The Omen Machine

He had no answer. All he could do was sigh in frustration.

Kahlan hugged herself with bare arms as she nestled in close to him. “Richard, if we don’t know what’s going on, or who, or what is looking into our room watching us, how can we hope to stop it? How are we ever going to get any sleep?”

Richard put an arm protectively around her. “I don’t know,” he said in a tone of regret. “I wish I did.”

Kahlan had an idea. She looked up at him.

“Zedd’s power is weakened in the palace, but Nathan is a Rahl. His power is amplified in here. Maybe we can have him hide nearby, or stay in a room beside ours and see if he can sense where it’s coming from, where that person is hiding as they watch us. If he could sense where they are, then while they’re busy watching us he could send men to grab them.”

“I don’t think that will work.”

“Why not?”

“Because I suspect that it’s not originating here in the palace. As you said, the palace reduces the power of anyone but a Rahl. I think that for them to do something like this they would have to be someplace else. I think they have to be projecting this, this power, or observation, or what ever it is, into our room from outside the palace.”

“So there is no way to stop them? You mean that we’re going to have to endure someone watching us in our bedroom every night?”

Kahlan watched the muscles in his jaw flex as he clenched his teeth in frustration.

“The Garden of Life was constructed as a containment field,” he finally said, half to himself. “I wonder if that would shield us from prying eyes.”

Kahlan was taken with the idea. “Containment fields were created to prevent errant magic, no matter how powerful, from getting out, or getting in.”

“Then maybe…” he said as he considered.

Kahlan folded her arms. “I’d rather sleep in a bedroll on the grass in there if we could be all by ourselves than on a big soft bed in here with someone watching me.”

“I know what you mean,” Richard said. “If fact, maybe we should.”

“I’m game,” Kahlan said, stepping into her underclothes.

He sat on a bench at the foot of the bed and stuffed a leg into his pants. “Me too. But what I can’t figure out is why someone, or something— or prophecy— is playing this game of riddles with us.”

Kahlan opened a drawer and pulled out some of her old traveling clothes. “Maybe prophecy is trying to help you.”

Richard frowned as he buttoned his pants.

“The thing that bothers me,” he finally said as he leaned over and snatched up his shirt, “is that the prophecies that seem like they may be saying the same thing use different words. Some say that the roof is going to fall in, but another said that the sky is going to fall in. The roof and the sky aren’t the same thing. Yet those two warnings have something in common: they say that both are going to fall in. And, there’s also a certain commonality to roof and sky.”

“Maybe they were meant to be the same thing, but the exact right word was lost in a translation, so the language used was imprecise. Or maybe it was meant to be oblique.”

Richard pulled on a boot. “Or maybe the warnings of the roof falling in and the sky falling in are metaphors.”

“Metaphors?” Kahlan asked as she drew a pair of pants up her long legs.

“Yes, like the one about queen takes pawn. That was obviously predicting that you would take that woman with your power. Calling her a pawn was telling us that she was being used. She was a puppet. I think the hidden hand directing that puppet wanted all the representatives gathered here at the palace to see the show.”

“You mean you think that roof is a metaphor for the sky, or the other way round?”

“Could be,” Richard said. “You know, like calling the night sky a roof of stars.”

“So what do you think prophecy about the roof or sky falling in really means, then?”

“Maybe that it’s life, the world, that is going to be falling in around us.”

Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that.

They both froze at the sound of a loud howling shriek outside in the hall.

Something heavy thudded into the double bedroom doors. For a moment, Kahlan thought they might be knocked off their hinges, but they remained firmly in place.

Richard and Kahlan both stood stockstill, staring at the door.

“What could that have been?” she whispered.

“I can’t imagine.” Richard’s fingers found the hilt of his sword. “Let’s find out.”

Richard cracked open the door just enough for them to peer outside into the hallway. Reflector lamps mounted on the walls lit the corridor and a nearby intersection of halls. Through the narrow slit Kahlan saw heavily armed men racing in from every direction.

Splashes and smears of blood stained the marble floor in the hall.

Lying against the door at their feet was a big black dog with two pikes sticking from its side. Blood still flowed from several other gaping wounds.

Richard opened the door the rest of the way. The dead dog’s head flopped over across the threshold. One of the officers, seeing Richard and Kahlan at the door, rushed up.