for one wall. The floor was blank stone; there was no furniture or debris. One side, to the right of the skeleton, was an extension of the right-hand wall of the corridor; on the wall opposite that hung the only adornment, a broad, dark tapestry.
Tobas stared at it, unable to make out details in the gloom, but certain that there was something odd about it. “Bring that light here,” he said.
Peren lifted the torch and rose from where he crouched by the broken skull. He took a few steps closer to the tapestry so that the torch lit the entire scene, and together the two adventurers stared at the hanging.
It was unlike any tapestry either of them had ever seen; it was all a single scene, depicted in incredible detail and absolutely flawless perspective, showing a pathway leading across a narrow band of rough stone toward the gates of a castle.
Above the pathway towered the castle itself, shown almost in its entirety, a very strange and forbidding castle built of gray and black stone, its every available feature carved into a leering, demonic face. The main entryway was a gaping, spike-toothed mouth, and two windows above it served as eyes, so that the castle itself seemed to have a malignant face as well. A gargoyle perched atop each merlon in the battlements; each corner was decorated with fiends standing upon one another’s shoulders for the full height of the structure. Towers hung out at odd angles, cantilevered without any signs of buttressing, topped with battlements of jagged spikes or conical roofs made to resemble furled bat wings. Inhuman, grinning faces, carved in black stone, peered over the tops of some of these, seeming to look straight out of the tapestry at the viewer.
The base of the castle stood on a rounded mass of rock, like a weathered mountaintop, with a few feet of clearance on each side and then cliffs dropping away out of sight or even seeming to curl back under. It was separated from the pathway by a narrow bridge of ropes and planking that was stretched across a yawning chasm.
To all sides of the castle and pathway, beyond a yard or so of stone, was simply space, limitless space, lit eerily from somewhere unseen with purple and crimson.
Tobas stared at it, studying it. It had none of the fuzziness or texture of an ordinary tapestry, no single underlying background color; it looked almost like a painting, or even a window, rather than mere cloth. Furthermore, it showed no trace of decay at all. At the very least, it was a truly fabulous work of art; he had never seen a tapestry so finely crafted and detailed.
Peren turned away, a trifle unsteadily. “I don’t like it,” he said. “That thing is hideous! No place like that could possibly exist, with those cliffs, that empty sky, and that foul light.”
Tobas glanced at him, then back at the tapestry, still fascinated. “It’s beautifully done, though. Look at the detail! You can see a red highlight there on that gargoyle’s fang and another here, that must be a spider web, that shiny line there. I’ve never seen anything like that. And the colors would probably be better in daylight; you know torches make everything look reddish and bring out the shadows.”
“I don’t like it,” Peren repeated, unswayed.
Tobas ignored this complaint and said, “Bring that light closer. Notice how it isn’t faded or worn? It looks brand-new.” Hesitantly, he reached out a finger and touched the cloth. It was cool and slick to the touch, a little like fine silk, with none of the warmth and give of the wool used in ordinary hangings.
Peren reluctantly brought the torch nearer so that Tobas could study the tapestry’s fabric more closely.
“Look at this,” Tobas said. “The fabric’s partly made out of metallic threads, gold, I’d guess. And the colors — I think that red is some sort of powdered gemstone. It looks like ruby.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Peren said. “Why would anyone make a tapestry out of gold and jewels? And if they did, why would they hide it up here?”
“It must be magic of some sort,” Tobas said, studying the demonic figures.
Peren took an involuntary step backward. “What sort?” “Oh, I don’t know; wizardry, probably, given where we are, but it could be something used in demonology, too, I suppose. If it’s wizardry, I can’t say what it was for; Roggit never mentioned anything like this. It might be something oracular, or maybe the wizard could use the tapestry to conjure up monsters. I don’t know; Roggit certainly didn’t have any magic of this sort.” He looked up to see how the tapestry was supported; it hung from loops around a metal bar. Tobas took the torch from Peren and held it up.
The bar was gold-plated, which explained why it was intact; even the brackets set into the stone wall gleamed golden. “Here,” Tobas said. “I’ll take this end; you take the other. We ought to be able to get it down.”
“Why do we want to?” Peren asked. “We should leave it where it is.”
“I want it, that’s why we should take it down. This is the only thing we’ve found in this wizard’s castle that’s obviously magic and looks as if it might still work, and I’m a wizard in need of more magic. Even if I can’t figure out how to use it myself, if I can get it back to Ethshar I can trade it to a wizard there for a few spells. If this wartime wizard thought it was important enough to be hidden away like this, to use up all this gold, and for him to be trying to reach it when he died, then it’s got to be something really powerful. It looks powerful. Even if no one knows what it’s for, it would look impressive enough in a wizard’s shop to please anybody. And if somebody can use it, and it’s as powerful as I think it is, this could set me up for life!”
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
