And now, finally, Tobas had come pounding on the door.
“There’s another tapestry?” Tobas asked when it was obvious that she was done.
“Yes, of course,” she answered. “Each one only works one way.”
“Could I see it?”
“First tell me who you are and how you got here.”
Tobas started to explain, describing how his father’s ship had been sunk, and almost immediately Karanissa interrupted.
“Do you mean you’re a Northerner?” she asked, shocked.
“A what?”
“A Northerner? An Imperial?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Tobas answered, confused. He had never considered the matter, since the only Northerners he had ever heard of had supposedly been wiped out to the last man centuries before. Caught off guard, he did not realize at first that Karanissa had been out of touch since before that extinction happened; instead, he thought she was using the word “Northerner” in some unfamiliar way.
“Then why would an Ethsharitic demonologist sink your father’s ship?”
Comprehension dawning, Tobas answered, “Because my father was a pirate, or a privateer. The Great War ended two hundred years ago, my lady; the Northern Empire was completely obliterated. There are no more Northerners, as you mean the term. But Ethshar doesn’t rule everywhere; part of the western coast threw off the overlords’ rule and became the Free Lands of the Coast, or the Pirate Towns, as I believe they’re known in Ethshar and the Small Kingdoms.”
“What are the Small Kingdoms?” she asked, puzzled.
“Oh, well, Old Ethshar fell apart toward the end of the war. The generals set up the new Ethshar, the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, as it’s properly called, and the old Ethshar fell apart into the Small Kingdoms.”
The witch stared at him. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Of course I’m sure!” Tobas found it difficult to deal with someone who questioned the most elementary historical facts.
She sighed. “I can see you mean it, unless my witchcraft has deserted me completely. But it’s all so hard to believe! The war over? The Empire gone? Ethshar gone? I knew that the civilian government was in disarray, but I didn’t think...” Her voice trailed off into uneasy silence; she shook her head to clear it and said, “Go on with your story.”
Tobas explained how he had talked Roggit into accepting him as apprentice, how the old man had died after teaching him a single spell, and how he had gone off adventuring. He did not bother with any of the sordid details of signing up to kill a dragon; instead, he merely said that he had come to Dwomor hoping he might find himself a place and that he had wandered up into the mountains and found the fallen castle. He mentioned the strange lack of magic and explained how he had been sure the tapestry was valuable and had hauled it back down toward Dwomor.
And finally, he explained, he had taken shelter in a deserted cottage waiting for a dragon to move on and had decided to take a closer look at his prize, and here he was.
“Dwomor is a kingdom now?” Karanissa asked, bemused.
“Yes,” Tobas replied. “One of the Small Kingdoms. There are a lot of them.”
“Dwomor isn’t just a military administrative district under General Debrel?”
“No, it’s a kingdom, ruled by his Majesty Derneth the Second.”
She sighed again. “How very strange.” She stared off into space for a moment, then shook her head and looked at Tobas again. “And you’re a wizard, you say?”
“Well, sort of.”
“Do you know the Guild secrets?”
“Well, not all of them, certainly...” Tobas began cautiously.
“I mean, do you think you might be able to use some of the spells in that book, where I can’t?”
“I don’t know,” Tobas admitted. “I might; I’d have to see it. I don’t know whether wizardry would work the same way here as it does in the World.”
“Do you think you could get the tapestry working again?”
“I don’t know; I’d have to see it and study the spell first.” A horrible thought occurred to him. “For all I know,” he added, “wizardry won’t work here any more than it did in Derithon’s other castle.”
“But some wizardry still works; I’m still young, and the garden still bears its fruit, and the servants still do what I tell them to.”
Tobas nodded, greatly relieved. “You’re right; that shouldn’t be a problem.” He resolved, however, to test his own spell at the first opportunity. “Could you show me this tapestry that’s supposed to take you back?”
“All right.” She stood, and Tobas followed suit.
As she led the way through the castle, he quickly became lost in the maze of rooms and corridors; there was nothing traditional whatsoever about the layout of this fortress, and it was far larger inside than it had appeared from the outside. The walls were all of gray and black stone, some hung with drapes or tapestries, but the majority bare. The carved faces were only in a few passageways, not everywhere. Most of the corridors were dark and gloomy; Karanissa carried a torch so that they could see their way. The windows they passed were not particularly comforting, as the light that poured in was the now-familiar red-purple glow that seemed to have no source, but permeated the void around the castle.
At least the wind could not penetrate; the interior of the castle seemed a trifle warm and dry, but not truly uncomfortable, and a welcome change from the cold and damp of the hills of Dwomor.
Finally, when Tobas had lost all idea of where they were, they arrived in a small room on an upper floor where one wall held a tapestry that was just as odd, in its own way, as the one Tobas had taken from the downed castle.
The scene depicted in this tapestry was so utterly simple as to be almost an abstract design; it was done entirely in black and dark gray and showed a bare stone chamber that Tobas recognized, with a start, as the room where the other tapestry had originally hung, seen from a point two or three feet in front of the tapestry’s wall, looking back toward the passageway that led to the wizard’s study.
Looking closely, Tobas could make out the patterns in the stonework and other details that established it beyond question as the same room. The scene was exactly as he had seen it when taking down the tapestry, save that Derithon’s skeleton was missing.
He reached out and ran a hand over the tapestry and felt only cool, smooth fabric. He had hoped that he might be able to use it, that some protective spell prevented only Karanissa from stepping through, but that was obviously not the case.
After another moment’s study, he shrugged and turned away. He could see nothing odd about the tapestry that might explain why it had stopped functioning.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll need to see that Book of Spells.”
He tried very hard to sound calm, but it was difficult, very difficult, when he realized he might at last be about to achieve his long-sought goal of learning more magic. If he could learn a few of the enchantments from Derithon’s book and somehow return to the World, he would be ready to start a career.
These, however, were no circumstances he had ever imagined that achievement might be made under. He was trapped in an otherworldly castle with a beautiful witch four or five hundred years old, trying to make an unfamiliar spell work in order to return to the real World.