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.
Jack drew a breath, and began to examine the spell at greater length. This was in fact the sort of work a wizard excelled at; sorcerers were more spontaneous in their magic, and rarely studied spells in any sort of written form. Still, knowing that a spell existed was an important first step in perfecting it for his personal use, so he set himself to the task of unraveling each of the instructions, building up a mental construct that linked each word, gesture, or syllogism to the desired effect. Time passed, and he began to feel thirst, but he pressed on. After what seemed to be hours, he felt that he was as ready as he would ever be to attempt the spell. With a sigh of relief he straightened up and closed the Sarkonagael.
“Now, where could I expect to find a suitable shadow?” he asked himself. Well, his closet at Maldridge ought to be in darkness. He gathered up his things, and then fixing the image of the closet interior in his mind, he commenced to recite the spell. The darkness around him seemed to take on a brooding, watchful atmosphere; the strands of shadow magic did not show themselves to his mystic senses as he expected, but instead seemed to press in close around him, unbidden and hungry. Jack shuddered at the icy touch of the darkness but pressed on, speaking evenly through the rest of the spell. With the last words, the darkness seemed to rush in upon him, and his stomach rose almost as if he’d fallen into some great dark pit … but he felt himself lurching into existence again almost instantly. He was in a vast, dimly lit space the size of a cathedral, with a great blinding bar of yellow light on his right side. He raised his hand to shelter his eyes, wondering where he’d managed to transport himself until, suddenly, the distant walls and ceiling began to rush in on him from all sides.
Jack yelped in surprise and scrambled back, only to find that wall closing in on him, too, even as the floor suddenly shot away. He flailed for balance, and felt his hands catching on tunics and coats and cloaks that filled the shrinking room, until at last he toppled over completely and crashed through the door. He found himself lying on the bedroom floor of his room in Maldridge amid a heap of his own fine new clothes.
“Of course,” Jack mumbled to the ceiling. He’d been magically shrunk when he was trapped in the bottle; when he shadow-jumped into his closet, he resumed his normal height all at once. “I should have expected it, really.” He slowly picked himself up, still feeling a little shaky on his feet.
The bedroom door flew open, and more light spilled into the room. Edelmon stood at the threshold in his nightclothes, a lamp in his end. “Who’s there?” the old servant demanded. “Show yourself!”
“There is no need to fear, Edelmon. It is only I,” Jack said wearily.
“Master Jack, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you were out for the evening, and did not hear your return.” Edelmon glanced at the open closet door and the piles of clothing around Jack, but said nothing more.
“What is the hour?” Jack asked.
“A little after three bells in the morning, I think, sir.”
“Very well. As long as you are up, please be so kind as to find a bottle of something strong and a glass. I am very much in need of a drink to steady my nerves.”
“Of course, sir. Right away.” Edelmon lit the lamp by the door, then hurried off to fetch whatever cordial or brandy he had handy.
Jack dropped his satchel to the floor, and sat down in a chair by the closet to pull off his boots. Fine white sand poured out of each one as he pulled them off. “How long before Tarandor notices my absence?” he wondered. There was a chance that the wizard didn’t intend to remove him from the carrying case until he stood before the mythal stone and was prepared to magic Jack back into his encystment, which might be days yet. Or he might check on Jack in the morning to gloat a little longer. Now that he thought about it, the rogue almost wished he could be there to see the expression on the abjurer’s face when he discovered that his carefully prepared entrapment had failed to hold Jack for even a single day … but that of course was hard to reconcile with the desire to avoid recapture.
“I must give some careful thought to exactly how I will inform Tarandor of my freedom; compensation is due,” Jack reflected aloud. But that could wait a few hours; he was suddenly exhausted, no doubt from the exertion of decreasing and increasing his size a hundredfold in the course of a single day, and he could hear Edelmon returning. A strong nightcap, and then to bed, he decided. Wizards, shadowy tomes, suspicious fathers … tomorrow would be soon enough to untangle them all.
CHAPTER TEN
Jack didn’t stir from his bed until ten bells in the morning. He trudged down the stairs yawning, thoroughly exhausted by the late night and his unusual adventures. He’d spent no small amount of time lying awake as he grappled with the challenge posed by Tarandor and his schemes, to little avail. It would be useful to determine how exactly Tarandor intended to return him to his confinement in the wild mythal, but Jack could not think of a way to do that safely if in fact the Guild itself sanctioned Tarandor’s extreme measures. Wizards could be a bureaucratic and inflexible lot at times, and he could not be certain that the Guild would intervene on his side instead of Tarandor’s. He might be able to find someone to serve as a go-between to broker some sort of truce with the guild, but anybody he dispatched in that capacity could easily be charmed or dominated and turned against Jack.
“Perhaps it is time I retired,” he thought aloud as he sat down to his breakfast-now a very ordinary plate of toast with butter and jam and a cold mug of coffee.
The cook was apparently done with wasting time on him. “Or perhaps I should take up Lord Norwood’s suggestion and travel for my health, preferably someplace where dogmatic wizards will not feel compelled to encyst me and throw away the metaphorical key.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?” Edelmon said as he shuffled into the room.
“I am beset by complications; answers are unclear.”
