The Spell of the Black Dagger (2nd Edition)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Vengar, using warlockry, helped them to raise it until it hung perfectly smooth and unwrinkled—the spell might not work if the fabric wasn't smooth.

  "Now what?" Tobas said. "Do you think we could lift it while Sarai dives underneath, and then drop it back before Tabaea could stop?"

  "I don't…" Karanissa began. Then, as the sound of desperately running footsteps suddenly became audible, drew near, and vanished, all in a few seconds, she said, "No."

  "What happened?" Tobas asked.

  "Sarai hit the tapestry. She's gone."

  "What about Tabaea?"

  "Stopped in time."

  "Then should we put it down?"

  "No!" Teneria called. "If we do, she might come out here and attack us!"

  Karanissa nodded confirmation, and for a long moment she and Tobas stood absolutely still, holding the tapestry up against the palace door.

  Then, at last, they heard retreating footsteps; cautiously, Tobas began to lower the rod, just in time to let them all hear Tabaea shrieking, "I abdicate! I abdicate! I give up! Just leave me alone!"

  Karanissa lowered her end, too. "Now what?" she asked.

  "Well, if she's serious, we just forget about her for now," Tobas said. "We have to deal with the Seething Death."

  "What about Lady Sarai?"

  "Oh, damn." Tobas frowned. "That's right, she doesn't know where she is. She's probably terrified. Someone had better go after her and bring her home."

  "I'll go," Karanissa said. "After all, I know the way."

  Reluctantly, Tobas nodded. "You're right. You go." He beckoned for Vengar to come hold the other side of the tapestry while Karanissa stepped into it.

  Wizard and warlock supported the hanging, one on either side, while the witch stepped up and put her hand on it. Nothing happened.

  "She must still be in the room," Karanissa said. "It won't work while she's in the part that's in the picture."

  "That's it, of course," Tobas agreed. "I guess we'll just have to wait until she finds the passage, or wanders into one of the back corners."

  He and Vengar stood patiently for a moment, while Karanissa kept her hand on the fabric. "I'm getting tired of holding this," Tobas said. "Maybe we should put it aside for now and see if we can do something about the Seething Death, and then try again later."

  Karanissa, her hand still on the tapestry, started to say something—and just then, she vanished.

  Karanissa found herself standing in complete darkness, and the silence was startling after the constant hum of the city. She stepped forward and peered into the gloom, trying to make out whether Sarai was anywhere nearby. "Sarai?" she called. "Are you there? Damn it all, I forgot we'd need a light."

  No one answered; Karanissa frowned. Maybe Sarai had already found the corridor out to the rest of the castle.

  "Are you in the passage?" the witch called. "Did you find it? Sarai, it's me, Karanissa!"

  "I'm here," Sarai's voice replied. Karanissa still couldn't tell where it was coming from, though.

  Well, she was a witch; she could do something about that. She raised her hand and concentrated.

  The hand began to glow, a weak orange witch-light. At first, Karanissa saw only the bare stone walls of the arrival chamber, but then Lady Sarai, crawling on hands and knees, backed into the room from the passageway out, and turned to look up at her. "Karanissa," the Ethsharitic noblewoman asked plaintively, "where are we?"

  "In the mountains between Aigoa and Dwomor," Karanissa answered. "In a secret room in a castle that Tobas and I own."

  "What!? " Sarai shrieked, as she turned to a sitting position. "We're in the Small Kingdoms! A hundred leagues away?"

  "Not much more than eighty, by my best estimate," Karanissa corrected her. "But yes, we're in the Small Kingdoms. I came after you to show you the way back. Now, can we get out of here, please? This light's very tiring, and there isn't much to eat around here."

  "Yes! Where? Where's the door?" She was almost pathetically eager—but then, Karanissa could understand that.

  "That way," she said. "Down the passage to the end, and out through the door."

  Sarai stood and proceeded down the corridor, never more than a few feet ahead of Karanissa for fear of losing the light, until at last the two of them emerged into daylight in a room lit by a single high window.

  Sarai stopped and stared. The room was lined with bookshelves, but most were empty, many broken or rotted; a table had been shoved to one side. And like the dark room and the connecting corridor, everything was at a slant. It was as if the entire building, whatever it was, had tipped.

  She remembered what Karanissa had said; the words hadn't really registered, as she had been more concerned with getting out of that horrible darkness. "A castle?" Sarai asked. "You two really have a castle?"

  "We have a couple of them, actually," Karanissa said. "Both of them were built by Derithon the Mage, hundreds of years ago. This one used to fly, until it ran into a place where wizardry doesn't work."

  "Oh," Sarai said. Understanding slowly dawned. "Oh. A place where wizardry doesn't work? You wanted to send Tabaea here. That's why I lost… why I'm back to just myself. And she would have been, too."

  Karanissa nodded. "She dodged the tapestry, though; she wouldn't touch it."

  Sarai held out the Black Dagger, which she had not yet sheathed. "So this thing is useless, now? The spell on it is broken?"

  Karanissa frowned. "No," she said, "it doesn't work that way. As long as we're in the no-wizardry area, that's just an ordinary knife; but once we're back out, it'll be magical again. We've brought a magical tapestry and an enchanted mirror through this place, and neither one worked here, but they both worked just fine elsewhere."

  "Oh." Sarai looked at the dagger. "Maybe we should leave it here, then, where it can't harm anyone."

  "Not without a guard," Karanissa said. "We tried that with the mirror. For one thing, there are spriggans around here, a lot of them, and they just love playing with magical things." She hesitated, then added, "Besides, we might need it."

  "Against Tabaea?"

  "Or against the Seething Death; I don't know if that thing will do any good against the Death, but it certainly stopped every other spell Tobas and Telurinon sent against Tabaea."

  Sarai looked at the knife, then nodded and tucked it into the sheath on her belt.

  "All right," she said, "how do we get out of here, and back to Ethshar?"

  Karanissa considered that. "Well, we have to walk to the edge of the dead area, of course," she said. "Usually, we have a flying carpet to take us from there, but I'm afraid we don't have it with us—after shuffling the tapestries about I'm not sure whether it's in Dwomor or Ethshar or somewhere else entirely, but it's not here." She sighed. "So unless Tobas or one of the other wizards has arranged something special, I think we'll have to walk the entire distance to Dwomor Keep."

  "Not all the way to Ethshar of the Sands?"

  "Oh, no!" Karanissa replied, startled. "Of course not! We have another tapestry down in Dwomor, even if the carpet isn't there. Once we get to Dwomor Keep, we can be back in Ethshar in no more than a day, probably no more than an hour."

  "Oh, good," Sarai said, relieved. "And how far is it to Dwomor Keep?"

  "Three days," Karanissa said. "Two, if we really hurry."

  "Three days," Sarai repeated, thinking of Tabaea roaming freely about the city, of the Seething Death spreading in the throne-room floor. She wondered what the Wizards' Guild would do with those three days. Would anyone tell the exiled nobility that the Black Dagger was gone and Tabaea's power lessened? Would Tabaea cling to her title of empress right up until someone killed her, or would she flee?

  What would Ethshar be like when she got back to it?

  Well, there was no use in wondering; she would see for herself soon enough.

  "Let's get going, then," she said.

  CHAPTER 41

  Tobas watched intently as the dozen volunteer warlocks went about their work,
cutting deep grooves in the marble floor in a circle around the Seething Death. The lamps set on every side did not burn well, but smoked and flared—Teneria thought the fumes from the pool were responsible. Whatever the reason, the magicians worked in a dim and smoky light, surrounded by gigantic shadows, adding to the strangeness of the task at hand.

  Telurinon was still trying counterspells; he had brought three cartloads of raw materials from the Guildhouse and set up shop in the meeting room directly below, where a roiling bubble of the Seething Death now hung from the ceiling, hissing and smoking and dripping corrosive slime on the floor beneath—but not spilling through. The stuff remained a perfect hemisphere, demonstrating irrefutably that despite appearances, it was not a liquid in any normal sense of the word.

  It wasn't a solid or a gas, either; it was magic.

  And it was, Tobas thought, damnably powerful and stubborn magic. It had already dissolved a bottomless bag when Mereth had attempted to scoop the goo into it, on the theory that Hallin's Bottomless Bag could hold anything. It had been utterly unaffected by Thrindle's Combustion, Javan's Restorative, the Greater Spell of Temporal Stasis, Tranai's Stasis Spell, the Spell of Intolerable Heat, the Spell of Intense Cold, Fendel's Accelerated Corruption, and Javan's Contraction. It had expanded unhindered through Verlian's Spell of Protection, Fendel's Invisible Cage, Cauthen's Protective Cantrip, Fendel's Elementary Protection, and the Rune of Holding. If Tobas had interpreted Telurinon's latest efforts correctly, the Guildmaster was currently attempting the Spell of Reversal, but Tobas did not expect that to work, either—and even if it did, it would only shrink the Seething Death back to where it had been perhaps an hour before. The prospect of wizards endlessly working the Spell of Reversal to keep the Seething Death contained for the rest of time was not appealing.

  There were still more spells to be attempted, and Tobas expected Telurinon to attempt them—if his own scheme didn't work.

  Marble dust sprayed up as the warlocks used their mysterious powers to slice through the stone of the floor, cutting out the chunk that held the Seething Death. It was perhaps twenty hours since that one fateful drop had been spilled, and the bubbling, boiling, smoking pool was more than a yard across, the outer edge expanding fast enough that if a person watched for a moment he could see the surrounding stone melting away.

  Tobas felt he had to work fast if his plan was to have any chance at all. Once the Seething Death was wider than the tapestry, it might not fit.

  He had hoped that the warlocks would be able to simply scoop the stuff up, out of its hole, but they reported that there wasn't anything there that warlockry could touch. Whatever the stuff was, though, the floor could hold it, and the warlocks could touch the floor, so they were cutting a chunk free, intending to lift it up to the Transporting Tapestry. It meant doing serious and permanent damage to the overlord's Great Hall, but the Seething Death would do that anyway—had already done that. The rest of the mess Tabaea had made could be cleaned up fairly easily, Tobas thought, but this might be difficult. He supposed a good stonemason could handle it, somehow.

  At the thought of Tabaea he glanced around nervously. The would-be empress had vanished without a trace that morning, after announcing her abdication—which meant she was still around someplace, and could spring out at them at any time, complicating matters.

  Once the Seething Death was dealt with, the Guild really would have to track down Tabaea and kill her. Maybe they should go ahead and throw a death-spell after her right now—but Tobas didn't want to take the time and was reluctant to act on his own in any case. The Guild might want to use something especially horrible.

  "We almost have it, wizard," one of the warlocks said—a tall, black-clad man whose name Tobas did not know.

  "Good," Tobas said. He bent down and picked up the tapestry that lay at his feet. He hoped that Sarai and Karanissa were well clear; in theory the stuff would be completely harmless the instant it passed into the dead area around the fallen castle, but Tobas had his doubts about just how fast it would lose its virulence. The Seething Death was not just another spell.

  Teneria helped him unroll the tapestry, lift it, and smooth it.

  "It's free," another warlock announced.

  "All right, then," the black-clad man said. "Lift!"

  The marble circle, four feet in diameter, shuddered, and then began to rise, up out of the surrounding floor.

  Unfortunately, the Seething Death did not rise with it; instead, Tobas stared in horror as the steady hiss of dissolving marble suddenly became a roar, and dust and smoke boiled up from the circular hole in the center of the ascending marble cylinder.

  A warlock coughed; then another.

  "Stop! Stop!" Telurinon shrieked from below.

  The steady ascent slowed; the stone cylinder wobbled, and still more smoke and powder spilled out of the central hole.

  "You might as well keep going," Tobas said. "It's too late now."

  A warlock doubled over, coughing, as more of the reeking cloud of smoke rolled over the magicians.

  The marble cylinder, four feet across and fifteen inches high, was clear of the floor now—and clear of the Seething Death. Still following the original plan, the warlocks started to move it toward the tapestry.

  "No!" Tobas shouted, suddenly realizing what they were doing. If they sent the chunk of stone through the tapestry, the tapestry would no longer function—not until somebody hiked out to the fallen castle, in the mountains between Dwomor and Aigoa, and removed the cylinder from that hidden chamber.

  The warlocks paid no attention, and in desperation Tobas simply dropped his end of the tapestry's hanging rod; Teneria, not entirely sure why but following the wizard's lead, dropped hers as well. A moment later the marble cylinder hung suspended in the air, touching nothing, above the tapestry.

  "Put it down somewhere," Tobas called. "Somewhere out of the way. It didn't work."

  The cylinder wobbled, then glided to the side and settled to the floor.

  Tobas stared at it for a second, then turned his attention to the Seething Death. It was hard to see clearly through the swirling vapor, but at last Tobas convinced himself that he was not imagining it.

  The Death was hanging there, totally unsupported, exactly where it had been before, in the center of a ring of empty air. It was a perfect half sphere, flat side up.

  Not that the flat side was truly flat; it bubbled and, just as the name said, seethed.

  "It's dripping all over now!" Telurinon wailed from below. "You people aren't holding it, are you?" Tobas asked the nearest warlock.

  "No," the woman assured him, smothering a cough. "We couldn't if we wanted to."

  "I was afraid of that." Tobas stared at the Death. This was not a possibility he had considered. This meant that his back-up plan, of having relays of warlocks transport the entire thing to Aigoa, was totally impossible, not just incredibly difficult and impractical. The only way to get it to the dead area would be through the tapestry.

  Well, if he couldn't move the Seething Death to the tapestry, he would just have to bring the tapestry to the Seething Death. "All right," he said, "time to try it another way." It took another half hour to cut away more of the floor, so that the tapestry could be suspended flat beside the expanding hemisphere; the first faint light of dawn was beginning to show in the dome's skylights, high overhead, as Tobas and Teneria maneuvered the hanging into position. In the interim, Telurinon had established that Kandir's Impregnable Sphere did not live up to its name; the Seething Death had burst it, popping it like a soap bubble.

  And afterward, the Seething Death had still touched nothing but air.

  The circle had grown at least an inch in diameter, though; Tobas was certain of that. He and Teneria had to approach it much more closely than he liked; he moved with exaggerated caution, dreading the possibility that he might lean out too far and touch that stuff, or worse, lose his balance and fall into it. Finally, though, the tapestry was in position, hung through the floor,
its lower edge dangling into the meeting room below, its supporting bar in Tobas' and Teneria's hands. Several of the warlocks had left to escape the fumes; those who remained, though no longer involved now that they had cleared away the chunks of marble flooring, watched from the sidelines with interest.

  "Now what?" the young witch asked.

  Tobas had maneuvered the tapestry as close as he dared, without touching the stuff; whatever was to be transported had to come to the tapestry, not the other way around, to be certain the spell would work.

  "Now we wait," he said. "When it expands far enough, it'll touch the cloth, and then poof! It's gone!" He smiled; then the smile vanished, and he added, "If we're lucky."

  They waited, seated cross-legged on either side of the hole, the tapestry between them.

  At last, after a quarter-hour of growing nervousness and worsening sore throats from breathing the foul air, the Death touched the tapestry—and did not vanish. Instead, stinking white smoke billowed up from the point of contact.

  Teneria looked up and stared across at Tobas, looking for some sign as to what she should do.

  Tobas stared in horror.

  "My tapestry," he said weakly. He could see the fabric dissolving, the threads unraveling, where the Seething Death had touched it.

  "What should…" Teneria began.

  "Pull it out!" Tobas shouted, before she could finish her sentence, but he knew it was already too late.

  They pulled the tapestry back, away from the Death, then lifted it out and spread it out on the floor; Tobas studied the semicircular hole, six inches across, and the blackened, frayed edges around it.

  "It's ruined," he said. "A four-hundred-year-old Transporting Tapestry, ruined."

  "You're sure?" Teneria asked. "It won't still work? It can't be repaired?"

  "I'm sure," Tobas said. "The tapestry has to be perfect, or the spell is broken, and you can't put it back without reweaving the entire thing." He looked up from the hanging and glared angrily at the Seething Death.

  "There must be some way to stop that thing!" he growled.

  "Maybe the dagger Tabaea had," Teneria said. "It stopped all the other wizardry."