Fortress in the Eye of Time (17 page)

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
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.

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 while 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?

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 Lenualim, 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
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
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 methodology and exercises of focus that, from his writings, slipped into orthodox Teranthine
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—literally—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 conceivably have destroyed a wizard who could have restored the art to its former, enlightened glory—and given all the world to them.

Refraining from power is, he thought, gazing at the eight-pointed star shining on the altar shelf, the sole virtue I have achieved in all these years. Mauryl would not have lied to us. I
believe
that. But…

Doubting is my sole defense, the only effective barrier against the unequivocal dark. I am all grays.

And the safest, wisest thing to do now is to go into retreat at Anwyfar and to have nothing to do, for good or for ill, with this thing of Mauryl's.

I shall die soon,—soon, at least, as men reckon years. I have seen to my own soul. I need not risk it in Mauryl's service. I need not fling myself into Mauryl's designs, against Mauryl's enemy, ancient—unknowable to my age.