Chapter 8: The Weaver

The person hailing me was a woman. Or that is what it seemed like, at least: The voice was feminine enough, neither young nor old, and the person hidden underneath the thick layer of dark clothing was short and stocky.

The stranger halted in front of us and, judging from how her veil moved, looked us both up and down.

"Questor, I have been waiting for you," she said simply and matter-of-factly. "I implore you to come with me. I will explain later."

I exchanged a quick look with Quaila, who merely shrugged and left the decision up to me.

"Lead on," I said in my finest questorial tone of voice. She might lead us into some trap but, like Quaila when I first met her, I had a feeling she would not. And how did she know I was a Questor? How did everyone seem to know that?

The little woman turned around and made a beckoning signal before she started off down a side street. Neghast might not look like a huge city when seen from the outside, but when one is caught on the giant maze of twisting alleys with dreary towering buildings looming over you on all sides with the threat of violence or imminent collapse, with refuse littering the cobbled streets, with hostile faces staring from windows and doorways, then you feel as small as an ant who has stumbled into the Ice Palace of the Silver Dragon Wanor herself. And you feel lost in whirl of confusion. After only a minute and three intersections after we had veered off the Gate Road I knew I would never be able to point south if forced at knife point. Which might was a very real possibility in here; the knife point part of it, anyway.

After what seemed like ages the stranger stopped in front of a six story building guarded by two statues of nine-clawed dragons, a run-down place where the slates had begun falling off the roof. Opening the door she made a gesture for us to follow her down a set of unlit stairs. A strange smell wafted up from below as I helped Quaila down the roughly cut and well worn heavy slabs of stone.

Seventeen steps I counted before a thick wooden door with a strange sigil on it blocked our path. By rights it should be completely dark down here, but it was like a very faint glow was emanating from the Sword of Black Flame; very faint indeed, but it was there. The weapon was supposed to be magical, and for the first time I felt a kind of awe towards it.

The strange thing was that unlike me neither of the women seemed to give the weapon a second glance. While Quaila looked around at the walls, which here hewed of gargantuan stone blocks, with a most seeing look in her eyes, the other woman seemed to be in complete darkness. She did not fumble or trip, but she definitively felt her way for the keyhole in the fashion of someone blind but familiar with her environment.

The door creaked open, and as we entered the room beyond I saw that the sigil on the door was painted in dark blue, showing some symbol akin to a spider in a web, or maybe it was the rings forming on the water after one has thrown in a rock? The room inside was not very large, not considering that it seemed to double as a bedroom with a hammock and blanket hanging from the ceiling, and as a living room with one chair and a small divan. And then it doubled again as a kitchen, with a small pipe-like fireplace were the smoke was carried out through a narrow window high above. From up there came a glimmer of daylight illuminating what had to be the final purpose of the room: A wizard's laboratory, if I was not mistaken, with a bench covered by yellowed papers, thick leather bound books, strange plants of which some were dried and some grew live in pots, and powders and statuettes and amulets and other items i could not put a name to. The walls were lined with shelves with more of the same.