The Sarkonagael he kept in a plain leather satchel under his left arm. He didn’t want to leave it out of his sight—Myrkyssa Jelan clearly knew where he lived and might be able to have Aderbleen divine its location again if he left it somewhere else. Several times throughout the afternoon he considered turning in the book immediately to get his hands on more coin sooner rather than later, but he checked the impulse: There was no hurry to part company with the prize until he’d seen whether he could drive up the price with some shrewd bargaining. No, the best thing to do was to secure good temporary quarters with the funds he already had in hand, simply to provide himself a place to keep his just-purchased wardrobe and personal belongings.
Jack turned his attention to the best inns and boarding-houses he could find, with little more success. Finally the thought occurred to him that he’d recently made a good impression on many new friends among the lower nobility; perhaps he could quietly let slip the news that Maldridge was soon to be renovated and that he was seeking a place to stay for a little while. Some kindly old matron among Lady Moonbrace’s friends or perhaps an acquaintance of the Flermeers would certainly step forward to extend hospitality to a person of his current celebrity. Jack decided that he liked that plan much better than parting with his own good gold … but that, of course, depended on Marden Norwood issuing no public denouncement of him. So far Seila’s father seemed disinclined to do so, perhaps because he’d offered Jack the chance to leave quietly with the coin he already had, but who could say what might happen when Norwood discovered Seila’s defiance?
Determined to put his new plan into action at once, Jack returned to Maldridge to write a few properly worded notes to some of his new friends among the well-to-do. He deflected Edelmon’s none-too-subtle inquiries about when exactly he would be vacating the premises and enjoyed another good dinner, even if it was unquestionably more ordinary fare than he’d enjoyed before Norwood’s unfortunate visit. “It appears the staff has determined there is no longer any particular reason to curry my good favor,” he muttered to himself.
He set straight to his correspondence after finishing his supper, and became so absorbed in the task that he lost track of the hour. It wasn’t until he absently noted the distant gongs echoing through the city streets as the various temples marked seven bells of the evening that sudden recollection struck him: He’d promised to meet Master Tarandor of the Wizards’ Guild in Bitterstone at this very hour.
“Selûne’s silver teats!” he cried, sitting upright. Whatever business Tarandor had with him, no good could come of missing the appointment. He dashed for the door, slinging his satchel over his shoulder and throwing on a long cloak against the evening chill, and then hurried out. He took a moment to secure his cloak and consider the speediest route; as he did so he thought he saw a black-cloaked figure watching him from an alleyway across the street. Jack peered into the evening gloom, but the cloaked watcher was gone. Had he seen a hint of ruby-colored eyes and ebony skin? Or had he imagined something in the shadows of the alley?
“The thrice-damned dark elves have me starting at shadows,” he muttered. At least the afternoon’s rains had lifted, although a thick mist was gathering in the seaward districts; the night would be foggy indeed. Putting the uncertain sighting behind him, Jack crossed over to Moorland and hurried south all the way to Rhabie Promenade at a pace that was more than half a run, then followed the wide boulevard through Altarside and the Anvil into the harbor district of Bitterstone. Good luck to any skulking drow trying to dog his footsteps!
He managed the distance in a quarter-hour, but then once he was in the proper neighborhood the combination of thickening fog and poorly remembered directions delayed him further; he actually walked past the warehouse of Mumfort and Company twice before he realized that that was the place he was looking for. With some chagrin, he went up and knocked firmly at the door. “Master Tarandor?” he called.
He heard footsteps on a creaking wooden floor, then Tarandor Delhame opened the door. “Ah, good evening, Master Ravenwild,” the lean wizard said. Jack thought his smile seemed a little forced, but then again, he’d kept the fellow waiting almost half an hour. “I was beginning to fear that you’d forgotten our appointment.”
“In truth, I did not remember it until I heard seven bells struck. Please excuse my tardiness.”
“No matter,” the mage replied. “You are here now; we can proceed.” He stepped back and invited Jack inside with a slight bow; Jack nodded and entered the warehouse. Stacks of wooden crates and small wooden casks lined the walls; several lanterns hanging from posts cast a warm yellow illumination over the otherwise dim and dusty interior. Jack saw that a large space had been cleared in the center of the room. A work table littered with parchment, old tomes, and a couple of curious green glass bottles stood to one side of the room, while a large object of some sort stood covered by a shapeless sheet of canvas in the center of the open area. Several more wizards—a plump young man with a patchy beard, a fetching elven woman with greenish-gold hair, and a Calishite man who wore a fez turned and bowed to Jack as he made his entrance.
“Good evening,” Jack said to the others, enjoying the air of professional camaraderie. “So how might I be of assistance? I confess this is all very mysterious.”
“Perhaps it might be easiest to show you,” Tarandor answered. “Attend, sir.” He walked up to the covered object in the middle of the room, and glanced at the other wizards. Then he took hold of a cord or lanyard hidden under the canvas and gave it a firm yank. In the corner of his eye Jack noticed the other mages in the room averting their faces as Tarandor turned his back fully on the falling canvas shroud. Beneath the canvas there stood a battered old statue of no particular quality, the sort of thing one might have found gathering bird-nests in any poor nobleman’s garden—but the face had been carefully chiseled into a flat, mirror-smooth surface, and there glowed a complex mystic rune. Jack’s eyes fell on the symbol before he even realized that he was looking at it, and a great burst of greenish light sprang from the device. A sudden dizziness swept over him, as the warehouse seemed to whirl away into darkness and shadow and the most peculiar sensation of motion in all directions at once overcame him.
He fell to his hands and knees, and found cool sand underneath him instead of the dusty old floorboards of the warehouse. Jack scrambled back to his feet and whirled around, astounded by his new surroundings. He seemed to be in a small, spherical room made of dark greenish glass. The walls curved inward to meet the low ceiling, which then drew away into a dark passage or flue. Beneath his feet was coarse white sand, which served to level the floor. “What is the meaning of this?” he shouted, and struck at the wall with his fist. The glass was so thick he might as well have been punching at stone.
Jack realized that he could see through the dark glass wall; outside the small chamber that held him, he could still make out the yellow lanterns hanging from the posts in the warehouse, strangely dim and distant. A vast shadow suddenly seemed to move across the wall behind him, and the room shuddered under a dull impact. The whole structure, Jack of course included, seemed to rise straight into the air. He lost his balance and sprawled to the sand again, which now slithered past his hands and knees, shifting to one side as the strange chamber tilted. Jack floundered in the rough sand, cursing … then the face of Tarandor Dethame suddenly appeared against one wall, but vastly huge, easily twice Jack’s height from peppered goatee to gleaming bald brow.
“AH, THERE YOU ARE JACK,” the monstrous visage thundered. “HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR ACCOMMODATIONS?”
“This is outrageous!” Jack shouted. “What have you done to me?”
“I HOPE YOU WILL FORGIVE ME, BUT I CAUSED YOU TO LOOK UPON A SYMBOL OF ENTRAPMENT,” Tarandor’s gigantic image answered.
Jack clapped his hands to his ears. “Cease your titanic demonstrations, Tarandor, and release me at once!”
“I REGRET THAT I CANNOT COMPLY,” Tarandor said. “AND I AM NOT TITANIC, JACK; YOU ARE SIMPL
Y MINUSCULE.”
Jack examined himself swiftly, looking at his hands and feet to see if they were the same distance from his eyes that they had always been. They certainly seemed to be, but of course if he had been minimalized in some way, why should he not shrink in perfect proportion? He looked back at the strange green room in which he was trapped … and suddenly he recognized the place. He was inside one of the odd green bottles that had been standing on the table beside Tarandor when he walked into the warehouse! The wizard’s spell had shrunk him to the size of a doll (and a small one at that), whisking him into the container Tarandor had prepared for him. Now the abjurer was holding him aloft by the bottle’s neck, peering at him through the glass.
“What is the meaning of this villainy?” Jack demanded. “What have I done to you, Tarandor?”
“OH, THIS IS NOTHING PERSONAL, MY LITTLE FRIEND. I AM MERELY FULFILLING THE OBLIGATION LAID UPON ME BY MY FORMER MASTER, WHO INHERITED IT FROM HIS OWN MASTER, MERITHEUS OF RAVEN’S BLUFF. IT SEEMS THAT MERITHEUS LEFT STANDING INSTRUCTIONS THAT HE OR HIS APPOINTED REPRESENTATIVE WAS TO BE SUMMONED AT ONCE IF YOU ESCAPED YOUR INTERNMENT IN THE WILD MYTHAL. I WILL SIMPLY RETURN YOU TO YOUR CONFINEMENT, AND BE DONE WITH THIS WHOLE TEDIOUS BUSINESS.”
“Return me to my confinement?” Jack stared at the gigantic face studying him, and his heart sank. “Do you mean to say that it was the Wizards’ Guild that imprisoned me a hundred years ago? But why would they have done that? And why in the world do you believe you must imprison me again?”
“AS BEST I CAN DETERMINE THEY IMPRISONED YOU TO SUPPRESS THE MAGIC CALLED WILDFIRE, JACK—SPONTANEOUS MAGIC, APT TO SURFACE IN THE UNTRAINED, THE UNDISCIPLINED, THE UNGUIDED. MY PREDECESSOR FORESAW A GREAT CATASTROPHE DRAWING NEAR, AND REALIZED THAT TO SAFEGUARD THE CITY THE PHENOMENON OF WILDFIRE HAD TO BE CONTAINED. YOUR CONNECTION TO THE WILD MYTHAL MEANT THAT YOU WERE INSTRUMENTAL TO THE PROCESS OF CONTROLLING WILD SORCERY.”
Great catastrophe? Jack wondered. That was why he had been encysted in the mythal? Jack thought back again to that last night of his former life, remembering a stroll through the damp and misty streets of the city on whatever errand he had in mind … and now his memory supplied him with one last recollection, of robed figures appearing from the shadows with wands leveled at him, a crescendo of magic words and stunning spells. “Well, that would have been helpful to recall before now,” he muttered. He certainly would have been more careful about returning to the High House of Magic if he’d remembered that wizards waylaid him before his imprisonment.
He looked back up at the gigantic visage of the wizard and tried a different tack. “Tarandor, be reasonable! Whatever disaster your predecessors foresaw for me clearly was anticipated to occur in my natural lifetime. We are at least forty or fifty years past that span; justified or not, their concerns have been mitigated. There is no point in confining me now!”
“YOU ARE PROBABLY CORRECT. HOWEVER, MY INSTRUCTIONS PERMIT ME NO DISCRETION. DOUBTLESS IT IS FOR THE BEST.”
“For the best?” Jack snarled in anger and pummeled the unyielding green glass of the bottle. “You intend to confine me until the Night Serpent devours the world, and you tell me it is for the best? The obstinacy! The stupidity!”
“I, TOO, FIND THIS INCONVENIENT,” Tarandor offered. “I HAVE IMPORTANT AFFAIRS IN IRIAEBOR THAT I HAD TO DROP ALL AT ONCE TO DEAL WITH THIS RIDICULOUS OLD DIRECTIVE. I CERTAINLY HAD NO WISH TO WAIT DAYS AND DAYS IN RAVEN’S BLUFF FOR AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOU.”
“I wish to appeal to the Guild Council!” Jack shouted.
“I SHALL NOTE YOUR OBJECTIONS IN MY REPORT,” Tarandor replied. “I AM SURE THE GUILD WILL EXAMINE THE FACTS AND TAKE THE APPROPRIATE ACTION.” He lifted the bottle again and set it carefully into a waiting box or case.
“Wait!” Jack cried. “The drow will never allow you near their mythal now! There is no point in proceeding!”
“NEGOTIATIONS ARE ONGOING,” Tarandor admitted. “I WILL LIKELY HAVE TO PAY THE CHÛMAVHS A KING’S RANSOM TO BE DONE WITH THIS THANKLESS TASK—THE SOONER, THE BETTER. FAREWELL FOR NOW, JACK.” The immense shadow of his hand moved over the bottle again, and the lid of whatever box he’d placed Jack closed over the bottle. Instantly the bottle interior was plunged into pitch blackness, but Jack felt the case holding his bottle picked up and carried off with an unpleasant swaying sensation. He tumbled to the sandy floor one more time, and scrambled desperately against the higher wall to keep from being buried in the stuff. Clearly, being reduced in size to an inch or two in height magnified all the ordinary motions of people retaining their natural dimensions.
“Stop! Wait!” he spluttered through a mouthful of sand. Of course, no one heard him, or would be terribly likely to listen even if they did. Throwing his arms wide against the cold glass walls of his prison, he held on as best he could as he was carried off to meet his fate.
The broad swaying of the bottle and case continued for some time; Jack imagined that he was being carried through the streets of Raven’s Bluff, likely by the most junior of the wizards attending Tarandor. It was hard to judge the passage of time in the darkness, and of course there was no way to know how far he’d been carried, but eventually the bottle and its case came to a rest with a bone-jarring thump that knocked Jack down from his perch. The sense of motion and the constant sliding of the sand back and forth ceased abruptly; Jack decided that the bottle and its carrying case had been set down. He didn’t think he’d been carried more than a half-hour or so; in all probability he was still somewhere in the city of Raven’s Bluff. Was Tarandor staying in the High House of Magic, or had he taken lodging in one of the city’s better inns? he wondered.
“This situation is impossible,” Jack said into the blackness around him. “Either Tarandor will have his way, in which case I shall be entombed again, or Dresimil Chûmavh and her brothers will betray him, in which case I shall be in their power once more.” Neither prospect was appealing; escape was clearly imperative.
Jack built a mental picture of the trunk in which his bottle rested and imagined its immediate surroundings. Before the thrice-cursed Spellplague he’d had a knack for minor teleportations. So far he hadn’t managed to master any such spell in this new age, but this seemed like the perfect occasion to renew his efforts. Murmuring the words he’d formerly used for his spell of blinking, he reached out to seize the intangible stands of magic surrounding him … only to feel nothing at all. He tried again, and again, to no avail. For a moment he feared that he’d lost whatever talent for spellcasting he had managed to recover, but then he realized that his current confinement might be magical as well as physical. “Well, naturally the bottle would be proof against magic,” he muttered sourly. “How else could they hope to keep a sorcerer of my stature contained?”
Perhaps he might be able to unplug the stopper or otherwise make a physical exit from the bottle. For that he would need some light, so he called up a minor light spell to illuminate the area. But that, too, failed. Jack swore viciously in the dark, reminding himself that the bottle was made to wall him off from magic altogether.
“When magic fails, muscle and wit must serve,” he resolved. He was, after all, carrying everything he’d been carrying when he gazed upon the symbol of entrapment; his favorite rapier was scabbarded at his side, even if it was no bigger than a pin at the moment, and he might have other useful items on his person. One by one he emptied his pockets and pouches, hoping against hope that he had anything that might serve to strike a light. Then he went through his satchel as well. He recognized the cool leather of the Sarkonagael under his fingers, and set aside the book to rummage through the bag. He found paper, ink, coinage, but nothing that might serve to strike a spark other than his dagger and his rapier. “I shall henceforward always carry a small piece of flint,” he promised himself.
He considered his plight at length, and decided that the only step left for him to pursue was to worm his way up the neck of the bottle and pry it away with his dagger, light or no light. But before he could put hi
s plan in operation, he noticed a faint silvery glow in the darkness. At first he thought that perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the longer he looked, the clearer he saw it: The silver runes on the cover of the Sarkonagael were glowing.
“Now that is interesting,” Jack murmured. Seating himself on the sand floor, he picked up the book and held it in his lap as he examined it more closely. With care he opened the book to see if the cryptic scribbling inside was also glowing … and was astonished to discover that the book’s pages were full of perfectly legible silver lettering, bright enough to illuminate his hands and breeches. He had of course attempted to read the Secrets of the Shadewrights on previous occasions, but he had never been able to make heads or tails of the jumbled glyphs and diagrams that filled its pages. Now, however, the text was plain to see.
Despite his desperate circumstances, Jack laughed aloud. “Ingenious!” he declared. The enchantments of the tome obscured its message in anything but absolute lightlessness. Who would ever attempt to read a book in complete darkness? The wizard who had scribed this tome long ago had hidden its message with a puzzle both simple and diabolically clever.
And that was something noteworthy, too—Jack was absolutely walled off from access to magic by the bottle imprisoning him, but the Sarkonagael’s magic seemed unimpeded. He’d heard stories of shadow magic, spells that weren’t magic of the ordinary sort; it was reasonable that a book describing itself as the Secrets of the Shadewrights might make use of such powers. He could see by the Sarkonagael’s dim light that the bottle’s neck would be impossible for him to squeeze through, but perhaps there was a spell in the book that could help him to escape.
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