The others in the room, recognizing all too well what he intended to do, backed away.
Filled with the fury of the sword’s magic mixing with his own, Richard slowly lifted the gleaming blade and touched the steel to his forehead.
He let his own anger at the danger Kahlan was in surge through him, interlacing with the sword’s righteous wrath.
Eyes closed, he gave himself over to the volatile fusing of magic.
“Blade,” he whispered, “be true this day.”
With both hands, Richard lifted the sword high over his head. Without pause and with all his might and fury, he drove the blade down toward the machine.
The sword’s tip whistled as it sliced through the air.
Richard screamed with the power of the magic coursing through him, with the power of his rage. The blade arced around and down toward the machine with lightning speed.
A hairsbreadth from touching the machine, the blade stopped cold in midair.
Richard was taken by surprise. He hadn’t expected the blade to stop the way it had. His muscles ached with the expected release that didn’t happen.
The sword’s magic worked by intent. If the one wielding the sword believed that what he was attacking was the enemy, or evil, the sword would cut through it, cut through anything. If the Seeker believed the person evil, there was no defense against the blade, not even a wall of steel.
But if the Seeker, somewhere deep inside, in the darkest corner of his mind, believed that the adversary was innocent, then the blade would not cut through even paper to harm them.
Richard stood with the sword tightly gripped in both fists, the blade motionless in midair just above the top of the machine, a trail of sweat running down his temple.
And then the machine began to wake.
Shafts slowly started turning, gears engaged, and yet more of the mechanism began to gather momentum.
CHAPTER 70
Well isn’t that something,” Zedd said as he stepped out of the stairwell. “Seems that none of us has it in us to destroy the machine.”
Richard wondered why.
He staggered back from the machine as its internal mechanism gradually came to life, the internal parts progressively gathering momentum.
He stood silently staring at the waking machine, stunned that the sword had halted so abruptly. He hadn’t expected it to.
He’d had the same experience before, when somewhere deep down inside he’d had a glimmer of doubt. This time, as well, some part of him didn’t think the machine was at fault for the things that had happened. Some part of him thought that it was wrong to blame the machine for the terrible things that had happened.
If he hadn’t had those doubts, he knew, the sword would have shattered the machine.
Even so, he had fully committed himself. It was disorienting to come back from that lethal brink.
The fact that doubts existed prevented the sword from doing harm. But that didn’t mean that those doubts were justified. It could very well be that the machine was the source of the deaths and they would need to destroy it.
As the gears came up to speed, and the light from within projected the machine’s emblem up onto the ceiling, the room filled with the mechanical rumble of all the interior components at last in full motion.
Richard didn’t have to look through the window. He knew what was happening. In a moment, a metal strip dropped into the tray. He slid his sword back into its scabbard and tested the strip briefly, finding it cool to the touch. He pulled it out and in his head started translating the message.
“So,” Zedd asked impatiently, “what does it say?”
“It says ‘You can destroy those who speak the truth, but you cannot destroy the truth itself.’”
Zedd cast a dark look of suspicion at Regula. “So now the machine is spouting Wizard’s Rules?”
“So it would seem,” Richard said. He laid his hands on the top of the machine, leaning his weight on it, recovering from the experience of using the sword and having it stop cold, as he thought about what he should do next. “I’d still like to know how to destroy it if we have to.”
“The thing is obviously shielded somehow,” Nicci said. “But I can’t detect its presence and it doesn’t work like any shield I’ve ever encountered. There are powers involved here that we don’t understand.”
Zedd was nodding as she spoke. “It would appear that sometime in the past, someone else must have tried to destroy it as well. No one would have gone to this much trouble and effort to bury this thing unless it was the only option remaining to them.”
“I wish I knew that story,” Nicci said.
“We may one day end up having to bury it ourselves,” Richard said, “just like whoever buried it in the first place.”
The machine, never entirely still since inscribing the strip with a Wizard’s Rule, spun back up to speed. In a moment another strip dropped into the tray. It was as cool to the touch as the one before. Richard pulled it out and translated for the others.
“‘You would fault me for speaking truth?’”
Richard recognized the words he himself had spoken to Ambassador Grandon. It was unnerving that the machine had just repeated them back to him.
He realized, then, the reason the sword would not destroy the machine. He didn’t think, deep down inside himself, that the machine was actually the cause of the problems.
“I guess I did,” he whispered aloud in answer to its question. He leaned on the machine. “All of this isn’t exactly your doing, is it?” he asked the machine. “You’re just the messenger.”
The machine hardly slowed, and in a moment it was back at full speed, inscribing another strip. Richard pulled the cool metal out as it dropped into the slot and read it aloud.
“‘When the messenger becomes the enemy, the enemy gets buried.’”
Zedd, coming up beside Richard, also laid a ha
nd on the machine. “Isn’t that interesting.”
Richard wondered exactly how, and why, the machine had managed to get itself unburied.
Again the machine gradually spun up to full speed and then pulled another strip through the beam of light, burning symbols in the language of Creation onto it. When the strip dropped into the tray, Richard paused for a moment before pulling it out.
“Well, come on,” Zedd said impatiently, “have a look.”
Richard finally pulled the strip out and silently worked the translation. It was more complex than the previous ones, but he finally got it and read it aloud.
“‘Darkness has found me. It will find you as well.’”
CHAPTER 71
Nicci stepped up beside Richard. “Darkness has found it?”
“That’s what I had suspected,” Richard said. “I think it’s telling us that someone is using it, speaking through it. That’s the reason the sword wouldn’t harm it.
“The morning after Cara and Ben’s wedding, the boy down in the market, Henrik, said that darkness was seeking darkness. He also asked why he’d had dreams. None of it made sense at the time, so we thought the boy was sick and delusional, but it had to be that the machine was somehow speaking through him, saying that it knew someone was trying to coopt it. Maybe when it began, the only way the machine could describe it was as darkness finding it and interpreted the experience of someone speaking through it as dreams.”
Nicci’s brow tightened. “You mean you think that what the boy said was actually the machine? That it was a cry for help?”
Richard shrugged. “Could be.”
Zedd let out a noisy breath as he shook his head. “I don’t know, Richard. I think we have to be careful about letting ourselves act like this collection of gears and wheels and shafts can actually say anything as a result of conscious intellect. We’re all starting to act like this thing can think on its own, like it’s alive. It’s a machine. Machines can’t think.”