“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!” Tbbas 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 aver 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’s 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.”
“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 comer 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 hi 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 spuming, 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 longer 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 ha
d 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.
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