The Spell of the Black Dagger (2nd Edition)

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Maybe," Tobas agreed, "but that's in Dwomor with Lady Sarai right now."

  "Tobas," Teneria asked, "what about Sarai and Karanissa? How will they get back, without the tapestry?"

  Startled, Tobas looked at her. "Oh, they couldn't come back through that anyway," he said. "The tapestries are only oneway. They'll have to walk to Dwomor Keep, and then they can come through the other castle and the new tapestry the Guild-masters gave me to replace this one. They should be back here in a couple of days."

  "Is it safe?"

  Tobas shrugged. "Pretty safe. Karanissa's walked that route a few times before; she knows the way." He glowered at the Seething Death again. "I suppose we might as well keep trying things until they get here, though. And what we're going to do if the Black Dagger doesn't work…"

  He never finished his sentence.

  CHAPTER 42

  Whoever occupied the house on the corner of Grand Street and Wizard Street now was more careful than old Serem had ever been; Tabaea had found every door locked, front, back, or side-alley, with warding spells protecting them. The Black Dagger could have cut through the wards as if they weren't there, but the Black Dagger was gone.

  Whoever the wizard was who had placed the wards had been more careful than Serem, but he hadn't been ridiculous about it. He hadn't put wards on the roof. The idea that somebody might climb up on the roof and pry the tiles up with her bare fingers, one by one so they wouldn't clatter, in the middle of the night so she wouldn't be seen—well, no one had worried about anything as unlikely as that.

  Even with a cat's eyesight and the strength of a dozen men, the job took hours. The sky was pale pink in the east by the time Tabaea lowered herself, slowly and carefully, through the hole into the attic.

  She didn't know who lived here, or what the house had become, but she had seen the magicians going in and out, the messengers hurrying to and from the front door, and she knew that this place was somehow important. She guessed that her enemies had made it their headquarters.

  Why they weren't operating out of the palace, now that she was gone, she wasn't quite sure. Maybe they were waiting until me overlord came back—one of the messengers had said his ship was on the way; Tabaea had heard it quite clearly from her place on the rooftop.

  The city guard was back, even if the overlord wasn't; from atop the house Tabaea could see the uniforms in Grandgate Market, the formations of men marching back and forth as they resumed their duties and "restored order." Much as she hated to admit it, the sight was somehow comforting.

  Less comforting was the knowledge that the guard was clearing out the palace, room by room and corridor by corridor, but oddly, even the processions of the homeless finding their way back to the Wall Street Field were almost reassuring; Tabaea was relieved that her people weren't being sent to the dungeons, or slaughtered. Everything was to be returned to what it had been before, it seemed.

  Everything, that is, except herself. There was no way they could turn her back to the harmless little thief she had once been. They would have to kill her—if they could.

  And it seemed to her that the best chance of making sure that they couldn't would be to find out just what the wizards had planned. And since the wizards seemed to hold their meetings here, in Serem's house…

  Well, that was why she was standing on the bare, dusty planks of the attic floor, peering through the dimness, looking for the trapdoor that would let her down into the house itself.

  She found it at last, over in a corner, and lifted it with excruciating slowness, in case anyone was in the room below. The trap was larger than she had expected, and when raised it revealed not a ladder, or an empty space where a ladder might be placed, but a steep, narrow staircase with a closed door at the bottom.

  She crept down, and slipped through, and she was in the wizards' house, able to spy on all that went on.

  Except that nothing was going on; everyone in the place—and there were several people there—was asleep, or nearly so; from the central hallway of the second floor Tabaea could look down the stairs and see that one woman sat by the front door, presumably standing watch, but even this guard in fact dozed off and on.

  None of the people were witches, which was a relief; a witch, or possibly even a warlock, might have been able to detect her presence, no matter how quiet she was. Wizards, though, needed their spells to do anything like that.

  Of course, even a witch wouldn't spot her when the witch was asleep, and everybody here was asleep.

  This was hardly surprising, with the sun not yet above the horizon; after some thought, Tabaea crept back to the attic, closed the door carefully, then curled up on the plank floor for a catnap.

  She awoke suddenly, as cats do, aware that she had slept longer than she had intended to; quickly and quietly, she slipped back downstairs.

  A meeting was going on in the front parlor; she crept down the hall and stood by the door, out of sight, listening.

  "…at least sixty feet across now," a man's voice said. "It's taken out a section of the back wall and rear stairway, while mostly maintaining its hemispherical shape. It seems to send appendages up the walls, breaking off chunks and pulling them down into the main mass. On the stairs, the upper edge sags somewhat, rounding itself off, now that it's above the level of the step it's dissolving. It's penetrated the floor of the meeting room below the Great Hall and worked deep into the storeroom below; in a few hours, at most, it should pierce that floor, as well, and begin dripping into the dungeons. The Greater Spell of Transmutation, generally considered to be a tenth-order spell, has had no effect, any more than any of the earlier attempts at finding a countercharm. The Spell of Cleansing, third-order but requiring extensive preparation, should be complete soon. Llarimuir's Vaporization is in progress, but requires twenty-four hours of ritual, so we won't know the results until late tonight."

  A dismayed silence followed this report; Tabaea tried to figure out what it was all about. A meeting room below a great hall? That sounded like the palace. Something was dissolving things in the palace?

  Then she blinked, astonished. They were discussing the Seething Death! "… earlier attempts at finding a counter-charm…" They didn't know how to stop their own spell!

  And Lady Sarai had laughed at her!

  As if prompted by her thought, someone asked, "Is there any word from Lady Sarai?"

  "Not yet," a man replied, "but she and Karanissa should reach Dwomor Keep late this evening or early tomorrow, if all goes well, and they can be here within an hour after that. The tapestry we gave Tobas comes out in an unused room in one of the Grandgate towers; we have a guard posted there, ready to escort them here the moment they appear."

  "That assumes, of course," someone said, with heavy sarcasm, "that they're coming back at all, that it isn't raining or snowing, that they haven't been waylaid by bandits or eaten by a dragon, that they haven't gotten lost in the mountains, that Lady Sarai didn't panic and kill Karanissa the moment she appeared, that someone at Dwomor Keep hasn't inadvertently ruined the tapestry there…" Tabaea recognized the speaker as the one who had reported on the Seething Death.

  "Oh, shut up, Heremon," a different voice said, speaking with weary annoyance. "Karanissa is fine; she spun a coin the day we arrived in Ethshar, and it's still spinning, without the slightest slowing or wobbling. I checked less than an hour ago."

  "That doesn't prove she isn't holed up somewhere waiting out a blizzard, or warding off wolves," Heremon argued.

  "There are no wolves in Dwomor," the tired voice said. "And for that matter, even in the mountains, it doesn't snow in Harvest."

  "Still…"

  "Yes, they might be delayed," the tired voice agreed. "We just have to hope that they aren't." He sighed. "The overlord's ship is due tomorrow afternoon, I understand. It would be nice if we could present him with a palace, even a damaged one, that's safe to enter and not in danger of being reduced to bubbling slime."

  Someone answered that, but Tabaea was no longe
r listening; she was thinking.

  Lady Sarai would be returning soon, to one of the towers in Grandgate—and she would have the Black Dagger with her, surely; that was why all these wizards were so eager for her return. Tabaea had figured it out; the Black Dagger was the countercharm for the Seething Death! And when Sarai had carried it off to wherever that magic tapestry went, apparently some place called Dwomor, that had left them unable to stop the Death from spreading.

  If Tabaea could get to Sarai before the magicians did, she could take back the Black Dagger. Then she could stop the Seething Death, renounce her abdication, and resume her rule. Old Ederd was coming back, too—she could catch him and kill him and put an end to attempts to restore him to the throne. Stopping the Death would make her a hero; even those who had fought her would see that.

  And she would do better this time; she wouldn't make the same mistakes. Letting everyone live in the palace—well, there would have to be rules. And the city guard was useful; if she couldn't make the old one obey her, she would organize her own.

  She would do it right this time.

  First, though, she had to retrieve the Black Dagger, and that meant finding Lady Sarai when she came back, before she was surrounded by guards and wizards.

  She would be coming through an unused room in the Grand-gate towers, the man had said. There were eight towers in the Grandgate complex: the two gigantic barracks towers, and then the six lesser towers, three on either side of the entry road. Each of them contained dozens of rooms, Tabaea was sure, and many of those were unused; she would have to search them all until she found the right one.

  But how would she know which was the right one? She smiled. The wizards had told her that. When she found someone guarding an empty, unused room, she had found what she was after.

  And she had until that evening, at the very least. She scampered for the stairs, her eagerness making her so careless that in the parlor Tobas looked up, thinking he had heard something in the hall.

  But of course, that was ridiculous. No one could possibly be in the Guildhouse but the wizards, who were all gathered in the parlor—unless a spriggan had managed to hide somewhere.

  That was probably it, he decided; a spriggan must be running about somewhere. That was nothing to worry about, then; annoying as they were, spriggans were relatively harmless. "Has anyone tried Lirrim's Rectification?" he asked. "I've never used it myself, but it's in the books…"

  * * *

  Dwomor Keep was not a particularly attractive or well-designed structure, but Lady Sarai thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. However ugly and decayed it might be, it was a building, and after two days in the wilderness, anything that could possibly be considered urban was an absolute delight. That this ramshackle fortress was also the gateway back to her beloved Ethshar of the Sands only added to its appeal.

  The walk down through the mountains had not been enjoyable at all. Karanissa had taken it all in stride, but Sarai, accustomed to city streets and flat terrain, had been constantly tripping over stones and stumbling on the steep slopes. She had kept hoping, also, that her enhanced senses would return once they were free of the dead area, but that had never happened. With Karanissa's witchcraft to help she had managed to catch and kill a rabbit with the Black Dagger, which provided both dinner and proof that the Black Dagger's spell still worked, but the better hearing, tiny added strength, and slightly improved vision and sense of smell didn't amount to much.

  The little animal had been good eating, though, she had to admit.

  Half a rabbit, however, and a few apples stolen from a farmer's orchard were not much food for an entire two days, which made Dwomor Keep, where Karanissa assured her they could expect to be fed, very attractive.

  The guard at the gate greeted Karanissa familiarly in a language Lady Sarai had never heard before; the two women were then escorted inside, where Sarai got to stand idly by, studying the architecture and interior design, while Karanissa carried on several conversations with assorted people dressed in varying degrees of barbaric splendor. Some of the people she spoke to seemed concerned, others inquisitive, still others casually friendly; most of them, judging by gestures, inquired about Lady Sarai at one point or another, and each time Karanissa answered without bothering to explain to Sarai what was being said. In fact, throughout her stay in Dwomor Keep, including a bath, a change into fresh clothing, and a generous supper, Sarai had no idea at all what was going on around her. As far as she could tell, nobody present spoke a word of Ethsharitic.

  At last, however, Karanissa waved a farewell to three people and led Sarai down a passageway into a lush bedchamber, where she drew aside a drapery to reveal a truly bizarre tapestry.

  The image was absolutely perfect and incredibly detailed; it showed a path leading from a stone mound across a narrow rope bridge to a castle out of someone's nightmares, a fortress of gray and black stone encrusted with turrets and gargoyles, much of it covered with carven faces—most of them leering monstrosities, while the few that appeared human were screaming in terror. Even the front wall of the nearest section was a face, the entry way a yawning, fanged mouth, two windows above serving as eyes.

  This structure stood against a blank background of red and purple shading into one another in vague, cloudlike patterns, and the reddish highlights on the castle made it plain that these colors were part of the picture, intended to represent a sky unlike anything in the World.

  "You better hold my hand," Karanissa said.

  "Oh, you don't… We aren't going there…" Sarai said, trying to back away.

  The witch grabbed her by the hand and yanked, pulling them both forward into the tapestry. Lady Sarai screamed and fell to her knees.

  She landed on the rough stone of that pathway; on either side was empty, bottomless void, purple shot through with crimson.

  "Welcome to my home," Karanissa said, smiling. Then she led the way across the little bit of bare stone, over the rope bridge, through the fanged entryway and the open door within, into the castle.

  Lady Sarai followed wordlessly, staring at her strange surroundings, as Karanissa explained, "Deny—that's Derithon the Mage—made this place, hundreds of years ago, and brought me here. Then he got himself killed when his other castle, out in the World, crashed, and I was stranded until Tobas found the tapestry and came in here and found the way out, through the tapestry that took us to the fallen castle. Except Telurinon traded with him, to get the tapestry to the dead area—he wanted to send Tabaea there, or else the Seething Death after it killed her. So now we've got another tapestry, one that will bring us out in one of the towers in Grandgate." She paused for breath.

  Sarai didn't say anything; she was too busy looking around at the forbidding, torch-lit corridor, with its gargoyles peering down from the ceiling comers.

  Karanissa led the way up a broad spiral staircase, saying, "I suppose we'll have to move now, take the other tapestry out of Dwomor to Ethshar—it's just not practical, having our front door and our back door so far apart. The walk down the mountains was bad enough, even with the flying carpet; having to cross a hundred leagues of ocean is just impossible."

  They emerged in an arched passageway; Karanissa lifted a torch from a nearby bracket and led the way down a side passage.

  "I don't know if Alorria is going to like that much," Karanissa said, as they turned a corner. "And I'm pretty such that her father, King Derneth, isn't going to like it at all. He likes having Tobas as his court wizard, and he likes having his daughter nearby. Alorria's never lived anywhere but Dwomor Keep—well, and here, of course." She waved at the castle walls.

  Sarai shivered slightly; this place made her very nervous. There was something utterly unnatural about it. They had entered from bright sunlight, but most of the castle was dark except for Karanissa's torch, and where light did get in through windows, the light was an eerie reddish purple.

  It didn't seem to bother the witch at all; she prattled on cheerfully as she led the way throug
h a maze of chambers and passages until at last they arrived at a door, several stories up from the entrance. "We need to go through together," she warned Sarai, as she opened the door.

  Cautiously, Sarai stepped into the room beyond, and looked around. Karanissa stepped in behind her and reached up to set her torch in an empty bracket.

  The room was small and simple—no gargoyles or black iron here, just plain gray walls, on one of which hung a tapestry. There were no other furnishings.

  "Maybe we should move this downstairs, nearer the entrance," Karanissa said, considering the tapestry carefully. "That would save time when we're just passing through like this."

  Sarai gazed at the hanging, too, but with relief, rather than consideration. The room it depicted was so utterly normal and ordinary! A simple room, with off-white walls, an iron-bound wooden door, and one of the standard-issue wooden tables the Ethsharitic city guard used. "Come on," she said. This time, she was the one who grabbed and pulled, and an instant later she and Karanissa stepped out in Ethshar.

  The light was brighter here and the color of normal daylight, rather than the orange of a torch or that weird reddish purple; Lady Sarai blinked and looked around.

  The tapestry was gone; from this side it simply wasn't there. Instead she saw the other half of a nondescript and unused little room, with a single narrow window providing illumination.

  "North light," Karanissa remarked. "It's steadier, doesn't change much over time, so it doesn't matter where the sun is, or whether it's cloudy." She frowned. "I'll wager the tapestry doesn't work at night, though; I hadn't thought of that before, and that could be inconvenient." She stared for a moment, then turned back to the door. "Oh, well," she said, "there isn't much we can do about it now." She lifted the latch and opened the door.

  Before she could get a glimpse of what lay beyond, Lady Sarai heard the thump of a chair's front legs hitting the stone floor and a soldier getting hurriedly to his feet, kilt rustling and sword belt rattling. She followed Karanissa through the door into a wide hall, where various military equipment was strewn about or leaning against walls and pillars. Hazy sunlight poured in through skylights; voices and footsteps were audible in the distance. Close at hand stood a soldier and a chair; the soldier saluted, hand on his chest, and announced, "I'm Deran Wuller's son, ladies; if you'd come with me, please, Captain Tikri wishes to see you."