To the east the immense towers of Grandgate loomed high above the rooftops, shining in the afternoon sun. The street itself was packed sand, lighter in color than the dark and stony streets of his home city, and lined with houses built wall-to-wall; perhaps one in three had a shop window and signboard to indicate that it held a business as well as a home. Gresh spotted a baker, a vintner, a tinker-the typical things one would see in any residential neighborhood.
They had stopped in front of perhaps the smallest house on the entire street, a tiny, half-timbered structure with no sign or shop-window.
“I rather expected you to live on Wizard Street,” Gresh remarked. “It’s nearby, isn’t it?”
“A block and a half west,” Tobas said. “But I couldn’t really afford it. There weren’t any vacant properties, so I would have had to buy out an existing business, and those aren’t cheap. Besides, I don’t really want to run a shop-I was never trained for it.”
“He’s a court wizard, not a shopkeeper!” Alorria said, as she collected various baby supplies from the carpet.
“Except we don’t live in Dwomor anymore,” Karanissa said. “The Guild ruined the Transporting Tapestry that came out near there. Which makes it difficult to be their court wizard.”
“Well, if you didn’t insist on keeping close to the castle…” Alorria began.
“It’s my home!”
“And Dwomor is mine!”
“And neither of them…oh, never mind,” Tobas said. “Be quiet, both of you, and let’s get the carpet and luggage inside.” He drew his belt-knife and cut one of the cords holding the baggage and handed Karanissa a valise.
“You need to open the door,” Alorria said, as she waited with the baby on her hip.
Gresh got his own bag and one other, then followed and waited as Tobas peeled a black wax seal off the door-latch-a seal very much like the one he used on his own vault back in Ethshar of the Rocks. That answered any questions Gresh might have had about how Tobas kept his home secure in his absence; the rune on the wax would explode and cripple or kill anyone else who tried to open the door. Presumably there were similar seals, or other magical protections, on the other doors and windows.
The door swung open, and Tobas held it back while both his wives entered the house; Gresh was close on their heels, and a moment later Tobas followed, with two more bags. He, Gresh, and Karanissa proceeded to fetch the rest of the luggage in, while Alorria tended to the baby’s needs and got her dressed in a fresh gown, until finally Tobas was able to roll up the carpet and bring that, too, inside, closing the door behind him.
The party and their belongings were now clustered into a small, sparsely furnished parlor; a dusty hearth filled one end of the room, while a few chairs and a small table were scattered about elsewhere. The plank floor was bare; Gresh suspected that the flying carpet currently tucked under Tobas’s arm usually lay on it. Two doors led to back rooms, and a steep staircase led to the upper story-Gresh could see the slanting ceilings that reduced that second floor to a fraction of the size of the already-tiny ground floor.
The place was considerably smaller than his own home and business; it did not look like the house of a wealthy wizard, to say the least. Even Akka and her useless husband had a more luxurious home, though it was in worse repair, and Gresh suspected they had gone far into debt to pay for it.
“Welcome to my home,” Tobas said. “You can sleep here tonight, if you like, or take a room at an inn on Grand Street, whichever you prefer. I think Karanissa can provide us with some supper, or there are the inns for that, too, as you please.”
Gresh looked around at the utter lack of a couch or any likely place a guest room might be hidden away and concluded that staying here would probably mean sharing a bedroom with three adults and a baby. The adults weren’t a real problem unless one of them snored, but the baby…
“You’ll have the place to yourself, if you stay here,” Karanissa said, as if reading his thoughts. As a witch, she very well might be reading them. “We’ll be sleeping elsewhere.”
“Where?” he asked, startled.
“I’ll show you,” the witch said. “Come on.”
Gresh followed as Karanissa led him up the stairs, which emerged, as he had expected, into a single good- sized attic room. Sunlight spilled in through windows on either end, and for most of its length the two long sides slanted in. Three beds and several bureaus and nightstands were arranged between the stairs and the rear wall. The front area, above the parlor, was almost empty, with just a pair of velvet-upholstered chairs at one side.
The portion above the parlor hearth was somewhat different from the rest; here the side wall was vertical, closing in the chimney, rather than sloping, and a pair of heavy gray drapes hung on it. As Gresh reached the top of the stair, Karanissa strode to these drapes and pulled a cord, drawing them back to reveal a tapestry.
“There,” she said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll be.”
Chapter Ten
Gresh stared at the tapestry in astonishment. He had never seen anything quite like it; the realism, the attention to detail, was amazing. Neither stitch nor brush-stroke was visible at first glance-if not for the slight billowing as it moved in the breeze created by the opening drapes, and the neatly sewn silk binding at the hem, he might almost have taken it for a painting, or even a window.
The image on the tapestry was also unlike anything he had seen before. It was a single scene, a picture of a castle-but it was a castle out of a nightmare, a weird structure of black and gray stone standing on a rocky crag, framed against a red-and-purple sky, approachable only by a narrow rope bridge across an abyss. Faces and figures of demons were carved into the structure at every opportunity; the battlements were lined with gargoyles, and monstrous stone visages peered around corners, from niches, and from the top of every window. A dozen towers and turrets jutted up at odd angles, some topped with rings of black iron spikes, others with conical roofs carved to resemble folded bat-wings. Even the one visible door was surrounded by a portico carved to resemble a great fanged mouth.
“Don’t touch it,” Karanissa warned.
“I won’t,” Gresh assured her, as he realized what he was looking at. “That’s a Transporting Tapestry, isn’t it? One that goes out of the World completely?”
“Yes. And it leads to our real home, more or less.”
“The castle? You live in that?”
“Most of the time-at least, since Tabaea’s death. Before that we spent most of our time in Dwomor Keep, where Tobas was the court wizard for Alorria’s father.”
Gresh remembered the story Karanissa had told him when she first came to his shop-that she had spent four hundred years trapped in a wizard’s castle, and Tobas had rescued her. That was presumably the castle he had saved her from. And she had later said that the Guild had ruined the tapestry that had been the only exit from the castle.
“How do you get out of it?” he asked. “I mean, if you’re planning to sleep there tonight…”
“We have another Transporting Tapestry in the castle,” Karanissa explained. “When the Guild ruined our old one while they were trying to stop Tabaea, they replaced it with another that comes out near here. That’s why we bought this house and relocated to Ethshar of the Sands-it’s where we can get out of the castle.” She sighed. “At first I thought I’d like that-I never really felt very welcome in Dwomor Keep, after all, since it’s Alorria’s home.”
Gresh started to ask a question about the relationship between the two women, then caught himself. He did not want to pry into their personal lives uninvited. “It hasn’t worked out?” he asked instead.
“We don’t really belong here,” she said. “Tobas is from a little village in the Pirate Towns, Alorria is a princess from the Small Kingdoms, I’m from the distant past-none of us really fits in a city like this. When I was here as a girl it wasn’t a city at all; it was General Torran’s staging area for the western campaign-they were still dredging the ship channel and drawing up plans for the city wall, and Grandgate was one tower called Grand Castle because there wasn’t a wall yet to put a gate in. There wasn’t any palace or city, just tents and wooden sheds.”
