The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 30

Outside of the Garden of Life hundreds of heavily armed guards filled the corridor in both directions. They all looked a great deal more than edgy. Kahlan realized that they would have had to have heard the lightning hit the Garden of Life. They probably heard the glass roof breaking and falling as well. They undoubtedly wondered what in the world had been going on beyond the doors.

They might even have feared that it was an attack of magic of some sort, and so they were standing ready in case they were called upon to defend the palace.

She knew, though, that despite their worry, none of them, not even a Mord-Sith, would dare to enter the Garden of Life while the Lord Rahl was inside unless he invited them in.

The grim look on Richard’s face and the set of his jaw as he came marching out probably only confirmed to all the men watching him approach that they had made the right decision to remain outside.

The only people who regularly went into the garden were the staff assigned to tend the grass, flowers, shrubs, and trees. Only the most highly trusted people on the palace staff were allowed to work in the garden. Even then, when they went in to do their work officers of the First File watched them at all times.

During the war, when they were under constant threat and there were dangerous objects of magic containing tremendous power locked away in the Garden of Life for safekeeping, not even the people who tended the garden had been allowed to go in to take care of the plants and trees. As a result it became for a time a wild, overgrown place that had taken on an eerie look that in a way matched the gloomy mood of everyone in the palace.

After the war had ended, it had taken a lot of work to return the garden to the state of splendor it was now in.

Kahlan had a feeling, though, that even such occasional tending was at an end and the Garden of Life was about to again become strictly off-limits to everyone except on Lord Rahl’s instructions.

Throughout history the Garden of Life had been a place where the Lord Rahl, from time to time, had unleashed some of the most powerful magic in existence.

It had been a place that on occasion had been a gateway to the underworld itself.

Magic was a mystery to most people and therefore greatly feared. Kahlan knew that magic could be glorious, wondrous, a magnificent affirmation of life. But Kahlan knew magic’s other side, its dark and dangerous side. Most people only knew magic as a dark, mysterious danger. For the D’Haran people, the Lord Rahl was their protection against those dark dangers of magic. For their part, these soldiers were meant to be the steel against steel. They would lay down their lives in that service.

But it was Richard’s responsibility as the Lord Rahl to deal with any matters involving magic.

It seemed that the Garden of Life had once again become the stage for dangerous magic.

Nyda stood before the ranks of soldiers, her arms folded, watching Richard and Kahlan come. The Mord-Sith was in her red leather. She looked to be in a foul mood, but for a Mord-Sith that wasn’t necessarily at all unusual.

“What’s going on?” Nyda asked.

As Richard stormed past, he took her by the arm and turned her around to walk with him, but he spoke to the commander of the soldiers on his way by.

“No one is to go in there. No one. Do you understand?”

The commander clapped a fist to his heart in salute. “Of course, Lord Rahl.”

The commander immediately assigned men to guard the doors and then issued orders to the rest of them to take up stations along the hallways and intersections. The hall came alive with movement and the echoing jangle of metal as men rushed to take up their posts.

Richard leaned close to Nyda. “Go get Berdine. Bring her to the library.”

Nyda, still being carried along with him by her arm, pointed downward. “You mean the library down there, below us, where she has been working?”

“That’s right. Get her and send her there. Then get my grandfather and bring him there, too. You had better bring Nicci, Nathan, and Cara as well.”

“All of them? Now, in the middle of the night?”

“In the middle of the night,” Richard confirmed.

Nyda leaned out past Richard to look over at Kahlan. “What’s going on?”

“The roof fell in.”