Fortress in the Eye of Time (16 page)

“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?”

“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
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,
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 hoped, 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.

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
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?

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
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?