The Spell of the Black Dagger loe-6

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  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 widiin, 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 castie 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 through 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, ratiier dian 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.”

  “Tikri?” Sarai was astonished and delighted; she hadn’t seen Tikri since the day Tabaea first marched on the palace, when he had gone off to defend the overlord. She had feared he was dead, or at best driven into exile, yet here he was, apparently back at work.

  “Yes, my lady,” Deran answered. “This way.”

  Sarai and Karanissa followed him across the room, toward a stairway leading down. “Where are we?” Sarai asked.

  “Officers’ training area, my lady,” Deran answered. “Top floor of the North Barracks, in Grandgate.”

  “So the city guard is back here? Everything’s back to normal?”

  Deran kept walking, but hesitated before answering, “Not everything, my lady. The guard’s back, all right—Lord Torrut saw to that as soon as he heard that Tabaea had given up her claim to be empress—but I wouldn’t say everything’s back to normal. The overlord is still aboard his ship down in Seagate— there’s something wrong with the palace, something to do with the Wizards’ Guild. Nobody goes in there without the Guild’s permission. And Lord Kalthon...”He broke off.

  “What about my father?” Sarai demanded. “They say he’s dying, my lady,” Deran reluctantly admitted. “The sea journey was bad for him; they say he has a sixnight at most, even with that witch Theas tending him. But the overlord won’t appoint a replacement, and we need a Minister of Justice right now, to sort out the mess. Lord Torrut’s doing what he can, but... well, I wouldn’t say everything’s normal.” He stopped in front of a door and knocked.

  The door opened, and Captain Tikri glared out angrily. When he saw Sarai, though, the anger evaporated; he smiled.

  “Lady Sarai!” he said. “You’re back!” Belatedly, he added, “and you, Karanissa!”

  The two women smiled and made polite noises, but then Tikri held up a hand. “We don’t have any time to waste,” he said. “We need to get you to the palace immediately; the wizards have been very emphatic about that. We can talk on the way; just let me get my sword.” A few minutes later, a party of four
—Deran, Tikri, Sarai, and Karanissa—emerged from the barracks into the inner bailey of Grandgate, walking briskly; they passed through the immense inner gate into Grandgate Market, headed for the palace.

  And atop the south inner tower Tabaea leaned over the battlement, glaring furiously. She could not see faces clearly from that distance, could not be sure of the scents, but two women in aristocratic garb, accompanied by two soldiers—that had to be Sarai! She had missed them! After all this time spent searching through the absurd complexities of Grandgate’s many towers, she had missed them!

  She ran for the stairs, berating herself for being overcautious. She had searched all six of the gate towers, and most of the South Barracks, but had left the North Barracks, with its hundreds of soldiers, for last.

  But of course it would be the North Barracks—that was where everything important was. She should have checked there first, despite the soldiers.

  Furious, she plunged down the stairs, in hot pursuit of the Black Dagger.

  CHAPTER 43

  Lady Sarai stared in shock and dismay through the stinking, unnatural white mist at the bubbling, steaming, swirling mass of greenish slime before her. It blocked the entire corridor, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, at an oblique angle.

  “It’s slightly over a hundred feet in diameter now,” Tobas told her. “It’s down into the lower dungeons, and as you can see, it’s consumed the rear half of the throne room, including the entire rear staircase and the corridor below. It’s also eaten its way through into the passageway above, there, but hasn’t reached the overlord’s apartments yet.”

  “And you expect the Black Dagger to stop thaf!” Sarai demanded, turning to face the party of magicians and soldiers jamming the corridor behind her, and holding up the knife so that everyone could see just how small and harmless the enchanted weapon looked when compared with that gigantic mass of corrosive, all-consuming wizardry.

  For a moment, no one answered; Sarai could see them judging, comparing, contrasting, considering.

  Then one of the warlocks giggled nervously.

  The giggle caught and spread, and in seconds several magicians—witches, warlocks, and even a wizard or two—were laughing hysterically. The soldiers were grinning, but not openly laughing.

  Angrily, Telurinon shushed them all; after a few moments, with the soldiers’ assistance, order was restored. Then the Guildmaster turned angrily on Lady Sarai.

  “What do you know about wizardry?” he shouted. “Size is irrelevant! What matters is the strength and nature of the enchantment, nothing else!”

  “And you think a dagger enchanted by accident, by a girl who knew almost nothing of wizardry, is going to stop a spell you say can destroy the entire World, Guildmaster?” Sarai shouted back. “It might!” Telurinon answered, not as certainly as he would have liked.

  “I don’t mink so,” Sarai replied. “I think that stuff will dissolve the dagger, just as it dissolved Tobas’s tapestry and everything else, magical or mundane, that it’s touched.”

  “And what would vow suggest, then?” Telurinon sarcastically demanded. “Do you have some clever little counterspell that’s somehow eluded the attention of the Wizards’ Guild? We’ve tried everything we know; the warlocks, the witches, the sorcerers, they’ve all tried. The theurgists couldn’t even find anything to try; the demonologists marched a score of demons and monsters in there, and it consumed them all. Nothing stops it.”

  “And the Black Dagger won’t, either,” Sarai retorted.’ “Look at it!”

  “The dagger cuts all other wizardry,” Telurinon insisted. “We’ve never found anything else that stops wizardry so completely.”

  Startled, Sarai glanced at Tobas and Karanissa, then announced, “That’s not true, Guildmaster, and you know it.”

  Telurinon gaped. The rest of the party, soldiers and magicians alike, was suddenly absolutely silent, and Sarai could feel them all staring at her, giving her their full attention. Accusing a Guildmaster of lying, before such an audience as this...

  “I saw it myself,” Sarai insisted. “There’s a place in the Small Kingdoms somewhere where wizardry doesn’t work; it brought down & flying castle, by the gods! That could stop the Seething Death!”

  Telurinon recovered quickly. “Oh, that” he said. “Well, yes, there is such a place. We had hoped to transport the Seething Death there, in fact, but it turned out to be impossible.”

  “It dissolved the Transporting Tapestry,” Tobas confirmed.

  “It ate away the chunk of floor we tried to move,” a warlock added.

  “It can’t be moved,” Vengar agreed.

  Sarai looked from face to face, trying to think. “You can’t move the Seething Death,” she said.

  Several voices muttered affirmation.

  “Can you move the dead area?” she asked. “As the saying has it, if the dragon won’t come to the hunter, then the hunter must go to the dragon.”

  For a moment, silence descended, broken only by the hissing of the Death, as everyone considered this.

  “I don’t see how,” Tobas said at last. “It’s not a thing, it’s a place. Certainly wizardry couldn’t move it, since wizardry doesn’t work there.”

  “Witchcraft does,” Sarai pointed out. Karanissa had demonstrated as much.

  “Yes, but Lady Sarai, it’s a place,” Tobas insisted. “Even if, say, moving that entire mountain would be enough to move it, how could you bring it eighty leagues to Ethshar? Witches couldn’t do it, not unless you had thousands upon thousands of them, probably more witches than there are in the World. Warlocks could, perhaps—if they were all willing to accept the Calling. Sorcery, demons—I don’t think so.”

  “Not sorcery,” Kelder of Tazmor agreed.

  “Nordemonology,” Kallia confirmed.

  “Then can you create a new one?” Sarai demanded. “A new dead area, here in the palace?”

  Tobas hesitated and looked at Telurinon.

  “No,” the Guildmaster said, quite emphatically.

  “The spell is lost,” Tobas agreed.

  Intending to make a point, Sarai turned to look at the Seething Death and involuntarily found herself backing away—the wall of seething ooze had drawn visibly nearer while she argued. Shaken, and after having moved several feet farther down the corridor, she turned back to Tobas and demanded, “You’re sure of that?”

  He nodded. “The only Book of Spells that ever held it was burned, over four hundred years ago—in 4763,1 think it was.” He added helpfully, “They hanged the wizard who used it.”

  “But it was done by wizardry in the first place?” Sarai asked.

  Telurinon glared at Tobas.

  “Yes,” Tobas said.

  “And the spell was written down?” Sarai asked.

  “By Ellran the Unfortunate, in 4680,” Tobas said.’ “That was when he discovered it.” He smiled wryly. “By accident. Just the way Tabaea made the Black Dagger by accident. Ellran never used the spell again, but his apprentice did, and got hanged for it. And the book was burned.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” Sarai remarked.

  “It’s a sort of specialty of mine, if you’ll recall—I told you that,” Tobas said. “It’s why I was brought here in the first place. As you know, I have a personal interest—or at least, I used to.” “If you know that much about this spell,” Vengar asked, “can’t you recover it somehow?”

  “If you know the true name of the apprentice, and when the spell was used,” Mereth volunteered, “the Spell of Omniscient Vision ought to let me see the page it was written on. We never knew enough about the countercharm for the Seething Death, but this one...”

  “No! ”shouted Telurinon. “Mereth, I forbid it! Stopandthink what you’re proposing! The overlord’s palace, dead to wizardry? The Guild could no longer...”

  He stopped, abruptly, looking about wildly, as if realizing that he was about to say far too much in front of far too many people. Then he shouted, “No! We’ll try the Black D
agger, and if that doesn’t work we can evacuate the city...” Lady Sarai, moving as quickly as she could without her cat abilities—rabbits were quick, but not as fast in their reactions as cats—stepped up and, with her left hand, grabbed the front of Telurinon’s robe. The Black Dagger, in her right hand, pressed against his chest.

  “Listen to me, Guildmaster,” she said. “You and your stupid spells are destroying the overlord’s palace—and maybe the rest of the city, maybe the rest of the World—and you’re worrying about saving your Guild’s secrets, your Guild’s power? You’re worried that maybe you won’t be able to eavesdrop any more, won’t be able to threaten the overlord with your spells and curses? That you might have to really give up meddling in politics? Well, I’ve got a real worry for you, Telurinon—this dagger. I don’t intend to try it on the Seething Death, Telurinon—I intend to use it on you. It’ll eat your soul, you know—it sucks the essence right out of you, doesn’t even leave a ghost.”

  She didn’t know whether this was truth or lie—but right now, she didn’t care. She pressed the point harder against the old wizard’s chest, piercing the fabric of his robe.

  Telurinon gaped at her. “You can’t do this!” he said. “The Guild...”

  “The Seething Death is going to kill us all anyway if we stay here,” Sarai told him. “And besides, I don’t think your Guild is on your side in this one. Has anyone tried to stop me?”