Bloodfire Quest (The Dark Legacy of Shannara, #2)(90)

It took them all night to discover this, and at the end Woostra simply shrugged. “Unfortunate. We’ll try the sleeping chamber of the Ard Rhys.”

They left the document chambers and went up another flight to Khyber Elessedil’s private rooms. Woostra took the boy inside, and together they resumed their search. There was a desk and a writing table, but neither yielded anything of value. Because this was primarily a sleeping chamber, the search went quickly and finished when Railing, looking through a nightstand, found a series of journals belonging to Khyber Elessedil beneath a false bottom in a drawer containing a collection of loose documents.

He thought at first he had found what they were looking for, flushed with anticipation as he handed the journals to Woostra.

But the Druid scribe, after carefully paging through each, shook his head. “These were written by Khyber Elessedil. And they aren’t what we want. They don’t go back far enough. There is at least one missing, the oldest. That’s the one we need to find.”

So they went back to looking, working their way from the obvious places to the least obvious, trying to work out where the Ard Rhys could have hidden another journal. They looked for the better part of an hour but in the end came up empty-handed.

“I don’t understand it,” Woostra admitted. “Why would she hide one journal and not the others?”

“Maybe there aren’t any besides the ones we’ve found,” Railing said. “Maybe that’s all there are.”

Woostra shook his head. “I don’t believe that. She would have started keeping a journal right from the start of her term of service if she was going to keep them at all. She’s always been very thorough. She’s hidden that one deliberately. We have to look some more.”

Railing glanced around at the already ravaged room. “Where? Should we start tearing out the walls?” He paused. “Wait a minute. Could she have used magic to hide it? Redden and I used to do that with all sorts of stuff. If the journal’s so important …”

Woostra was on his feet. “That’s exactly what she’s done. She’s done it before with important documents.” He looked around expectantly. “Can you use your magic to look for it? Can you try uncovering it that way?”

Railing stood up quickly. “I think so.”

He glanced again at the journals they had already read through. All of them looked the same. So he pictured another like them and began to hum, calling up the wishsong. He felt the magic respond, felt the familiar warmth and the tingling at his fingertips. Holding the wishsong steady as he hummed, he began a slow scan of the room. He felt the magic spread away from his hands, lighting here and there, revealing patches of color, bits of detritus from earlier magic. The room was filled with it, and he realized he was sweeping over years of magic use, all of which probably related to the journals in one way or another and none of which gave him a clue as to the whereabouts of the one missing. The leavings were especially thick around the writing desk, which confirmed his thinking.

He stopped his search and told Woostra what was happening. “We have to find another way. Something that will set the hiding place of the journal apart from all this other stuff.”

They considered the problem in silence for a long time, and then Woostra said, “If she hid it, she must have left a way to find it. A way that a Druid would understand. But we don’t have a Druid with us to ask.”

“What if she put something in one of the other journals?” Railing asked. “A key to the one that’s missing.”

“She would have done that right at the beginning, assuming she wanted it hidden right after Grianne left the order.” Woostra took out the earliest journal and paged through it quickly. “Nothing written in here that stands out.”

“It wouldn’t be something written.” Railing took the journal from him and studied it. “Let me try another approach.”

He called up the wishsong a second time, humming first, and then shifting into words that just came to him as he envisioned a link between this book and the one missing. He sang of a need for rejoinder, for assembling all of the journals as a unit, for a reunion and an end to separation.

At first, nothing happened. But then he felt a tugging and the sudden launch of the blue light, flaring out and sweeping through the room. Almost immediately it settled on the stone blocks of the south wall about midway up, flaring once as it revealed a series of red lines, then consuming the lines and turning dark again.

Woostra crossed quickly to the place in the wall upon which the magic had settled and began fingering the surfaces of the stone blocks and the crevices between. It took him only moments to discover what he was looking for, and abruptly one of the stone blocks popped loose, extending out far enough for Railing to pull it free and set it aside.

There, in the space behind the stone, was the missing journal.

Together they sat down and began to scan the contents.

Railing brushed strands of his unkempt hair out of his eyes. “I can’t read any of this. What language is this?”

“Old Elfish,” Woostra answered, giving him a look. “Interesting that she changed languages after filling up this first journal. She made a choice at that point to make the others more readable, so that they would be more accessible to anyone who found them. Why not this one?”

He scanned a few pages, searching.