Fortress in the Eye of Time

by C. J. Cherryh

  his line, and not far, far older, as the peasants claimed—as Emuin hinted sometimes to believe. Mauryl had not been Sihhë himself, but a native of lost Galasien, last of its fabled builders—so rumor said.

  Rumor said Mauryl had served the Sihhë from the witchlord Barrakkêth to their fall in the death of Elfwyn—deserting them for crimes only wizards understood.

  Wizards like Emuin, who would not speak of it, and who, legend now held, had entered holy orders soon after the dreadful night.

  Which was not true. Even he could give the lie to that: Emuin had been quietly active in his art and at court in Guelessar for ten years of his own young life, and had taken to the gray habit and religious retreat only lately…but so readily the Amefin took rumor and legend-making to their hearts that the years between events, most of which had transpired in the very midst of Amefel, mattered nothing to the bards: it fit their expectations, that was all that mattered. If the truth did not fit, why,—cast it out.

  As gods knew they would take this truth with no small stir.

  Mauryl dead. And this, this vacant-eyed youth come in his place…one could hear the rumors starting. One could hear the gate-guards gossip to their Amefin cohorts, and the lower town guards to the baker and the butcher, and them to the miller and the pigherds, and from there, gods knew, over the fields to the villages, to the hills, to the Elwynim across the river and the Olmern who supplied the old tower with flour, and back again.

  By the time it had made three trips, Mauryl would have perished in fire and sorceries. Mauryl would have cast himself in stone.

  Mauryl would have set a curse on the precinct of the tower to entrap any fool who ventured there, Mauryl would have raised cohorts of the dead—

  Mauryl would have sent this young man—

  For what? For what purpose, in the gods’ good name, did Mauryl send this innocent-seeming creature, and to him? To him, when all Mauryl’s legendary interventions had been to the ruin of kings Mauryl served?

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  The candle began to drown and sputter in its own wax, the ceiling to dim at the corners. Cefwyn rolled aside and rescued the flame, tipped the wax out, let the candle flare and the wax puddle and dry on the marble tabletop. He did not trust his reason in the dark, and sleep, as he had foreknown, was entirely eluding him.

  In the small, secret shrine contained within the Bryaltine fane, Emuin sat on a low bench, hands locked upon each other, and the sweat stood on his face.

  His thoughts strayed persistently from the meditations he attempted and other thoughts crept in like hunting wolves, in a darkness that pressed upon the light of the candles. It was a nook of solid stone, all about it thick stone containing other nooks dedicated to other gods, a place permeated with diverse beliefs. It was isolate, it was silent, it was surrounded by other prayers that should have made him immune to fear or to sorcerous intrusion. He clenched his hands and muttered the ancient ritual aloud, trying to prevent the wit-wandering that was suddenly so dangerous, so permissive of fatal indiscretion.

  Mauryl, Mauryl, Mauryl, his thoughts ran, with more grief than he had ever remotely thought he would feel for the old reprobate; and for a moment despite the candles blazing at arm’s length on the altar in front of his face the darkness in the shrine felt almost complete. Such was the distress in his soul.

  I am the last of us, he thought, trying to foresee the personal, moral import of Mauryl’s passing; and in doing that, met another realization, inevitably that other name: Hasufin.

  The sweat broke and trickled down his temples, and his hand moved to the Teranthine sigil at his breast, silver that—whether chill, whether hot—seemed to burn his hands. He opened his eyes on the candles he had lit and set in a pattern about this private shrine, a pattern itself of obscure significance even in Amefel, whose ancestral roots went deep. There 146

  were thirty-eight candles that burned hot and bright, that drowned in light the memory of murder, that drowned in their heavy scent of incensed wax the remembered stink of blood.

  But the years ran like water. They trickled through the fingers when a young man shut his fist, and then he was old, and men were knocking at his door at night and showing him a young man whose mere existence told him the extreme, the consummate skill which Mauryl had reached—a knowledge which no wizard before him had attained, not counting Hasufin’s abomination at Althalen. Mauryl had done this—created this—Summoned this.

  Without telling him what he planned. Without asking help.

  But did Mauryl Gestaurien ever ask help of him?

  Only once.

  Damn him! Emuin thought, and caught a breath and smothered his anger in prudent, clammy-handed terror. Even yet, he felt fear of the old man’s cruel rages. Fear of the old man’s skill. Fear of the old man’s deep and mazelike secrecies about his past, his present, his ambitions.

  Fear…counting the state of young Tristen’s wits, or lack of them. Fear of his innocence, his unwise trust. Fear that Mauryl might have fallen short of his ultimate, perhaps killing effort, to Shape this creature, then, and last and cruelly cynical act, passed the flawed gift to him.

  Damn him twice.

  Mauryl gone from the world. It was thoroughly incredible to him.

  It must be done, Mauryl had whispered that night, three generations ago, as men reckoned years. Destroy his body. Trap him where he wanders. Leave him stranded forever. It’s our only chance against him.

  Gods, how had he listened to Mauryl? How had he broken through the spells that ringed that chamber and that sleeping child, and carrying silvered steel, which should have blasted the hand that wielded it?

  I will hold him a time elsewhere, Mauryl had said. Only be swift,—and do not flinch. He is not the child he seems. He is 147

  not a child, mark me. Not for nine hundred years. Hasufin is the spirit’s name. The child died—fourteen years ago. At its birth.

  The body had had so much blood, so much blood. He had never imagined that blood would strike the walls, his robe, his face—he had never imagined the feeling of it drying on his skin when for the entire night of fire and murder he was waiting for Mauryl to rescue him from the collapsing wards, an entire night not knowing whether that eldritch soul was indeed banished or loosed within the chamber with him.

  Go, get you away, Mauryl had said to him, after. Man of doubts, get you away from this business. Doubt elsewhere.

  Doubt for those with too much confidence. You will never want for usefulness.

  That spirit had, Mauryl swore, gone back to a very ancient grave, dispelled, dispersed—discomfited, but not, it had become very clear, destroyed. Mauryl had taken the tower of lost souls and Sihhë magics, had held the line for decades against that baneful, outraged soul.

  It had seemed it would hold forever. That no more would ever be required—of him, at least. Mauryl had not entrusted the dreadful tower to him, nor offered to. Mauryl had not called him to further study. After his obedience, after his survival where all others perished, Mauryl had harshly dismissed him, bidden him live his life in modest quiet afterward and to barrier his soul by whatever means he could.

  I shall not call you, Mauryl had said. An end of us. I take no more students. An end of folly, for this generation.

  For this generation. For this generation and two more. He had held the truth from two Marhanen kings—and taught their heir…at once more and less than he wished.

  Emuin thrust himself to his feet, limping in the aches and stiffness of old age he had, for a dozen heartbeats and in the grip of potent memory, forgotten. He wiped a gnarled hand across his lips, cast his thoughts this way and that from the path his devotions and his conscience directed as his personal salvation.

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  I cannot manage this, he thought, refusing this new thing as he had tried to refuse new things the night Althalen fell. Mauryl had chided him for his trepidations. Called him coward. And relied on him because Mauryl had no one else fool enough—wizard enough—to attempt that warded chamber whi
le Mauryl fought by less physical means.

  And now that Mauryl had attempted this Shaping without advising him and without seeking help from him—now that Mauryl was dead and his work came down to a feckless, hapless youth, at risk and unguarded,— now did Mauryl have the audacity to send the unformed and vulnerable issue of his folly to him to guard?

  Where was Emuin the coward in that reckoning? Where was the contemptuous advice to defend his own soul and renounce wizardry in favor of pious self-defense?

  Save himself for this moment? Was that Mauryl’s reasoning?

  Unnoticed, out of the fray, moldering his youth and his time away in self-limiting meditations, preventing himself from what, unchecked, he might have been, losing the years he might have added to his life—all the while waiting for Mauryl’s hour of decision?

  And Mauryl never telling him?

  He felt for the door and leaned there in the fresher air, slowly taking his breath. There was a pain in his chest that came with passions and exertions. It came more frequently in this last year.

  Mortality, he thought. He might well have lived a century longer, might even have reached Mauryl’s fabled years, had he not renounced his arts in favor of—what? A fabled but insubstantial immortality—a priest’s immortality—which priests could not in concrete terms describe, could not produce, could not remotely prove? His outrage for the waste of his life frightened him. His doubt made mockery of all his deliberate, studied years of abnegation. His doubt raised up anger, and impulse to action, and separated him from all the choices he had ever made.

  Still turning away? he could hear Mauryl ask him. Still running, boy?

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  Still the hand on the latch, boy, and will not open the door?

  But all wizardry since that night had held peril for him such as he could not bear. He did not wish to contemplate it, knowing he had bathed himself in blood, betrayed a trust, crossed thresholds each one of which could lead him to darker and angrier magic than he wanted to contemplate—to sorcery and damnation indeed.

  His weakness was his own strength. His weakness was his own knowledge. It was fear of both which had led him to the Teranthines—seeking tamer certainties.

  And he had found believers who linked their hopes to milder things. Oh, indeed, believers. Unquestioning believers who thought they questioned everything, unhearing believers who heard nothing that in the least degree questioned the tenets of their sacred quest toward a salvation they predetermined to exist.

  What denied that,—why, shut it out. What threatened that, never was; what threatened that, never had existed. What threatened their confidence had no validity at all for the true and determined believers.

  And came this,—Mauryl’s evidence of an access to souls departed, a power the Teranthines denied existed?

  Came this,—calling up the nightmare that was Althalen, the ruin of the last of the Old that had flickered on this side of Len-ualim, and the death of the one wizardling among Mauryl’s students who might have been the greatest of them…who might, if he had lived, if one could believe the promises that still came whispering in one’s dreams, have restored lost Galasien and undone the spells of the Sihhë?

  Hasufin would have become, so far as the Teranthines remotely imagined such power, a god.

  But for doubt, they—who, through Hasufin, might have inherited the Old Magic—had murdered Mauryl’s old student and stranded him in a second death: at least that was the belief Mauryl had urged upon them. A second death—because Hasufin was not the fair, soft-spoken child he seemed to be, a mere fourteen years in the world, and was by no means the Sihhë

  king’s young brother. They had died, all the

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  wizards at Althalen, all but himself and Mauryl, in that desperate assault on Hasufin’s wizardry, while the Marhanens ran through the halls with fire and sword. The wizards had all perished, except himself, except Mauryl, who had parted from him thereafter and called him coward.

  Him—coward. He still trembled with the indignity of it.

  Ask—what this Shaping was. Ask about its innocence, this wayfarer with Mauryl’s stamp and Mauryl’s seal all over him—in a book on which he felt Mauryl’s touch.

  He felt a clammy chill despite the heat of the candles. He turned from the door and fought down the smothering panic that urged him to flee all involvement, panic that urged him to seek retreat at the shrine at Anwyfar among the pious, the modest Teranthines, and to take refuge in the semblance, at least, of godly and human prayers.

  Why? the essential question pressed upon him. Because Mauryl knew he was dying?

  Because somehow, by some means, what they had trapped and banished had found a Place to enter again that they who bound him had not thought of?

  Temptation offered itself: there were ways to find those answers. He could even yet set himself mind-journeying; that art did not leave a wizard, once practiced. It seemed reasonable, even sanely necessary, to look however briefly at Ynefel, where none of Cefwyn’s patrols dared go, to confirm or deny human agency in this…apparent wakening of an old, old threat.

  It was appallingly easy to make that slight departure, that drifting apart from here…they had gone far beyond illusioning, the brotherhood at old Althalen. He had not been the least of Mauryl’s students, only—for a time, only for a time, evidently, after that dread and bloody night—the last.

  Out and out he went faring, through gray-white space.

  And drew back again, shivering, an impression of blinding light yet lingering in his mind, a glimpse of something too well remembered—too tempting—that final reach for power, first, to govern those who had no power, and then to contend 151

  with each other for more power, the greater against the lesser, for the ambition of gods…

  He carried the Teranthine circle to his lips, clasped it in his two hands, warming it with his breath, attempting again the peace of meditation. His mind was too powerful for easy diversion into ritual inanity, endless repetition of prayers. That was the reason he had sought the once-obscure Teranthines—not a confidence in their pantheon, which was in major points of belief the same as the Quinalt’s—but rather interest in the intricate, interwoven and demanding patterns of their approach to meditation, which sought, in their most convolute supplications, all gods, lest any be neglected.

  For one who did not, in any case, believe in the new gods the Guelenfolk had brought to the land, it had been very attractive.

  For one who did not wholly desert the gods of his youth and his art—it had given comfort and stability in a world he perceived as entirely conditional.

  Now, considering what he knew and what he feared of Mauryl’s workings, he found his meditations at once terrifying—and liberating, to wizardly powers the Teranthines did not remotely guess.

  He had continually, in his devotions, approached the Old, the Nineteen, seeking answers to questions which would have horrified even the all-forgiving Teranthines: it was in consideration of their sensibilities that he had never explained to them that the Sihhë icon for which he had asked—and bought—their secret indulgence, for its presence in a Bryaltine shrine…was not mere honor to an ideal. That this particular form of the Sihhë

  star was older than the Sihhë, who had needed no gods—he had not mentioned that. He never murmured Old names aloud in his devotions. He applied himself to intricate and many-sided rituals the origin of which the eastern-born Teranthines, jackdaws of all religion, had themselves appropriated from the western-bred Amefin. Sometimes he provided them innovations of meditative practice that were not innovation at all, with method-ology and exercises of focus that, from his writings, slipped into orthodox Teranthine

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  practice across all Ylesuin. The Bryaltines were exclusively Amefin, heretic to the Quinalt eye, and practiced dangerous meditations and collected gods like talismans because they feared to lose anything. The Teranthines, meditative and truly less interested in proselytizing, gave him respectability in
the royal court and a comfortable life: they had the Marhanens’ patronage, and they let an intelligent man think. He had respect within the Brotherhood: the Teranthine ritual constantly evolved and grew, now with scattered pieces of Galasite belief set into it—his own.

  He should, he thought, feel profoundly guilty for those inclusions, for the Teranthines were innocents born of the new age and he was not; but he had until now found his appropriations from the Galasite practices small matters, nostalgic for him, and unlikely to do the Order harm or bring it into conflict with the Quinalt—he was very circumspect, and argued with a jurist’s knowledge of the Quinaltine belief. And indeed, he had cherished his small deviations as the last connection of the world with the Old, to bequeath something of their practice to safeguard the new, a silent and precautionary gift, like this shrine, that his donative had established in the face of changes and persecutions.

  The candles here never ceased, through all the years, day or night, in his absence. It kept the light of wizardry burning—lit-erally—in this ancient land: it strengthened by its little degree the wards and barriers wizardry had never abandoned, not through all the Sihhë reign, not through the Marhanen ascendancy: and the age of those reigns together was, almost precisely, a thousand years.

  His gnarled hands clenched. So easy it was, if he willed, to fall into the old thoughts, the way of wizardly power so easy to a man once practiced. Hasufin had been very old, very evil, Mauryl’s student once in Galasien, who had aimed at power nine centuries ago and come back from the grave to have it: it was still necessary to believe what Mauryl had told them, and not that they, in the circle of Mauryl’s disciples, might conceiv-ably have destroyed a wizard who could have restored the art to its former, enlightened glory—and given all the world to them.