Fortress of Eagles

by C. J. Cherryh

  But from above another source of light spread along the ceiling, and that proved to be a torch in the hallway, 334 / C. J. CHERRYH

  where three men of the viceroy’s Guelen Guard besieged the door of the Aswydds’ old apartment.

  “Your Grace,” their sergeant said, recognizing him, “we’ve sent for axes.”

  “No, sir. By no means.” He was appalled. They were beautiful doors, carved and very heavy. “Not yet.—Have you spoken with the earl? And has he answered at all?”

  “His servants answer, your lordship, and won’t open for our asking.”

  That was no surprise. He beckoned the young thane forward, among the viceroy’s guard and his own. Crissand rapped uncertainly at the door.

  “Father? Father? Do you hear me? Answer.” Crissand rapped harder. “Father? I need your advice, sir. Please.”

  There was no response.

  Uwen rapped the door with his sword hilt, no gentle tap.

  “You mayn’t stay there, your lordship. Open. Your son is asking. Soon it may be others wi’ less goodwill.”

  There was no sound at all within.

  “This is His Grace Tristen of Ynefel asking!” Uwen shouted this time. “His Grace has brought your son in his safekeepin’, and your son is asking ye kindly to open an’ surrender the king’s messenger, your lordship, which would be very wise to do, before His Grace’s patience runs out, an’ afore we spoil these fine doors. Ye come out, now!”

  There was still no answer, but more, no sound within the apartment.

  “Could they have gotten out beforehand?” Uwen asked.

  “Not by us,” the viceroy’s men said.

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  Tristen knew the place. The same as most rooms of the Zeide, its windows had only a small vent, and if the earl and his men damaged them to get out that way, they were on the second floor above pavings and the courtyards occupied by king’s men.

  It was possible that they had escaped down the stairs into the dark before the fighting, but if that were the case, the earl and his company might be lying among the dead downstairs, or they might be anywhere in the upper floors.

  Most urgently, there was the king’s messenger to account for.

  Uwen thumped the door with his gloved fist, a frown on his face. “Now’s certainly a finer time to come out than tomorrow, your lordship, and it won’t get better. His Grace is patient, now. And your son is anxious for ye, wi’ increasin’ good cause.”

  Still there was no answer.

  “Open the door,” Tristen said. The question of Lord Edwyll’s fate had become more important than the fine doors, and one of the viceroy’s men had by now brought up an axe from a martial display down the hall.

  “Father!” Crissand shouted out loudly, leaning against the door. “Will you not answer your son?”

  There was still no response. Tristen gave the signal and the garrison soldier plied the axe, wonderful dark carving reduced to chips about the lock, and with a widening gap between the latch and the frame.

  It was wrong, Tristen was increasingly convinced, remembering Lady Orien, who with her sister had had these rooms after her brother. It was all wrong. They would find nothing friendly in this room. And if not friendly, they had best not have the young thane loose in their midst.

  336 / C. J. CHERRYH

  “Sergeant,” he said to the viceroy’s man in charge, and quietly, as the blows continued and the chips flew, “move the young lord away.”

  “No,” Crissand said, but the sergeant’s men laid hands on him, and moved him firmly back.

  In that same moment the axe had cleared enough wood from the edge for a sword to lift the bolt, and the soldiers shouldered in an armored rush into a dim, narrow foyer leading to a well-lit room.

  Men lay all about that room, dead, down to the man tied with ropes to a chair, near the tall, green-draped windows.

  Tristen stood still, surrounded by the green-velvet drapery and the rich bronze-and-gold furnishings of Lady Orien’s residence…and the ill feeling in the room was stifling. He had not tried the gray space, until now—and it was cold, and ominous.

  He let down his shield, let it stand against the side of a chair, but he did not let down his defense against the insubstantial hazards he felt.

  There began to be an argument outside, passionate and suddenly loud. “No, Your Honor!” someone said, and Crissand reached the foyer in his struggle, stopped as Lusin allowed him no further progress.

  “Where is my father?” Crissand cried.

  “Dead,” Tristen said. “Dead, I fear, every one of them.—Let him go.”

  Lusin released him, and in a sudden rush Crissand went through the apartment searching. They followed as far as the bedroom that had been Lady Orien’s, and there they found Crissand on his knees by the bed, where an old man lay atop the bedclothes, fully clothed, but composed, unlike the others.

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  “The earl died first,” one of the viceroy’s Guelens surmised.

  “An’ they followed.”

  “This ain’t a young man to loose in the town tonight,” Uwen said, moving close to Tristen’s side, speaking to him with his back to the young man and quietly. “I ask ye, m’lord, send the lad wi’ these lads down to the guardroom an’ put a watch on him, or he’ll do someone hurt, hisself an’ his own men like as any.”

  He knew the guardroom and abhorred the thought. But he regarded Uwen’s advice when he regarded no other, and the feeling in the air was disquieting, unsettling to reason.

  “Take him to the guardroom,” Tristen said. “For your own safety, sir. I ask you go with them.”

  Crissand made no resistance being gathered up in the hands of the guards, but caught Tristen’s eye with a white, shocked stare as he passed, as if asking for what reasonable cause all this had happened…as Tristen asked himself the same question.

  He had attempted kindness and charity; and disregarded the advice of knowledgeable men, and all this was the issue of it: the king’s messenger, the earl, his servants, all dead, young Crissand stricken with a bitter, unsettling grief, and the harm that he had felt likely in all this journey was real. The earl was dead on the green-velvet coverlet of the bed. The man in the chair in the first room was the king’s messenger, bound to that chair, dead by what cause was not evident. The earl’s men were all dead, five of them, scattered about the place, three near the heavy sideboard.

  “Ain’t no mark,” Uwen said, pushing a dead man with his foot. “Poison, I’d guess.” Uwen’s guess was plainly practical, while the gray space roiled with unease.

  338 / C. J. CHERRYH

  Then Lusin lifted a cup from among two cups and a pitcher on the table, and turned it sideways.

  A red drop spilled out.

  “Drunk from,” Lusin said.

  There were half a dozen cups in all, some on small tables about the room.

  “All these, used,” Tawwys said, examining another near where he stood. “M’lord, all drunk from.”

  Servants such as these seemed to be did not drink with their lord on any ordinary occasion. And the king’s messenger as well…had he drunk wine, bound to a chair, with the fighting raging downstairs?

  Folly. Outright folly, and villainy. The other earls had hung back to know the issue of it—then disavowed Edwyll altogether.

  Perhaps he had committed himself to rebellion even before he had ever intercepted the king’s message…but coincidence still smelled of wizardry at the least.

  And the wine service…and the death of a messenger, whose person was sacrosanct, even between warring factions…

  “Lady Orien’s cups,” he said aloud, and knew it was not alone Lady Orien’s cups…but Lady Orien’s wards: the Zeide servants had sealed the place after Orien’s banishment, after the king returned from Lewenbrook. The rooms had been two months unopened, until the earl moved in.

  No few of the men blessed themselves, Uwen halfway so, and then Uwen abandoned the gesture
, as Uwen at last renounced such protections in despair.

  “Lady Orien’s wine,” Uwen said. “Well, her lady-ship hardly had time to pack, did she?”

  Not packed, indeed. All about them was the opulence of the Aswydds, the dark green velvet, the brazen FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 339

  dragons that upheld massive candles, the dragon-legged tables and the eagles that, paired wings almost touching, overshadowed even the velvet-covered bed in the other room, where the earl lay.

  The messenger sat bound to his ornately carved chair, alone incapable of drinking.

  But there was wine stain on the man’s blond beard and on the Marhanen scarlet of his tunic, details apparent, Tristen found, once one walked over to have a closer look. The earl’s servants, their lord dead of poison, the citadel falling, had all drunk from the cups and forced the messenger to drink, too, men not bound by the understandings of earls and dukes. Anger was in this room; uncleansed, untenanted, haunted by Aswydd hate, and the earl the remote kin of the Aswydds: he had been drawn in, drawn down, if he had had the smallest portion of the Aswydd gift. Tristen felt the tug of it himself, and dismissed it, with force.

  Then he could draw a whole breath.

  “Take them wherever they take the dead,” he said. “Do whatever you judge fit, Uwen.”

  “Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said. And then a hesitation. “There’s some as would say burn the rebels’ bodies. Ye want that, m’lord, or buryin’ ’em, like honest men?”

  “Do what should be done,” he said again, at the moment lost as to what that was, or what he had the power to do to mend his arrival here. At the moment he ceded all power of decision to Uwen.

  Burials. Burning. Neither destroyed the shadows, and Althalen, where all had burned, was most haunted of all. He only clung to the necessity of moderation in himself. Wide, inconsiderate action, Emuin as well as Mauryl had informed him, led to bruises. And worse.

  Worst of all, he cast his own responsibility on Uwen, 340 / C. J. CHERRYH

  who could not see into the danger in this place—or know the danger of a strong spirit given Place on the earth.

  “Bury them,” he decided for himself. “The earl, the servants, all the men who died. Let priests say words, Uwen, whatever they like.”

  He had heard running steps in the hall, and heard them approaching the door. Men had lately been in haste, and might still be. He took no alarm even as a breathless man of the Dragons pushed his way past objecting guards; but the expression, the pallor, the distress in the man foretold worse yet.

  “Your Grace.” The man was one of Anwyll’s men, but both Uwen and Lusin held him from coming closer in his agitation.

  “The captain’s respects—the lord viceroy is killing the prisoners.”

  Lightning might have struck. It was like that, throwing into clarity all a dark landscape of Amefin resentments, Guelen angers, potent as the ill that gathered in this room.

  “Where?” was his first conscious thought, and the man began to say, “The South Court.”

  Tristen pushed the man, Lusin, all his guards, aside.

  “M’lord!” he heard Uwen call out, heard Uwen shout orders to some men to stay, some to come with them. Tristen gathered up his shield as he went out into the hall, and stayed for nothing else. He began to run, down the hall, down the stairs, and his men chased him with thumping of shields and the rattle of armor and weapons, down to the vacant center hall and the partially restored candlelight.

  Beyond the open doors, torchlight shone in the South Court.

  He ran out onto the landing, saw a confused straggle of guards, Dragons, standing at the bottom, not opposing them as he came down the steps

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  with his men, rather looking for orders, while a dark wall of red-coated men clustered near torchlight in the center of the yard and screams of threat and dying echoed off the walls beyond.

  Death, death above, and death here below…death proceeding methodically, with the rise and fall of swords against unarmed men, death with outcries of anger and fear, death in a mass of men engaged in killing each other at the last curtain wall.

  “Shields!” Tristen called out, and, without mercy: “Swords!”

  as they came up on that dark knot of shadows, Guelen Guard penning Amefin against the corner and cutting them down. A few Amefin had swords. Only a few.

  “Dragon Guard!” Uwen roared out in a voice that echoed off the walls. “Guelens! Stand aside! Stand back! Come to order, here! Way for His Grace, damn ye! Down weapons!”

  Men turned stark-faced from the killing, men drew back at a sergeant’s profane voice, except the last handful, gone mad with slaughter, and them Tristen hit with both shield and sword, battering them aside. In the distance Anwyll shouted,

  “Pull back, pull back for a captain of the Guard!” but Tristen thought only of breaking through the ranks in front of him, overwhelming anyone who resisted him, until the killing stopped.

  “Way for His Grace!” Uwen shouted, and at last, again, Anwyll’s voice near at hand. “Draw back, draw back!”

  Then other voices, many voices, the sergeants: “Stand aside, stand back there, lads!”

  Quiet descended, except the drawing of breath, the moans of the wounded.

  Tristen found himself with a strewed mass of bodies 342 / C. J. CHERRYH

  at his feet, an area fringed by armed guardsmen…them, and a small surviving knot of earl’s men in the corner of the wall: Crissand, the seven, and a handful more.

  Slaughter, plain and thorough, Guelen Guard against unarmed Amefin prisoners.

  For a moment he could only think of adding to it anyone who opposed him, and it was perilous, very perilous, for Uwen to come up beside him, but Uwen did, a shadow in a wind that blew out of the Edge of the gray place. He was there, on the very brink of death, and he was here, his hands clenched on leather and iron, his body insensible to pain, the wind in his nostrils cold and burning his chest.

  “M’lord,” Uwen said quietly, the only voice in all the world.

  “M’lord, I’m right by ye. So’s Lusin and the lads. We’re with ye.”

  “Why have they done this?” He hardly knew where he had found the words. “Why have they done this?” And the next question stooped and struck, sharp as talons. “Where is Lord Parsynan?”

  “Lord Parsynan,” the call went out and went on and on through the bloody courtyard. But it found no remedy. Life was ebbing out of the fallen, pooling on the stones, and much as he could deal death, he could not mend it. He saw shadows gathered, some new, and terrified, at the edges of the yard. He saw one hovering just above a body, and he wished it back, and it sank into the body like water into dry earth. He willed others, and was aware of living men around him, and of Uwen holding him by the arm, but what those men did, he had no idea. Wherein he could mend, he mended, but shadows flowed like smoke.

  “M’lord,” Uwen said. And more sharply, “M’lord. The lord viceroy’s captain is asking to withdraw his FORTRESS OF EAGLES / 343

  men. Ye should grant it, m’lord. It was the lord viceroy’s orders, which the Guelen Guard did, to their shame, and he ain’t to be found, the dastard.”

  He felt the bite of the cold wind, felt the aches of his body, and turned his face toward his own men, toward Lusin, and toward Gedd and Aran and Tawwys. He saw all around him the desperation and the grief of a night gone wildly amiss.

  “Your Grace.” Crissand said from close at hand, and for a moment the edges of everything were unnaturally sharp, edged with shadow. “Your Grace, they would have killed us unarmed…”

  Justice, Crissand had asked him in the East Court, before the shrines and the tombs. And now this.

  “You are free,” he said sharply. “Go where you choose.” He was as sure of both the folly and the rightness of freeing this man as he had not been of all his recent life in Guelessar. He must not countenance a rebel against the Crown. But the viceroy’s hate had done this, Guelen hate. He had no doubt at all th
e earl had had both provocation to rebel and aid in that rebellion. And he could do nothing else, on his given and now-violated word and by all that was now between them. “The wounded I shall send to you, each as he can, wherever you choose to lodge or go. I do justice, such as I can.” He expected to hear Your Grace from Anwyll, but there was not a sound from Anwyll about the law. And matters echoed into the gray space, into a roil of disturbance in that place.

  “I would go home, Your Grace,” Crissand said, “and see my mother safe in my father’s house.”

  “Give him escort,” Tristen said. And it came to him with a sinking of his heart that the lord viceroy might not have spared even the loyal earls in his slaughter. The 344 / C. J. CHERRYH

  torches, few as they were, shed little light on the courtyard, to know who was dead and living. “Help him find his dead. See him home. And find the other earls and their men.”

  “I’d get the Guelen Guard under its sergeants, m’lord,” Uwen said, close by him, “and under its captain, in good order. Let them serve sortin’ out the dead. This is a sorry hour—ain’t no coverin’ it. Let’em serve here an’ stand guard at your orders, and then send’em to barracks.”

  “Order it,” he said. “And arrest Lord Parsynan.”

  “M’lord,—”

  “Do so!”

  “Aye, m’lord.”

  He heard Uwen give the orders, heard the captains and the sergeants give orders, and looked straight before him, at the gates, shut again, gates beyond which the people of Henas’amef still wondered about their fate.

  It was not a good beginning of his rule here. He had not wished bloodshed. He saw Crissand, weary and bloody, talking to a few of his household, such as remained. He saw dead men scattered across the courtyard, unarmed men, killed by cowardly orders that had slipped past his intentions.