“Where?” he asked, startled.
“I’ll show you,” the witch said. “Come on.”
Gresh followed as Karanissa led him up the stairs, which emerged, as he had expected, into a single good-sized attic room. Sunlight spilled in through windows on either end, and for most of its length the two long sides slanted in. Three beds and several bureaus and nightstands were arranged between the stairs and the rear wall. The front area, above the parlor, was almost empty, with just a pair of velvet-upholstered chairs at one side.
The portion above the parlor hearth was somewhat different from the rest; here the side wall was vertical, closing in the chimney, rather than sloping, and a pair of heavy gray drapes hung on it. As Gresh reached the top of the stair, Karanissa strode to these drapes and pulled a cord, drawing them back to reveal a tapestry.
“There,” she said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll be.”
The Spriggan Mirror
A Legend of Ethshar
Chapter Ten
Gresh stared at the tapestry in astonishment. He had never seen anything quite like it; the realism, the attention to detail, was amazing. Neither stitch nor brush-stroke was visible at first glance-if not for the slight billowing as it moved in the breeze created by the opening drapes, and the neatly sewn silk binding at the hem, he might almost have taken it for a painting, or even a window.
The image on the tapestry was also unlike anything he had seen before. It was a single scene, a picture of a castle-but it was a castle out of a nightmare, a weird structure of black and gray stone standing on a rocky crag, framed against a red-and-purple sky, approachable only by a narrow rope bridge across an abyss. Faces and figures of demons were carved into the structure at every opportunity; the battlements were lined with gargoyles, and monstrous stone visages peered around corners, from niches, and from the top of every window. A dozen towers and turrets jutted up at odd angles, some topped with rings of black iron spikes, others with conical roofs carved to resemble folded bat-wings. Even the one visible door was surrounded by a portico carved to resemble a great fanged mouth.
“Don’t touch it,” Karanissa warned.
“I won’t,” Gresh assured her, as he realized what he was looking at. “That’s a Transporting Tapestry, isn’t it? One that goes out of the World completely?”
“Yes. And it leads to our real home, more or less.”
“The castle? You live in that?”
“Most of the time-at least, since Tabaea’s death. Before that we spent most of our time in Dwomor Keep, where Tobas was the court wizard for Alorria’s father.”
Gresh remembered the story Karanissa had told him when she first came to his shop-that she had spent four hundred years trapped in a wizard’s castle, and Tobas had rescued her. That was presumably the castle he had saved her from. And she had later said that the Guild had ruined the tapestry that had been the only exit from the castle.
“How do you get out of it?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re planning to sleep there tonight…”
“We have another Transporting Tapestry in the castle,” Karanissa explained. “When the Guild ruined our old one while they were trying to stop Tabaea, they replaced it with another that comes out near here. That’s why we bought this house and relocated to Ethshar of the Sands-it’s where we can get out of the castle.” She sighed. “At first I thought I’d like that-I never really felt very welcome in Dwomor Keep, after all, since it’s Alorria’s home.”
Gresh started to ask a question about the relationship between the two women, then caught himself. He did not want to pry into their personal lives uninvited. “It hasn’t worked out?” he asked instead.
“We don’t really belong here,” she said. “Tobas is from a little village in the Pirate Towns, Alorria is a princess from the Small Kingdoms, I’m from the distant past-none of us really fits in a city like this. When I was here as a girl it wasn’t a city at all; it was General Torran’s staging area for the western campaign-they were still dredging the ship channel and drawing up plans for the city wall, and Grandgate was one tower called Grand Castle because there wasn’t a wall yet to put a gate in. There wasn’t any palace or city, just tents and wooden sheds.”
Gresh glanced out the window at the street and tried to imagine that; he failed.
“Now there are more people in the Grandgate district alone than in all of Dwomor, so Alorria is as lost here as I am,” Karanissa continued. “The Guild brought Tobas here because he’d been doing research in countercharms, trying to fix some of the things that had gone wrong back in the mountains, so someone thought he was some sort of expert and called him in to help against Tabaea’s magic Black Dagger, and he didn’t argue-he thought it would be fun, and that he might know something useful. He does have the formulas for plenty of spells, including some that had been lost for centuries, but all the same, he’s not really that good a wizard-more than good enough for Dwomor, or anywhere in the Small Kingdoms or outlying lands, but here in the three Ethshars he’s only up to journeyman level, really. He doesn’t know anyone except Telurinon and a few other wizards…” She let her voice trail off, and sighed.
“He seems to have the Guild’s respect,” Gresh said.
“Yes, he does, and he earned it,” she agreed. “He was the one who finally stopped Telurinon’s stupid miscalculation from destroying the whole city. They showed their respect by ordering him to find and stop the spriggan mirror-typical of them. If you do one impossible thing your reward is to be asked to do another.”
“But he made the mirror in the first place?”
“Which is why we didn’t argue when they told him to stop it. He does feel responsible. So he’s been running around the city talking to magicians and conferring with Lady Sarai and so on, until finally someone suggested we talk to you, and here we are. But when this is all done, we’re going to have to hold a family conference and decide just where and how we want to live.” She looked at the tapestry. “We may have to give that castle up-or at least, spend much less time there.”
Gresh glanced at the image and shuddered; he could not think of giving up that horror as a real loss.
Then Karanissa shook herself. “That’s all for later, though. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in the castle, so that Tobas can collect some things he needs from the workshop there, and you can have this place to yourself. We’ll be back out first thing in the morning and off to Dwomor.”
Gresh started to nod, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the workshop where the mirror was first enchanted?”
Karanissa looked at him. “Yes. Why?”
“There might be evidence…”
“No.” Karanissa held up a hand. “We checked, very carefully.”
“You’re absolutely certain the mirror isn’t still in there somewhere?”
“Oh, yes. We saw it go through the tapestry to the mountains. Besides, we haven’t seen any new spriggans in the castle in years-there are still about half a dozen that never left, but we only see those same ones, never any others.”
“Hmm.” He was not absolutely convinced. He had seen people lose things in plain sight often enough to have no faith at all in the human ability to see what was actually in front of them, and after his twenty questions a few days before he had far more respect for how deceptive spriggans could be. But Karanissa was a witch and probably knew what she was talking about.
Even a spriggan would know a castle was not a cave-or could there be a cave somewhere in that stone mass the castle sat upon?
“Are there any ruins in that…that place?” he asked.
“What place?” Karanissa glanced from him to the tapestry. “The void? No, there are the two stones-the little one at this end of the bridge, and the big one holding the castle. That’s all. There’s nothing a ruin could stand on, nowhere it could be.”