Serreg kneeled, picked a dead stalk of grass, and inspected it closely. It was withered, with some pale green still trapped in its blades, mocking its vanished vitality. Serreg rolled it in his fingers, then let it drop. He dug into the earth with his hand and loosened a clod. The lifeless dirt crumbled between his fingers, trailing pale dust on the thin breeze. It's happening again, he thought. Serreg stood, took a deep breath, and looked around, hands on hips, at the patch of desiccated vegetation. It was several miles across and perfectly centered beneath the city that floated a half mile over Serreg's head. Delia was Serreg's home, one of the enclaves built on inverted mountaintops that sailed majestically across the skies of Netheril.
Serreg took another deep breath in a vain effort to purge the weight in his heart, then he cast Oberon's flawless teleport to return to his chambers. After years of teleportation, instantaneous travel no longer disoriented the archwizard. He materialized in his chambers already walking across the floor to his desk. Opening one drawer, he pulled forth a small crystal sphere. He held it lightly in one hand and passed the other in front of it. It began to glow with an inner light.
'Sysquemalyn, please deliver this to Lady Polaris promptly,' he said. 'Thank you.'
He passed his hand twice in front of the orb, and spoke again, saying, 'Lady Polaris, the land beneath us is also blighted, as if the very life is sucked out of the soil. The grass withers in place. Insects and even small animals lie dead in the shadow of the city. There is no decay. The cycle of life and death is not heading back to rebirth. I shall keep you apprised of my findings.'
He turned the hand holding the crystal upside down and the item rolled out of his hand. It floated-light as a soap bubble, yet purposeful of movement-directly out the window, then turned right toward the Central Keep. Serreg strode out the door.
The archwizard's chambers lay in the innermost circle of Delia, in the palace the city's founder, Lady Polaris, built nearly a thousand years before. People called it the Glade; there had been some sort of garden there originally, and short of the Central Keep where Lady Polaris and her two aides lived, it was the most prestigious neighborhood in Delia.
The city had been built in concentric rings, and Serreg walked easily down one of the radial streets toward the north rim of the enclave. The archwizard had lived in Delia for over two centuries, and he no longer noted the gradual deterioration in the cityscape as he walked ever so slightly downhill from the clean, elegant lines of the Glade to the peasant's huts and farmers' markets at the rim.
There was no railing around the rim of Delia. Those citizens who ventured near the edge either knew to remain safe, or else they departed the city rather more abruptly than they had intended. But though dangerous (especially on windy days), the rim afforded a gorgeous view. It was like a view from a mountaintop,but without the rest of the mountain in the way.
Nevertheless, for all the panoramic beauty, Serreg's eye drifted to the north, and a touch east, where he knew another patch of dead earth lay, ten miles across. He fancied he could just see a part of that barren patch-and his eye saw something else. A long line started beneath his feet and lightly arced to the barren patch to the north, a trail of wilting grass and pale earth. Whatever blight had struck the land beneath their fair enclave, it had followed Delia as Lady Polaris moved the city to greener pastures.
The land was dying beneath Delia, and without the land, Delia would die as well.
For the next year, Serreg labored intensely, studying the blight. He had the resources of the Delian libraries at his disposal, as well as his decades of scholarship and magical studies. It was gratifying to put his knowledge and studies to tangible, practical use. Such a grave crisis merited the superior mind of the archwizard. He had always wanted to exercise his power in a serious pursuit like smiting the enclave of Doubloon, destroying the Lich of Buoyance, or something else of — that order. While the puzzle of the crop blight was not as immediately gratifying as combat would be, the challenge at least carried mortal stakes.
Alchemical analysis determined that the enclave had not been altered. No insidious plague lingered on the underside of Delia's granite, and the city's shadow had no strange new side effect. Of the dead creatures themselves, they could not be resurrected, which implied that whatever spark gave them life had been utterly crushed. Test animals placed anywhere within the area of the blight suffered a similar fate, despite the efforts of Serreg and the temple healers to preserve their essence. Once removed from the zone, the subjects resumed normal lives, if a bit weakened ever after.
Lady Polaris moved Delia twice during that year at Serreg's behest, and each time the blight followed the city's path exactly. The radius of the blight below expanded as Delia remained stationary over that spot. In a similar manner, the width of the blighted trail left in Delia's wake varied inversely with the speed with which the enclave moved.
Throughout his researches, Serreg assiduously recorded small anomalies in a separate tome reserved for that purpose. Minor mysteries all, and hardly worth note, except that they persisted as Serreg pursued this research.
Then Serreg began adding unrelated news into this journal. Quasimagical items that had functioned perfectly for scores of years intermittently failed. Illnesses increased in lethality, especially among the elderly. Serreg himself saw a rather dramatic failure of the enclave's longevity field take place on the streets of the Grove. One of the more revered tutors of the magical college aged from his apparent fifty years to his true age of over four hundred. Within the space of a breath he withered, died, and crumbled to dust.
The entries in the journal began to fit an insidious pattern, but Serreg could not tie together the magical failures with the death of the ground-dwelling creatures below.
Serreg attempted detections and divinations, revelations and dispellings, but none produced any answers. Yet all the negative results pointed to something that hid itself. Eventually he came to the inescapable conclusion that Delia suffered from a vast and powerful spell, too subtle and carefully woven for even an archwizard to unveil. At least not directly.
Rather than find out the spell's purpose, Serreg turned his attention to finding out who was casting it. He began by eliminating those who weren't casting it. Through careful examination, he removed specific people as well as potential vectors, one by one. It wasn't Karsus, thankfully, for who wanted to engage in battle against the premier Netherese archwizard? It wasn't extraplanar in origin, again thankfully, for Serreg had little desire to combat creatures from other dimensions. The blight did not hail from Realmspace, nor from any of the gods. Serreg's divinations also cleared the Lich of Buoyance, to his small displeasure.
Every so often, Serreg would get close, and he'd feel the spell squirming to evade his scrying eyes. He was never sure if the spell itself took action to evade definition, or if the practitioners behind the magic made adjustments to keep it out of Serreg's hands, but every instance gave the Delian archwizard a better idea what was happening.
And at long last, he had enough information to try a field test.
Again he drew a small crystal ball from his desk drawer, and waved his hand to activate it.
'Lady Polaris, Candlemas, and Sysquemalyn'-I have narrowed the source of the blight as well as I can, and it appears to be subterranean in origin. Deeply subterranean. There is no doubt in my mind that the dwarves are innocent, because they do not delve to the depths from which the spell originates. I wager they also lack the subtlety to weave a spell of this nature.
'In any event, I cannot pursue this further from the laboratory, so I shall go and test my hypothesis in the field. I may come back empty-handed, but I think it is far more likely that I shall uncover the source of this evil magic, and show them what it means to cross a Netherese archwizard. In any event, I should be back within a few hours at most, and I shall report to you my results. Keep a supper warm for me. Good day.'
He let the orb go, and by the time it reached the window, the study was empty.
Serreg arrived-magically, of course-shortly before sundown at the location he had chosen. He placed everburning lights around the area, in case his efforts required more than an hour.
He closed his eyes and clasped his hands for a few minutes to cleanse himself of the excitement and impatience that tugged at his mind. Though eager to pull aside the last veil over the spell, he knew he must be careful, lest his eagerness alert those behind the blight, and they slither away from him once again.
Once relaxed, he ensorcelled himself with Zahn's seeing and began to dig using Proctiv's earthmove incantations. As he dug, his mind's eye scouted ahead with the seeing enchantment, looking for any hollow areas under the ground wherein creatures might lair. On finding a small fissure, he widened it all the way to the surface. He picked up one of his lights and dropped it down the cleft, then used the earthmove spell and began following the
