The Omen Machine

Nicci’s blue eyes revealed her inner satisfaction at his sudden insight. “Very good, Richard.”

In that instant, as she and Richard, the sorceress and the wizard, looked into each other’s eyes, it was as if no one else was in the room, as if no one else existed. Kahlan wondered if even Zedd had known the shades of meaning Nicci had just taught Richard about that figure.

Nicci’s smile ghosted away. “I don’t like this, Richard. I don’t like it one bit. People don’t go to this much trouble and effort with such things, only to bury them … unless it had turned out to be great trouble. To see such elements dealing in such dark powers at the center of it all confirms it.”

Richard puzzled at the symbol for a moment. “Why is the nine backward?”

Everyone leaned in, gazing down at it, as if seeing it for the first time. Nathan frowned at the book, unable to offer a reason. Nicci shook her head, not even able to venture a guess.

“Backward?” Zedd asked as he peered down at the symbol.

“Yes. The whole emblem is backward. You can tell because the nine is backward as well.”

“Good question,” Zedd said. “I just assumed it was intended to be that way. But now that you mention it, it does seem backward.”

Richard stared at the drawing for a long moment. He suddenly looked up at his grandfather.

“Backward … that’s it!” He shot to his feet. “Zedd, you’re a genius!”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that.” He cocked his head. “But … how exactly have I outdone myself this time?”

“You’ve just helped me figure out how the book works. You’ve given me the key to get past the locks.” He looked down at Berdine. “It’s backward. Everything in this book is backward.”

Berdine made a face. “Backward?”

Richard nodded, then turned back to his grandfather. “The rules we’ve been applying don’t work, and as a consequence the translations don’t work. It should be a relatively straightforward process to translate the elements so we can begin to understand the language on the strips, but the translations aren’t working properly. You just helped me figure out the reason.”

Zedd looked more than a little suspicious. “And what would the reason be?”

“It’s a trick meant to protect the information.” Richard dropped into his chair. “It’s all backward from the way the machine sees the emblem.”

“What do you mean, the way the machine sees the emblem?” Nicci asked in a careful tone.

CHAPTER 34

Zedd waved a hand, insisting on being the first one to ask the questions. “What do you mean it’s backward? What’s backward?”

“The symbols in the book,” Richard said. He lifted the book to show Kahlan the emblem on the spine. “This symbol is the same one that’s inscribed on the machine we found. Remember?”

“I remember.” Kahlan couldn’t understand what he was getting at. “They’re all the same— the ones on the sides of the machine, the one on the first page of the book, and that one on the spine. If they’re all the same then they must have been deliberately drawn that way because they’re part of the language of Creation. So what makes you think they’re backward?”

“That’s right,” Zedd put in. “You said yourself you can’t make the book work at decoding anything, so for all you know the nine in all of these emblems is supposed to be backward. It’s stylized, after all, not necessarily intended to be literal.

“Symbolic elements are often stylized. They don’t always look exactly like the thing they represent. The serpent head making the top of the nine is stylized, not an exact representation. The symbol for fire on that other strip doesn’t actually look like fire, it’s stylized. It very well could be as Kahlan suggested, that it’s meant to be that way because it’s part of the language.”

“They’re not right,” Richard insisted. “They’re all flipped around backward from the way they’re supposed to be. All of them are wrong.”

Zedd threw his hands up. “If every one of them, in every place, is the same, then how can they all be wrong?”

Nicci hushed the apoplectic wizard, then turned toward Richard, intent on hearing him out. “How do you know they’re wrong? How do you know they’re backward?”

“Because,” Richard said, “this is what we see when we’re looking inward. But it’s not what the machine sees.”

Nicci’s brow lowered in a way that would have halted most people’s breath and maybe made their heart skip a beat. Her intent gaze remained locked on Richard’s. “You said that before, that it’s backward from the way the machine sees the emblem. What are you talking about, the machine seeing?”

Richard pressed the heels of his hands together, pointing all his fingers up and out to demonstrate. “The machine used light to project the symbol upward, like this, the same symbol as on the spine of this book. It projects it out from down inside its metal box, up onto the ceiling.”

Nicci straightened with the disquiet of comprehension.

Zedd, still not understanding, planted his fists on his hips. “So?”