Phantom (60 page)

Nicci stared at the old man, seeing him in a new light. She had known of
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
, but, like everyone else who had studied it, she had never understood its purpose. There had been debate about it, of course, but no one could ever offer a purpose for such an esoteric book of magic. It defied the conventional wisdom on the functioning and purpose of magic. In the end it had been dismissed as a mere curiosity from a time past. In fact, it had been presented in lectures as just that, an oddity, a relic of ancient times, useless, but nonetheless an object of note simply because it had survived.

Zedd, like Richard, never dismissed any bit of knowledge. Like all knowledge collected, he kept it cataloged somewhere in the back of his mind in case it ever came up again. When he had trouble finding an answer he would check his memory of forgotten things residing in an index in some dusty corner of his mind.

Richard did the same thing. Knowledge, once acquired, remained in his arsenal. It enabled him to put things together in new ways, to come up
with surprising solutions that often challenged old, established ways of doing things. Many people found such a way of thinking, especially when it had to do with magic, treading dangerously close to heresy.

Nicci saw its true value. Real answers to problems came from just such a process of thought, logic, and reason—all based on what was known. It was the essence of a Seeker, the foundation of what he did in his search for truth. It was also one of the central qualities about Richard that so captivated Nicci. He was a student without formal training who was able to intuitively grasp the most complex issues in a way no one else could.

Zedd leaned in, pulling Nicci with him. “Look here. See this? Do you recognize it?”

“The part that didn’t invert?” Nicci shook her head. “No. What is it?”

“It’s the contamination left by the chimes. This, I recognize. This is the spider in the web of magic.”

Nicci straightened. “This proves that Richard was right, then.”

“The boy got it right,” Zedd agreed. “I don’t really understand how, but he had it exactly right. Once it’s isolated like this, I recognize the corrosion left by the chimes, the same as I recognize the reddish brown scale of rust. He was able to see it in the language of the lines, and he was right. The spell is contaminated; the source of that contamination was the chimes. This is the mechanism by which the chimes erode and destroy magic. If it has infected this spell, it has to have infected other things of magic as well.”

“Is that what’s killing the night wisps?” Cara asked.

“I’m afraid it would seem that way,” Zedd told her. “The oaks around their home place are also invested with protective magic. That both the oaks and the wisps are dying out together is suspicious in the extreme.”

Nicci walked to the windows, watching the indistinct fits of lightning through the opaque glass. “Creatures of magic are dying out. Just as Richard told us.”

She missed him so much that mournful anguish passed through her like the shadow of death itself darkening her soul. She felt like she would shrivel and die if they didn’t find him soon. She felt like she could not survive if she never got the chance to see him again, see the life in his gray eyes.

“Zedd, do you think he was right about the rest of it? Do you think that there really were dragons, and we’ve all forgotten that there were such
things in the world? Do you think Richard was right that the world we knew is passing out of existence, vanishing into the realm of legend?”

Zedd sighed. “I don’t know, my dear, I really don’t. I’d like to think the boy is wrong in that much of it, but I learned a long time ago not to bet against Richard.”

Nicci smiled to herself. She had learned the same thing.

“Nicci,” Zedd said, hesitating as he gestured vaguely, seeming to search for words, “you are…well, someone who holds Richard in the same regard as I do, feels a similar passion and loyalty for him. In many ways you almost seem like…” He threw his hands up and let them flop back down at his sides. “I don’t know.”

“Zedd, you, Cara, me—we all love Richard, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“I guess that’s the core of it. I don’t have any recollection at all of Kahlan, but I imagine I must think of you in much the same way I can only imagine I must have thought of her, as more than just his confidante sharing the same struggle.”

Nicci felt as if she had just been hit by lightning. She dared not allow herself to even begin to consider the emotional charge in his words. With the greatest of difficulty, she managed to keep her composure and merely twitch her brow, finally asking, “What are you getting at?”

“Like Cara and Richard, I’ve come to think a great deal of you, especially considering what I thought of you in the beginning. I’ve come to trust you, like I say, as I would trust a daughter-in-law.”

Nicci swallowed but didn’t meet his gaze. “Thank you, Zedd. Considering where I came from, and what I thought of myself in the beginning, that means more to me than you could know. To have people actually, sincerely…”

She cleared her throat and finally looked up at him. Despite how his words hit her, she didn’t think that he meant them to have any meaning, but merely to preface something important. “You want to tell me something?”

He nodded. “I’ve learned some other things. Greatly disturbing things. I would not tell anyone else such things, but, well, other than Richard himself there is no one I would trust more than you and Cara. You two have become more than friends in all of this. I’m only trying to find a way to express to you how much…”

When his words trailed away and he stared off into the distance, Nicci gently laid a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get him back, Zedd, I promise you that. But you’re right in how we feel about him. Richard completely changed my life. If there’s something you need to talk about, I would like to think that you can trust Cara and me almost as much as you would trust Richard. I think that’s what you’re getting at? We all feel the same about him, and about our cause. I…well”—she tapped her fingertips together—“you know what I mean.”

Fearing she’d already said too much, Nicci felt her face turning red.

“What I’m trying to say,” Zedd finally said, “is that I need your help, and I want you to know what you both mean to me—that I do not now reveal these things lightly or capriciously. All my life I’ve kept secrets because they had to be kept. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but that’s just the way it was. Things have changed, though, and I can no longer keep certain knowledge to myself. There is so much more involved now than there ever was before.”

Nicci nodded and turned her full attention to the wizard. “I understand. I’ll do what I can to be worthy of your trust.”

Zedd pursed his lips. “That book,
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
, was hidden in a place no one but me knows exists. It was in the catacombs beneath the Keep.”

Nicci shared a look with Cara. “Zedd,” she asked, “are you saying that there are bones beneath the Keep? And there are books there as well?”

Zedd nodded. “A lot of books. That was where I found
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
.”

He took a few steps away to stare at the windows flickering with light from the storm beyond the containment field. “No one that I’m aware of ever knew the place of the bones was down there. I found it when I was a boy. I knew that no other person had been in there for ages. Not a single footprint had marred the dust on the floors in thousands of years. I was the first to make a mark in that dust of ages. I did not need to be told the significance of that fact.

“As a boy it rather frightened me to find those ancient catacombs. I was already spooked because I was trying to find a way to sneak back into the Keep. When I found the catacombs I knew instinctively that it would not be hidden as it was unless there was a good reason, so, as much as I wanted to at times, I never told anyone about it. I almost felt as if the place
had allowed me entry, but in return required my silence. I not only took my attitude of responsibility seriously, I felt genuinely protective of such an undiscovered place. It contained, after all, the remains of a great many people—perhaps even my own ancestors. I knew that there were always those who would exploit such a find and I didn’t want that to happen to a place so clearly held in sacred regard by those who had hidden it.

“Added to that, I felt rather guilty for having disturbed such a burial place for the feeble reason of trying to sneak back in to avoid getting in trouble for having gone out without permission in the first place. I had slipped out of the Keep to go to the market down in Aydindril to look at all the exciting baubles being hawked there. It seemed so much more fascinating than the dry studies to which I was supposed to be devoting my time.

“After my chance discovery, I quietly asked veiled questions and found that not even the old wizards I knew had any knowledge of the place beneath the Keep. Over time, I came to realize that such a place was not even suspected, much less rumored to exist.

“As a boy, I had a lot of studies that took up nearly all my time. Back then, there were many people living in the Keep, and with my assignments I never had a chance to spend—in total—more than a couple of hours down there. I quickly found that there were many of the same books that we had up in the Keep, so, as a boy, I came to believe that it wasn’t as important a find as I had at first believed it to be.”

He smiled distantly. “I fancied myself a great explorer, discovering ancient treasures. This treasure was mostly bones and books. There were endless dry books up here in the Keep that I had to study, so yet more books wasn’t exactly as exciting as thoughts of constructed spells encased in amber, or jewel-encrusted curses. But there was none of that down there. Just crumbling bones and old books.

“There are rooms upon rooms down in the catacombs filled with dusty old books. I never had much time to explore those rooms. I can’t even begin to guess at the numbers of books hidden down there. I never had time to do more than look at a small sampling. As I said, many I’d seen before up in the Keep and of the ones I hadn’t, at such a young age, none of them impressed me enough to remember, except a few, such as
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
.

“When I grew up I fell in love with the most wonderful woman and soon she was my wife. She gave birth to the other light in my life, a
daughter—who grew up to be Richard’s mother. As a young wizard working at the Keep, there was always more to do than there were hours in the day. There was no time to spend down among old bones.

“And then the world was cast into a terrible war with D’Hara. It was a dark time of terrible struggle. I had become First Wizard. The battles were gruesome as battles always are. I had to send men to die. I had to look into the eyes of wizards, young and old, that I knew were not up to the challenges, and tell them to do their best when I knew their best would not be good enough, and they would likely die in the effort. I knew in my heart that if I were to do it myself it would get done and I could make it work, but there were a lot of those kinds of tasks that needed to be done, and only one of me.

“At times, I found responsibility, knowledge, and ability were a curse. To look at all the innocent people counting on me as First Wizard, and know that if I failed they would die, was almost more than I could endure.

“In that respect, I know exactly what Richard is going through. I have been in his place. I have carried the world on my shoulders.”

He gestured to dismiss his melancholy departure from the subject at hand. “Anyway, with all my other responsibilities, the catacombs lay mostly forgotten, as they had for thousands of years before I ever came along. I simply had no time to look into what might be down there. From my limited search as a boy I believed that there was nothing to be found but old and comparatively unimportant books buried along with forgotten bones. There seemed to be so many more pressing matters of life and death.

“To me, the most important thing about the catacombs was that they provided a secret passage for me to enter the Keep. That passage came to be invaluable when the Sisters of the Dark took the Wizard’s Keep.

“Back when I was younger, after the war in which my wife had died, the council and I had a bitter dispute over the boxes of Orden. And then…Darken Rahl raped my daughter. So I left the Midlands—quit it for good—taking my daughter with me through the boundary to Westland. She was all I had left and all that mattered to me. I thought I would live out all my days beyond the boundary in Westland.

“Then Richard was born. I watched him grow. My daughter was so proud of him. I secretly worried that he had the gift, and fretted that forces from beyond the boundaries would one day come for him. And then, there
was a fire and all of a sudden my daughter, Richard’s mother, was gone from my life, from Richard’s life.

“I turned to Richard for solace. I gave him everything I could that would help him be all he could be. I had some of the best times of my life with him.

“Unbeknownst to me as I did my best to forget the outside world, Ann and Nathan, driven by prophecy, had helped George Cypher recover
The Book of Counted Shadows
from the Wizard’s Keep. It had been stored in the First Wizard’s private enclave, where I had left it for safekeeping.”

“Wait a minute,” Nicci said, stopping his story. “You mean to tell me that
The Book of Counted Shadows
, one of the most important books in existence, was just lying around in the Keep?”

“Well,” he said, “not exactly ‘lying around.’ Like I said, it was in the First Wizard’s enclave. That’s more secure than the Keep in general and not exactly an easy place to breach.”

“If it’s so secure,” Nicci reminded him, “then how did Ann and Nathan and George Cypher get in to take the book?”

Zedd sighed as he looked up at her from under his bushy eyebrows. “Therein lies what has come to trouble me—the only copy of a book that important being that vulnerable—”

“That’s what Richard was going to tell you,” Nicci said with a sudden flash of comprehension. “That’s why he was in such a hurry to get back here—he said he had to get to you right away. That was the reason!”

Zedd frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She stepped closer to the wizard and pulled the small book from her pocket. “This is the book that Darken Rahl used to put the boxes of Orden in play—”

“It’s what!”

“This is the book that Darken Rahl used to put the boxes of Orden in play,” she repeated to the astonished wizard. “We found it at the People’s Palace. I promised Richard that I would study it and see if there was a way to undo what Sister Ulicia had done, see if there was a way to perhaps take the boxes of Orden back out of play. I tried to explain to Richard that magic doesn’t work that way, but you know Richard, he doesn’t so easily accept that something can’t be done.”

Zedd stared at the book she was holding up as if it were a viper that might bite someone. “That boy has a way of turning over rocks and finding trouble.”

“Zedd, this warns that to use this book, the key must be used. Otherwise, without the key, everything that has come before, meaning what has been used from this book, will not only be sterile, but fatal. It says that within one full year the key must be used to complete what has been wrought with this book.”

“The key,” Zedd whispered, as if it were the end of the world. “The boxes must be opened within one year of being put into play. You need
The Book of Counted Shadows
to open the boxes. That book has to be the key.”

“I think so, too,” Nicci said. “The thing is, we found information from back at the time of the great war saying that some wizards had made five copies of ‘the book that was never to be copied.’”

“And you think that ‘the book that was never to be copied’ was
The Book of Counted Shadows
?”

“Yes. There is a book of prophecy that says ‘They will tremble in fear at what they have done and cast the shadow of the key among the bones.’”

Zedd was staring at her as if his world were crumbling apart. “Dear spirits. That sounds like it’s from
Yanklee’s Yarns
.”

“That’s right. The thing is,” Nicci said, “all the copies but one were false copies. Five copies—four false, one true copy.”

Zedd pressed a hand to his forehead. Nicci noticed that his breathing was faster than normal. He looked on the verge of passing out.

“Zedd, what is it?”

His fingers were trembling. “You know what you said about
The Book of Counted Shadows
being too easy to steal? That was always my thought too, but not something I consciously dwelled on. It was more one of those thoughts in the back of your mind that never fully surfaces.”

“Yes,” Nicci said, waiting patiently until he went on.

“Well, when I remembered
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
, I finally remembered where I had seen it as a boy: the catacombs. I needed it to test this spell, so while you were gone with Richard to the People’s Palace I went back into the catacombs and looked for
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
.”

Nicci knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“And while I was searching for
The Book of Inversion and Duplex
, I found a copy of
The Book of Counted Shadows
.”

“‘They will tremble in fear at what they have done and cast the shadow of the key among the bones,’” Nicci quoted again.

Zedd nodded. “All my life, I never knew there was a copy of that book. I had been taught that there were no other copies. I had been taught that there was only one copy. That alone told me how important that book was. But if it’s so important, then why was it not in a safer place? That question was what always stuck in the back of my mind.