“He tried to get back to you,” Tobas said when she began crying. “He was reaching for the tapestry when he died; that was how we found him.”
She glared at him through her tears. “How could you have found him,” she demanded, “if he was dead four hundred years ago?”
“We found his skeleton, at least, somebody’s skeleton, with a silver dagger and several rings, wearing an embroidered tunic. That was him, wasn’t it?”
“Aaagh!” She burst out in renewed weeping, and Tobas realized that he had been tactless. He waited for her hysterics to subside. She seemed to be struggling to control her reactions, and Tobas had enough sense to see that his arrival and the news he brought must have come as quite a shock; after centuries of isolation he could not fault her for her display of emotion. He thought no less of her for it. In fact, he was quite impressed by her; not only was she beautiful, but she spoke well and had already begun adjusting her accent so that it was closer to his own, making her speech more easily understood. Furthermore, if her story was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, she had lived here alone for centuries without losing her sanity or otherwise visibly degenerating. He was unsure he could have done that.
When she had at last regained control of herself, she went on with her story.
At first she had simply stayed in bed, waiting for Derithon to return. When she was quite certain that several hours had passed, she had gotten up, gotten dressed, and puttered about the castle, tidying up and poking around, waiting for Derithon to return.
Eventually she had gotten worried and had tried to use her witchcraft to establish contact with him, but without success. She had put that down to being in an entirely separate reality.
Finally, she had decided to go and see for herself just what had happened and had gone to the tapestry that was supposed to lead back to the flying castle. Then she had discovered that it did not work. She was unable to step through it.
This was something of a shock; up until then, returning to the World had simply been a matter of walking right through the tapestry into the private chamber of Derithon’s flying castle. The thought that she might be trapped in this strange other world had never occurred to her.
However, it became quite clear that she was, indeed, trapped.
Eventually, she had gotten up her nerve to consult Derithon’s great Book of Spells to see if she could get the tapestry to function again. She had found the spell that created it but had been unable to use it to get the tapestry to work. She had then experimented with other spells, right down to the elementary little training exercises for beginners, and had not yet found any that she was sure she could use. There were one or two that might work, but required items she did not have in order to be sure — such as living subjects. A hypnotic spell she had attempted had given her an eerie feeling that something was happening; but without someone to test it on, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t simply imagining things.
And nothing she had tried with wizardry, witchcraft, or sheer random experimentation had gotten her back to Ethshar. She had simply lived on, waiting, talking to the invisible servants Derithon had left to take care of her, even though they could not speak to answer her, tending the magical garden that provided her food, and trying to keep from going mad with loneliness. She had taken to sleeping for days at a time; she knew spells that allowed her to do that without harming her health. Several times she had tried putting herself in a trance that would last until Derithon returned or until her body needed food desperately, and each time she had awoken on the verge of starvation, with Derithon still absent.
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?”
