The creature reared back, opened its jaws, and bit savagely into the base of Rolf’s neck. It tore a large chunk of muscle away, then spat it out. Knowing that Rolf would soon die, the beast let go, sending him tumbling to the ground. Twisting its head this way and that, the thing hissed and looked down at the dying woodsman. To Rolf’s added horror, the beasts started wantonly slithering over and under one another in an orgiastic display of victory.
Amid the chaos, in another area of the pool the surface of the water quietly broke again to reveal a different kind of being. This creature was unlike the many others still rising from the depths. Striding from the pool, it walked up the riverbank to stand over the dying Rolf.
The being wore a dark, tattered robe that spilled down over his wrists and feet. So as to hide his face, the hood of his robe was pulled up over his head. He gripped a gleaming silver staff in one hand as he dispassionately watched Rolf suffer.
As his vision slowly dimmed, Rolf watched the strange figure raise his silvery staff. At once a great shaft of azure light streamed from the staff’s end and went tearing into the forest. The ground started to shake and Rolf heard explosion upon explosion as the craft mowed down ancient trees and dense brush. Wildfires soon cast their orange-red flames into the dark night sky.
As his azure bolt faded, the robed figure continued to point the staff toward the charred path that he had cleared. Then he looked down at his servants as they hissed and slithered about in their orgiastic frenzy.
“That way, my children,” he said quietly. “Our work here is done. Kill no more until you are again ordered to do so.” His voice was deep and resonated with the power of the craft.
As the creature that had wounded Rolf slithered toward the path, the others quickly followed. With their great tails snaking back and forth, their speed soon became as great as the swiftest horses. Rolf turned in agony to see still more of the monsters rise from the water and slither up the charred trail.
There had to be hundreds of them by now, he realized. If their rampage continued, the monsters would soon number in the thousands. But his mind could not fathom how or why the terrible things and their mysterious master had so suddenly appeared.
To Rolf’s further horror, the hooded figure dispassionately turned and levitated into the air. He then hauntingly glided to a place just above the beasts’ onward-flowing column. With his dark robe billowing in the wind and his strange staff gleaming, he flew down the path and shepherded his newborn charges away.
While the forest fires crackled and smoke rose into the air, ever more of the newly born monsters exited the pool to follow their master. As Rolf drifted toward death, he heard a distant Hartwick wolf suddenly call out to announce another night of foraging.
How odd, Rolf thought, as he felt his warm blood spill out onto the ground. The wolves that once worried me are now the only familiar part of this fiery, monster-strewn madhouse. It seems that the old wives’ tales about these woods are true, after all. The craft really does live here…
For the last time, Rolf turned his head to look at his son. If he could summon enough strength, there was one thing left to do. Reaching toward the stag carcass, with a trembling hand he gathered some of the deer’s sticky blood onto his fingertips, then gently smeared it onto Dale’s cheek. Goodbye, my son, he thought. You did well today.
As Rolf’s eyes closed for the last time, the faraway wolf again let go his plaintive cry.
CHAPTER VII
TRISTAN WAS THE LAST CONCLAVE MEMBER TO AWAKEN. He tried to sit up but his head spun sickeningly, forcing him to lie down again. He soon realized that his weapons had been taken from him and that Shailiha sat by his side. Searching his face, she smiled cautiously.
“So you finally decided to rejoin the world,” she said. “Welcome back. We were worried about you.”
The princess sat on a chair that had been pulled up beside the sofa on which Tristan lay. He tried to sit up but again his grogginess won out, forcing him back down. As best he could tell, he was still in the Archives of the Redoubt.
“What happened?” he asked thickly.
Shailiha handed him a cup of hot tea. “Drink this first,” she ordered. “Abbey laced it with some herbs. It will help bring you around.”
Tristan took the cup and gratefully sipped its steaming contents. After giving it back to his sister he finally managed to come up onto his elbows and look around.
As he thought, he was still in the Archives. From somewhere across the room, the other Conclave members were talking in concerned tones. Except for the Tome and the two Scrolls having been released from the wizard’s box, the room looked much as it had before everyone passed out. The oil lamps seemed to twinkle even more pleasantly, and mounds of disheveled archives still lay on the floor. Then his vision finally cleared and things came into better focus. A look of wonderment crossed his face.
The entire chamber and all six of its upper levels were sprinkled with a fine azure dust. It lay atop the furniture, coated the displaced archives lying on the floor, and dirtied every oil lamp and chandelier. Then Tristan realized why the lamps twinkled so prettily—their lamplight was filtering through the strange material that dusted them. The dust shimmered with a life of its own, adding a faint azure glow to the room.
When he looked back at Shailiha, he realized that her hair, clothes, and skin were lightly tinged with the stuff. He looked down to see that he was similarly dusted. He collected some of the strange material from his vest and onto his fingers to discover that it felt soft and fine, like highly milled flour. Suddenly he remembered what Faegan had whispered, just before he blacked out.
“Subtle matter,” he said, half to himself.
Shailiha frowned. “What did you say?” she asked.
“He said ‘subtle matter,’” Wigg’s voice announced.
The First Wizard stepped closer. He had brushed most of the azure dust from his person but shimmering bits still clung to him here and there. Kneeling, he placed his face near Tristan’s and looked deeply into the prince’s eyes.
“Remain still,” he announced. “I doubt that you have been harmed. Even so, it seems that you were the most deeply affected. Most of us awakened hours ago.”
Tristan was hungry for answers but he did as Wigg asked. Finally satisfied, the wizard stood up. After placing his gnarled hands into the opposite sleeves of his robe, he let go a short smile.
“You’ll live,” he said drily. “We can only guess that because of the exceptional quality of your blood, you were the most affected. Shailiha has been conscious only a short time as well.”
Tristan sat up on the edge of the sofa and looked around. As he did, some of the strange dust fell from his clothing, shimmering beautifully as it drifted to the floor.
“Is everyone all right?” he asked.
Before answering, Wigg reached toward a nearby chair and retrieved Tristan’s weapons. The prince nodded his thanks.
“Everyone seems fine,” the First Wizard answered. “You have been unconscious for six hours. At first I considered using the craft to try to bring you around. But we are still unsure about what happened here, so we decided to let you come around naturally, like everyone else. It was an interesting experience, wasn’t it?”
“Six hours…,” Tristan whispered. “It seemed like moments.” A look of concern flashed across his face. “What about the Tome and the Scrolls?” he demanded. “Are they safe?”
“Yes,” Wigg answered. “Faegan and the others are examining them as we speak. But as we feared, freeing them from the wizard’s box seems to have changed them. I think it best that—”
Suddenly Faegan’s familiar cackle sounded from the other side of the room. It was full of the same timbre it always held when the eccentric wizard was close to unraveling some puzzle of the craft. Wigg raised an eyebrow, then beckoned the royals to follow him. Tristan stood gingerly and strapped his weapons into place behind his right shoulder. Taking a deep breath, on wobbly legs he accompanied Wigg and
Shailiha to the other side of the room.
Jessamay, Faegan, Abbey, and Aeolus were sitting around one of the Archives tables and conferring among themselves. The Tome and the two Scrolls lay before them. As Tristan, Wigg, and Shailiha sat down, the prince regarded the precious relics. At first he couldn’t see what Wigg had meant about the Tome and the Scrolls having been changed. Then he looked closer, and he understood.
The massive Tome lay open at about its midway point. Subtle matter lightly coated the Tome’s two exposed pages. Its covers of white tooled leather seemed unaffected, but its pages had changed slightly. Until today, the Tome’s Old Eutracian script had been written entirely in black ink, but now some of the letters glowed azure. Tristan could discern no reason why only certain of them had been affected.
He then looked at the two Scrolls. The Vigors Scroll lay totally unrolled and stretched the entire length of the table. It too was lightly dusted with subtle matter. Like the Tome, some of its individual markings glowed. But in this case the glowing marks were selected symbols and numbers that helped form the many hundreds of Vigors forestallment formulas. The Vagaries Scroll was unwound. Although it too had been dusted by subtle matter, it seemed unchanged by whatever phenomenon ravaged the Archives.
Tristan was about to speak when Faegan smiled and leaned across the tabletop. The wizard’s mischievous gray-green eyes bored straight into his.
“Unless I’m wrong, you were about to demand answers about subtle matter,” he said slyly.
Tristan nodded. “What happened here?”
“First things first,” Wigg interjected. He raised a bony index finger and pointed it toward the ceiling. “Look there,” he said simply.
Tristan and Shailiha raised their faces to see glowing azure lines of script hovering silently in the air high above the tabletop. One line was far longer than the others, and Tristan recognized it as a craft formula. Several more lines hovering nearby formed a short paragraph that was written in Old Eutracian. The four lines wavered to and fro teasingly, as though they were begging to be deciphered. Tristan and Shailiha returned their attention to the mystics.
“You all know that my brother and I can’t read Old Eutracian,” the princess said. “Where did those lines come from? And perhaps more important, what do they say?”
“Taken as a whole, they seem to be comprised of various letters, symbols, and numbers that have been selected from the Tome and the Vigors Scroll,” Jessamay answered. “When the three relics were placed side by side, subtle matter was released from two of them. The amazing things that we all saw just before we blacked out were only the start of the process. The subtle matter seems to have searched the Tome and the Vigors Scrolls for certain letters, symbols, and numbers, then formed them into the paragraph and the formula that you see hovering above us. It appears that the Vagaries Scroll was not a part of that process.”
“What does the paragraph say?” Tristan asked.
Faegan looked up at the glowing words.
“Here lies the coded spell that will unlock so much,” he read aloud. “Enacted properly, it will help lead the seekers toward their ultimate goal. After the image appears, travel with care, for many perils await those who would follow the path.”
“That’s not much to go on,” Tristan said. “Like the Tome, its message is purposely obscure.”
As Tristan thought more about the paragraph, a sudden realization left him nearly speechless. He stared blankly first at Wigg, then at Faegan.
“Do you mean to say that the Tome and the Vigors Scrolls contain some type of a code?” he breathed. “And that the Ones used an ancient spell to make it appear from them?”
“That is exactly what we mean,” Faegan answered. “We also believe that this is the first time that it has happened.”
“And simply placing the three documents side by side caused this phenomenon?” Shailiha asked.
“Correct,” Faegan answered. “The idea is quite clever. I believe that the Ones guessed that at some point over the centuries, craft mystics would eventually come to possess all three documents at once. As I quoted just hours ago from the Tome, the catalyst that started it all was placing the three relics side by side and allowing them to remain in close proximity to one another. I unwittingly did that when I conjured my wizard’s box. The spell was automatically enacted, causing subtle matter to appear. We must rely on a few assumptions about what happened next, because we were all unconscious. We think that the subtle matter selected the encoded letters, symbols, and numbers from the Tome and the Vigors Scroll to construct the paragraph and the formula that hover above us. The weaker our blood, the less we were affected. But we all blacked out, and that’s a pity. The process by which the code formed would have been a fascinating one to watch.”
“It seems that the Ones took a terrible risk,” Abbey protested.
“What do you mean?” Shailiha asked.
“She means that there was no likely way that the Ones could ensure that the three documents wouldn’t fall into the hands of Vagaries practitioners first,” Aeolus answered. “Had that happened, the results might have been disastrous.”
“Yet the Ones decided to chance it anyway?” Tristan asked skeptically.
“Apparently so,” Jessamay answered.
“But why incorporate a secret code into the relics at all?” Tristan asked.
Faegan cackled again. “Ah, why indeed?” he asked in return. “We believe that there is but one answer. Do you remember how the Scroll Master said that you are not the first Jin’Sai to seek to fulfill the destiny outlined in the Tome? Moreover, during your time with the Envoys of Crysenium you learned what that destiny truly entails—to bring a lasting peace to Rustannica and Shashida. We believe that this code was meant as a secret way of helping you and your sister to fulfill that task. And if we are right about this being the first time that the code has been released, then you and Shailiha are the first Jin’Sai and Jin’Saiou to claim this wondrous advantage.”
Tristan sat back in his chair, then he looked over at his sister to see that she was equally overwhelmed. Yet another piece of this ancient puzzle has fallen into place, he realized. But what will it reveal? He looked back into Faegan’s eyes.
“It seems that there is only one way to learn what the coded spell holds for us,” Tristan mused. “We must enact the formula.”
Faegan’s expression hardened. “While that is probably true, we must be extremely careful,” he warned. “Although it is overwhelmingly tempting, opening the spell could be the worst possible mistake. It might kill us all.”
Tristan scowled. “I don’t understand,” he protested. “Why would the Ones provide us with a harmful spell?”
Just then Tristan noticed that the First Wizard’s expression turn decidedly glum, as though some old wound had been reopened.
“What’s wrong?” Tristan asked.
As Wigg took a deep breath, then laced his long fingers together atop the table, Abbey moved her chair closer in a silent show of support.
“You’re forgetting something,” Wigg answered. “For some time we have suspected that Failee possessed the Tome and both Scrolls. What we do not know—and might never know—is whether she possessed them concurrently. If she did—”
“She could have been the first to discover the code!” Shailiha exclaimed. “If that’s true, she might have altered it somehow, making it deadly for the next mystics who came across it!”
Jessamay shook her head in disagreement. “I know better than most how brilliant Failee was,” she said. “But it seems unlikely that even she could corrupt a spell constructed by the Ones. I still say that the Ones took a terrible risk that the code might first be found by Vagaries practitioners. How could they install the spell and then just trust the documents to the world that way?”
“How could they, indeed?” Aeolus asked. “It might be that the spell holds built-in safeguards, preventing it from forming among enemies. For example, one such protection might be that the spell ca
nnot be enacted in the presence of left-leaning blood. But we cannot be sure. Now you understand the extent of the problem. The question is not how to enact the spell, but whether to do so at all.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Tristan said to Faegan. “What is subtle matter?”
“We have long suspected the possibility of subtle matter, but until today we had no proof that it existed,” Faegan answered. “It is mentioned only in passing in the Tome, making the prospect of its existence all the more tantalizing. This is a great day in our study of the craft—as great, I daresay, as the discovery of forestallments, the two Scrolls of the Ancients, and acquiring the index that allows us to search the Scrolls at will.”
Pausing for a moment, Faegan cast his gaze around the table. “You are all familiar with the azure light that accompanies any significant use of the craft,” he said. “Simply put, we believe that subtle matter is that same azure light, converted into a tactile form that can then be ordered to perform a mystic’s bidding on a molecular scale. The construction of a formula bringing subtle matter into being certainly required power and knowledge of the highest order, and provides yet more proof that it is the work of the Ones.”
Tristan shot Faegan a skeptical look. “Or of the Pon Q’tar,” he added quietly.
“Although we must admit that possibility, the likelihood seems small,” Jessamay said. “The Tome and the Vigors Scroll were written by the Ones, and the Vagaries Scroll apparently contributed not one of its letters, symbols, or numbers to the paragraph and the formula hovering above us. There seems little chance that the Pon Q’tar or the Heretics had a hand in this.”
“But that is not proof positive, is it?” Tristan countered.
Faegan pulled thoughtfully on his beard. “No,” he answered quietly. “And there lies the unspoken threat.”
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