Poisoned Book

The Poisoned Book

The Poisoned Book is a book which has the ability to show the reader what they most desire to see.

Its pages are covered in a poison, which will cause the victim to bleed out of every pore on their body and die in agony afterwards. The binding of the book is safe to touch. Laird De Curry believes the poison to have been Dragon's Blood, and it is so powerful that it was too strong for him to heal.

It is given to Kingson by Walter Padick when he infiltrates Gilead. The book is discovered by Cort, who dies from the poisonous pages.

Possible Influence

While not confirmed to have been an influence, the Poisoned Book bears a resemblance to a tome mentioned in a story from the One Thousand and One Nights, in the tale of "King Yunan and Duban the Doctor." In the story, a king named Yunan, suffering from leprosy, is cured by the kindly Duban, who is given many favors and riches in return. However, the king is soon turned against the doctor by a jealous advisor, and despite the doctor's protests Yunan sentences Duban to death. In retaliation, Duban tricks the king into taking a certain book of "medical secrets" after the doctor's death as a "gift," only for Yunan to die himself from contact with the book's pages, which were smeared with poison (due to the toxicant being sticky, Yunan had to lick his finger repeatedly in order to turn and separate the pages, thus unknowingly ingesting the poison).