“Or it is hooking it to a host,” Nicci said with demure authority.
Richard looked up from the emblem. “A host?”
Nicci had been waiting for his gaze. “Whoever, or whatever, this is intended for. A host. It’s meant to hook it fast to them. So what is the nature of the hook?”
“The nature of the hook?” Richard was intently focused on the lesson being laid out before him even though he couldn’t yet grasp its meaning.
“What did Zedd say about this figure?”
Richard glanced at his grandfather momentarily before returning his attention to Nicci. “He said it was Creative.”
“And what does that tell you?”
Richard rested his chin on the tips of his fingers as he gazed down at the curl of the backward nine in the book. “That makes sense,” he said, half to himself. “It has to do with Creation. The curled figure nine almost looks embryonic….”
“And the hook?” Nicci asked so quietly that Kahlan knew the words were meant for him alone.
“The nine is Creation, life,” Richard said under his breath. “Life is a cycle. Birth, life, death. Life and death together. Creation needs death to enable life to continue to exist, to continue to come about. Death must eventually follow Creation.”
Richard looked up suddenly. “The hook is death.”
The room was dead silent.
Richard’s gaze stayed locked on Nicci. “The hook is the symbolic representation of death, of the Keeper of the underworld, always waiting to eventually reap the living.”
Kahlan felt goose bumps tingle up her arms.
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?”
“Well, all the other symbols— on the sides of the machine and in the book— are the same, but the one projected by light from within the machine up onto the ceiling was reversed. Up on the ceiling, the nine wasn’t backward. That emblem, projected from inside the machine up onto the ceiling, is what the symbol looks like from inside the machine, looking out. It’s what the machine would see on the ceiling. That’s how it sees its own emblem.”
“How it sees its own emblem?” Zedd repeated in frustration. “You can’t be serious.”
Richard pulled a piece of paper close and dipped his pen in an ink bottle and drew a large, boldly dark figure nine on it. He held it up for Zedd to see.
“This is what the machine is drawing with light, what it sees: a nine.”
Zedd rolled his hand. “Go on.”
Richard turned the paper around and held it in front of a lamp so Zedd could see the nine through the back of the paper. “When you look down into the machine at the light, at what the machine sees as a nine, what it is drawing with light, you see the nine like this— backward.
“The emblem, as we see it marked down everywhere, the impressions, the imprints, are what we would see looking down into the machine, at the designs in light it would be creating and projecting outward. But that’s backward from the machine’s view out onto the world”— Richard flipped the paper around so Zedd could see the front with the nine the way he had drawn it—“of the way it sees the emblem it projects onto the ceiling.”