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.

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 war 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.

CHAPTER 53

"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?"