"This book was compiled, I believe, sometime not long after the great war had ended," Zedd told them as he tapped the open cover near the title: Continuum Ratios and Viability Predictions. "The gifted back then had discovered that, for whatever reason, fewer and fewer wizards were being born and the ones who were being born were not being born with both sides of the gift, as had almost always been the case before. What's more, the ones who were being born with the gift were all being born with only the Additive side. Subtractive Magic was vanishing."

Ann looked up from under her brow. "It is hardly a novice and a boy wizard standing before you, old man. We know all this. We have spent our lives devoted to this very problem. Get on with it."

Zedd cleared his throat. "Yes, well, as you may know, this also meant that there were fewer and fewer prophets being born."

"How remarkably fascinating," Ann mocked. "I, for one, would never have guessed such a thing."

Nathan irritably hushed her. "Go on, Zedd."

Zedd pushed back his sleeves, briefly casting a scowl Ann's way. "They realized that, with ever fewer wizards born to prophecy, the body of work of prophecy was of course going to cease to grow. In order to understand what the consequences of this might mean, they decided that they needed to do an intensive investigation of the entire subject of prophecy while they still could, while they still had prophets and other wizards with both sides of the gift.

"They approached the problem with the gravest of concern, realizing that with them, this might very well be mankind's last opportunity to comprehend the future of prophecy itself, and to offer future generations an insight to understanding what these wizards were increasingly coming to believe would one day be seriously corrupted or even lost."

Zedd glanced up to see if Ann looked like she intended to offer anymore disparaging comments. She did not. This was apparently something she hadn't known.

"Now," he said, "to their work."

Richard moved up to the table beside Nicci and with a finger turned over pages as he listened to Zedd. He quickly noticed that the book was written in such strange technical jargon having to do with the intricacies of not only magic but prophecy as well that it was nearly incomprehensible to him. It might as well have been a different language.

One of the surprises was that the book contained a series of complex mathematical formulas. These were interrupted by diagrams of the moon and stars marked with angles of declination. Richard had never before seen a book about magic that contained such equations, celestial observations, and measurements-not that he had actually seen that many books about magic. Although, he recalled, The Book of Counted Shadows that he had memorized as a boy did have a number of sun and star angles that were necessary to know in order to open the boxes of Orden.

Yet more formulas were scratched in the margins, but by different hands, as if someone had come along and done the sums to check the work in the book, or perhaps approached it with updated information. In one instance, several of the numbers in an elaborate table were crossed out, with arrows pointing from new numbers scribbled in the margins to the stricken numbers in the tables. Zedd occasionally stopped Richard from turning pages in order to point out an equation and explain the symbols involved in the calculation.

Like a dog watching a bone, Nathan's dark azure eyes tracked the pages as Richard slowly turned each over, idly looking for anything that made sense to him as Zedd droned on about overlapping transpositional forks and triple duplexes bound to conjugated roots compromised by precession and sequential, proportional, binary inversions shrouding flawed bifurcations that the formulas revealed which could only be detected through Subtractive levorotatory.

Nathan and Ann stared without blinking. Once, Nathan even gasped. Ann incrementally went ashen. Even Nicci seemed to be listening with uncharacteristic attention.

The unfathomable concepts made Richard's head spin. He hated that feeling of drowning in incomprehensible information, of trying to keep his head above the dark waters of complete confusion. It made him feel dumb.

Intermittently, Zedd referred to numbers and equations from the book. Nathan and Ann acted like they thought Zedd was on the verge of revealing not only how the world was going to end but the precise hour.

"Zedd," Richard finally asked, interrupting his grandfather in the middle of a sentence that showed no signs of ever coming to an end, "is there any way you can boil this stew down to some meat that I can chew?"

Mouth agape, Zedd regarded Richard for a moment before pushing the book across the table to Nathan. "I'll let you read it for yourself."

Nathan cautiously picked up the book as if the Keeper himself might pop out at him.

Zedd turned back to Richard. "Basically, to put it in terms you might better grasp, and at great risk of oversimplifying it, imagine that prophecy is like a tree, with roots and branches. Like a tree, prophecy was continually growing. What these wizards were basically saying was that the tree of prophecy behaved as if there were a kind of life to it. They weren't saying that it was alive, mind you, only that in a number of ways it mimicked-not duplicated-some attributes of a living organism. It was this property that allowed them to come up with their theory and from that run their calculations-in much the way there are parameters by which you can judge the age and health of a tree and from that extrapolate about its future.

"During a previous time when there had been a great many prophets and wizards around, the works of prophecy and its many branches grew quite rapidly. With all the prophets who had contributed, it had solid, fertile ground in which to grow, and deep roots. With new prophets constantly bringing new vision to the collected works, new forks of prophecy sprouted continuously and those new branches, over time as other prophets added to them, grew thick and strong. As it grew, prophets continually examined, observed, and interpreted events, enabling them to tend the living stock and prune the deadwood.

"But then, the birthrate of prophets began to plummet and with each passing year there were fewer and fewer of them to attend to such duties. Because of this, the growth of the tree of prophecy began to slow.

"In essence, to explain it in simple terms you can understand, the tree of prophecy had in a way matured. Like an old monarch oak in a forest, these wizards knew that the vast tree of prophecy had many years of life ahead of it as a mature entity, but they also knew what the future eventually held in store.

"Like all things, the existence of prophecy could not be eternal. As time passed, prophetic events came to pass, becoming outdated. These no longer served any use. In this fashion, if nothing else, the passage of time would eventually supersede all the predictions dealt with in the work. In other words, without new prophecy, all the existing prophecy, whether or not they turned out to be true forks, nonetheless would eventually reach their chance in the chronological flux. As they did, their time passed —they would be used up.

"Thus, the commission studying the problem came to realize that the tree of prophecy, without the growth and life that it drew from prophets, from the constant stream of prophecy feeding the many branches, would eventually die. Their task, and the purpose of this book, Continuum Ratios and Viability Predictions, was to try to predict how and when this would happen.

"The best minds in prophecy studied the problem, took a measure of the health of the tree of prophecy. Through known formulas and predictions based on not only observed patterns in the decline of growth in prophecy, but a decline in prophets to sustain it, they determined how this particular tree of knowledge would become heavy with the deadwood of false and expired prophecy as prophetic forks were reached and chronology moved on down the sections of branches still viable. As this happened-as the tree of prophecy grew thick with age and deadwood that could no longer be culled by true prophets-they predicted how it would become susceptible to, to, well, a kind of malady, a decay, much like an old tree in the forest will eventually become susceptible to disease.