The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 38

Richard yawned. He looked up from the complexities of translating the symbolic elements he was working on to see Zedd coming back into the library. Through the high windows above, the first blush of dawn revealed a clear sky.

The strange spring storm had broken, but it seemed that it had merely been the harbinger of bigger problems. It was clear to Richard that there was trouble about, but what ever the core of the trouble might be, it was hidden from him. He was getting that familiar, uneasy feeling that he was in the dark about what was really going on.

All of it, from the boy down in the market to the storm, to the strange deaths, to the variety of strange prophecies, to the machine buried for so long that had suddenly come to life, was too much to be a coincidence. Things that seemed to be a coincidence always made him edgy. He was worried the most about the machine they had discovered, worried that it was somehow at the heart of it all.

The translations of the metal strips were only confirming his suspicions.

Since he had discovered that everything in the book was backward, those translations, while tedious, had been working smoothly. The more he learned from those translations, the more his concern grew.

As his grandfather crossed the library, Richard noticed that Zedd didn’t have the usual spring in his step. He thought at that moment that Zedd looked like nothing so much as an old man, a tired old man. Richard could read the creases in Zedd’s face and tell that he, too, was concerned about what kind of trouble they might have on their hands. Zedd’s typical exuberant, sometimes childlike way of looking at the world was nowhere in evidence. That, more than any words, framed for Richard the seriousness of the situation.

That, and the translations from the strips.

Richard stuck his hand in the book to stop the pages from turning over when out of the corner of his eye he spotted the part he was looking for.

“There’s the first one,” he told Berdine. He tapped an element on the page. “That’s the one. What’s the inversion of it?”

Berdine leaned in, looking, reading the High D’Haran explanation silently. “It has to do with falling.”

Richard had already begun to grasp the language of Creation and he knew what many of the symbols meant. He had only been looking to confirm his worst fears. Berdine just had.

“That’s the last symbol, so it—”

“So it ends the action of the subject,” Berdine finished in a mumble. She hadn’t yet figured out what Richard already had. She stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth as she wrote it down, then started turning pages in the book. “I need the subject.”

Richard tapped the metal strip, showing her. “Here. If it’s inverted, then this part of the device is the subject.”

Zedd, coming to an abrupt halt across the table, leaned in, squinting, trying to read the paper she was working on.

“What’s that, there, that you’ve written down?”

“It’s the translation of the language of Creation inscribed on this strip,” Richard said. “How’s Kahlan? Were you able to heal her hand?”

“I’m a wizard, aren’t I?” He gestured to the paper where Berdine was writing. “So, you’ve figured out how the book works? How these symbols work?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “It’s quite remarkable, actually. The symbols are an incredibly efficient and compact form of language. What might take sentences, or even paragraphs for us to say, the language of Creation can express in a brief line of symbolic elements. With just a few devices combined in the right way it can tell you a whole story or convey a tremendous amount of information. It’s extraordinarily precise in conveying meaning in a compact fashion.”

Richard had long ago learned to understand emblematic devices. He understood their language, how they represented things, and how they functioned in spell-forms. It turned out that those emblems he had already learned were rooted in the language of Creation. Without knowing it, he had already long ago begun learning to use the language of Creation.

Once he started using the book, and started translating the symbols, at some point in the night it had all clicked into place for him and he saw how what he already understood related to this new language, and how to use that knowledge to interpret the symbols the machine used. It was like opening a door he had never known was there. In a flash of comprehension, everything he already knew fell into place in helping him to understand this new language.

He came to realize that it was more like learning a new dialect than a new language. As a result he had been able to rapidly grasp how it worked. Now he no longer needed the book Regula to understand the symbols.

Zedd picked up the strip to look at it again, as if he suddenly, magically, might understand it. He didn’t. “So if it worked, what’s the translation? What does this strip say?”

Richard pointed with the back end of his pen. “That one you’re holding says ‘The roof is going to fall in.’”

Zedd’s frown grew. “You mean, like that prophecy you mentioned? From that blind woman? The fortune-teller, Sabella, that you met out in the halls?”

“That’s the one.”

“After the warning about darkness from the boy down in the market the other day? The one with the fever who was delirious?”

Richard nodded. “That’s right.”

“The boy you thought was speaking gibberish.”

“We thought it was gibberish at the time, but maybe it wasn’t. After the boy’s warning, I got the fortune from the blind woman that turned out to be the same prophecy we then got from Lauretta and from the machine. The boy said something else that, at the time, we thought was the fever speaking. He said, ‘He will find me, I know he will.’”

“Certainly sounds like a fevered delirium.”

Richard picked up another strip. “This one was at the bottom of the stack in the machine. That means it was the first one the machine made since it seems to have awakened down there in the darkness. I could hardly believe it when we translated it. It says ‘He will find me.’”

Zedd gestured to the strip Richard was holding. “You mean to say that the machine predicted that you would find it?”

Richard shrugged. “You tell me.”

“Are you sure that you’ve translated it properly?”

Richard glanced toward the door to see Nathan marching into the library. He, too, looked grim.

“Now that I have the key I needed, yes,” Richard told Zedd. “There can be no doubt. It all works out perfectly.” Richard reached over and picked up the third strip. “This one here, the one I thought has only the symbol for fire on it, turns out to translate perfectly in the High D’Haran key. It’s exactly as I thought. It says only ‘fire.’”

“What’s that about fire?” Nathan called out as he rushed up.

Zedd took the strip from Richard’s hand and showed Nathan. “The translation worked out just like Richard thought. It does mean fire, and nothing else.”

At the far end of the library, Richard saw Lauretta trundle in carrying a load of her predictions. Two guards followed behind, lugging big stacks in their arms. It was going to be a lot of work for them to help carry all her predictions down from her room to their new home in the library. Richard was relieved to see that she was moving all that paper out of her place.

Nathan scowled. “Fire.”

“That’s right,” Richard said. “One of the others says ‘He will find me.’ That’s what the sick boy down in the market told Kahlan and me. The other says that the roof will fall in, like Lauretta and the blind woman, Sabella, told me.”

Nathan planted a fist on his hip. “So happens that I’m here about Sabella.”

“Really? What about her?”

“She’s been causing trouble. A few of the representatives went to her to hear her prophesy. They are insisting that they need to learn what the future holds.”

Richard sighed. “Oh great. What did she tell them?”

Nathan leaned in. “‘Fire.’”

“What?”

“That’s all she said: ‘Fire.’ The representatives went back and told the others. They’re all worked up, fearing that there will be a fire in the palace. Several of the representatives woke up a short time ago, and came running out of their rooms in their night clothes, all upset because they had dreams of fire.”

“That is curious,” Zedd mumbled as he rubbed his chin.

Richard caught sight of Lauretta hurrying toward them from across the library. “Lord Rahl! Lord Rahl!” She was waving a piece of paper. “There you are. I’m so glad I found you here.”

Richard stood as she came to a breathless halt. “What is it?”

She put a hand to her chest as she panted a moment, catching her breath. She thrust out a folded piece of paper.

“I had another prophecy for you. I wrote it down like always. I was going to put it with the others for safekeeping until I saw you again, but here you are.”

Richard unfolded the piece of paper. It had only one word on it.

FIRE.

“What is it?” Zedd asked.

Richard handed him the paper. Zedd’s brow drew down as he read the single word on the paper.

“And do you have any inkling as to what this means?” he asked the woman as he handed the paper to Nathan.

She shook her head.

The tall prophet read the single word silently and then looked up. “Just like Sabella.”

Zedd peered down at Richard. “Any idea what it could mean?”

Richard sighed. “I’m afraid—”

He stopped as icy realization washed over him.

He tossed his pen on the table and raced for the door.

“Come on!” he called back over his shoulder. “I know what it means! I know where the fire is!”

Zedd, Nathan, and Berdine ran to follow after him. Even Lauretta raced to catch up.