The alchemist's extract & formula book
A wax-sealed alchemist's formula book out of a dead band's cache, whose seal is itself the trap
The finer of the two clasped books out of the slain explorer band’s cache, taken from under a barn-stall floor at Ridh: good leather, shut with a wax seal laid over a piece of brass. It is an alchemist’s extract and formula book: a working alchemist’s recipes.
The seal is the trap. The wax is made of two reagents that anyone taught alchemy at the Arcane Congress would know on sight, and broken the wrong way it will very likely start a chain reaction and take the book with it. Aldo had the hands for that kind of work and was offered the try. Mikhail argued for waiting on somebody who might know the seal’s make and how it is meant to come apart, and so the book was set aside for Professor Ashanti al-Hassan.
It has not been opened. The men who carried it were contractors to Ebon Ink, hired out on a survey of the Twisted Grove for a sponsor the ledger from the same cache will not name. What formulae are written in the book, and whether they bear on the Grove at all, will not be known until the seal comes apart.