The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 69

When the violence of the wizard’s fire at last subsided, Richard was finally able to open his eyes and take his hand away from his face. As the last glowing clots of conjured conflagration dripped onto the floor and extinguished with a steamy hiss, and the smoke cleared away, Richard expected to see Regula reduced to a puddle of molten metal.

It was not.

He saw that the machine was still sitting in the center of the room, looking exactly the same as the first time he had seen it. It looked untouched.

He was certain that the outer walls of the machine would be scorching hot, but as he approached it he felt no residual heat radiating from the metal. Richard cautiously reached out, carefully testing, then tentatively touching the metal surface. It was cool to the touch.

Richard had seen some of the terrible damage done by wizard’s fire, yet it had done nothing to the machine. It hadn’t even scoured the patina of corrosion off the surface. The symbols on the sides, the same symbols that appeared in the book Regula, were still in perfect condition.

If he hadn’t seen the wizard’s fire engulfing it with his own eyes, he might not have believed that anything had happened, much less that it had been the target of some of the most powerful conjured magic in existence.

Nicci, standing beside Richard, tested the surface with her fingers.

“Well, Additive Magic obviously didn’t work. Maybe it’s time to try something a little more destructive.” She motioned for the rest of them to move back.

Richard shepherded Zedd and Cara back into the protection of the stairwell. He knew what Nicci was going to do. He could see the aura of power crackling around the sorceress. It gave her a kind of glowing, otherworldly appearance, almost as if she were only there in spirit.

The sorceress lifted her hands out toward the machine. The sizzling aura around her flickered with intensity. He knew that others couldn’t see it, but he had always sensed the field of power around certain people. No aura he had ever seen was as strong as Nicci’s.

Black lightning— Subtractive Magic— ignited in the room with a thunderous thump. Dust lifted from the floor. The proximity spheres instantly went dark.

The black lightning twisted together with a blindingly bright sudden discharge of Additive Magic. The rope of Subtractive Magic was so dark that it was like looking through a crack in the world of life into the underworld itself.

In a way, it was.

The inky black lightning connected with the machine. The end played over the surface, flickering up and down it. The rest of it, between Nicci and the machine, whipped wildly about the room as it crackled and popped where the two flows of power, impossible darkness and blinding light, touched. The air of the room smelled like burning sulfur and vibrated with the power of the conflicting forces fighting each other. Both dark and light twisted with savage effort to dominate the other, to occupy the same place at the same time. The machine was bathed in the hot glow of the Additive Magic, only to then vanish into the void of Subtractive Magic.

It was a terrifying display of incompatible powers focused with destructive intent on the omen machine.

As abruptly as it started, it stopped.

The sudden quiet made Richard’s ears throb. The proximity spheres brightened, but slowly.

“It isn’t working,” Nicci said as her hands dropped to her sides. The aura around her calmed and then extinguished.

Richard stepped out of the stairwell. “How could it not work? What’s wrong?”

“I’ve never felt anything like it before.” Nicci ran her hand over the top of the machine as if trying to perceive its inner secrets through that light caress. “I could sense that it simply wasn’t connecting.”

“What do you mean it wasn’t connecting?”

Nicci shook her head in disbelief as she stared at the machine. “I create a node at the other end, at the target. The flow of power then fills the void between me and the target. The node is there to create a link for the power to seek, a route to follow. Once the connection is established, the two flows of energy are released into the node, destroying what it’s attached to. It happens instinctively and almost instantaneously.

“This time, as I cast my ability outward, the node just couldn’t find the target, wouldn’t settle where I intended, almost as if the object wasn’t there. Because of that, my power couldn’t connect with the object.” She turned to look up at Richard. “I’m sorry, Richard. I tried. It should have been utterly destroyed, but I couldn’t even scratch the metal of the outer shell.”

Richard wasn’t satisfied. “There has to be a way.”

“This is something the likes of which none of us has ever seen before.” Nicci shook her head. “No wonder they buried it.”

Richard knew something that would cut any metal.

As he drew the Sword of Truth, the unique ring of steel filled the gloomy room.

With the floodgates to the sword’s magic opened, its magic inundated him. He gave himself over to it, letting the storm of power thunder through him. He let it rage for a time, letting it seep into every fiber of his being.

The others in the room, recognizing all too well what he intended to do, backed away.

Filled with the fury of the sword’s magic mixing with his own, Richard slowly lifted the gleaming blade and touched the steel to his forehead.

He let his own anger at the danger Kahlan was in surge through him, interlacing with the sword’s righteous wrath.

Eyes closed, he gave himself over to the volatile fusing of magic.

“Blade,” he whispered, “be true this day.”

With both hands, Richard lifted the sword high over his head. Without pause and with all his might and fury, he drove the blade down toward the machine.

The sword’s tip whistled as it sliced through the air.

Richard screamed with the power of the magic coursing through him, with the power of his rage. The blade arced around and down toward the machine with lightning speed.

A hairsbreadth from touching the machine, the blade stopped cold in midair.

Richard was taken by surprise. He hadn’t expected the blade to stop the way it had. His muscles ached with the expected release that didn’t happen.

The sword’s magic worked by intent. If the one wielding the sword believed that what he was attacking was the enemy, or evil, the sword would cut through it, cut through anything. If the Seeker believed the person evil, there was no defense against the blade, not even a wall of steel.

But if the Seeker, somewhere deep inside, in the darkest corner of his mind, believed that the adversary was innocent, then the blade would not cut through even paper to harm them.

Richard stood with the sword tightly gripped in both fists, the blade motionless in midair just above the top of the machine, a trail of sweat running down his temple.

And then the machine began to wake.

Shafts slowly started turning, gears engaged, and yet more of the mechanism began to gather momentum.