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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 a
"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 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 ru
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 di
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.