The Omen Machine

As he stepped off the ladder the area around him brightened with an eerie greenish light coming from a proximity sphere sitting in an iron bracket. Richard had seen the ancient devices before. They were used to illuminate various areas of the People’s Palace and the depths of the Wizard’s Keep, among other places. They looked like nothing more than a solid piece of glass, but they had been invested with ancient magic so that when someone gifted came near them they began to glow.

As he lifted the hefty glass sphere out of the bracket, the light it gave off warmed in color.

Kahlan stepped off the ladder beside him. “At least we don’t have to carry the torch.”

“Guess not,” Richard said as he squinted down into the darkness. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?”

He brushed cobwebs out of the way. “I would have thought there would have been a room or some area of the palace under here, but this looks like no one has been down here in a thousand years. Maybe longer.”

Kahlan glanced around at the thick gray layers of dust clinging to the walls. “A lot longer.”

As Richard started down the steps he carefully stepped around chunks of fallen stone and areas of sand and dirt that covered large parts of the stairs. Kahlan, a hand on his shoulder, followed him down, careful to also step around rubble.

At the bottom of the long flight of stairs they reached a walkway at the outer edge of a room. The walls were made up of granite blocks, and soaring arches created a vaulted ceiling, all supporting the center portion of the Garden of Life. The dark stone, its surface dirty and decayed, looked ancient. Richard didn’t think the place had seen the light of day for millennia.

Rather than being flat, the center portion of the floor rose up in a dome formed by fat stone ribs filled in between with simple stone blocks. The dome forced them to use the walkway around the outer edges of the room. A lot of debris from above covered the dome, but much of it had slid down to build up in the well against the wall that was the only walk-way. Richard started around the room, climbing over the rubble. Kahlan clambered over huge stone pieces fallen from above, going around in the opposite direction.

The room appeared to serve no purpose except possibly as an inspection area for the structure. There were other places in the palace that were intended only as inspection ports for the foundation, or hidden parts of the support columns, connections, and beams, so he didn’t find that much of it surprising.

Richard wondered why, though, if that was true, it had been closed off from the Garden of Life. The stairway above the landing where the ladder rested appeared to have been dismantled. Since that part of the garden’s floor had collapsed, there was no longer any way to know if there had ever been access up into the garden. He supposed that it could have been nothing more than a construction access that had been sealed over.

“Over here,” Kahlan called out. “There’s a spiral staircase over here in the corner that goes down to what’s below.”

CHAPTER 28

Richard held the glowing sphere out ahead of him as he wound his way down the spiral of wedge-shaped stairs. There was no railing, making the descent into the darkness treacherous, especially since a lot of the sand and dirt from the floor of the Garden of Life that had fallen into the room above them had in turn poured down the spiral stairs. Richard had to pause in places to use the side of his boot to move dirt and debris aside so that they would have a safe place to step.

As they went ever lower into the blackness, the confining shaft for the spiral stairs opened up into a dark, dead still room. The light of the sphere Richard was holding cast only enough illumination into the distance to see that the simple, unadorned room was made of stone blocks. There were no doors or other openings that Richard could see. The room was empty except for what appeared to be a block of stone sitting in the middle.

“What in the world could this place be?” Kahlan asked.

Richard shook his head as he looked around. “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like much of anything. Maybe it’s just an old storage room.”

“It doesn’t make any sense that they would seal off a storage room the way this place has been sealed up.”

“I suppose not,” Richard conceded.

Kahlan was right. It didn’t appear that there had ever been any convenient access to the place.

As he moved into the gloomy room, proximity spheres set in wall brackets began to glow. By the time he made it around the perimeter of the room the four spheres, one on each wall, had all come to life, if weakly. Each sphere brightened as he came close and dimmed as he moved away. Even so, they cast sufficient light to banish enough of the blackness for them to see.