Read Online The Sword of the Truth, Book 12 - The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind - Free Book Online

sorry for the interruption. If you will excuse me it will only be a moment.”
    He took Nathan by the arm and moved him back a few more steps toward the double doors all along the wall at the back of the room. Zedd came along, as did Kahlan. Cara and Benjamin, not far away, took the hint in the look Richard gave them and drew the attention of the delegates by asking about how the rebuilding was going in their homelands.
    Once sure that no one was within earshot, Richard turned back to Nathan. “The boy said that there is darkness in the palace. He said that darkness is seeking darkness.”
    Without a word, Nathan opened the book and handed it to Richard.
    Richard immediately spotted the line all by itself: Darkness is seeking darkness.
    “That’s the boy’s exact words,” Kahlan said, a tone of concern clearly evident in a low voice.
    Richard almost said that it had to be coincidence, but he knew better. Instead he asked, “Anything else about this, this fragment prophecy anywhere else in the book?”
    “I don’t know,” Nathan said with obvious frustration. “I have no way of knowing if anything in the book is connected to anything else. For all I know, everything else might be tied to this darkness prophecy, or none of it is. I don’t even know if the other one, the one about the ceiling falling in, is connected to this line about darkness seeking darkness.”
    Richard knew it was.
    He was more than skeptical that it could be a coincidence that the boy spoke a line from a book that contained another line in it that the old woman had spoken. He knew it couldn’t all be connected by chance. He remembered the surprised look on the woman’s face when she had told him his fortune, that the roof was going to fall in, as if that hadn’t been what she had meant to say.
    Richard had learned that his gift often manifested itself in unique ways. Some texts called him the pebble in the pond, because he was at the center of ripples of events. Incidents that at first seemed like chance events were in fact often elements that were somehow drawn to him, or drew his attention, by his gift, by the ripples he created around him. Such events could appear to be coincidence until he dug deeper.
    Or until the sky fell in on him.
    He knew now for certain that he couldn’t let this lie and let events get out ahead of him. He needed to dig deeper.
    He let out a deep breath. “All right. There’s nothing we can do about it at the moment. Let’s not get all these people worked up by letting them know that something is wrong.”
    “We don’t know that there really is something wrong,” Zedd reminded him.
    Richard didn’t want to argue that there was. “I hope you’re right.”
    “The way prophecy works,” Nathan reminded Zedd, “it’s likely that this is all connected somehow.”
    Zedd’s face twisted with a sour expression, but he didn’t challenge the point.
    Richard tapped his thumb against the hilt of his sword as he ran all the events through his mind for a moment. He couldn’t see any connection between the three events. He couldn’t even imagine any.
    That wasn’t true, he realized. Darkness seeking something could be connected to Cara’s feeling that someone was looking into her room in the night— in the dark.
    He turned to Nathan. “You said that there’s a woman who works for the palace and that she is visited by small premonitions.”
    “That’s right. She’s general kitchen help, usually doing preparation work like cutting up things for the palace cooks, but she helps out with other things when extra people are needed. As a matter of fact, I believe she’s one of the people in the blue robes helping serve tonight.” He glanced around without trying not to look obvious. “I don’t see her at the moment, though.”
    “And you said that there was another woman, Lauretta, I think you said her name was, who has a hint of ability. You said that she wanted to see me because she has something for me,