.’ I have very neat handwriting.”

“And what could that mean?” Richard asked. “How can the sky fall in?”

“Oh dear me, I have no idea,” she said, snorting a chuckle. “I am only the channel. The prophecy comes to me and I write it down. Then I save it, the way you’re supposed to save prophecy.”

Nathan gestured at the papers all around. “You have no visions about these things, these prophecies that come to you?”

“No. They come, I write them down.”

“So then you don’t necessarily know what they mean.”

She considered a moment. “Well, if the prophecy is for rain, I admit I have no vision to go with that, but it seems pretty clear, don’t you think?” When Nathan nodded, she went on. “But when it says the sky is going to fall, I can’t begin to imagine what that could mean. The sky can’t very well fall in, now can it?”

“No, it can’t,” Nathan agreed.

“So,” she said, holding up a finger thoughtfully, “it has to have some hidden meaning.”

“So it would seem,” Nathan agreed. “And how does a prediction like that one come to you, if not in a vision?”

She frowned as she looked up while she tried to recollect. “Well, it comes to me as words, I guess. I don’t see a picture in my mind of a sky falling in or anything. It just comes to me that way, that the sky is going to fall in, like a voice in my head saying it, so I write it down just the way it comes.”

“And then you store it in here?”

Lauretta glanced around at all of her precious predictions. “I suppose that future generations of prophets will have to study all of this in order to make sense of it.”

Richard could hardly contain himself. He struggled to keep his mouth shut. The woman was harmless enough. She wasn’t trying to drive them crazy. She was the way she was and he wasn’t going to argue her out of her nature, or her lifelong obsession. It would be pointless and cruel to say something that would only end up making her feel bad.

“Oh,” she said, turning suddenly to shuffle to the back of the room, “I almost forgot. I have another that came to me just yesterday. Came to me quite unexpectedly. It was the last of the prophecies that came to me for you, Lord Rahl.”

Lauretta pulled at papers, reading them quickly and then shoving them back where she’d found them. Finally, she came across what she was looking for. Richard found the fact that she could find a single piece of paper she was looking for among all the thousands and thousands stacked everywhere to be more remarkable than anything she was writing down.

She hurried back, holding the paper out for Richard. He took it and read it aloud.

“‘Queen takes pawn.’” He looked up with a frown. “What does that mean?”

Lauretta shrugged. “I have no idea. My calling is to hear them and to write them down, not to interpret them. As I said, future prophets will have to do that work.”

Richard glanced over at Nathan and his grandfather. “Any clue what this means?”

Zedd made a face. “Sorry, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Nathan shook his head. “Me neither.”

Richard took yet another deep breath. “Thank you for passing these along, Lauretta. ‘People are going to die,’ ‘The sky is going to fall in,’ and”— he glanced down at the paper again to read the words—“‘Queen takes pawn.’ That’s it, then? Do you have any others you want me to see?”

“No, Lord Rahl, that’s all of them. When they came to me I didn’t know their meaning, but I did know for certain that they were meant for you.”

“Do you usually know who the prophecy is meant for?”

Her brow creased as she considered the question. “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t recall ever knowing who my prophecies are meant for, or about.” She looked up at him. “But you are said to be a very unusual man, a wizard of great power, so I suppose that had something to do with it.”

Richard glanced at the teapot with the candle under it. “You know, Lauretta, in appreciation for bringing your prophecy to my attention, maybe I can do something for you in return.”

She cocked her head. “For me?”

“Yes. I think that all of these prophecies should be in their proper place.”

Her brow creased. “Proper place?”

“That’s right. They don’t belong here, hidden away. They belong in a library with other prophecy. They should take their rightful place in a library.”

“A library…” Lauretta gasped. “Really, Lord Rahl?”

“Of course. These are prophecies. That’s what the libraries are for. We have a number of such libraries here at the palace. What would you say to us sending men by to collect all of these prophecies and placing them in a proper library?”

She looked around, hesitating. “I don’t know…”

“There is a large library not far from here. There’s plenty of room there. We could put your predictions there all together on shelves where someday prophets can study them. You could come visit them anytime you wished. And whenever you have new prophecies and write them down, they can be added to your special section in the library.”

Her eyes widened. “Special section? For my prophecies?”

“That’s right, a special section,” Zedd said, joining in, apparently catching on to Richard’s purpose. “There they could be properly looked after and protected.”

She put a finger to her lip, thinking.

“And I could go there anytime?”

“Anytime you wish,” Richard assured her. “And you can go there to add new ones when they come to you. You can even use the library tables to write down your new predictions.”

She brightened and then took Richard’s hand, holding it as if a king had just granted her part of his kingdom. “Lord Rahl, you are the kindest Lord Rahl we have ever had. Thank you. I accept your generous offer to protect my prophecies.”

Richard felt a twinge of guilt over his ruse, but the place was a fire waiting to happen. He didn’t want her to be hurt or die just because of prophecy. There was ample room in the library, along with all the other prophecy, to keep hers. Besides, he didn’t know that her prophecies were any less valuable than all the others.

“Thank you again Lord Rahl,” she said as she let them out.

Once they were on their way down the hall, Zedd said, “That was very kind of you, Richard.”

“Not as kind as it may seem. I was trying to prevent a needless fire.”

“You could have simply told her that you were sending people to take all that paper away so she wouldn’t start a fire.”

Richard frowned over at his grandfather. “She’s spent her whole life devoted to those pieces of paper. It would be cruel to confiscate them when there’s plenty of room in the library. I thought it made more sense to make her feel good about giving them up— make her part of the solution.”

“That’s what I mean, the trick worked like magic and it was a kind way to do it.”

Richard smiled. “Like you always said, sometimes a trick is magic.”

Nathan caught Richard’s sleeve.

“Yes, yes, very nice indeed. But you know the last prophecy she gave you, the one about a queen?”

Richard glanced back at the prophet. “Yes, ‘Queen takes pawn.’ I don’t know what it means, though.”

“Neither do I,” Nathan said as he waggled the book he still had with him, “but it’s in here. Just like she wrote it, word for word. ‘Queen takes pawn.’”