"I believe I told you-once, at least-that I'm a wizard and wizards are supposed to know things."
"So much for your demons!" Garsalt snarled.
"My demons?" Cherdahn glared back at the balding wizard.
The priest and his three wizard "allies" sat in luxuriously comfortable chairs around a long, glassy-smooth table of stone. The stone walls were covered with tapestries-less horrifying, thankfully, than the mosaics of the main tunnel, although still gruesome enough to affect most people's appetites-and wall sconces less brilliant than the tunnel's overhead spheres spread gentle illumination through the sumptuously furnished chamber. The dinner dishes had been removed before Bahzell arrived, and they'd been sipping wine with celebratory anticipation as they watched the images Garsalt's scrying spells had projected into the head-sized gramerhain crystal hovering in midair above the table. But those images hadn't shown them what they'd hoped for, and now their wine glasses sat ignored on the table while he and Cherdahn locked fiery eyes with one another.
"The Scorpion's servants did exactly what they were supposed to do," Sharnā's priest half-spat. "And, forgive me if I seem a little confused, but I was under the impression that you knew where Wencit was. Apparently, I was mistaken, wasn't I? And did you simply forget to mention that . . . that . . . whatever that thing out there is?"
"Of course not! But if you'd done what-"
"Enough, Garsalt!" Tremala snapped, and both men (assuming the term "man" was still applicable to Cherdahn) turned to glare at her, instead of each other.
"No," she continued, once she was certain she had their attention, "the demons didn't succeed. That certainly wasn't Cherdahn's fault, however, Garsalt. Nor was it ours. We opened the portal exactly as planned, and without Wencit's arrival, the Bloody Hand and his horse would both be dead now and the demons who'd survived their encounter with him would be waiting for Wencit, when he came blundering in too late to save the Bloody Hand. So yes, Cherdahn, we should have told you where he was. Unfortunately, we did. The last time Garsalt and I checked, Wencit was still at least ten leagues from here."
"Then you should have checked more recently," Cherdahn said icily.
"We last checked less than twenty minutes before Bahzell arrived outside your door," Tremala said sweetly.
"That's ridiculous!"
"Yes, it is, isn't it? Unless, of course, he knew exactly what was going on-exactly what we had planned-and built a glamour within a glamour expressly to deceive us."
"That's impossible, Tremala," Rethak objected. She looked at the dark, dapper wizard, whose specialty was the creation of sophisticated glamours, and he shook his head. "He may be Wencit of Rūm, but even so, he couldn't possibly have known. Certainly not long enough ago to set something like that up!"
"What's he talking about?" Cherdahn demanded suspiciously.
"The only way Wencit could have deceived us that way would have been to build two glamours," Tremala said. "One of which-the one we knew about-was designed to keep us from locating him at all, or so we thought. And the second of which was intended to deceive us into thinking he was farther away than he really was just in case we did manage to relocate him. And, just coincidentally, allowed us to 'know' where he was without letting us actually see him or his surroundings, which meant we didn't know anything about that . . . vehicle he brought with him."
She paused for a moment, one eyebrow arched, until Cherdahn nodded impatiently for her to go on.
"Unfortunately, there are two problems with that possibility. First, we-or, rather, certain . . . colleagues of ours-have been monitoring him for weeks. We knew, or thought we did, exactly when he became aware of our plans, because that was when his glamour of concealment went up in the first place. At which point, exactly as we expected, we lost track of him for quite a while. But not even Wencit of Rūm could have built two nested glamours without the ones watching him realizing what he was doing, and nested glamours have to be put together very carefully. The inner glamour has to be erected first, Cherdahn, and there's no question at all but that the glamour we finally managed to pierce is the original, outer one we saw go up in the first place."
"Then, obviously, you're mistaken about what he did."
"Do I tell you how to summon the Scorpion's Servants?" Tremala demanded, her lip curling scornfully. "I'm not mistaken about what he did, but it's just become abundantly clear that we've all been mistaken about when he did it. That's the second problem I mentioned. It's the order in which the spells are cast, not the order in which they actually activate, which really matters. What Wencit must have done is cast the inner glamour before those colleagues of ours started monitoring him, constructed in such a way that it didn't activate-didn't manifest-until after the outer glamour did."
"So you're saying your 'colleagues' were clumsy enough that he realized what they were doing that far ahead of time?"
"No, that's not what I'm saying. The fact that they didn't see him doing it means he must have prepared the inner glamour literally weeks, even months ago. And the problem, you see, Cherdahn, is that for him to confuse us as to where he is in relationship to where we're standing right this minute, he had to include this specific location in his spell construct. In other words, he had to know at least approximately where your temple was before he could cast the spell. Which means any warning he got must have come from your side."
"That's ridiculous!"
"Of course it is. But it's also what must have happened. Without his knowing this location so that he could anchor the second glamour to it, every time we checked his location through the chink he 'accidentally' left in his outer glamour, we'd have gotten a different distance reading-a fixed distance from the observer. The same fixed distance, whether it was one of us, right here, or one of our colleagues elsewhere. And the fact that we could have compared our distance readings would inevitably have shown us what was happening, since he couldn't actually be the same distance from both of us. The only way to avoid that problem for a moving glamour is to anchor it to a specific, previously known and located physical location. In other words, he needed to index the spell here to be certain that the distances we got were consistent."
"But there's no way he could have done that," Cherdahn insisted. "He may be a wild wizard, but my Master is a god. No wizard could penetrate His concealment. Not, at least, without our knowing he'd done it. No, Tremala, the only way he could have come to this location was following you, exactly the way he was supposed to. Although," Cherdahn showed his sharp teeth, "he wasn't supposed to be here just yet, was he?"
"No, but-"
"Excuse me," Rethak broke in, his voice sharp. Both of them looked at him, and he grimaced. "Does it really matter how he and that thing out there managed to get here without our realizing how close he was? He's here now, he's managed to rescue the Bloody Hand, and the two of them are about to decide what to do about us. Don't you think we might do better to be worrying about that than arguing over whose security measures were at fault?"