Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Nicci eyed him suspiciously. "Lay your hands on a copy?"

Zedd cleared his throat. "The point is," he said, taking her arm and turning her back to the glowing lines and the subject at hand, "I remembered from reading that book many, many years ago that it talked about techniques to duplex spell-forms. It never made any sense to me at the time. Why would anyone want to duplex a spell-form?

"But there was more. The book went on to give instructions on how to invert the spell-form that had first been duplexed. Craziest thing I'd ever heard of. At the time I dismissed the book and its obscure procedures. What could be the purpose of such a thing? Who would ever need to do such a thing? No one, I thought."

He held up a finger. "And then, when thinking about the possibility of contamination left by the chimes, and trying to think of a way to prove Richard's theory, I suddenly remembered reading that book once, and it hit me. I knew why someone would want to duplicate and invert a spell-form."

Nicci was getting lost. "All right, I give up. Why?"

Zedd gestured excitedly to the two spell-forms. "This is why. Look. This one is the original, much like the one you were in, but without some of the more complex and unstable elements." Zedd waved a hand, stressing that it was beside the point. "We don't need them for this purpose. This one, here, is the exact same spell, duplicated, and then inverted. It's a copy."

"I understand that much of it," Nicci said, "but I still don't see what purpose it could serve to perform such a strange analysis."

Smiling knowingly, Zedd touched his fingers to the side of her shoulder. "Flaws."

"Flaws? What about — " Nicci gasped with comprehension. "When you turn a spell inside out and backward, the flaw won't invert!"

"That's right," Zedd said with an impish twinkle and an instructive shake of his first linger. "The flaw won't invert. It can't. The spell-form is just a demonstration of the spell, a surrogate for something real. Therefore it can be manipulated — inverted. It's not the real spell; you couldn't invert a real spell. But flaws are not subject to the influence of the magic in books of instruction — only the specific, target magic is. The flaw is real. The flaw resides whole."

Zedd turned solemn with the deadly serious nature of the material issue. "When the spell-form is activated, it carries with it the flaw, which is already embedded. When you duplicate the spell-form it carries the same flaw, but then when you invert it, the flaw can't invert because it's real, not a stand-in for something real like spell-forms are. Don't forget, that contamination was what nearly killed you."

Nicci looked from Zedd's intense hazel eyes to the two glowing spell-forms. They were mirrored. She started searching the structure, seeing each line, each element, looking to the other spell-form that was the same, but flipped.

And then she saw it.

"There," She breathed, pointing. "That part there is identical in both. It's not flipped. It's not a mirror image like everything else. It's the same in both of these while everything else is inverted."

"Exactly," Zedd said in triumph. "Hence, the purpose of The Book of Inversion and Duplex — to discover flaws that can't otherwise be seen or detected."

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.