The Omen Machine

CHAPTER 27

As they ducked, trying to avoid being hit by the debris flying in every direction, Richard and Kahlan both covered their ears against the deafening sound of thunder crashing and stone breaking. In the staccato flashes of lightning, Richard glanced back over his shoulder and saw the floor in the center of the room caving in.

Great granite blocks under the floor groaned as they twisted apart from one another and fell inward. Grass, dirt, and a thick bed of sand poured into the expanding hole, like the sands of an hourglass falling inward.

When the broken sections of glass finally stopped falling, Richard looked up to see in the flashes of lightning a jagged breach in the ceiling surrounded by twisted pieces of the heavy metal framework. Fortunately, most of the ceiling all around the room held in place. By the looks of the framework that Richard could see, the builders had overbuilt it for all but the rarest of events. It had, after all, stood for thousands of years. But the nearly inconceivable combination of snow made dangerously heavy by a cold rain, along with being struck by lightning, had been too much for the glass roof to withstand.

Wind whipped in through the opening, swirling sleet and snow down through the room and into the gaping hole in the center of the floor.

Keeping a wary eye skyward for any hanging pieces of glass that might come down on him, Richard pulled the shard of glass out of his leg and tossed it aside. He quickly retrieved a steel and flint from his pack and used them to light a torch in an iron stand not far away. Worried that people below the collapsed floor had been hurt or killed, he rushed toward the opening even as dirt and sand was still sliding down into the dark maw.

Kahlan clutched at his sleeve. “Richard! Stay back. The rest of the floor could fall in and you could go with it.”

He held the torch out, trying to see into the hole. The flame flapped in the gusts of wind that lashed down into the room from the break in the ceiling. He leaned down, peering under the edge on the opposite side of the opening in the floor. It looked like the floor of the Garden of Life was actually held up by a series of radiating arches of a vaulted ceiling underneath it.

“It seems to have stopped,” he said. “I think the lightning must have damaged the structure below that supports the room enough that the weight of all that falling snow broke open the weakened spot, but it looks like the rest of it is stable. See there? The lightning hit the thinnest place in the vault, between two heavy arches.”

Kahlan inched up close behind him. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.” Richard crouched down and held the torch out, trying to see what was down below. It wasn’t a room of the palace, as he expected.

“Look there,” he said, pointing inside the hole to the left. “There are stairs over there.”

Kahlan frowned as she leaned over a little more. “There wasn’t any opening for stairs up here.”

“You’re right. It looks like there used to be a stairway up to the Garden of Life, but it was covered over.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kahlan said. “This room was constructed very deliberately as a containment field. It doesn’t make any sense that it would have later been closed off from below. For that matter, being a containment field, it doesn’t make sense that there were ever stairs. The opening for them would have weakened the field.”

“May not make sense, but that’s what it looks like.”

“Unless what’s below is within the containment field,” she said, thinking out loud, “or used to be.”

Richard inched in closer. The rest of the floor, supported by the beams of an arch system under them, seemed stable. “The stairs may have once led up into the Garden of Life, but they end at a landing. See it, there? It no longer comes all the way up. I want to get down there.”

Kahlan shook her head. “The landing is too far down to jump.”

Richard stood, holding the torch out, looking. He pointed. “There’s the shed where the people who tend to the garden keep tools. These trees have to be kept trimmed to keep them from overgrowing and getting too big, so there must be a ladder.”

When he pulled open the shed door, Richard saw that there was indeed a wooden ladder inside. He handed Kahlan the torch. The ladder was heavy, but he was able to handle it by himself.

When he reached the hole he slid the ladder down the side until it rested on the landing. Enough of the ladder stuck up out of the hole for a good handhold.

Richard looked up through the jagged opening in the glass roof. Snowflakes drifted down, but the wind was slowing. He could see breaks in the clouds, and through the breaks, stars. The storm was ending.

“Why don’t you wait here,” he said as he started down.

“Right,” she said, “like that’s going to happen.”

“Well at least wait until I get down onto the landing and see if the steps are safe.”

Kahlan agreed to that much of it. She stood at the edge of the hole, foot braced on a freshly exposed stone block, torch in hand, peering down to watch him descend the ladder. When he looked up at her, the dislodged granite blocks at the edge of the hole reminded him of a line of crooked teeth, as if he were being swallowed down the gullet of a stone monster.

As he stepped off the ladder the area around him brightened with an eerie greenish light coming from a proximity sphere sitting in an iron bracket. Richard had seen the ancient devices before. They were used to illuminate various areas of the People’s Palace and the depths of the Wizard’s Keep, among other places. They looked like nothing more than a solid piece of glass, but they had been invested with ancient magic so that when someone gifted came near them they began to glow.

As he lifted the hefty glass sphere out of the bracket, the light it gave off warmed in color.

Kahlan stepped off the ladder beside him. “At least we don’t have to carry the torch.”

“Guess not,” Richard said as he squinted down into the darkness. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?”

He brushed cobwebs out of the way. “I would have thought there would have been a room or some area of the palace under here, but this looks like no one has been down here in a thousand years. Maybe longer.”

Kahlan glanced around at the thick gray layers of dust clinging to the walls. “A lot longer.”

As Richard started down the steps he carefully stepped around chunks of fallen stone and areas of sand and dirt that covered large parts of the stairs. Kahlan, a hand on his shoulder, followed him down, careful to also step around rubble.

At the bottom of the long flight of stairs they reached a walkway at the outer edge of a room. The walls were made up of granite blocks, and soaring arches created a vaulted ceiling, all supporting the center portion of the Garden of Life. The dark stone, its surface dirty and decayed, looked ancient. Richard didn’t think the place had seen the light of day for millennia.

Rather than being flat, the center portion of the floor rose up in a dome formed by fat stone ribs filled in between with simple stone blocks. The dome forced them to use the walkway around the outer edges of the room. A lot of debris from above covered the dome, but much of it had slid down to build up in the well against the wall that was the only walk-way. Richard started around the room, climbing over the rubble. Kahlan clambered over huge stone pieces fallen from above, going around in the opposite direction.

The room appeared to serve no purpose except possibly as an inspection area for the structure. There were other places in the palace that were intended only as inspection ports for the foundation, or hidden parts of the support columns, connections, and beams, so he didn’t find that much of it surprising.

Richard wondered why, though, if that was true, it had been closed off from the Garden of Life. The stairway above the landing where the ladder rested appeared to have been dismantled. Since that part of the garden’s floor had collapsed, there was no longer any way to know if there had ever been access up into the garden. He supposed that it could have been nothing more than a construction access that had been sealed over.

“Over here,” Kahlan called out. “There’s a spiral staircase over here in the corner that goes down to what’s below.”