The Scrolls of Skava

The Ruby Keep - Part 3

     This one wouldn’t open at all, and had no opening anywhere on it for a key. His heart raced with excitement. Magically locked! This had to be it! What was more, just a few weeks before he’d have had no way of opening a magically locked box but, prompted by his experiences in the smallest moon, a spell to do just that had been one of the ones he’d learned at Redhill. Delighted by the opportunity to finally use it, he checked his spellbook to make sure the words hadn’t changed since the last time he'd looked. They were the same, and so he put his hands on the box and cast the spell.

    The casket flared with a nimbus of blue light and Thomas felt a tingle in his fingers that made him jerk them back in alarm. That hadn't happened when he'd tried the spell on Meatar's test box! Maybe locking spells had changed over the centuries and his counterspell didn’t quite fit. When he tried the casket again, though, the others watching excitedly over his shoulders, it opened easily and he breathed a sigh of relief.

     Inside were about twenty sheets of yellowing parchment bound together with faded red ribbon, and Thomas’s hand trembled with excitement as he carefully lifted them out. Could it be... He examined them carefully and found them covered with neat, closely written handwriting, but it was written in old Garonian, a language that had become extinct thousands of years before. He couldn’t read it.

     “Well?” demanded Naomi, her curiosity and patience both reaching their limits. “Is it the Scrolls of Skava?”

     “Can’t tell,” replied Shaun, leaning forward to see better. “Could be anything. Fairy stories, pages from a diary, a shopping list...”

     “I’ll have to translate them,” said the wizard. “Then we’ll know.”

     The black girl paced up and down in frustration and impatience. “Well, how long will that take?”

     “Just a few minutes,” replied Thomas, feeling a little smug as he remembered Meatar Halten, his tutor wizard in Redhill, telling him that he'd have no need for such a spell in wartime. "When the war's over and you return to civilian life, then you can learn any spell you want," he'd said. "Until then, it's war spells you want to learn." Thomas had been adamant, though, and Meatar had sighed in resignation as he'd handed over the spellbook containing the requested spell, hoping his young and foolish charge would return to sensible war spells once his itch was scratched.

     Thomas looked forward to telling him about this moment as he took his prism from his backpack and looked at the scrolls through it. Seen through the polished quartz, everything had a halo of rainbow colours and they intensified as he spoke the magic words. The prism began to glitter with tiny motes of glittering light and the rainbow colours brightened further, but then his view through the prism cleared. The writing on the scrolls was unchanged, but now he could read them as though he'd known the language all his life.

     “Well?” demanded Naomi again, but Thomas held up a hand to be left alone and Shaun ushered the others away from him. “He probably only has a limited time before the spell comes to an end,” he explained, “so he’ll want to be left in peace to read as much as he can. He’ll let us know in his own good time.”

     The others looked back at the wizard, totally lost to the world as he pored over the papers, and reluctantly moved away to explore the rest of the library.

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     “Where did you find them after all?” whispered Garnet to Jasper.

     “I didn’t,” replied his companion. “The original scrolls were destroyed in the Mage Wars. I had to summon an emissary of Tizar to tell me what was on them and then create duplicates. They’re as good as the originals.”