Abruptly, they swirled around to leave. “It will be as you have commanded, Bishop,” the handless one said. “We will tell our mistress your words.”
“See that you do.”
Hannis Arc watched as they swirled like smoke and slipped out through the cracks around the heavy door. On their way out, as Mohler before them, they were careful not to meet the gaze of the woman standing guard there.
Hannis Arc’s rage still burned out of control. He would set the wrongs right. The spirit of his father would watch from his hallowed place in the underworld as his son finally visited vengeance upon the House of Rahl.
This was the awakening of a new day in D’Hara, in more ways than one. The ages of darkness under the House of Rahl were about to be over.
Richard Rahl was about to lose his grip on power. He was about to lose everything. Hannis Arc would see to it. And when he did, a fearful people would clamor for a new leader.
Justice would finally be done.
Hannis Arc yanked the knife from the desk, the now slack hand still impaled on the blade. As he held it out toward the woman by the door, she stepped to the desk.
“Dispose of this, would you?”
As she reached for the knife, he abruptly drew it back. “No, I have a better idea.” He gestured with it. “Place it in that display case, there, for visitors to see.”
The woman in red leather flashed a grim smile. “Of course, Lord Arc.”
CHAPTER 38
Richard yawned. He looked up from the complexities of translating the symbolic elements he was working on to see Zedd coming back into the library. Through the high windows above, the first blush of dawn revealed a clear sky.
The strange spring storm had broken, but it seemed that it had merely been the harbinger of bigger problems. It was clear to Richard that there was trouble about, but what ever the core of the trouble might be, it was hidden from him. He was getting that familiar, uneasy feeling that he was in the dark about what was really going on.
All of it, from the boy down in the market to the storm, to the strange deaths, to the variety of strange prophecies, to the machine buried for so long that had suddenly come to life, was too much to be a coincidence. Things that seemed to be a coincidence always made him edgy. He was worried the most about the machine they had discovered, worried that it was somehow at the heart of it all.
The translations of the metal strips were only confirming his suspicions.
Since he had discovered that everything in the book was backward, those translations, while tedious, had been working smoothly. The more he learned from those translations, the more his concern grew.
As his grandfather crossed the library, Richard noticed that Zedd didn’t have the usual spring in his step. He thought at that moment that Zedd looked like nothing so much as an old man, a tired old man. Richard could read the creases in Zedd’s face and tell that he, too, was concerned about what kind of trouble they might have on their hands. Zedd’s typical exuberant, sometimes childlike way of looking at the world was nowhere in evidence. That, more than any words, framed for Richard the seriousness of the situation.
That, and the translations from the strips.
Richard stuck his hand in the book to stop the pages from turning over when out of the corner of his eye he spotted the part he was looking for.
“There’s the first one,” he told Berdine. He tapped an element on the page. “That’s the one. What’s the inversion of it?”
Berdine leaned in, looking, reading the High D’Haran explanation silently. “It has to do with falling.”
Richard had already begun to grasp the language of Creation and he knew what many of the symbols meant. He had only been looking to confirm his worst fears. Berdine just had.
“That’s the last symbol, so it—”
“So it ends the action of the subject,” Berdine finished in a mumble. She hadn’t yet figured out what Richard already had. She stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth as she wrote it down, then started turning pages in the book. “I need the subject.”
Richard tapped the metal strip, showing her. “Here. If it’s inverted, then this part of the device is the subject.”
Zedd, coming to an abrupt halt across the table, leaned in, squinting, trying to read the paper she was working on.
“What’s that, there, that you’ve written down?”
“It’s the translation of the language of Creation inscribed on this strip,” Richard said. “How’s Kahlan? Were you able to heal her hand?”
“I’m a wizard, aren’t I?” He gestured to the paper where Berdine was writing. “So, you’ve figured out how the book works? How these symbols work?”
