He was quite literally trembling with fear and anticipation as they crawled up the sloping stone slab toward the castle gate.
CHAPTER 16
The heaped debris in the old gateway puzzled Tobas at first; but as they got close enough to see it properly, he realized that the gates had been solid iron and had rusted away like the sword in the ruined town, but, unprotected by even a ruin, they had collapsed beneath their own weight, or perhaps caved in before a storm.
Whatever the exact events had been, Peren and Tobas were able simply to crawl through the open gate on hands and knees. Had it been at a different angle, they could have walked in, but neither felt secure standing upright on the steep slope of cool, slippery white stone.
The castle had no courtyard, not even a garden, so far as they could make out. Neither Tobas nor Peren had ever heard of such a thing. But then, neither one had ever encountered an ancient wizard’s stronghold before; the ordinary rules of castle building would not apply to an airborne fortress.
Instead of a court, the gate opened directly into a large hall, dimly illuminated by dirt-encrusted windows in the upper part of the wall at the far end. Arcades ran along either side on three different levels, while below the windows the first floor ended in a wooden screen topped by a broad balcony.
The room was tilted so that the near left corner was the lowest point; the slope from side to side was pitched roughly twice as steeply as from one end to the other. Tobas half climbed, half slid down into the lowermost arcade and got cautiously to his feet.
A layer of dirt and debris had accumulated along the seam of wall and floor where he stood, providing fairly solid, secure footing. He was able to walk easily along the side of the hall, under the arcade, save where doorways opened off into other chambers. At each doorway he was forced to brace himself with his hands and step carefully across to avoid slipping down into the side room or corridor.
Behind him, as he reached the first such opening, he heard Peren sliding down from the doorway to follow him.
The walls of the great hall were polished stone, white up to shoulder height and black above that. Tobas guessed that the change in color was to prevent smoke stains from showing. The wires and brackets that had once held tapestries were still hanging, but the tapestries themselves had rotted and crumbled, for the most part. A few recognizable fragments were tangled in the layer of rubble on which he stood.
Rusting fragments of candelabra still clung here and there as well, both on the walls and on the pillars of the arcades. However, there was no evidence that the hall had ever held any considerable amount of furniture; neither Tobas nor Peren could find any trace of tables or chairs. Peren found something he believed to be the remains of a fur rug, but Tobas was not sure that the foul, black, stiffened thing wasn’t the remains of some small animal that had wandered into the castle and died there.
One small comfort was that whatever decay there might be had mostly taken place already, and the only smell was of dry, ancient dust.
When they reached the innermost end of the arcade, Tobas studied the wooden screen and balcony with misgivings. As he understood it from stories he had heard as a child, the lord of a castle would traditionally have his own apartments on an upper floor, leading off the inner end of the Great Hall, but he had no way of knowing whether this long-dead wizard had followed that tradition. Dwomor Keep had not, since it had no proper Great Hall, but this castle had no such lack. If the lord’s apartment were indeed reached by way of the balcony, that would be where they would be most likely to find valuables — gold and silver do not rust or rot, so they presumably would have survived, though the silver would be badly tarnished.
The wood looked solid, but Tobas found it hard to believe that no ants or termites had gotten at it and that damp breezes through the rusted-out gate had not rotted it. He tapped at the screen.
It sounded solid. Perhaps it had been painted or stained with some powerful preservative, Tobas thought. He motioned for Peren to come closer.
Neither one of them had spoken since entering the building; both of them felt, without knowing why, that speech would be somehow inappropriate. Now, though, Tobas broke the silence, saying, “Catch me if I fall.”
Peren nodded, and Tobas threw his weight against the screen, testing it.
It creaked, and dust whirled up from somewhere above; he felt a very slight give, but the wood held firmly enough to satisfy him. “Wait here until I call,” he said. “I want you to be able to come after me if something breaks.”
Peren nodded again, and Tobas began inching his way along the sloping floor in front of the screen, toward the stairs that led up to the balcony. He used the elaborate carvings that decorated the screen as handholds.
There were two staircases, one from either side; they met in a small landing at the center of the balcony’s forward edge. The nearer one, however, Tobas did not care to climb; its slope was added to the castle’s tilt, making it virtually unnavigable.
The further staircase, however, had the castle’s tilt subtracted from its own rise, so that it was now very gentle indeed, so long as one could avoid falling forward from the angle of the treads.
Tobas reached and climbed the second stair without incident and found himself on the broad balcony that had obviously been where the head table stood.
The table itself lay upended and broken against the lower side wall, but Tobas could make out the gleam of gold amid the dust and wreckage surrounding it. He made his way cautiously down the sloping floor to investigate; since the wood here, blackened and splintering as it was, was far less slippery than the stone floors below, he stayed upright.
A moment later Tobas leaned out over the balcony’s rail and cried, “Hey, Peren! Catch!”
Peren reached up and caught the object Tobas flung to him, and a smile spread across his face as he looked at it and felt its weight. It was a dented golden goblet, and from the weight it was plain that, unless someone had been foolish enough to use poisonous lead in a drinking vessel, it was not just gold-plated.
Tobas rummaged through the remains of the head table for several minutes, but turned up no more goblets. He did find two small golden bowls.
Nothing else seemed worth digging out, and he turned away at last to see what else he could find. What he actually hoped for, more than anything, was to find the wizard’s Book of Spells. With wizardry inactive, of course, it would be no more than an ordinary book and could easily have rotted away decades ago, but he still hoped.
The wizard-lord would presumably have kept the book tucked away safely somewhere in his own inner chambers, either that, or in a laboratory in one of the towers. If it had been in the tower that had shattered, then the Book was gone, but the odds, Tobas told himself, were against that.
As for the lord’s inner chambers, from this public balcony Tobas expected to find access to a smaller audience chamber, which should in turn lead to a sitting room, and that to a bedchamber, and that, finally, to a study. At least, that was what he understood the tradition to be, and, in modified form, that was how Dwomor Keep had apparently been arranged originally, before overcrowding had forced changes to be made. Of course, Dwomor had no Great Hall at all, so he could not use it as a model — but perhaps the Great Hall was what they now used for an audience chamber, or had been broken up into smaller rooms. In any case, the royal apartment had been described to him as following the pattern of audience chamber, sitting room, bedchamber, and study, though the study was off to one side rather than in a straight line and the original audience chamber now served as a dining hall.