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.”
“Ah, very good, sir. To what address shall I have your things sent today?”
“My things can stay right where they are for three more days, by my count, so I would appreciate it if you did not send them anywhere at all.”
Edelmon acknowledged Jack’s instructions with a small bow, and withdrew. Jack observed that no handbills waited neatly by his place setting, nor was any correspondence arranged for his inspection. Apparently the cook was not the only one anticipating his imminent departure; Jack scowled after the valet for a moment, and drained down his lukewarm coffee with a grimace of distaste. What to do? he wondered. He had an engagement of sorts with Seila in the evening, but between now and then, he needed to find some suitable new address. “And that suggests resolving the question of the Sarkonagael’s reward in order to determine my budget,” he decided. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to part with the tome so soon after finding a use for its magic, but Tharzon and the Blue Wyverns would be waiting for their cut of the reward; it wouldn’t be wise to give them cause to doubt his trustworthiness.
Absorbed in his thoughts, Jack retrieved the Sarkonagael in its old wrappings from his satchel and brought it back to the table. “Myrkyssa Jelan caused a great deal of trouble with you once upon a time,” he told the book, “including the creation of an evil duplicate who subverted half the city against me. The last thing I need is another shadowy twin.”
There were some dark and strange spells in the tome, including a number that Jack did not really understand, but it was the spell of making shadow-doppelgangers that most concerned him. He didn’t particularly care if Myrkyssa Jelan or any other interested parties had access to any other part of the Sarkonagael, really. That suggested an obvious if somewhat crude solution. Jack took the tome into the cupboard (a roomy closet, really) and pulled the door shut behind him. He stood there in the dark for a moment until the book’s silver runes began to glow, then opened the book to the spell entitled “Sarkon’s Umbral Simulacrum.” He drew his dagger from his belt, and with great care removed the spell from the book, excising a total of four pages. If the Sarkonagael’s seeker had sinister intentions for that particular enchantment, the absence of the spell should check them quite thoroughly. He let himself out of the cupboard and took the book back to the dining room table for a little more work with better light, trimming the cut pages very close to the binding; it was hard to notice the missing pages without a careful inspection. Finally he took the removed pages, folded them in half, and tucked them into an envelope from his stationery set before hiding it in the inner pocket of his jacket.