make her a hero; even those who had fought her would see that.
And she would do better this time; she wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Letting everyone live in the palace—well, there would have to be rules. And the city guard was useful; if she couldn’t make the old one obey her, she would organize her own.
She would do it right this time.
First, though, she had to retrieve the Black Dagger, and that meant finding Lady Sarai when she came back, before she was surrounded by guards and wizards.
She would be coming through an unused room in the Grand-gate towers, the man had said. There were eight towers in the Grandgate complex: the two gigantic barracks towers, and then the six lesser towers, three on either side of the entry road. Each of them contained dozens of rooms, Tabaea was sure, and many of those were unused; she would have to search them all until she found the right one.
But how would she know which was the right one? She smiled. The wizards had told her that. When she found someone guarding an empty, unused room, she had found what she was after.
And she had until that evening, at the very least. She scampered for the stairs, her eagerness making her so careless that in the parlor Tobas looked up, thinking he had heard something in the hall.
But of course, that was ridiculous. No one could possibly be in the Guildhouse but the wizards, who were all gathered in the parlor—unless a spriggan had managed to hide somewhere.
That was probably it, he decided; a spriggan must be running about somewhere. That was nothing to worry about, then; annoying as they were, spriggans were relatively harmless. “Has anyone tried Lirrim’s Rectification?” he asked. “I’ve never used it myself, but it’s in the books...”
Dwomor Keep was not a particularly attractive or well-designed structure, but Lady Sarai thought she had never seen anything so beautiful. However ugly and decayed it might be, it was a building, and after two days in the wilderness, anything that could possibly be considered urban was an absolute delight. That this ramshackle fortress was also the gateway back to her beloved Ethshar of the Sands only added to its appeal. The walk down through the mountains had not been enjoyable at all. Karanissa had taken it all in stride, but Sarai, accustomed to city streets and flat terrain, had been constantly tripping over stones and stumbling on the steep slopes. She had kept hoping, also, that her enhanced senses would return once they were free of the dead area, but that had never happened. With Karanissa’s witchcraft to help she had managed to catch and kill a rabbit with the Black Dagger, which provided both dinner and proof that the Black Dagger’s spell still worked, but the better hearing, tiny added strength, and slightly improved vision and sense of smell didn’t amount to much.
The little animal had been good eating, though, she had to admit.
Half a rabbit, however, and a few apples stolen from a farmer’s orchard were not much food for an entire two days, which made Dwomor Keep, where Karanissa assured her they could expect to be fed, very attractive.
The guard at the gate greeted Karanissa familiarly in a language Lady Sarai had never heard before; the two women were then escorted inside, where Sarai got to stand idly by, studying the architecture and interior design, while Karanissa carried on several conversations with assorted people dressed in varying degrees of barbaric splendor. Some of the people she spoke to seemed concerned, others inquisitive, still others casually friendly; most of them, judging by gestures, inquired about Lady Sarai at one point or another, and each time Karanissa answered without bothering to explain to Sarai what was being said. In fact, throughout her stay in Dwomor Keep, including a bath, a change into fresh clothing, and a generous supper, Sarai had no idea at all what was going on around her. As far as she could tell, nobody present spoke a word of Ethsharitic.
At last, however, Karanissa waved a farewell to three people and led Sarai down a passageway into a lush bedchamber, where she drew aside a drapery to reveal a truly bizarre tapestry.
The image was absolutely perfect and incredibly detailed; it showed a path leading from a stone mound across a narrow rope bridge to a castle out of someone’s nightmares, a fortress of gray and black stone encrusted with turrets and gargoyles, much of it covered with carven faces—most of them leering monstrosities, while the few that appeared human were screaming in terror. Even the front wall of the nearest section was a face, the entry way a yawning, fanged mouth, two windows above serving as eyes.
This structure stood against a blank background of red and purple shading into one another in vague, cloudlike patterns, and the reddish highlights on the castle made it plain that these colors were part of the picture, intended to represent a sky unlike anything in the World.
“You better hold my hand,” Karanissa said.
“Oh, you don’t... We aren’t going there...” Sarai said, trying to back away.
The witch grabbed her by the hand and yanked, pulling them both forward into the tapestry. Lady Sarai screamed and fell to her knees.
She landed on the rough stone of that pathway; on either side was empty, bottomless void, purple shot through with crimson.
“Welcome to my home,” Karanissa said, smiling. Then she led the way across the little bit of bare stone, over the rope bridge, through the fanged entryway and the open door widiin, into the castle. Lady Sarai followed wordlessly, staring at her strange surroundings, as
Karanissa explained, “Deny—that’s Derithon the Mage—made this place, hundreds of years ago, and brought me here. Then he got himself killed when his other castle, out in the World, crashed, and I was stranded until Tobas found the tapestry and came in here and found the way out, through the tapestry that took us to the fallen castle. Except Telurinon traded with him, to get the tapestry to the dead area—he wanted to send Tabaea there, or else the Seething Death after it killed her. So now we’ve got another tapestry, one that will bring us out in one of the towers in Grandgate.” She paused for breath.
Sarai didn’t say anything; she was too busy looking around at the forbidding, torch-lit corridor, with its gargoyles peering down from the ceiling comers.
Karanissa led the way up a broad spiral staircase, saying, “I suppose we’ll have to move now, take the other tapestry out of Dwomor to Ethshar—it’s just not practical, having our front door and our back door so far apart. The walk down the mountains was bad enough, even with the flying carpet; having to cross a hundred leagues of ocean is just impossible.”
They emerged in an arched passageway; Karanissa lifted a torch from a nearby bracket and led the way down a side passage.
“I don’t know if Alorria is going to like that much,” Karanissa said, as they turned a corner. “And I’m pretty such that her father, King Derneth, isn’t going to like it at all. He likes having Tobas as his court wizard, and he likes having his daughter nearby. Alorria’s never lived anywhere but Dwomor Keep—well, and here, of course.” She waved at the castie walls.
Sarai shivered slightly; this place made her very nervous. There was something utterly unnatural about it. They had entered from bright sunlight, but most of the castle was dark except for Karanissa’s torch, and where light did get in through windows, the light was an eerie reddish purple.
It didn’t seem to bother the witch at all; she prattled on cheerfully as she led the way through a maze of chambers and passages until at last they arrived at a door, several stories up from the entrance. “We need to go through together,” she warned Sarai, as she opened the door.
Cautiously, Sarai stepped into the room beyond, and looked around. Karanissa stepped in behind her and reached up to set her torch in an empty bracket.
The room was small and simple—no gargoyles or black iron here, just plain gray walls, on one of which hung a tapestry. There were no other furnishings.
“Maybe we should move this downstairs, nearer the entrance,” Karanissa said, considering the tapestry carefully. “That would save time when we’re just passing through like this.”
Sarai gazed at the hanging, too, but with relief, ratiier dian consideration. The room it depicted was so utterly normal and ordinary! A simple room, with off-white walls, an iron-bound wooden door, and one of the standard-issue wooden tables the Ethsharitic city guard used. “Come on,” she said. This time, she was the one who grabbed and pulled, and an instant later she and Karanissa stepped out in Ethshar.
The light was brighter here and the color of normal daylight, rather than the orange of a torch or that weird reddish purple; Lady Sarai blinked and looked around.
The tapestry was gone; from this side it simply wasn’t there. Instead she saw the other half of a
