The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 34

Zedd waved a hand, insisting on being the first one to ask the questions. “What do you mean it’s backward? What’s backward?”

“The symbols in the book,” Richard said. He lifted the book to show Kahlan the emblem on the spine. “This symbol is the same one that’s inscribed on the machine we found. Remember?”

“I remember.” Kahlan couldn’t understand what he was getting at. “They’re all the same— the ones on the sides of the machine, the one on the first page of the book, and that one on the spine. If they’re all the same then they must have been deliberately drawn that way because they’re part of the language of Creation. So what makes you think they’re backward?”

“That’s right,” Zedd put in. “You said yourself you can’t make the book work at decoding anything, so for all you know the nine in all of these emblems is supposed to be backward. It’s stylized, after all, not necessarily intended to be literal.

“Symbolic elements are often stylized. They don’t always look exactly like the thing they represent. The serpent head making the top of the nine is stylized, not an exact representation. The symbol for fire on that other strip doesn’t actually look like fire, it’s stylized. It very well could be as Kahlan suggested, that it’s meant to be that way because it’s part of the language.”

“They’re not right,” Richard insisted. “They’re all flipped around backward from the way they’re supposed to be. All of them are wrong.”

Zedd threw his hands up. “If every one of them, in every place, is the same, then how can they all be wrong?”

Nicci hushed the apoplectic wizard, then turned toward Richard, intent on hearing him out. “How do you know they’re wrong? How do you know they’re backward?”

“Because,” Richard said, “this is what we see when we’re looking inward. But it’s not what the machine sees.”

Nicci’s brow lowered in a way that would have halted most people’s breath and maybe made their heart skip a beat. Her intent gaze remained locked on Richard’s. “You said that before, that it’s backward from the way the machine sees the emblem. What are you talking about, the machine seeing?”

Richard pressed the heels of his hands together, pointing all his fingers up and out to demonstrate. “The machine used light to project the symbol upward, like this, the same symbol as on the spine of this book. It projects it out from down inside its metal box, up onto the ceiling.”

Nicci straightened with the disquiet of comprehension.

Zedd, still not understanding, planted his fists on his hips. “So?”

“Well, all the other symbols— on the sides of the machine and in the book— are the same, but the one projected by light from within the machine up onto the ceiling was reversed. Up on the ceiling, the nine wasn’t backward. That emblem, projected from inside the machine up onto the ceiling, is what the symbol looks like from inside the machine, looking out. It’s what the machine would see on the ceiling. That’s how it sees its own emblem.”

“How it sees its own emblem?” Zedd repeated in frustration. “You can’t be serious.”

Richard pulled a piece of paper close and dipped his pen in an ink bottle and drew a large, boldly dark figure nine on it. He held it up for Zedd to see.

“This is what the machine is drawing with light, what it sees: a nine.”

Zedd rolled his hand. “Go on.”

Richard turned the paper around and held it in front of a lamp so Zedd could see the nine through the back of the paper. “When you look down into the machine at the light, at what the machine sees as a nine, what it is drawing with light, you see the nine like this— backward.

“The emblem, as we see it marked down everywhere, the impressions, the imprints, are what we would see looking down into the machine, at the designs in light it would be creating and projecting outward. But that’s backward from the machine’s view out onto the world”— Richard flipped the paper around so Zedd could see the front with the nine the way he had drawn it—“of the way it sees the emblem it projects onto the ceiling.”

Kahlan rose from her chair as the simplicity of it dawned on her. “Of course. Richard is right, these are all backward.”

Zedd eyed them both as if the insanity had become infectious. “You’re making this machine sound alive. It’s gears and levers, you said. A machine.”

“Of course.”

With one hand on a hip, Zedd paced as he considered it. “I hate to say it,” he finally admitted, “but as crazy as it sounds that actually does make sense. Dangerous books involving magic usually have safeguards to keep just anyone from using them. It may sound crazy when you hear it at first, but it certainly would make a powerful safeguard.”

“It seems like a pretty easy safeguard to crack,” Berdine said. “Sure, it took Lord Rahl a little while, but he figured it out. Seems like a safeguard would have to be more difficult to solve if it really is going to protect a dangerous book.”

“You really think so?” Zedd slowly shook his head as his gaze left Berdine to meet Richard’s. “The only reason he figured it out was because he activated the magic that showed him the projected symbol.

“I have a feeling that only the right person could have done that. Many forms of magic are keyed to specific users. Someone else might have found that machine, but I have a feeling that only Richard could have activated it. In so doing it gave him the solution he needed to make the book work for him so that he could use that clue to understand what the machine wants to tell him. I doubt anyone else would have had access to that clue. That makes the safeguard doubly safe.”

Zedd tossed a metal strip on the table.

Richard stared at the old wizard for a moment. “Now you’re the one making it sound alive.”

Zedd only smiled.

Richard finally sat and scooted his chair up to the table. “Berdine, we have to invert all those rules we had listed out and then link them to the High D’Haran translations.”

Berdine dipped her pen in an ink bottle and pulled a piece of paper close. “Here, let me see one of those other strips.”

Richard picked one of the strips up off the table. He turned it over in his fingers a moment before looking at the symbols inscribed on it. He laid it at the top of Berdine’s paper so she could use it as reference.

“This is going to take a while,” Richard told Zedd as he pulled the book back. “But we’ve already established all the links, so hopefully it will be a little easier this time through.”