The Omen Machine

Looking around the room for any sign of what the place might have been used for, Richard only distantly noted the nondescript monolithic block sitting in the center of the room. He thought it might be a leftover block of stone used in the construction of the palace walls. The only thing that Richard thought was odd about it was that it sat square with the room, as if it had been carefully placed. It served no structural purpose as far as he could see.

Snowflakes drifted down from the stairwell and into the room to mix with the dust they had stirred up. Up above, the storm raged across the land, but the remnants of gusty wind could not make it this far down. Snowflakes floating by, catching the light of the proximity spheres, sparkled in the murky light.

A quick search around the perimeter confirmed that the room had no doors. There were no other stairs, or openings of any kind. There was no way out but the spiral stairs that had brought them down into the still grave of a room.

Richard wasn’t sure why, but the place was making the hair on the back of his neck stand out.

The still, silent room had the feel of a place deliberately built to be sealed over and forgotten. But why would anyone seal off and bury an empty room?

Kahlan inched in close to him. “Something about this place is creepy.”

“Maybe it’s because it’s a dead end. There’s no way out but the way we came in.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t like to get trapped down in here. No one would ever find you. Why would this place be sealed up like a tomb?”

Richard shook his head. He had no answer.

He half expected to see bones on the floor, but there were none. There were burial vaults in the lower reaches of the palace, but the Garden of Life was at the top of the palace, and besides, the tombs were grand places meant to revere the dead. None had the forsaken feel of this room.

As he looked around more carefully, Richard spotted something low against the far wall. He thought it might be a narrow ledge in the stone, maybe a stone block sticking out a little more than the rest. He held the sphere out to see better as he leaned in. He brushed away a layer of dust and crumbled granite flakes from the surface and saw that it was individual, small strips of metal, piled in tight, neat, orderly stacks.

He picked a strip of metal off one of the stacks and turned it in the light, trying to figure out what it was, or its purpose. Each was only a little longer than his longest finger, and soft enough that he could easily bend it. All the strips looked to be identical. Stacked tightly and evenly as they were, and covered in dust and dirt, the mass of them looked like part of the wall, like a ledge in the stone.

Kahlan bent close, trying to see it better. “What do you think they are?”

Richard straightened the strip of metal and set it back in its resting place atop one of the stacks. “They don’t have any markings on them. They seem to be nothing more than simple strips of metal.”

Kahlan’s gaze swept along the wall. “They’re stacked all around the edge of the room. There must be tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. What could they be for, and why are they buried in here?”

“It seems like they were left and forgotten. Or it could be they were hidden away.”

Kahlan’s nose wrinkled. “Why hide plain strips of metal?”

Richard could only shrug as he looked around, trying to see if the room held any other clues to its purpose. The place didn’t seem to make any sense. He scuffed the side of his boot across the floor. It was stone, covered with what was probably thousands of years of dust and crumbled, decayed granite from the surface of the walls. Even though he knew from being above the room that it had a vaulted ceiling above, the ceiling down inside the room was flat, a false ceiling, probably plastered over but now the same dark, dingy color as the walls.

All in all, other than the stacks of metal and the odd block of stone in the center, it was an unremarkable room. Except, perhaps, that it led to nowhere. Had the floor of the Garden of Life not collapsed, there would have been no way into the buried room. If not for the roof falling in, the room could easily have remained undiscovered for a few thousand more years.

As Kahlan trailed her fingers along the wall, looking for any hint of writing carved into the stone, or possibly a hidden passageway, Richard turned his attention to the square block that sat in the center of the dingy room. Oddly enough, the stone floor stopped short of the block, leaving a narrow gutter of dirt all the way around it. The block was slightly more than waist high. If he and Kahlan would have reached across from opposite sides, they wouldn’t have been able to touch their fingers.

He couldn’t imagine what it could be, or what it was doing there.

With snowflakes drifting past, he squatted down, holding out the glowing sphere to see better, and brushed the flat of his hand along the surface of the side.