The shock on Bill's face was like a lake frozen in an instant. It lasted only a few seconds before a Curse-Breaker's professional instincts swiftly thawed it.
He took a deep breath. The mingled smell of dust and dried plants instead brought his thoughts, left somewhat adrift by shock, back down to earth.
"I understand."
Bill's gaze sharpened again. He circled the seven earthenware jars, his steps regaining their distinctive rhythm, a mixture of composure and precision.
"The intruder's stories... Ankh-Ka used the disturbances caused by spirits he'd dealt with as the sequence for the code."
He stopped, looking at Douglas with the excitement of someone who had met his match.
"Then the logic is simple. The order of the stories is the order I discovered them in."
Bill's mind raced like a precision instrument that had just been recalibrated.
"The first story I read in that forged book of fairy tales was 'Whispers of the Nile,' about the girl wearing a lotus crown."
He pointed to the jar that gave off sorrowful whispers.
"So the first note is sorrow."
He moved on to another jar, above which light and shadow had once revealed a sandstorm that blotted out the sky.
"The second story was 'The Signpost in the Sandstorm.' The caravan met that gray-robed man in their despair."
Bill pointed to the jar representing fear.
"Then came 'The Jar Man and the Green Lizard,' with the shadow of a snake in the well water."
He pointed to the jar of deception.
"Last was 'The Prince and the Forgetting Flower.' The prince searched a tomb passage for a flower that could make him forget his pain." He pointed to the jar of forgetting.
"Sorrow, fear, deception, forgetting..."
Bill recited the sequence, his face filling with the confidence of someone about