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 acode?” 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 firstJin’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
