From the depths rose the glow of the craft. Swirling as it came, it finally stopped spinning at the level of his eyes and coalesced into gleaming, azure letters of the Eutracian alphabet. They hung there silently, like long-forgotten, dead ghosts of language. It was a list.
He slowly ran down the titles of the hundreds of related documents, seeing that he had already examined many of them. Most had not been helpful. And then, at the bottom of the shimmering list, was an entry that had not appeared with his previous queries:
A Treatise on Forestallments and Their Possible Uses
Author: Egloff, of the Directorate of Wizards
The Vault of the Scrolls
Sixth Floor
Section 1999156
Document 2037
Date of completion:
Seventy-Third Day of the Season of New Life, 327 s.t.
Faegan closed his eyes and recalled all he could of Egloff. The highly precise wizard had always worn spectacles. He had been slight in stature but great in intellect, with a rather diminutive head and an incongruously long nose. He had also been highly respected among the wizards as a master of the Tome.
Faegan opened his eyes again and reread the words that hung there, motionless in the silence of the room. And then it hit him.
The blood stalkers and screaming harpies, the horrific tools of the Coven that had been revisited upon Eutracia just before the sorceresses returned, might have been brought forth from their hibernation by Forestallment, the same aspect of the craft Faegan suspected the princess’s bond with the fliers to be!
The wizard’s blood raced as the possibilities whirled through his mind like pinwheels. He placed his cat on the floor, turned his chair toward the only section of wall that was not lined with books, and raised his hands. “Open,” he ordered.
The marble wall separated down the center, becoming twin doors opening to either side. Wasting no time, the master wizard wheeled his chair through—into the Vault of the Scrolls.
The Vault of the Scrolls was constructed of black marble, and held countless racks of ancient, dusty rolled-up parchment.
Searching his mind, he retrieved the section number: 1999156. The level upon which the scroll was to be found was represented by the last number of the series. He therefore needed to be on the sixth floor. Since the winding staircase was useless to him, he levitated his wheelchair up to the appropriate floor and over the railing, coming to a gentle landing in the appropriate alleyway between racks.
The first three digits of the section number indicated the number of the alley: 199. The fourth, fifth, and sixth digits were indicative of the particular section of racks in which the document could be found: rack 915.
Finally stopping in front of the correct section, he reached into his memory and retrieved the number of the individual scroll he wished: document 2037.
Once he spotted its resting place, above his reach, Faegan used the craft to call the scroll to him. Slowly, one of the parchment tubes began to slide itself out from among its brothers and gently floated down into the wizard’s lap.
Faegan looked at it for some time, feeling overcome by emotion. Having been isolated in Shadowood for so long, he had not read a true scroll of the craft for over three hundred years. And this particular scroll had been written by Egloff, one of his old friends who was now buried in a nameless grave.
The golden tag that traditionally hung from the leather strap surrounding the scroll was still there. Glistening as if new, it was engraved with Egloff’s signature. He always did prefer scrolls to books. As he unrolled it, he felt old, dusty memories tugging at his heart. His friend had had a beautiful script, and preferred to write in red ink. The treatise was very long and detailed—just as he would have expected it to be.
It is truly a window to Egloff’s intellect, Faegan told himself. Then his heart skipped a beat. What he had been searching for was the method by which one could empirically prove the existence of a Forestallment in another. And he had just found it.
The existence of a Forestallment residing in another can be proven by the subject’s blood signature! His gray-green eyes continued down the parchment, searching for more clues. Finally, near the end of Egloff’s treatise, came the answer. That’s it! he realized.
At the bottom he saw Egloff’s signature, the accompanying signature of one of the many consuls of the Redoubt needed to authenticate it, and the document’s date of completion. The air went out of his lungs in a rush as he reread the date, the importance of which had eluded him until now.
The Seventy-third day of the Season of New Life, 327 s.t.
The treatise had been written the same day as the attack by the Coven. The very day Egloff and all of the other wizards of the Directorate, except Wigg, had been murdered.
That would explain why the other wizards of the Directorate had never learned of Egloff’s findings, Faegan realized. There would have been no time to tell them. They would all have been preparing for that evening’s coronation of the prince, and Egloff no doubt had planned to tell them afterward. Faegan sadly looked away from the parchment, trying not to think of all Wigg had told him of that fateful day. But Egloff never got the chance, he thought.
It was forbidden to remove any document from the Archives or the Vault of the Scrolls, so he decided to make a copy in the event that Wigg would want to study the scroll as well.
Opening the drawer of a desk he found sheets of extra parchment. Carefully he laid a clean sheet directly over the original, then closed his eyes.
Almost immediately the glow of the craft appeared and the words from the original began to bleed upward into the developing copy, creating an exact duplicate. When the process was complete, he rolled the fresh copy up and placed it in his robes. The original rolled itself up and, with a thought from Faegan, floated gently upward to replace itself in the spot from which it had come.
Faegan levitated his chair over the railing and wheeled himself out of the Vault of Scrolls and into the Archives proper, where he retrieved Nicodemus. He gave the cat an affectionate scratch under the chin, and Nicodemus stretched to ask for more.
“We have found it, my friend,” Faegan whispered. “This could change everything.”
In his excitement he allowed himself to use the craft again to levitate his chair. Cackling with glee, he went sailing down the halls of the Redoubt in search of the princess.
20
Tristan carefully followed Wigg down the narrow, curving steps and into the bowels of the Caves. The radiance stones glowed more softly here, and the deeper they went, the colder it became. Moisture seeped visibly from the walls, and the air grew increasingly musty. There was no sound save that of their boots on the unforgiving rock. Tristan thought the journey would never end, his sense of apprehension growing with each pace downward.
After what seemed leagues Wigg stopped short and held up his hand. He turned around in the stairwell to look at Tristan with a silent expression of complete disbelief, then beckoned the prince to follow him into the room at the bottom of the stairs. What Tristan saw staggered him.
Embedded in the walls of the large stone chamber was a continuously circling vein of azure. Glowing brightly, it pulsated and throbbed as if it had a life of its own—as if wishing to free itself from this place in which it was imprisoned. At the opposite end of the room was another door.
The vein’s amazing glow bathed the entire room; it was perhaps the most beautiful thing Tristan had ever seen. But the look on Wigg’s face told him that it was also something terrible.
In horror, he watched the wizard fall to his knees before the vein, a tear rolling down one of his cheeks. “So this is where it is being taken to!” he exclaimed. “And as the vein grows, our world above collapses around us!” His hands were balled up into fists, his knuckles white with tension.