“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 CHUMAVHS 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 Chumavh 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 his 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.
“It will take Tarandor some time to negotiate access to the mythal stone from the dark elves,” the rogue mused. Hours, at the very least, and more likely a day or two. With nothing else to occupy his time, Jack made himself comfortable and began to read.
When beginning the study of an arcane tome, it was always wisest to begin at the very first page and take careful note of the frontispiece, foreword, table of contents, introduction, and so forth, and proceed very systematically from one chapter to the next in order. Jack, of course, immediately discarded any such plan. If he had a tenday to examine the book at his leisure he might have done exactly that, but his liberty or life might now be measured in hours; this was no time for caution. He quickly flipped through the book’s front matter, found a table of contents, and puzzled over such obscure topics as “Of Nethermancy and Umbral Magicks,” “Adumbrations and Dismissals,” and “The Seven Darks of Murghmo,” which struck Jack as vaguely ludicrous. But “Abjurations, Enchantments, and Conjurations” seemed more promising, so he flipped to the indicated chapter and found dozens of spells of varying complexity. Jack pored over the material and soon isolated a promising subject: a spell named “The Most Excellent Incantation of Shadow-Walking,” which at least implied going somewhere else.