“That’s what they do,” Cara confirmed. “The stairs and passageways twist in a spiral upward, just like the rooms in the palace below us. That actually made it easy to diagram the plateau. It may be a great height, but the basic design, spiraling up with rooms and stairs along the way, is simple once you understand how it works.”
Richard couldn’t imagine a Mord-Sith thinking magic was simple or understanding how it worked. He looked from one face to another.
“Do you mean to say that the machine goes all the way down somewhere into the center of that spiral up through the plateau?”
“Worse.” Cara leaned in. “Once we had started mapping it out, with Nathan and Zedd showing us how the spell-form would be drawn, we were able to go down through the palace and find the central shaft that is this node thing. That central area contains the machine. That also allowed us to map it downward through the plateau.”
“But you didn’t tunnel into the walls down in the plateau to see if the machine was at the core? So you aren’t sure it goes that far down.”
“We didn’t have to,” Benjamin said.
Cara folded her arms. “I sent Nyda with some of the other Mord-Sith, armed with the map we had made, to escort Benjamin down into the catacombs. Sure enough, the same pattern is laid out in those tunnels, too. They have the same protected core that the palace above has.”
Richard nodded. “They would have to because they feed the axis of the spell-form—the containment field that is the Garden of Life. The spell-form has to go to ground intact. You can’t breach it from below or the whole thing wouldn’t work.”
“Well, down there, in the lowest reaches of the catacombs, in the hub of those tunnels, that’s where Nyda and I dug an inspection hole.” Benjamin tapped a finger on the silent machine. “We hit the metal wall of this thing.”
Richard’s head spun with the dizzying implication. The machine that rose up through the palace to just under the Garden of Life came all the way up through the plateau from the Azrith Plain far below.
CHAPTER 41
Richard couldn’t begin to imagine what it could all mean— what the machine really was, who had made it, and why it had so long ago been sealed away.
And worse, why it had suddenly awakened from its long slumber.
He supposed that what ever the machine’s purpose had been at one time, it might have fallen into disuse and, being so massive, might have been more trouble than it was worth to dismantle, so it had simply been walled away and forgotten.
Yet, for all he knew, it could just as well be that the machine had been sealed away because it had been a source of trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time that prophecy had caused trouble, and perhaps the machine was no less troublesome for that reason.
But none of that explained why it had come back to life now.
Unable to answer any of those questions for the time being, Richard turned to his grandfather. “So, what have you been able to learn about the nature of this thing?”
Zedd looked somewhat exasperated, maybe even a little sheepish. He glanced at Nathan and Nicci before he answered.
“Nothing, I’m afraid.”
That wasn’t what Richard had been expecting to hear, least of all from Zedd.
“Nothing? Nothing at all? You had to have been able to learn something.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Richard spread his hands in frustration. “But it uses magic. Can’t you at least tell something about the magic it uses?”
“So you say.” Zedd laid a hand on the machine. “We can detect no magic. The machine has been as silent as this grave where it rests. As far as we can tell it’s just an inert collection of gears and levers and wheels and ratchets and shafts. We looked down inside, as best we could, but that told us nothing useful. All the inner workings seem to be made of ordinary metal, even if on a grand scale.”
Richard raked his fingers back through his hair. “Then what made the gears turn when we were down here before?”
Zedd shrugged. “We’ve done everything we can think of to get it to start up, or to react, or to do something to reveal its nature, but it remains silent. We’ve fed in threads of magic, used analysis spells on it, and sent in conjured probes, but they reveal nothing.”
“Maybe that’s just because the palace weakens your power,” Richard suggested.
“Being a Rahl, my power works just fine here within the palace,” Nathan said as he swept his hand out over the machine, “yet my power was of no more use on this thing than Zedd’s was.”
Richard turned to Nicci. She had different abilities than either Zedd or Nathan did. She could wield Subtractive Magic. He hoped that maybe with her unique gift she could sense a hint of magic that Zedd and Nathan couldn’t.
“You must be able to tell something about it.”
