"Tell her to come back later," Telurinon answered. Lirrin bowed and ascended the stairs, out of sight. "There must be something better than another Black Dagger," Mereth said, when Lirrin was gone.
"There are any number of incredibly powerful magicks we could use," Tobas remarked. "Can that dagger really stop all of them?"
"Apparently so," Telurinon said. "We’ve been throwing death spells at her ever since we first heard her name, after all, and what the dagger doesn't stop, Tabaea can probably handle by herself. Remember, she has the speed and eyesight of a cat, a dog's sense of smell, the strength of a dozen men, and multiple lives-she must be killed repeatedly, not just once, to be destroyed. Even if we got the dagger away from her, she would be a threat."
"If we got the dagger away from her, we could dispose of her in any number of ways," Heremon the Mage pointed out. "She wouldn't be protected against wizardry anymore."
"She would still have some protection," Mereth replied. "She would still be both witch and warlock, and wizardry is unreliable against either one. We would want to use something really drastic, to be sure."
"We have plenty of drastic magic at our disposal," Tobas pointed out. "We have spells all the way up to the Seething Death-it's hard to imagine anything much more drastic than that."
"I don't know if we need to be so drastic as all that," Telurinon muttered.
"What's the Seething Death?" Mereth asked.
"Never mind," Tobas said, "we don't want to use it."
"You're supposed to be an expert on countermagicks, aren't you, Tobas?" Heremon asked.
"Well, not exactly," Tobas said. "I happen to have a castle in a place where wizardry doesn't work, that's all."
"You do?" Mereth eyed him curiously. "A place where magic doesn't work?"
"Wizardry, anyway; witchcraft still works there, and I don't know about the others," Tobas explained. "I'm not inclined to invite a bunch of theurgists and sorcerers out there to experiment."
"But it's really a place that wizardry doesn't work? I thought those were just legends." Mereth said.
"Oh, no," Tobas said. "It's real. And it appears to have been created on purpose, by a wizard-apparently there's a spell that will do that, will make a place permanently dead to wizardry."
"Do you know it?"
"By the gods, no," Tobas said, "and I wouldn't want to use it if I did. Think about it, Mereth-it makes a place permanently dead to wizardry. The one I know about has been there for centuries, and it covers half a mountain and part of a valley. We're powerless there, just ordinary people. We don't want any more places like that around, and certainly not in a city like Ethshar!"
"I suppose not," Mereth agreed.
"If we could get Tabaea into a place like that, though," Heremon suggested, "then wouldn't her magic stop working? Wouldn't she be just another vicious young woman?"
"I don't know," Tobas said. "It's very hard to say just what magical effects are permanent and which are only maintained by magic. I mean, if you had cast a perpetual youth spell on yourself a hundred years ago, you wouldn't instantly age a century in the no-wizardry area-but you would start aging at a normal rate. So perhaps Tabaea would lose all her acquired abilities, and perhaps she wouldn't."
"Besides, how would we get her there?" Mereth asked. "A Transporting Tapestry, perhaps?" Heremon suggested. "One of those that a person can step into and emerge wherever the picture showed? I believe you've said you own such a thing, Tobas?"
"Two of them," Tobas admitted. "A set. One of them goes into the dead area, all right, but I need it-I mean, it's absolutely essential." He paused, and then added, "Besides, I can't get it here."
"Can’t? "Telurinon snorted. "Tobas, are you sure you aren't putting your own convenience before the welfare of an entire city, perhaps the entire World? Where in the World is this tapestry, that you cannot bring it hither?"
"Well, that's the thing, Guildmaster," Tobas said. "It isn't in the World-it's somewhere else, somewhere that can only be reached with the other tapestry. And I can't bring the tapestry out because the tapestry itself is the only way out."
"Oh," Telurinon said. He frowned and stroked his beard. "Is that possible?" Heremon asked. "I never heard of such a thing!"
"Oh, I don't doubt it," Telurinon said. "Tobas would scarcely lie about that, and the Transporting Tapestries have always been quirky and untrustworthy things. That's why we don't use them more."
"I thought it was the cost," Mereth muttered.
"Oh, that, too," Telurinon agreed. "But during the Great War cost and reliability weren't as important as we consider them now, and they made a great many of those damnable tapestries, and a good many of them went wrong. About half of them would only deliver people at certain times of day, or when the weather was right-if you stepped in at the wrong time, you just wouldn't be anywhere until the light or whatever it was matched the picture. There was one fool who got the stars wrong, outside a window; it took the astrologers months to figure out what had gone wrong with that one, and meanwhile the people who stepped into it have been gone for three hundred years and they still aren't going to step out again for decades yet-and that's assuming that the room in the tapestry is still there when the stars are right!"
"I've had some experience with that sort of thing," Tobas remarked. "They're tricky devices, all right."
"Yet you trust one to get you safely out of this nowhere of yours?" Heremon asked.
Tobas shrugged.
"What if," Mereth suggested, "we gave Tobas another Transporting Tapestry that he could take into this wherever-it-is, and then he could hang it there and bring the one that shows the no-magic place out through it?"
"Where would we get another one?" Heremon asked. "Doesn't it take a year or more to make one?"
"Telurinon said there were many of them made during the Great War," Mereth said. "What happened to them all?"
Telurinon blinked. "Um," he said.
A sudden smile spread across Tobas' face. "You know, I’ve wondered sometimes about how some of the elder Guildmasters seem to be able to travel so quickly, yet I never see them flying."
"Well, there might still be a few old tapestries in use," Telurinon admitted. "But not so many as all that; some of the old ones show places that aren't there anymore, and therefore they don't work."
"You don't appear somewhere in the past, when the place did exist?" Heremon asked.
"Oh, no," Telurinon said. "Transporting Tapestries can never move anyone back in time. They aren't that powerful or eccentric. If the place did exist, but doesn't anymore, they just don't work."
"But you have some that still work," Mereth said. "Why don't you give one to Tobas, in exchange for his to the no-wizardry place?"
"Well, I suppose we might," Telurinon said uneasily, "but they're all Guild property; I'd have to consult with, um, the others…"
"And will the Guild put their own convenience ahead of the welfare of an entire city?" Tobas said, grinning.
"We'll just have to see about that," Telurinon said angrily. "And besides, even if we get this tapestry of yours here to Ethshar, Tobas, how would we get Tabaea to step into it?"