Chapter Four #4
It turned out that finding the East Temple was easy enough, as I was already on the eastern side of the city and the Temple building was so large that I could simply look up above the crowded houses and shops, and follow its spire like a guiding star.
As I made my way through the streets, I started to notice graffiti scrawled here and there on the walls—an eye (perhaps representing the One-Eyed God?) with a line through it, and crude caricatures of what I assumed to be Temple guards and Priests in their yellow robes.
Clearly, despite it being such a pious city, Quell had some citizens who were discontent with the amount of power wielded by the Temple.
When I reached the East Temple building, I saw it was heavy and square, with little grace but an unmistakable gravitas.
Rain-damp steps led all the way to the heavy double door—the height of two men and the width of half a dozen, ornately carved with a human ribcage and spine at the center.
The spine ran the length of the door’s opening and divided the ribcage so that opening the door would crack it in half, which probably represented something holy and profound.
This design divided the door into quarters, each quarter holding a different carved image—a lock of hair, knotted and tied; a tooth; an outspread hand; a skull.
An elderly couple twittered excitedly on their way up the steps, mentioning the Tapestry. They said it with such reverence that I could hear the capital letter.
“Excuse me,” I said, touching the old woman’s arm lightly. She turned with a smile already prepared and trembling on her lips, but it turned into more of a grimace when she saw the enormous black bird on my shoulder.
“Yes, my dear?” she managed, although her eyes remained fixed on Baldbeak.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear you mentioning the tapestry? Am I in the right place?”
Her eyes brightened. “The Tapestry! Oh yes, we have come all the way from Wex to see it.”
I nodded and tried to look like someone who had heard of Wex.
“Bertram.” She elbowed her husband. “Show her the offering.”
Bertram had the folded-in smile of someone missing all their teeth. He held out the basket that hung from one spindly arm so I could see its contents—pears, I thought, and some kind of stone fruit that I didn’t recognize.
“How lovely,” I said. “I’ve heard the fruit in … in Wex is wonderful.”
This was clearly the right thing to say. They beamed.
“Are you here alone, my dear?” said the old woman. “Besides your … pet?” She sounded uncertain.
“I am,” I said. “But I would very much like to see the tapestry, although I have no offering.”
“You could share ours,” said the old woman doubtfully.
Bertram clutched his basket a little tighter, glaring at her.
I rummaged in my pack and came out with a piece of embroidery I had started and not quite finished.
It looked inadequate to me, but I thought it would be pretty enough to someone else.
“Would this do?” I said. “I don’t have any food …”
“Oh yes!” said the old woman merrily, relieved not to have to share the credit for the abundance of Wex with this stranger. She peered at Baldbeak again. “But I think your bird will have to wait outside.”
“Oh yes, of course.” I gave Baldbeak a meaningful look.
I want to come with, he said. She smells like cooking grease. I like it.
“Well, she doesn’t like you, and the Temple won’t either,” I hissed under my breath. “Please. Just find a perch. I won’t be long.”
He rattled his shoulder feathers, leaving them bristled upright like the fur of an angry cat.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
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 to them, 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 practically was the 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 no idea 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 hands covering 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.