Tales of Ethshar

inside than it had through the glass — she had thought there might be some sort of illusion at work, altering the room’s appearance when seen from outside, but if so it worked inside, too. She crept carefully out to the center of the room and stood on the rag rug, looking around.

Doorways opened into three other rooms — one appeared to be a dining hall, another a storeroom stacked with dusty wooden boxes, and the third she couldn’t identify. None were visibly inhabited.

She transferred her belt-knife to her left hand and drew her great-grandfather’s sword. There should be guards, she thought — either hired men, or supernatural beings of some sort, or at least spells. In the family stories of the Great War wizards were all part of the Ethsharitic military, and always had soldiers around, as well as their magic.

Kirinna saw no soldiers here — and for that matter, no magic. Breaking in the window might have triggered some sort of magical warning somewhere, but she no sign of anything out of the ordinary.

She also saw no sign of the wizard Alladia, or of Dogal. All she saw was a big, comfortable house.

She crept to the nearest doorway and peered through, half-expecting a guard to jump out and knock the sword from her hand; she clutched the hilt so tightly her knuckles ached.

All she saw was a dining hall, with a big bare table and half a dozen chairs and a magnificent china cabinet.

Something thumped, and she froze; it sounded again, and she realized it was coming from the cabinet.

Was someone in there? Could Dogal have been stuffed in there, somehow? She moved nervously across the room, dashing a few steps and then pausing to look in all directions, until she reached the cabinet and opened one of the brightly-painted doors.

A cream-colored ceramic teapot was strolling up and down the shelf on stubby red porcelain legs, bumping against pots and platters.

“Dogal?” she asked, wondering if her beloved had somehow been transformed into crockery.

The teapot ignored her and ambled on until it tripped over a salt-cellar and bumped its spout on the side of the cabinet; then it stopped, and somehow managed to look disgruntled as it righted itself and settled down on the shelf.

There was magic here, certainly, but nothing she could connect with Dogal; Kirinna closed the cabinet and moved on.

She made her way through room after room, from study to kitchen to privy, without being challenged or impeded and without finding anything else out of the ordinary except general displays of wealth and a remarkable number of storerooms. She began to fear that the house was deserted, that Alladia had fled somewhere with Dogal.

Finally, she heard footsteps overhead — the house was not deserted! Someone was here! She hurried to the nearer of the two staircases she had discovered and crept up the steps, sword still ready in her hand.

At the top of the stairs she found herself at one end of a hallway; she could smell incense and other, less- identifiable scents, and could hear an unfamiliar low rattling and thumping. Warily, she made her way down the hall, following the sounds and odors.

She came at last to an open door that was definitely the source; she crept up beside the doorframe and turned to peer in.

A woman was seated with her back to the door, working at a sort of loom — but not a loom quite like any Kirinna had ever seen before, as it had odd angles built into it, and extra structures projecting here and there. The whole construction was wrapped in a thick haze of incense, but she could see levers, weights, and pulleys in peculiar arrangements. Although a high window let daylight into the room three tall candles stood atop the frame, burning brightly amid mounds of melted wax, while the fabric being woven glittered strangely, as if points of light were being worked directly into the pattern.

Kirinna had sometimes heard people speak of magicians weaving spells, but she had always assumed it to be a metaphor, a description based on the intricate gestures wizards used in their conjuring; now she saw that perhaps it could be meant literally. This woman was surely Alladia, working some dire magic on her wood-and-rope framework.

The woman seemed oblivious to everything but her work, and Kirinna stepped around the doorjamb, intending to march in and demand an explanation at swordpoint of Dogal’s disappearance.

Instead she collided with someone, or something, that had been out of her line of sight and had turned to come through the door at the same moment she did. She had a glimpse of a bearded face and a thick homespun tunic, and then someone was grabbing her wrists, shouting, “Hai! Out! Stay out!”

Here was the guard she had been expecting. She tore her hands free and tried to raise her sword to strike, but the flat of the blade slapped into the underside of the man’s arm and was harmlessly deflected; then his knee came up and caught her painfully in the belly, and she staggered back into the hallway. That dragged her sword’s edge across the man’s raised thigh, and he yelped in pain and stepped back.

Kirinna swept disarrayed hair from her face with her left hand, raised the sword with her right — then stopped.

The bearded man was Dogal. He was bent over, clutching his leg, where blood was seeping from a slash in his breeches; his hair and beard were somewhat longer than Kirinna remembered, and far more unkempt, but it was unmistakably Dogal.

“Augh!” Kirinna said. “She’s ensorcelled you!” She lowered the sword — then raised it again.

Dogal looked up from his wound, and got his first clear look at her face.

“Kirinna?” He stared, his bleeding leg forgotten. “What are you doing here?”

At least he remembered who she was, despite being in the wizard’s thrall. “I came to get you,” she said. “We’re to be married tomorrow — has her spell made you forget?”

“What spell? Where did you get a sword?”

Kirinna hesitated. Dogal didn’t sound enchanted — just confused. And the wizard herself was still busily at work at the loom, ignoring the discussion just a few feet away.

“It was my great-grandfather’s,” she said. “From the war.”

Dogal looked down at his ruined breeches. The blood had stopped; the cut obviously wasn’t very deep. “It’s still sharp,” he said.

“My father cleans it every year during Festival,” Kirinna said. She felt foolish explaining such mundane details while facing her beloved at swordpoint in a wizard’s workshop, surrounded by incense and magic, but she could not think what else she should say.

“I hadn’t forgotten the wedding,” Dogal said. “I would have been there, really — at least, I hope so. We should be finished tonight if nothing goes wrong.”

Kirinna looked at the wizard. “Finished with what?” she asked. “Is she tired of you already?”

At that the wizard glanced briefly over her shoulder at Kirinna before returning to her work; the face Kirinna glimpsed was rather ordinary, round and soft, with a large nose and wide mouth.

“Tired of me?” Dogal looked utterly baffled. “No, the tapestry will be finished, that’s all.”

Kirinna looked from Dogal to the wizard and back; then she lowered the sword warily.

“What’s going on?” she said. “Why didn’t you come home?”

She was not necessarily convinced yet that Dogal wasn’t under a spell, but he seemed so normal, so much himself, that she was willing to consider it unproven either way, and the wizard’s complete failure to intervene had her fairly certain that she did not know what was happening.

Dogal sighed. “Can we go somewhere else to talk?” he asked. “Somewhere I can sit down and get away from the smell of incense?”

“She’ll allow it?” Kirinna asked, pointing the sword at the wizard.

“Of course she will; I just finished my turn at the loom.”

“Go on,” the wizard called, the first words Kirinna had heard her speak. “Go away and stop distracting me.”

Now completely defeated by awareness of her own ignorance, Kirinna sheathed her blades. “Come on,