I don’t know how the old couple’s faces had looked while I was arguing with the raven, but by the time I turned back tothem, they had schooled their expressions into the appearance of polite interest. The old woman tucked my hand under her arm in a confiding way as we walked up the rest of the steps. It gave me a bit of a lump in my throat, this unthinking grandmotherly affection, and I felt a stab of longing and worry for Mother.
“My name is Marta. What’s yours, my dear?”
“Netta,” I said, before thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t go handing out my real name to all and sundry. But after all, there was little chance that Marta and Bertram had any connection to the man who had taken my mother.
The huge doors swung open silently.
“It’s the way they’re weighted,” said Bertram, seeing my surprise. He seemed eager to explain the mechanics of it, and I let him chatter on as we entered, although I wasn’t really listening. I was too absorbed in studying the Temple.
It was overwhelming, at first. I had an impression of lit braziers, the spit and sizzle of tall tallow candles, yellow and gold robes. A long nave pointed like the shaft of an arrow to the enormous gold altar at one end, spread with a cloth that could have served as a banquet hall carpet, it was so large. I was about to ask where the tapestry was, when I turned my head to one side and realized the question would have been ridiculous.
The sight of it stopped my breath.
One whole side of the East Temple practicallywasthe tapestry. It ran the entire length of the Temple nave, strung from pillar to pillar and stretched taut; perhaps a foot from the floor all along its length, and reaching almost to the roof arches supported by those same pillars. I could not imagine the amount of people and time that went into creating something this large and this detailed.
“Come on, my dear,” said Marta, urging me onward.
Novice Priests stood about in their vivid yellow robes, holding wooden chests for the visitors’ offerings and looking like dyspeptic canaries. The one that Marta found clearly had noidea what to do with the basket of fruit—I think he had been expecting coins—and he had to hook it in an ungainly manner over one arm. Abashedly, I produced my little piece of embroidered cloth. He fumbled as he reached for it, and it floated down to the ground. A passing man picked it up, gave me a sharp glance, then smiled, placing it carefully in the novice’s money chest.
“Thank you,” I said, but he had already melted away into the crowd.
In one corner of the room, a group of Temple seamstresses in white robes with yellow, gabled hoods were embroidering—an altar cloth, probably. Visitors gathered to watch them.
“The Great Tapestry of Quell!” a Priest declared a little too loudly to a cluster of visitors. “It took a hundred weavers a hundred days to make the cloth, and a hundred seamstresses a hundred days to embroider it.”
That sounded a little too neat to be true, but the work was truly impressive. Moving closer, I saw that the tapestry was made up of three panels, so cleverly joined that you could not see the seams until you stood right before them. Here, the whole history of the Plague was laid out in images as bright and vivid as the mind-pictures Baldbeak sent to me: primitive and childlike in form, although exquisitely done, every picture so intricate and vibrant that I longed to lift it up and look at the mechanics of the tangled underside. I recognized many of the stitches that I used and thought that I had invented.
The first panel showed the world before the Plague—in rich greens and blues for the most part, aside from the clothing of the little stitched people. The peasants were in brown, the nobility in gold, and the mages in red, with symbols stitched on their robes to denote whether their sacrificial magic used their teeth, their nails, or their hair. Rainbow tangles of thread denoted the ripples of magic from all their hands.
The second panel showed bone magic run amok and the Plague spreading. The peasants and nobles now had their handscovering their faces, and their robes had become transparent, showing crude skeletons beneath. (Evidently anatomy had been a bit of a challenge for the seamstresses, but they had forged ahead bravely anyway.)
Those figures struck with the Plague were almost too disturbing to look at—skin melting like candle wax, lipless mouths grimacing. A triangular pile of bones and skulls dominated the center, with a bone mage atop it, their arms outspread as if casting a spell to encompass the whole world. Their face was a blank expanse of ivory thread.
There was something strange about the last panel. The tapestry had been created by dozens of different people all working together, so it made sense that the styles would differ slightly across the whole piece—but this final panel just felt so very different. I again recognized many of the stitches I used in my own work, but there was none of the life and movement of the rest of the tapestry here. The design felt somehow heavy; static.
I stepped closer to peer at the details. Here and there I could see sections that had the same energy as the rest of the tapestry, but there were places where their work had been unpicked and then over-worked in a heavier hand. It gave me a strange, oppressive feeling.
This final panel depicted the Eye of the One-Eyed God, hovering above the scene, and a group of Temple Priests below, in their traditional yellow and gold robes. The guide droned on about how the color represented the old belief that gold would draw out pestilence, a superstition which no one believed any longer but which lingered in the colors the Priests wore, the jewelry on their bodies, and the ornamentation in the Temple buildings. I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at the ghostly figuresbehindthe Priests. Their silhouettes overlapped in some places, but differed in others. The embroidered Priests had their faces upturned and arms lifted towards the Eye, as if in supplication, but behind that I could see … I squinted. If only Icouldtouchit. I needed the slide of the fabric beneath my fingers to read it fully. Given time alone with it, I was sure I could decipher whatever secrets …
“You!”
I jumped. The guide was pointing right at me, and the elderly couple were glaring in righteous disapproval. I realized that my nose was almost touching the cloth.
“Sorry,” I murmured, stepping back.
He started lecturing again, a little louder this time, as if to punish me for not listening. I returned my attention to the images. There were definitely other figures, behind those of the Priests, that had been erased or reworked. The tiny, almost invisible pattern of unpicked stitches showed me their hands had been outstretched before them, and they had been facing forward—not praying to the great Eye, but either warding off or attacking something in front of them. Something that was no longer pictured. But what?
I approached the little group of seamstresses diffidently and stood for a moment observing one in particular, whose needle moved like quicksilver through the rich cloth. After a moment, I said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt. I had a question about the tapestry.”
She looked up and smiled. The yellow hood turned her skin a sickly shade, but despite that she was pretty and cheerful looking.
“I was wondering about that last panel,” I said. “The one that looks like it was unpicked and stitched over.”
“You have a good eye,” she said. “No one really knows the true story, but we are told that a former Pontiff was dissatisfied with the work and demanded it be redone.” She winked. “Who knows?”
The guide cleared his throat pointedly from behind me, and I rejoined the elderly couple, chastened.
By the time we came to the end of the tapestry—and his lecture—we had reached the altar to the One-Eyed God,positioned as if offering itself as a conclusion to the story. A burgundy rug carpeted the stone floor here, so thick that it rendered my footsteps silent as I approached, and the altar itself was also stone—a great rough slab, not carved or shaped at all, with an elaborate altar cloth draped over it. The same motifs repeated over and over on the altar cloth—the lock of hair, the tooth, the outspread hand, the skull, and that lidless, lashless eye that had been staring at me since I arrived in Quell.
