Fortress in the Eye of Time (57 page)

“And Mauryl.”

“And Mauryl.”

“Who seems to have been a damned busy man. Why should he
care
what this Hasufin did? He was old. He was dying.”

“My lord king. He is dead. I do not know that he was dying.”

“Meaning?”

“He
lost
, m'lord. He lost to his enemy. Now
we
have Hasufin to deal with. But Mauryl was not a man to go down without revenge. We also have Tristen.”

“Revenge on whom?”

“That is the question. What did Mauryl promise the Marhanen when he stopped Hasufin the second time? To rule forever? I think not. Mauryl promised the Elwynim a King. And was it for love of them—or for some sort of balance with the Sihhë themselves? Far less did he love your grandfather, or your father, or care to leave Ynefel long enough to inquire what manner of King you would be. Was this the man they called Mauryl the Kingmaker, who, surrendering all power to the Marhanen and a regency in Elwynor, locked himself away from worldly power and said
nothing
for eighty years? Was this the action of the man who ruled behind the thrones of two kingdoms? I don't believe he went down without arranging something to settle accounts.”

There was no love wasted between Emuin and Mauryl. He saw that, too. And possibly it colored all Emuin said.

“He could have sent a plague on my grandfather. None of us would have cared. He sent us a gentle and reasonable young man.”

“So I apprehended. Mauryl took no oath to your father, neither of homage nor even of fealty. Little it would have mattered to him.”

“Tristen has. He swore to defend me. Knowledgeably. He did swear, Emuin.”

“I am aware. Perhaps that is the test Mauryl set you: to deal with young Barrakkêth.”

“Like lessons? Like
that?
Guess the reason? Guess the purpose?”

“My old student does remember.”

“Damned right I remember, old master. But is that all your theory?”

“It's my most hopeful one. And direst magic may have an escape, however improbable. Therefore I said, Win his love. We wizards are cranky, impatient sorts. We live long—unless we abandon our practice—and we grow damned impatient with fools. That is the worst thing about living long. One sees so many mistakes repeated, over and over and over. It makes one a little mad and desperately angry. Mauryl—was a master wizard. A Man, I have always thought, in the sense that he was not Sihhë himself. But one never knew his loyalties.”

“One never knew,” Idrys echoed him. “And what master do you serve? ‘Win his love, m'lord Prince.' ‘Win his good will'—all the while telling us
nothing
of his nature. It is damned
late
, sir priest, to come to us with your advice!”

“Now you understand me. Not then. Now you've dealt with him. I see fear, sir, that may still destroy you; but I see respect for what is by no means like yourself. You are dealing with your greatest enemy. His good will is
still
your best hope.”

“I
said
he was a wizard,” Idrys muttered, and paced away again, rubbing the back of his neck.

“He is not a wizard,” Emuin muttered under his breath.

“This
man
,” Cefwyn said, “whatever he is, this man you advised me to win, this friend, this sworn friend of mine, is nothing evil—a plague on your suspicious, Emuin. I do not believe he is my enemy. I refuse to believe it.”

“That might be best,” Emuin said. “All along, that might be best.”

“Don't read me such lessons! You think something else, sir. Out with it.”

“That wizardry at its highest is not cattle-curses. That what the Sihhë
are
, wizards struggle to be. Hasufin was not a greater wizard than Mauryl. But prone to cheat. Too willing to work in the physical realm, that was what Mauryl said. An assassination here, a tweak of wizardry there—Mauryl despised him. He'd brought Hasufin very far along before Hasufin's nature became clear to him, is what I very much suspect. Wizardry requires a man search himself very deeply and face all his most secret faults—lest they work the spells, that was what Mauryl used to say: that there comes a point when one realizes one has power, and the faults work the wizard as the wizard works the spells.”

“So with kings,” Cefwyn said, feeling they had wandered far from the subject.

“So with Tristen, too. This is the trap Mauryl set you and me and the Elwynim all in one.”

“You've lost me.”

“To live life
without
him, my lord, or to bring back the reign of magic over the world of Men by our own choice. The Quinalt, with its holy abhorrence of wizardry, has left us all but unarmed against that boy's lightest wish, and hope to the powerless gods we find better help. Mauryl has left me the last, the
last
teacher of the higher wizardry that stands any chance of denying that young man what he wishes.”

“To all I know,” Cefwyn said, feeling a most unaccustomed and angry moisture in his eyes, “what Tristen most wishes is my happiness. What are we saying? Tristen named us an enemy! And yet we're speaking of
Tristen
as the danger!”

“All the same,” Idrys said, “all the same, I hear what Emuin is saying, my lord King. And it disturbs me. What both of you say—disturbs me profoundly.”

He cast a frowning look at Idrys, and knew that there was yet another danger that Emuin did not reckon of: Idrys' loyalty, and Idrys' perception. Idrys had taken oaths of homage to him. Of fealty to him. But in the challenge to the Marhanen that those oaths had never anticipated, he found himself without sure knowledge what Idrys' attachment was:
to him, as King; to the realm; to whatever man Idrys served—or to his own unexpressed sense of honor. Idrys measured things by some scheme that had never yet diverged from his personal welfare.

He had, in that light, to ask himself what that welfare was, or might become, and what Tristen's was, or might become.

Tristen was now at Althalen, Emuin said. With this Hasufin.

How in hell did Emuin know? How did wizards know?

But Emuin said, Tristen was not a wizard; and presumably did not use wizardry—whatever that fine mincing of words meant. He was no longer certain he knew, and he was sitting at table with a man slipping fast toward wine-drowsiness who
was
the one and
did
the other.

 

In a small alcove of the ruin, a section of the wall with several such arches still standing, the Elwynim made a grave for the lord Regent, piling up loose stone from nearby rubble, in the dark and the misting rain. They had brought out one of the lamps from the tent. One man sheltered it with an upheld arm and his cloak, while others labored by that scant light to make their wall solid and to make the lord Regent a secure resting place.

The lady stood beside Tasien and the other two lords, a quiet, small figure in mail and a man's heavy, hooded cloak, her father's, Tristen thought, as the crown was her father's and the mail shirt was doubtless her father's, worn over her gown and halfway to her knees.

She was not a tall woman: she would never tower over anyone—but she wielded force of will and wit. She was very young, and was accustomed but not acquiescent to Lord Tasien making decisions, as Lord Tasien had grown accustomed to giving orders, probably, Tristen judged, in the lord Regent's decline and sickness. And Tasien seemed a good and faithful man, even if Tasien doubted his honesty and his intentions. Tasien was trying to protect the lady, considering
that she was young, while taking as many of her opinions as he dared, because she was her father's successor.

And honestly seen, that Tasien wished to prevent the lady rushing off into the dark on a stranger's advice was only sensible—unless Tasien were aware of the threat piling up more and more urgently around the ruin.

Ninévrisë was aware. Tristen felt it. Having found that gray space—she kept worrying at it, and was too reckless, and very much in danger.

The old lines of the masons held against the Shadows thus far. The horses had begun to grow restive—
they
knew, and the men who had gone to saddle them and have them ready for departure were having difficulty with them.

There was no preparation to take the wagon: Tasien had sensibly agreed with him, saying they would be able to come back for it and all it contained if all went well, and that if things went badly, they would need nothing at all. But Tasien had ordered certain things taken from the tent, among them the banners, and various small boxes and at least some of the lady's personal goods, the latter packed onto the backs of the two horses that ordinarily pulled the wagon. All that was going on while the burial proceeded.

But if his help had been at all welcome, Tristen thought, he would have taken up stones and put them in place himself. The men were building at a frighteningly deliberate pace, each one a measured clink of stone on stone as they first formed an arch and then, after the Regent's body was laid inside, sealed up the opening—stone by stone, while in the awareness he snatched out of the dark around them the lines on the earth were weakening, disturbed by the breaking of an old pattern, and something—some presence coming up on them was pressing more and more insistently, searching, as he thought. It was not alone wizardry, but men, many men.

For such eyes, the lantern-light by which they worked was a beacon. The place was overgrown round about, concealing them, but it equally concealed danger that moved against them as well, at least in the world of substance.

He dared not reach too often, too far into the gray, lest he guide trouble to them more quickly than he knew it was coming. But it had direction, now. He stood as respectfully, as quietly as the others stood, but he felt his flesh crawling with apprehension, a threat very strong in the same direction as the men taking down the rubble of that other arch to build this one. Stone after stone they brought, and the threat shivered in the air, out of the north, very definitely now from the north. He thought of warning the lady—but his welcome with them was already scant: he feared giving them cause to do something less wise than they were doing.

And possibly she felt it for herself, though awareness of that gray place had not come to him all at once. Reaching far off came with knowing one could do it. She did reach out at times, but he thought that that was an accident: she wanted her father—and that was a danger. She was a burning light in that other Place. She was angry and she was loyal to the old man, and that came through very surely.

But out there in the rainy dark was more than one presence, he thought. He perceived two subtly different sources, now, one wide and diffuse with distance and one terrifyingly, stiflingly close. One, elusive and strong and clever, was pulling the diffuse one, which he could feel only faintly—and which he could only see as a haze in the gray place, defined against the gray place itself. The elusive one was very, very close to them, very difficult to see, a presence tingling in the air, clinging to the stones, as if it possessed all the walls that protected them, and he had not
felt
it before they began to work.

Wind gusted. Trees down a little removed from the wind sighed and roared with it. The feeling of harm was very strong. Wind pulled at cloaks, seized edges, whipped them free, and the owners struggled to hold them. He had Cefwyn's cloak about him again, and the wind pressed it against him and rocked him on his feet. A horse called out, a warning cutting through the dark and the spitting rain, and in a distant play of shadows men fought to hold it still.

But by now there remained only a small opening at the crest of the sealing wall they had built and the feeling was worse and worse. Tasien placed a large stone, and the lady came and placed one, and a second: the last. She pressed her brow against the rubble, then, speaking to her father, Tristen thought: he could
feel
that disturbance in the gray realm, as loud as the panicked horse a moment ago. He was thinking, too,
Hurry, oh, lady, hurry, and let us go. Can you not feel it?

He thought she heard him. She turned with a frightened look. The sound of the trees down the slope from them, leaves blowing in the wind, all but overwhelmed the thunder.

But another sound had begun, not in the air, but in the earth, a thumping like horses running, louder and louder.

“Riders!” she exclaimed, and a man near them who had been pulling stones from the wall of the other arch leapt back as, with a rattle of stone and for no evident reason a section of wall crumbled.

Pale bones were in the rubble that fell out, bones sticking up among the tumbled stones. It was another burial they had disturbed, in their meddling with the stones. It had lain unguessed in the walls that protected them, and the feeling that came with that disturbance broke about them in a smothering fear.

The man protecting the lamp lost his battle to a watery gust of wind. The light failed. The wind sent something noisy skittering across the pavings, and in the gray world the lines of blue all faltered and began to fade.

“Lady!” he warned her.

“Let us go!” Ninévrisë cried, and Tasien seized her arm and hurried her toward the horses, the men running with panic just under their movements.

Tristen went, too, all but running among the others, biting his lip on pleas for haste for fear of another debate or anything to delay them. Petelly was in the number of mounts waiting, rolling his eyes so that the white showed. He took the reins from the man who was managing four of the horses
at once, and in his ears and in his heart alike he heard the arrival of riders through the brush to their north.

“Caswyddian!” he heard a man say, and Tasien: “Hold them off, sergeant! Hold them long enough—and join us as you can! The Regent has to live!”

“Aye, m'lord!” a man said, and rattled off the names of others to stay behind as Ninévrisë protested the order.