His enthusiasm was not contagious. “I don’t like it,” Peren insisted. “It scares me.”
Tobas sighed. How could a man who had dashed out in a dragon’s face to rescue a companion be terrified by a mere picture? “Listen, Peren, it’s harmless here; no wizardry works, remember? Help me get it down; if you help me get it out of here, you can have first pick of all the other loot, everything you can carry. I’ll take this tapestry for my share.”
“You will?”
“I will.”
“It might be a demonological thing, you said.”
“It might be, but it probably isn’t, and maybe demonology doesn’t work here, either. Besides, if it’s wartime demonology, it might not work anymore anywhere, since the gods closed the old openings into Hell. The rules are different now.”
“But...”
“If it were dangerous, wouldn’t it already have done something? Come on and help me.”
“All right,” Peren said after another few seconds of hesitation. Reluctantly, he propped his torch up against a wall and crossed to the far end of the tapestry.
The brackets were above their heads, but by standing on tiptoe and stretching Tobas was able to push his end of the bar up and away from the wall. Peren, being taller and at least as strong, had an easier time of it.
Nothing terrible happened; it collapsed like any ordinary hanging. Once it was down, Tobas insisted that Peren help him roll it up around the bar, and together they reduced it to a compact bundle. It was surprisingly thin and light for its size; the rod was roughly an inch in diameter, the tapestry a good seven feet high, but the entire roll was only four inches thick.
It was so light, in fact, that Tobas had second thoughts, about his conclusion that thread-of-gold had been used. The bundle was eight or ten feet long, but weighed no more than a hundred and fifty pounds, at most. With effort, Tobas could carry it single-handed.
He hoisted it on his shoulder, staggering slightly on the sloping floor, while Peren recovered the torch and headed for the passageway.
“Wait a minute,” Tobas called. “What about the wizard’s rings? And that dagger of his is good silver.”
Peren stopped and looked down at the skeleton, then back at Tobas. “Are they enchanted?” “Who knows? The rings might be. The dagger, well, I think I know that spell, and with the wizard dead it would be broken, permanently. But I can’t be sure; after all, there’s so much here I don’t know. For all I can say, this no-magic area may have a permanent effect, I’m not sure my own magic will come back, even when we’re out of it and back in someplace normal. I’m just guessing.”
This was true, but he did somehow feel that his athame, at least, would still be enchanted when he left the area. After all, the dagger held a part of his soul, and he couldn’t imagine that it could have died permanently without his feeling something.
On that basis, he thought that any sort of magical imprinting, such as a major enchantment, would be effective again when removed from this eerie dead area. He certainly hoped so; he was counting on the tapestry to be powerful magic. He thought of the deadening effect as if spells were paintings, and magic the light that made them visible; the paintings could be taken into a dark room, and there they would be invisible, no more wonderful than blank board; but when returned to the light, the colors would be as bright as ever.
At least, he hoped that that was how it worked and that wizardry was more like color than fire, which, once extinguished, had to be rekindled.
Peren still hesitated over the skeleton, but at last, with a sudden grab, picked up the dagger and tucked it into his own belt. The rings he decided to leave, which Tobas had to admit was probably a wise decision.
Together, the two youths made their way back down the sloping corridor; Tobas needed Peren’s assistance to maneuver the long, heavy, awkward roll of tapestry around the corner and through the door into the study. Once it was safely through, he lowered it with a gasp of relief, letting it rest atop a pile of crumbling books.
“Are you really planning to haul that all the way back to Ethshar?” Peren asked, working the muscles of his back to relax them after the strain of helping Tobas with the ponderous roll of fabric.
Tobas, who had never been fond of strenuous lifting, was still trying to catch his breath; he nodded. He gulped air and, when he felt he could spare a little breath, said, “Yes, I am. I’ll carry it as far as Dwomor, then see about hiring a wagon or something. I think it’s worth it, I really do. But right now all I plan to do is eat dinner and then sleep in a wizard’s bed. What about you?”
Peren grinned in agreement.
CHAPTER 18
They spent all the following day exploring the castle more thoroughly. Tobas needed the entire morning ta maneuver his prize tapestry step by step out through the wizard-lord’s apartment, down the two flights of stairs, and back across the Great Hall to the gate, while Peren gathered a good-sized pile of booty from throughout the castle. In the afternoon it was Tobas’ turn to explore, while Peren settled down in the Great Hall to pick through his booty and decide what was worth carrying away and what could be left. By the time the sun set again the wizard had gone through every nook and cranny, while the albino had put together in one pile his final selections, roughly thirty pounds of gold, silver, and jewelry in various forms.
“You know,” Peren remarked to Tobas as they ate dinner at a table they had righted in one of the lower rooms, “we’ll both be rich when we get home. Even if that tapestry isn’t good for anything but melting down, that rod it’s on must have ten pounds of gold on it, maybe more. Figure ten percent for the smith’s fee, and that’s ninety pieces of gold. They say a man can live on one copper a day if he’s not picky; ninety of gold are nine thousand of copper. Say four hundred and fifty a year, that’s twenty years you can live just on that.”
Tobas nodded. “And with it all in that tapestry I don’t need to worry about sneak thieves picking my pocket or burgling my room at the inn, the way you do!”
Peren laughed. “Ah, but I have far more than ten pounds here!”
“Counting the jewels and silver, maybe, and they’re probably half fake, too.”
Peren laughed again. “What if they are? Pounds of gold, and silver, and handfuls of gems! If nine out of ten are just cut glass, I’ll still be able to call myself a rich man! How could this one wizard have had so much wealth! It astounds me, it truly does. And Tobas, I think half the castle had already been looted, too. I didn’t find anything worth taking anywhere but the two main apartments. The butler’s vault had been broken open and all the plate cleared out; the armory had all of three swords left, two of them bent and the other one broken. The towers were empty — at least, the five I climbed. I didn’t care to see what was left in the fallen one.”
Tobas nodded. “I think the castle servants probably carried off everything in sight when they fled after the crash, but most of them wouldn’t have had the nerve to go into the private apartments. The wizard died; we saw that. As far as the servants were concerned, he had probably just vanished into thin air, they didn’t know about the secret passage. They probably didn’t dare steal from his suite, lest he reappear suddenly. What puzzles me is what happened to the lady; her jewels were still there, at least some of them, and I would have thought that she and her maids would have taken them all. There’s no sign that she, too, died, and it would have been quite an odd coincidence if she had, don’t you think?”
Peren shrugged. “Maybe she wasn’t home.”
“Maybe.” They ate in silence for a moment.
“Tobas,” Peren said at last, “are you sure you want to go back to Ethshar?”
Surprised, Tobas replied, “Well, I thought so; why?”
“I don’t think I do. I grew up there and I’ve seen all of it I care to. It’s true that I have my own money now, but my hair’s still white and my eyes still red, and the children in the street will probably still call me a ghost or a demon, even if I’m wearing velvet instead
of homespun. This sword I carry didn’t make any difference; I don’t think the gold will, either.”
“Well, what of it?” Tobas demanded. “The gods played a nasty trick on you when you were born that way, but what can you do about it? Where else would you go?” He was not comfortable with the subject; he had never paid much attention to Peren’s coloration, nor thought about how he might deal with those who did think it important.
“I don’t know, not for certain,” Peren replied. “I think I want to go on across the mountains and see what’s on the other side, in Aigoa or whatever land lies to the east.”
Tobas remembered the rows of mountains, marching off into the distance, that they had seen from the peak above the castle. He shuddered at the thought of trying to cross them all, let alone drag the massive tapestry over them. “It’ll just be more miserable little kingdoms like Dwomor,” he said, hoping to discourage Peren. “The Small Kingdoms extend as far as the Great Eastern Desert, don’t they? And that goes right to the edge of the World. There’s nothing out there worth seeing. If you don’t want to come back to Ethshar, if you think the Small Kingdoms are better, you can stay in Dwomor.”
Peren shook his head. “I don’t think so. We didn’t kill their dragon. I don’t think they’d appreciate having us come back rich while the dragon’s still out there somewhere.”
Tobas had no answer for that at first, but finally managed, “Well, not everyone can kill their stupid dragon. We’ve been gone more than a sixnight now; probably one of the other teams found it and killed it.”
Peren shook his head. “You saw that dragon, Tobas, and you saw the hunters; do you really think anyone’s killed it?”
“Uh... maybe the witches?” he suggested hopefully.
“Maybe the witches,” Peren conceded. “I don’t know much about witchcraft.”
“Neither do I,” Tobas admitted.
“You just know fire-magic, isn’t that right?”
Tobas smiled. “That’s right,” he agreed.
Peren smiled back, then turned serious again. “No, Tobas, I don’t want to come back to Dwomor. Would you want to stay there? It’s a pretty dreary little kingdom, even without the dragon rampaging about.”
“What about Ekeroa, then?”
“It’s better,” Peren admitted, “but I really don’t want to go back. We might run into the dragon, for one thing, and we’d have to go by way of Dwomor. I simply don’t want to see that ramshackle castle again. I want to go on to the east, over the mountains.”
Tobas could avoid it no longer. “I don’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t. It’s too far, too lonely, and too hard a journey. I’m a lazy person, Peren; that’s how I got into this mess in the first place; I was too lazy to work when I thought I had an inheritance coming. I got this far to keep from starving. But now that I have this tapestry, I don’t need to go any further and I’m not going to. We don’t have enough food to get over the mountains, hell, I’m not sure we have enough to get back! What will you eat?”
“I’ll hunt; I have a sling, a sword, and two good knives.”
Startled, Tobas asked, “You do? Can you use a sling?”
Peren nodded.
“Oh,” Tobas said. “Well, maybe you can do that, then, and catch what you need, but I can’t hunt. And I don’t want to depend on you for food like that. I’m going back. I’m going back to Ethshar, where I’ll sell this tapestry to a wizard, trade it for spells, or melt down its metal, and then I’m going to take the money and settle down quietly somewhere and make a home for myself. That’s all I want, a home; I don’t want any adventures. I’m going back.”
“I’m going on,” Peren said quietly.
“You’re sure?”
He nodded.
Tobas nodded acceptance. “All right. We’ll go in the morning, then, you to the east and I to the west.”
That settled, the conversation died away, and they retired early, Tobas sleeping in the wizard’s bed, Peren sleeping on a blanket in the Great Hall.
CHAPTER 19
Hauling the tapestry was more work than he had anticipated; he had forgotten how much up and down there was to the road back to Dwomor Keep. He was also unsure of the best route; until the foursome had split up on the fourth of Harvest they had been zigzagging about almost at random, looking for the dragon. He had estimated that he would have been able to get back to the castle in four days, unburdened, but the tapestry cut the distance he covered each day by at least half.
The first night found him scarcely to the edge of the magically dead area; he worked Thrindle’s Combustion three times before he got a campfire lit.
The second day he covered slightly more ground, but watched with concern as the sky clouded over. He hoped that the tapestry would not be harmed by rain; when he settled for the night, he slept uncovered, using his blanket to protect his prize instead of himself, draping his pack over the end the blanket could not reach.
As he had expected, rain began falling around midnight, building from a slow sprinkle to a steady drizzle.
The third day he struggled onward, desperately trying to keep the tapestry dry and out of the mud, and far more concerned with finding shelter than with traveling any great distance. At last, around midafternoon, he found a broad overhanging rock ledge protruding from a steep hillside. He crawled under it, pushing the tapestry as far in as he could.
He remained there that night and all through the next day, waiting out the rain; his supply of dried beef gave out, leaving him nothing but raisins and one very stale biscuit.
The thirteenth of Harvest dawned gray and dim, but without rain, and Tobas decided to risk moving on. The skies cleared as the day wore on, and he made good time; he was fairly sure when he made camp that night that he had passed the point where he and the others had encountered the dragon. He judged that to be half a mile or so north or northeast of where he finally stopped.
He finished off his last provisions and awoke ravenously hungry on the morning of the fourteenth. Water was easily found in the wake of the rain, in pools on rocks as well as in streams, but food was not so readily come by.
He did find some nuts, which he cooked with Thrindle’s Combustion and ate from the shell; that helped slightly. He considered hiding the tapestry somewhere and coming back for it later, so as to conserve his strength, but decided against it; he was fairly sure he was nearing civilization, if Dwomor could be considered civilized, and was afraid some wanderer, such as a dragon hunter, might discover it.
He had not yet dared to unroll it and see whether its magic might manifest itself; he did not want to try that alone and unprotected in the mountains, out in the open air.
Around midafternoon he came across a ruined cottage; something had smashed in the door, the windows were gone, and there were scorch marks on the slate roof, but it was basically intact. Tobas wondered at the slate roof, but a look around at the stony ground helped explain that; thatch would not be readily found here. He wondered, then, why the cottage’s builder had wanted his domicile in so barren a spot.
He had no good explanation for that, but he could and did guess at why it was broken and empty; the dragon had undoubtedly eaten the inhabitants, or at any rate had tried to. That heavy, fireproof slate roof might have saved their lives.
And whether it had or not, they might have left some food; he hauled the tapestry inside, dropped it on the floor of the main room, and began exploring the kitchen cupboards.
They were all distressingly empty, in fact, they gave every sign of having been intentionally and systematically stripped bare. Tobas guessed that the cottage’s owners had been besieged for a time and had then gathered up supplies and fled. He wondered whether they had made it to the castle safely.
Then he wondered whether the castle was really safe.
That was silly, he told himself; if the dragon had been unable to smash this little cottage to the ground, what could it do against a fortress like Dwomor Keep?
He sat down in a
convenient straight-back chair and stared at the tapestry, his stomach growling. He did not feel up to hauling the heavy thing any farther before nightfall, and this cottage seemed comfortable enough; he decided to stay until morning.
As he was leaning back, wondering what sort of spells he should trade the tapestry for, he heard a noise outside, as of something large moving about. He sat up.
Could that be dragon hunters, he asked himself, or perhaps the cottage’s owners coming back? He peered out a window.
It was neither; the dragon itself was perched on the top of a nearby hill, gazing out across the surrounding countryside. Tobas stepped back quickly.
He hadn’t expected that. The beast had not seen him, he was certain, but it was now quite definite that he would not be leaving this cottage for at least a few hours. If the dragon noticed him, he might never leave it alive at all. Worried and distracted, he started back for his chair and tripped over the rolled-up tapestry.
He caught himself before he fell, then turned and looked at his prize. Was there, he asked himself, a chance that he could carry out the task he had originally signed up for and somehow kill the dragon? Might there be some way he could use the tapestry’s magic, if it had any?
Well, he told himself, he obviously wouldn’t be doing anything else for a while, so he might as well look the thing over. He glanced up at the cottage wall and found a likely spot.
The place had not been designed for tapestries, of course; but with a little effort, he managed to wedge the tapestry rod diagonally across one corner, supported on one end by a step-back in the chimney and on the other by a gap betwixt a rafter and the wooden plate that topped the stone wall and anchored the tie beams.
Once he was satisfied that it was securely in place, he began unfurling the tapestry; the rod was wedged too tightly to turn freely, so instead he was forced to drag the fabric up over the top time after time and let it drop back behind.
Finally it hung down freely, brightly lit by the rays of the setting sun pouring in through one of the western windows, and Tobas looked at it with renewed interest — the scene it depicted was so very weird! That ghastly lighting, the strange rocks, the empty areas beyond the castle, whoever had designed it had quite an imagination, Tobas thought, even without considering the castle itself, with its bizarre architecture and hideous carvings.
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