Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  “No, sir.”

  “And what is in this book?”

  “He said I should read it. I make some sense of the letters, but I don’t know the words.—Can you read it, sir?”

  Trapper became trapped—in an earnestness, an expectation he had never met in anyone.

  “A few words.” He by no means could do even that. “Surely Emuin knows more.—Perhaps he would teach you—if you asked.”

  “I hope so, sir.”

  “What did Emuin say to you regarding it?”

  “He said I shouldn’t answer the guards’ questions any longer.

  He said I should come with him, and he would see you took care of me.”

  135

  “Did he?” He cast a look toward Emuin, standing, hands folded in his sleeves and looking like the fabled cat in the creamery.

  “And why would I take care of you?”

  “I suppose because you’re master here, sir.”

  “If he said so, why, of course it must bind me, must it not, master Emuin?—Believe him, young traveler. Like Idrys, there, do you see? Idrys is a very grim fellow—a very dangerous fellow.

  But if he likes you well, and if I say so, nothing will ever come close to you in this hall that would harm you, do you follow me?”

  Tristen looked briefly askance at Idrys, and seemed not in the least reassured. “Yes, sir.”

  “I promise you.” He let go the book into Tristen’s keeping, locked his hands across his lap. “Idrys, take our guest upstairs.—Aman, thank you, and thank your captain for the astuteness at last to call Emuin. Good night, gods attend, back to your posts, all.—And, Emuin,…”

  Emuin was, ghostlike, halfway past the door he had not ordered opened. Emuin stopped still, and ebbed silently back into the audience chamber while Idrys took their guest and the guards away out the selfsame door and out of his immediate concern.

  “I take it,” Cefwyn said as the door was shutting again, leaving himself and Emuin alone, “you do read somewhat of the book in question.”

  “I say we should go riding tomorrow.”

  Not to discuss within walls, Emuin meant.

  “Not a word tonight, old master?”

  “Not on this.”

  “A caution?”

  Emuin walked from the door to the dais and stopped, arms folded. “In specific? You are in danger.”

  “From him?” He sprawled backward, legs apart, the calculated image of his student, sullen self. “Master Emuin, surely you jest.”

  “I swore, no more students. I’ll not have you acting the part.

  Gods, you affront me!”

  136

  “I affront you, good sir. Whence this midnight call, with no counsel, and now my decisions affront you? Now we have dire secrets? I am not fond of being led.” He thumped one booted ankle onto the other. “I am not fond of being hastened into conclusions, nor of having advice presented me on the trembling, crumbling verge of decision, nor of being a pawn of others’

  ambitions, which—” An uplifted finger, forestalling objection.

  “—of course the Teranthine Brotherhood does not possibly have, nor you within the brotherhood, nor Idrys toward me, nor, gods know, the captain of the night-guard, whatsoever, toward anyone. So I confess myself entirely nonplussed, master Emuin.

  Why the book, why the secrecy, why this midnight alarum out of the hearing of my more slugabed courtiers?”

  “Ah, is that why you were so prodigal of your hospitality? To confound me?—I had rather thought it a glamor on the young man.”

  It stung, that Emuin had seen that moment for what it was.

  It warned him that others might have seen him bemazed.

  And it made him ask himself what he had felt—still felt, when he thought about it: an affinity of the soul for an utter stranger, a young man linked, moreover, to a wizard of dubious repute and legendary antiquity. For a moment in that audience he had felt as though some misstep might take their visitor away from him, and felt as though, if he should by that chance let him go, forever after he would know he had lost the one friend his fate meant him to have.

  Which was foolishness. Men were, among the chattels of which the Prince of Ylesuin had usage, the most fickle and the most replaceable. Let Emuin fall utterly from favor, as sometimes, hourly, seemed imminent, and two-score applicants would rise out of the hedges by sundown seeking Emuin’s office and bearing their prince’s humors far more philosophically.

  So he told himself—hourly. But Emuin knew him, Emuin had no fear of him, and that, while a sin in a councillor (Emuin had been that in the court at Guelemara), was a virtue 137

  in his privy counselor and a necessity in a tutor—which Emuin still was, when m’lord Prince needed a severe lesson read.

  His fortunes bound to some wizard-foundling-apprentice with feckless trust writ all over his features?

  “I’ve no need of him,” he protested to Emuin.

  “Said I ever you had need of him?”

  “I have need of advice, master grayfrock, from your ascetic and lofty height, doubtless superior to fornicating mortals. What is this creature, why at my doorstep, why in the middle of my night, why bearing grammaries of unreadable ill, and why in the name of the unnameable in my tenure in Amefel? He could have gone to the Elwynim. He could well have gone to the Elwynim. He may be Elwynim, for what we know—and needs must come to my gates begging supper? Damn the luck, sir tutor, if luck has anything to do with it!”

  “There is no violence in him,” Emuin said. “Peace, Cefwyn. I do not yet know the cipher he is, but it would be well to treat him gently. I do much doubt he is the witless creature your men believe. Ynefel, he cried out, and Mauryl. And your guard in an access of wit roused their captain, who, after a candle’s time lodging this boy in the prison’s stench and squalor, became uneasy, roused the magistrate of the hour, and so quite rapidly they came to the staff, and to Idrys, who broke my sleep, and I, after much shorter interrogation, yours. But in all this time, save a disagreement with the gate-guards, no defense did he use, neither by hand nor by word.”

  “What is he?”

  “My suspicion?”

  “I will take your chanciest and rarest guess at this point.”

  “Mauryl’s Shaping.”

  Shaping was a word that belonged to dark ruins and forests…not arriving in a man’s own downstairs hall, not standing at his feet, looking at him eye to eye.

  But it did accord, he thought with a shiver, with a face without the lines that twenty-odd years of living should have 138

  set into muscle and mouth. It could become anything—as it had varied quickly between apprehensive, or bewildered—but nothing stayed there. That was the innocence that attracted him.

  And chilled his blood now.

  “A revenant.”

  “So the accounts say: the dead are the source of souls.”

  He rested his chin against his hand, feeling an unstoppable roused-from-bed chill, a quivering of his skin, as if—he knew not what he felt. It was not a terrible face. It was not a cruel face. It had been—childlike, that was his lasting impression.

  “Are such things evil, master grayrobe?”

  “Not in themselves.”

  “Why?” His arm came down hard on the arm of the throne.

  He was disturbed, not alone for the realm, and for the guest under his roof; he was—personally disturbed that the visitor had that much moved him.

  More than moved him. He would not sleep tonight. He knew he would not sleep easy for days after meeting that intimate stare—and hearing what Emuin claimed.

  “Why?” Emuin echoed his question. “Why would Mauryl call such a thing? Or why would it come here?”

  “Why both? Why either? Why to Mauryl Gestaurien and his mouse-ridden hall? What did the old man want, living there as he did, when the Elwynim would have received him? What does this thing want here? And why did you let me give it hospitality?”

  “I gave you my guess, lord Prince. Not
my certainty.”

  “A plague on your guesses, Emuin! This is, or this is not—a man. Is it a man—or not?”

  “And I say that if I knew all about that matter that Mauryl Gestaurien might know, I should be a very dangerous man myself. I merely caution. I by no means know.”

  “And counseled me take him in, allow him that cursed book, set him upstairs from my own apartments—”

  “At least,” said Emuin, “if he takes wing and flies about the halls you should have earliest warning.”

  139

  There was no abating it. There was no more Emuin knew for certain, or, at least, no more that Emuin was willing to say. It was time for sober, direct questions.

  “What do you advise?” he asked Emuin. “All recriminations aside, what do you advise me do, since you were so forward to bring him to me?”

  “Keep him here; treat him as gently born, but keep silence about him. There are things he does not need to know. There are those who do not need to know about him. Inform His Majesty of particulars if you must, but none other. None other.

  And put strict limit to what order Idrys gives. Idrys does not approve this guest.”

  “And do what with him, pray, in the event he does begin to fly?”

  Emuin looked up from under white brows in that sidelong way that cautioned, reminding an old student that the old man was no fool. “Mauryl served Ylesuin for his own reasons. And yet did he ever serve Ylesuin at all? Or why did he turn so absolutely against the Sihhë? Mauryl is the question here, still.”

  Mauryl the recluse, the incorruptible; Mauryl the murderer of his own kin; Mauryl the peacekeeper on the marches of the West.

  Accounts varied. Nothing in Mauryl had ever been predictable.

  Neither was his death, at the last, predictable, nor, one could well surmise, was Mauryl’s last gift at all predictable—if it was indeed his last and not a wellspring of further gifts of dubious benefit.

  Cefwyn let his breath hiss between his teeth. “And back to my question: if he begins to fly, or to walk through walls, what in bloody and longstanding reason shall we do with him?”

  Emuin bowed his head, ironic homage. “You are the ruler of this province now, young Cefwyn. You say all yeas and nays. I am here merely to assist.”

  “In this I purpose, I swear, to take your advice, Emuin. What does this Shaping want here?”

  140

  “I am certain I have no idea.” Emuin brushed invisible dust off his gray robes and off his hands. “Time I should attend my devotions, my lord Prince. I grow too old for such nocturnal excitements.”

  “Emuin!”

  Emuin stopped at the bottom of the steps, looked back in the attitude of a father annoyed by a favored son. “Yes, my lord Prince?”

  “You brought him here. I want a plain answer. What manner of thing is such a Shaping, what is he likely to do, and what are we to do with him?”

  “Ah, no, no, no,” Emuin said softly. “I by no means brought him. Dismiss that notion from your calculations, my Prince. He brought himself. He has no idea what he is; nor have I; and we are safest if we do well with him.”

  “Is he personally dangerous?”

  “You know as much as I, my young lord.” Emuin turned his back a second time, which no sober man in the town of Henas’amef would have dared, and ambled away, dismissing his prince as the pupil he had once been. “I am for prayers and bed.

  Patience will unravel this; force has had its chance. And yes, he is perhaps very dangerous, as Mauryl was very dangerous. Win his love, Cefwyn. That is, in binding dangerous things, always wisest.”

  “Emuin.”

  The door closed. Cefwyn swore, stamped down the steps and stalked out the echoing door through the confusion of abandoned men-at-arms, who gave way in prudent haste before his anger.

  He was well up the stairs to his west wing apartment before he realized that, in the disarray of the men-at-arms’ general instructions and posting, the guards below had not followed, Idrys was on the uppermost floor with the prisoner, and he himself was unguarded. No prince of Ylesuin walked alone or slept without steel at his threshold.

  “Kerdin,” he hailed the captain below. “Attend me. Now.”

  And as the man scrambled to gather up a force of guard 141

  and overtake him, he turned and stamped his way up to his floor, his hall, his rooms, where, with a clatter and martial thump, an abundance of guards changed outside his foyer. He stormed through the two sets of foyer doors, seeking the doors of his bedchamber, where a rumpled bed and a lingering musk recalled the twins.

  He slammed the last doors, seeking unachievable privacy. The musk smelled as fetid as the prison-stench. He took off his cloak and his boots, stripped the bed, flung sheets this way and that in a fit of incoherent temper, and cast himself down on the bare mattress on his back, still fully clothed.

  The candle was all but spent. It flared brightly for a time, then dimmed in fitful spits and spurts. Cefwyn lay with his hands locked behind his head and his eyes fixed on the painted ceiling, his heart still beating for combat, not sleep.

  He could not rest with the like of that creature on the floor above him.

  Wizardry. Summonings. Shapings. Unreadable grammaries.

  Every village had its sorcerous pretender here in Amefel, who by sham and sleight of hand and an occasional—perhaps even credible—cattle-curse or -healing, maintained an Amefin tradition of pot-wizards and generally harmless simples-sellers to which the established Bryalt faith turned a blind eye. Poisonings by such practitioners were generally accidental, the occasional curse or healing was inevitably undocumented, the tin and silver amulets were far too numerously displayed in windows and scratched on sheep-bells to credit for great threat to public decency or the common weal.

  But greater magics, Old Kingdom wizardry—the Marhanen had rid the land of that and slammed the lid on that box of terrors once and finally, in the fall of the Sihhë, in the fall of Althalen.

  That his own house, the Marhanens, had used Mauryl’s help once to gain the throne—well, that debt of his family lay far in the past, two long generations before his own, as happened, and in the living memory, so far as he knew, only of Mauryl Gestaurien, Emuin, and the Duke of Lanfarnesse, 142

  who was stretching the point; besides, in the countryside, a handful of gaffers grown fewer and more incredible as the years rolled by. Wizard…well, yes, Emuin himself could be accounted as such, and of the Old Magic; but Emuin had renounced wizardry and taken the gray robe of holy orders.

  And as for Mauryl Gestaurien, arguably the greatest wizard alive, Mauryl had retired from the world to raise cabbages or, gods save them, wayward ghosts, once the old Sihhë hold at Althalen stood in ruins. Ynefel had been for hundreds of years the haunt of owls and mice, nothing more, its dreadful walls a subject of rumor and legend along the border. Mauryl had never come to Amefel’s court, nor the King’s court in Guelemara, not even to renew his oath to the Marhanen Kings; and one had hardly, except for the Olmern rivermen, spared a thought for the old man’s doings.

  Yet, more worrisome than the amulets and the sheep-bells, the countryfolk of Amefel burned straw men at harvest, reminder of other, bloodier customs; and despite the ban on wizardry in Marhanen lands, the Sihhë star still appeared in fresh paint on rocks out in the Amefin countryside.

  And the old silver and copper coinage that bore that mark turned up worn as amulets about Amefin necks despite the threat of the Marhanen King’s law and the ban of Quinalt priests. Such charms the countryfolk sold in open market even here in Henas’amef, as well as other, more dreadful charms, claimed to be bones of the offered dead.

  There might well be, in the remote and folded hills of Amefel, a few places remaining where the Nineteen were worshiped openly: a Guelen patrol not a moon ago had found in the ancient shrine at An’s-ford a saucer of something noxious, red, and only slightly dried. Horses and stout ropes had sufficed to pull the old stones apart and scatter them, which would, one hop
ed, discourage a continued observance at that site, but it had, a reminder how things always stood in Amefel, needed Guelen guardsmen to perform the dismantlement. The Amefin, even those who served to guard the gates at Henas’amef, had refused to aid in it.

  143

  Cefwyn tossed on his bed, cursed the whole benighted province, and wished the visitation instead on Efanor his brother, who sat comfortably in the far more entertaining court in Llymaryn (father’s dearly beloved son, Cefwyn thought bitterly) and who needed not endure this provincial exile, this plagued, wizardous frontier with assassins lurking in the streets and poison likely in the wine.

  Wine offered by smiling lords and ladies of the Amefin court at Henas’amef, of course, who sat across the table from him on state occasions and heartily wished it might be softer-handed Efanor, just Efanor, faraway Efanor, who would inherit the Marhanen throne.

  Or wishing they might sup instead with the hostile land of Elwynor across the river, which once, along with Amefel and much of the rest of Ylesuin, had been under Sihhë rule. Nine bleached skulls adorning the Zeide’s South Gate (which had gained from them a grim new name) and twelve of his own Guelen guardsmen dead preventing them: that was the Elwynim contribution to his peace of mind.

  Mauryl Gestaurien had occupied the land between the new and the old and occupied a loyalty between the new and the old—servant, some said, to the first Sihhë lord who had overthrown Galasien; uneasy and absent servant to the Marhanen, who had overthrown the last Sihhë king.

  And Mauryl dead—one could only believe, from the young man’s account—dead. At least immured.

  What could kill such a man, in such a dire and unnatural way?

  If one believed the youth, who seemed as sincere about his account as he knew how to be, the report that wizardry had overwhelmed Mauryl Gestaurien was more than ominous, and suggestive that the old business at Althalen was perhaps still simmering, and that wizardry which few living men had seen was not simply tales of peasant folk and riddling tutors. Emuin himself, one supposed, as young as a student of Mauryl could possibly be, had seen Althalen fall, and Mauryl had been even then no young man, if he were only the last of 144