Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

She saw the trees in a different light for other reasons as well. They marked the turn of time, the passing of seasons, the change of patterns that were part of her world now, too, because of their connection to all the things she had been studying in The Book of Life. It was all intricately interconnected — how the power of Orden worked, and how that power functioned through its connection to the world of life. The world, the seasons, the stars, the position of the moon, were parts of the equation, all parts of what contributed to and governed the power of Orden. The more she studied and the more she learned, the more she felt that pulse of time and life that was all around her.

She had also come to recognize with complete clarity that Richard had memorized a false key.

She never made the point to Zedd. It seemed unimportant for the present. It was also a difficult case to make. It wasn't so much what The Book of Life said, but how it said it. The book was in another language, and not just High D'Haran. While it was written in High D'Haran, the true language of the book was its interconnection to the power invoked through it. The formulas, spells, and procedures were only one aspect.

In many ways it reminded her of how Richard spoke so convincingly of the language of symbols and emblems. She was coming to understand what he meant by seeing it for herself all laid out in The Book of Life. She was coming to see the lines and angles in certain formulas as a language all their own. She was beginning to truly grasp what Richard meant.

The Book of Life carried meaning that had forced Nicci to look at the world of life in a new way — in a way that very much reminded her of the way Richard had always looked at the world, through a prism of excitement, wonder, and love of life. In a way it was a profound recognition of the precise nature of things, an appreciation of things for what they were, not for what people imagined of them.

In part, that was because The Book of Life was not just Additive, but Subtractive Magic in the same way that death was part of the process of life. It dealt with the whole. For that reason, Nicci couldn't explain it to Zedd; he didn't possess the ability to use Subtractive Magic. Without that ability, a constituent part of what was needed to understand The Book of Life was missing. She could explain the formulas, lay out the procedures, show him the spells, but much of it he could only observe through the filter of his limited ability. While he could intellectually understand some of it, he couldn't actually perform what was involved.

It was something like the difference between hearing about love, understanding the depth of such feelings, grasping how it affected people, but never having actually experienced it. Without that experience, it was only academic, sterile.

Until you felt the magic, you didn't know it.

It was in that sense that Nicci had come to know that Richard had memorized a false key. She had been right, before, in that if the person who put the boxes in play failed to use the key properly, the boxes would be destroyed along with the one who put them in play. But it was more than that simple statement. There was the whole complex nature of the processes involved in using the boxes that demonstrated that concept in ways that the words only presented in a simplified, condensed manner.

Through the mechanisms in the book, she could glimpse how the power functioned. By understanding that function on a profound level, she could see how the magic, if invoked, needed and used the key for completion. Through grasping that process, she could see how if the key was used improperly the boxes themselves were inescapably destroyed along with the person making the fatal mistake. The magic simply would not allow such a breach to go uncompleted.

It would be like tossing a rock and without any outside influence or intervention having it float in midair rather than fall back to the ground. It simply would not happen. In the same way, the magic of Orden had laws of its identity. By the way it functioned, by those laws of its identity, it had to destroy the boxes if the key was not used properly. The rock has to fall.

When Richard used his memory of what he believed was The Book of Counted Shadows, he changed it in order to trick Darken Rahl into opening the wrong box. But it had only been the wrong box named in a clever simulation that seemed as if it had meaning to The Book of Life. In fact, such a book was only a shrewd fake, a false key. Had it been real, and misused in such a way, the boxes would no longer exist.

A false key, a clever fake, simply could not trigger the power of Orden to destroy the boxes, but the real key, if used in the fashion that Richard had used it, would have caused the entire structure of spell to collapse in on itself, taking the boxes with it.