“What,” Valder said at last, “does General Gor have in mind?”
“I wouldn’t presume to guess General Gor’s thoughts, Valder — and I wouldn’t say, even if I did. However, your orders state that you’re to be transferred from General Karannin’s command to General Gor’s personal staff, effective immediately, with the same title and position. It seems to me — though this is strictly a guess, and I’ll deny ever saying it — that our illustrious commander has no objection to your current services other than the choice of targets.”
“More assassinations, then?”
“I would think so.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Don’t be silly, Valder. That would be treason; you know that.”
“But damn it, Kelder, I don’t want to be an assassin! It scares me half to death, and I hate killing people — I get sick to my stomach.”
“There are times when I don’t like being a spy.”
“I wouldn’t mind spying as much, I don’t think. Couldn’t I do that?” “Oh, maybe you will; I can’t say. I’m just here to give you your orders and get you safely to Gor’s headquarters on the coast. It’s too late tonight; we leave at dawn.”
“But...” Valder’s objections trailed off.
Kelder smiled ruefully. “I sympathize, Valder, honestly. You have no choice, though. That hermit trapped you for life when he enchanted your sword; we can’t possibly allow something like that to remain unexploited.”
Valder glared resentfully at Wirikidor where it hung at the foot of his bed.
Kelder stood up and pulled the tent flap open. “We leave at dawn,” he said.
Valder watched him go, then lay back, hoping that somehow dawn would not come.
Dawn came on schedule, however, and they departed.
Valder was startled by the transportation provided. They rode no horses, used no levitation spells; instead, Kelder led him to a small lavender tent in the magicians’ circle, empty save for a rich tapestry that seemed stupendously out of place in a military camp. It hung from a crossbar nailed to the rear tentpole, its ornately fringed lower edge dragging in the dirt, and depicted a seascape seen from a stone rampart.
Kelder calmly walked directly into the tapestry, pulling Valder in after him.
To his astonishment, he found himself standing on the seaward battlement of General Gor’s coastal fortress, Kelder at his side. The salt air washed into his nostrils, and he realized for the first time how accustomed he had become to the stench of General Karannin’s camp, compounded largely of sweat, dust, and cattle. The sun was rising behind him and pouring out across the sea, lighting the wave crests with gold.
He turned around, expecting to see an opening back into the little tent, but instead he saw the upper court of the Fortress.
“Now, that tapestry,” Kelder remarked. “That’s a twelfth-order spell, and it took a very good wizard a year to produce it, but it does come in handy. They carefully avoid changing this section of the ramparts so that it will keep working. It has its drawbacks — you’ll notice that it only works one way and that we had to leave the tapestry behind. It will be shipped wherever it’s needed next. I wanted to get you here immediately, and there simply isn’t anything faster, so I requisitioned the tapestry; nobody else was using it just now, so I was able to get it.”
Valder was still staring about in amazement at the solid stone of the Fortress, trying to convince himself it was not a dream or illusion. “Oh,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “Why did you wait until dawn, if the tapestry works instantly?”
“Because the tapestry depicts this spot just after dawn, of course. We’d arrive at dawn regardless of when we left, and I prefer a good night’s sleep to several hours in some wizardly limbo. We could have entered the tapestry at any hour, true enough, but we would not arrive here until the hour the tapestry showed, regardless of how long a wait that might require. We wouldn’t have noticed anything; to us the trip would still be instantaneous, but we would actually have lost those nighttime hours. I did that once; it messed up my sleeping schedule for days. And the weather can affect it, too — in fact, we may have missed a day or two if the weather was bad, but the prognostications were all favorable, so I don’t think we have.”
“I never heard of anything like that before.”
“Of course not; it’s a military secret, like almost any useful magic. Only the Wizards’ Guild and important officers know anything about most of the more powerful wizardry. You’d be amazed what wizardry can do; there are spells for any number of things you would never have thought possible.”
“Could they make more tapestries?”
“There are others, but right now no wizard can be spared for long enough to make more.” Valder was over his shock and beginning to think again. “Couldn’t they use them to dump assassins, or whole regiments, behind enemy lines, maybe right in the enemy’s capital?”
Kelder sighed. “It’s a lovely theory, isn’t it? But it won’t work. The wizard making the tapestry needs to see the scene he’s weaving very, very clearly. If it isn’t absolutely perfect, right down to the smallest detail, the tapestry won’t work — or at least won’t work properly. We don’t have any way of seeing clearly enough behind enemy lines; our scrying spells are good enough for most needs, but not for making these tapestries.”
After a moment’s pause he added, “Yet.”
Valder decided against pursuing the matter; instead he looked around the battlements. He had seen this fortress from a distance, assuming that it was indeed General Gor’s headquarters, but he had never before been inside its walls. Tandellin was here somewhere, he remembered.
The place was impressive. The stone walls appeared to be several feet thick, and the outer faces were steep enough that he could see nothing of them from where he stood. He did not care to lean very far out over the seaward parapet; the height was dizzying.
From where he stood, he could see nothing beyond the fortress walls but the sea, the sky, a few gulls, and, very far off in the northeastern distance, a line of dark green hills. The citadel was built atop the highest ground in the area, a jagged cliff that towered above broken rocks right at the ocean’s edge — Valder remembered that from his previous visit.
The wall he stood upon stretched for almost a hundred yards in either direction; behind it, the courtyard was more than a hundred feet across, but long enough that that seemed disproportionately narrow. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people were going about their business there. Men were sharpening swords or practicing their use, women were hanging clothes out to dry, and members of both sexes were sitting or standing in pairs or groups, talking. Off at the northern corner, two sentries peered out over the ocean; to the south, a bend in the wall and a small guardhouse hid the next pair from Valder.
“Well,” Kelder said, “if you’ve finished admiring the view, we have an appointment with one of General Gor’s staff, a Captain Dumery, who is to get you settled in and tell you your next assignment.”
“Oh,” Valder said unenthusiastically. He had no interest in any assignments, and the mere mention of one had ruined his enjoyment of his surroundings.
Kelder ignored the soldier’s tone and led the way to one of the staircases down into the court. They descended and, from the foot of the steps, proceeded across the court, through a vestibule into a corridor, down a flight of stairs, back along another corridor, across a large hall, along still another corridor, down another flight, across yet another corridor into a smaller hall, from there into an antechamber, and finally into a small room lined with tightly packed shelves. Valder was startled to see a small window slit with a view of the ocean; he had gotten turned around and would have guessed that they were deep in the interior of the Fortress, facing south toward the shipyards, and nowhere near the seaward side.