Mohler turned to look at her. “They murdered his family when he was still a boy.”
Richard nodded. “Some of my ancestors murdered a lot of people and made a lot of enemies.”
“Well,” Nicci said, changing the subject as she looked around, “this is no match for the vaults of prophecy that were once at the Palace of the Prophets.”
“Let’s hope that what is here at least turns out to be valuable to us,” Kahlan said.
Even with all the candles and lanterns Mohler had lit, the recording room was rather dark and gloomy, but more than that, the place was decidedly strange. An odd assortment of various items stood all throughout the expansive room. Glassed display cases held odd collections of smaller objects. Randomly throughout the room were low cabinets, cases, statues, and pedestals grouped in no particular order that Richard could make out, but he did see that everything had been placed in an even grid pattern, so that they almost resembled pieces on a giant game board. Around the edges of the room in several places there were overstuffed chairs, comfortable spots to relax or read.
Richard frowned as he scanned the room, trying to make sense of it, but he decided in the end that maybe it wasn’t supposed to make sense. Not everything had to make sense. Sometimes people simply put new things they collected wherever they could find space. Most likely, the items, everything from marble statues to a bronze sundial, were placed in the room as they were collected. Collected, though, by a disorderly mind that would put a sundial in a dark room with no windows, as if hiding it from its purpose. Either that, or Hannis Arc found comfort in chaos.
They walked slowly, silently, past glassed cabinets that held odd collections of items. There were bones from strange creatures Richard didn’t recognize, common-looking rocks, small figures made of straw wearing crudely sewn clothes, carvings of people and animals arranged in scenes of country life, and geared mechanical devices the purpose of which Richard couldn’t begin to guess.
Although, those geared devices did remind him in a way of Regula, the omen machine. Regula was filled with complex geared workings.
The shelves in the cabinets also held small boxes in a variety of sizes along with round tubes with symbols in the language of Creation carved all over them. Scanning a few of the boxes, Richard mentally translated some of the symbols and saw that each item told a story, not unlike the scenes depicted by some of the little carved figures.
Nicci shook her head as she stared into one of the cases. “I hate to imagine where Hannis Arc would have obtained some of these rare objects.”
When she looked at Mohler, he shrugged an apology for not having an answer. “He didn’t collect all of them. Some of these things were here since I was young. I know that he did add items from time to time, but others were here before I was born.”
There were also a number of preserved animals in different places around the room. Besides more common creatures in common poses such as a deer standing in a display thick with dried grass, a family of beavers posed on a mound of sticks, and raptors, their wings spread as they stood on bare branches, there was also a large bear towering up on its hind legs, jaws spread wide in a silent roar, its claws raised so that it looked perpetually ready to attack.
In various places throughout the room, conforming to the grid pattern, large pedestals stood in random spots within that gridwork, in no apparent order. Each carved wooden or stone pedestal held an enormous open book, each with a heavy leather binding. Some of the books were decorated with gold leaf. Most showed great age and wear, with frayed edges all around their covers. They would have been hard to move because of their sheer size, but because they appeared to be quite fragile they probably had permanent homes on their pedestals rather than on one of the bookshelves against the back wall.
They all lay open to different places in the volumes, places where the latest entries had been made. Some were opened in the middle, others closer to the end. Only a few lay open near the beginning.
Tables near the pedestals holding the books were piled with disorderly stacks of scrolls. Richard unfurled several and it confirmed his speculation that they were prophecies that had come in to the citadel for Mohler to record in the permanent collection of large books. While a few of the prophecies sounded complex, most were simpler than the typical prophecies he had read. The wax seals on many of the scrolls were unbroken, the scrolls waiting their turn to be opened and recorded.
Kahlan had told him the horror of how Ludwig collected prophecy by torturing captives. It was probable that for some of those scrolls, at least, someone had died at Ludwig Dreier’s hands. It had to be the ultimate terror to be at the mercy of such a madman.
And yet, strangely, it appeared that Hannis Arc was in no particular hurry to see all the new prophecies lying untouched. Richard was beginning to suspect that something else must have commanded the man’s attention, which meant that, for Hannis Arc at least, the prophecies were not the most important thing in the room, and not what occupied most of his time. Something else was. Richard wondered what that something else could be.
Mohler swept a hand of gnarled, arthritic fingers around, indicating the open books. “This has been my life’s work, Lord Rahl. These are the books where I recorded prophecy collected from out in the Dark Lands.” With a kind of reverent affection, he let the hand settle on one of the open books. “These books are where I would write down all the prophecy brought to the citadel, as scribes before me had done for generations.”
“Did all of these prophecies come from Ludwig Dreier?” Richard asked.
“Actually, only a small portion came from Abbot Dreier. He believed that he was the bishop’s most important source of prophecy, but actually he wasn’t. Most of the scrolls and even ledger books are brought in from various places around the Dark Lands. A number of emissaries from the citadel traveled the towns and more remote areas out among the villages and the cunning folk to collect prophecies from anyone with the talent for such foretelling. Once each foretelling arrived back here, I recorded it in these books.”
“You wrote all these books?” Kahlan asked.
“Oh my no,” he said with a short chuckle. “I work with these books, record into them, but they predate me by many centuries. They contain the work of a long line of scribes who came before me, going back several thousand years, almost to the time when the citadel was built, I believe. All of it is recorded here. As did those before me, I have worked at this my entire life. Since I was young I have entered new prophecy in these books, most of that time for Bishop Arc.”
Knowing what he knew about prophecy, Richard was having a hard time believing that these books of recorded prophecy were the source of Hannis Arc’s knowledge and power. Prophecy, especially what he suspected was more folklore than true prophecy, could not provide that level of expertise.
“How do you choose which book to record these new prophecies in?” Nicci asked the scribe. “Was that also your job, to decide where they belong?”
He looked somewhat puzzled by the question. “They are categorized and then recorded according to their subject. I record them in the proper book for the subject contained in the prophecy.”
Richard shared a look with Nicci before he gazed out over the books lying open all over the room. “I was just starting to organize the prophecies at the People’s Palace. But it takes a true prophet to read the prophecy first and determine the proper subject.”
“Really?” Mohler asked, his eyes brightening. “I had no idea you were interested in such matters. Bishop Arc never cared much about the mundane aspects of my work. He only cared to read the new prophecies once I recorded them. Are there many books of prophecies there, at the People’s Palace?”