Fortress in the Eye of Time

CHAPTER 23

The rain was a misery, pouring off the tent, finding ways under the edge to soften the ground around the stakes. The holy brothers had already been out in the rain, struggling to reposition the stakes at the end of the tent, and a man who had not begun his lifeʼs work as a priest reflected that prayers and the brothersʼ inexpert efforts did less for tent-stakes than minor wizardry could. Sit in the shelter of this rock, good father, rest yourself, good father: leave the tent to us, good father, in the godsʼ good grace, father.

Emuin was more and more tempted to fix that corner stake himself, suspecting that the good brothers would not feel a twinge or a tingle in the air if he did.

But there were powers in the air tonight that might. He did not think that they had reached as far as Arreyburn, but he was not willing to wager on it.

“Rocks,” he called out finally, impatient, and wishing he had closer attended the setting of the tent in the first place. He had trusted woodcraft in two seventh sons of some town mayor, gods save him, and let them position it when the gale came down on them and drenched them.

“Pardon, father?” one asked, rain-drenched gentility.

“Rocks. Good bloody gods, boy, you set the left-side stakes in a runnel down the damned hillside, what do you expect?” He brushed past the pair and slogged into the rain himself, gathered up three sizable wet rocks from the hill and jammed them, one after the other, tightly up against the three tent stakes and trod on each of them, hard.

After that he retreated, drenched, inside the tent, stripped off his sodden clothing, and seized up a relatively dry blanket to wrap in while he pulled off his boots.

He had a change of clothing in the baggage. The good brothers among whom he had been in retreat had given him no hired guards, who might have known how to set a tent. The hired guards had been off seeing to the protection of ten brothers going to the blessing of the harvest in this end of season, and the assessment of land-rent for the abbeyʼs tenants. Collecting the annual rent was a mission occasionally fraught with high passions, and occasionally beset by banditry, and the soldiers were reasonably called for. The abbot had not anticipated a message from His Highness or, now — if one believed Tristen, and he did — the King, bidding him come to a place and a danger he had tried very hard to avoid.

The brothers shivered in modest propriety in their wet robes, scorning the tyranny of the flesh. They lit the lamp after its overset in the collapse of the tent end: they were at least good for that. The oil had not caught fire, their tent had not burned down, and the brothers thanked the gods in their constant muttering of, “Thank you, sweet gods, thank you, dear gods,” that could drive a man to desperation. The muttering, as of doves, increased in times of trouble. They blessed the lamp, they blessed the tent pole, they blessed the oil-sopped carpet that, with the mud, was going to have the lot of them looking like mendicant friars by morning.

“In the godsʼ good name, sit down and be warm, brothers. Donʼt press against the canvas. It makes leaks.” Emuin tucked his own dry blanket around him, and wished the lamp oil had not had attar of roses added. It gave off a cloying perfume that had the closeness of the grave to a man who was holding the grave at bay with such difficulty tonight.

The pair settled. They heard the beating of the rain on the canvas. Thunder boomed, and the good brothers made prayers, quietly, at least.

But true gods, unlike spirits, did not permit themselves to be summoned, did not manifest at a wizardʼs whim — or a priestʼs — did not answer a mortalʼs demand; and did not know, perhaps, mortal needs, or mortal fears. Even the Nineteen, They of Galasien, the hidden gods, were wisps in the ether, a breath, an unanswering, unanswerable riddle.

And a wizard-turned-priest began to ask himself — then what earthly good were they? Were they more or less than Hasufin? Was that what wizards prayed to, and what the Elwynim held sacred? He no longer knew, and now doubted his years of prayers and all his attempt to save the old lore.

Ináreddrin dead, Cefwyn King — and Tristen set at liberty in the midst of it: none of the news that had flooded toward him by earthly messenger and unearthly summons could give a wizard-priest peaceful dreams. He felt the danger in the ether, where Tristenʼs every disturbance of that expanse of dream and substance gave advisement to the enemy which sat gathering forces at Ynefel. Every breath of wind through the insubstantial realm informed the power they least wished informed, and Tristen had no inkling what a powerful presence he was there. Tristen could not see himself — Tristen could not see the disturbance he made, could not, at least, understand that his manifestation was not ordinary, that it shouted to the heavens and drew attention. He was Sihhë. He was indubitably Sihhë, and that power was born in him — if he had been born. That power was in his bones, if he had had them shaped in anything but the womb of air and Maurylʼs will.

If he had ever personally doubted since he laid eyes on Tristen, it was only regarding the order of presence he had to deal with — not its potency.

No, Tristen was not a wizard. He did not need to be. No, Tristen did not work magic. Tristen willed things, and the ether bent, bending the earthly realm with it — even when Tristen was unaware he was doing it.

Like a young man, Tristen had reached out to the only elder he saw; or he, like an old fool, had sensed the troubled ether and reached first. He could not now remember how it had been — but he had become ensnared, and then Cefwyn had, and after him, others, the ineffectual gods save them.

Now Tristen had begun searching the mortal earth for a force he could not master in the unearthly realm, searching — although he was certain Tristen did not know it in so many words, and likely did not think of it in anything like the way a wizard thought of it — for points of Presence in the earthly realm where the enemy was most vulnerable.

And where the enemy was consequently most powerful: unfortunately. One went with the other.

If Tristen would not be so rash as to dare assail Ynefel itself, still there were even in Amefel places almost as fraught with the enemyʼs presence. He could name one very dangerous site without an instantʼs hesitation.

The boy was on the road. He caught impressions now and again as an unskilled presence tried to keep from attracting notice and achieved — if not the opposite — at least a very qualified success.

The boy — the Shaping, the Sihhë-lord, the power that a dying and desperate master had released on an unsuspecting world, where men thought that priests could hold back the dark without being shadowed by it — was looking for answers in a physical realm that could only lead him to trouble. There were places of potency. But in very truth, there was no dark to hold back — at least — the dark that there was had no wellspring and no dividing line that this wizard had ever found. The dark that he knew was general. It was ubiquitous. It had its frontier in every soul that lived and had lived, and the good brothers yonder in their goodness were a pale, powerless nothing if he cared to look. They were all but invisible in the ether, as all but a few of the Teranthines were invisible.

Once he had thought it a refuge, once he had thought it holiness, and a sanctuary where a wizard once stained with his craft could find a lodging for his soul that the Shadows could not find or touch.

But now he began to suspect that the good brothers did not shadow the ether not because they were good, but because they had masked themselves from everything, had carefully erased their stray thoughts, had poured out their human longings, emptied themselves of desires and become so transparent an existence that they had not only ceased to be evil, they had ceased to be good. They had ceased to fight the battles of everyday life, and simply weighed nothing. Not a feather. Not a grain. They had given up everything, until they vanished from the scale of all that mattered, having given away themselves long before any power declared the contest.

There were those who did cast a shadow in the ether. There were those whose presence could become a Place, and whose Places, however many they created in their lives and the leaving of life, were links to the physical world. Advantageously situated, they could make a power both elusive and unpredictable — like Hasufin.

He could recall a young, smiling boy whose shadow had loomed among wizards at Althalen, a Shadow trading on its childʼs shape, and on human sympathy and human scruples, Mauryl had argued, when the most of them among Maurylʼs students saw only the child, and argued that its natural, childish innocence might protect them long enough to let them, through moral teaching, change its character.

Then Mauryl had said a thing which echoed frequently through his nightmares nowadays, that innocence answered no questions, nor wished to, and that a very old soul counted on their reluctance to harm the housing it had chosen. No other disguise could have gotten it to that extent through their defenses.

Most of all he recalled how a childʼs body had lain still and helpless while the indwelling spirit ranged abroad in the halls of Althalen, killing men armed and unarmed, ordinary men and wizards, old and young, with no difference, up and down the halls, stifling their breath, stealing the force in them for the strength to break the bonds Mauryl had set on him.

That spirit is almost as old as I, Mauryl had warned the six of them that night. My student, yes, he was that, long ago, in Galasien. He was a terror to his enemies, but mostly, most of all, Mauryl had said to them on that dreadful night, Hasufin was a despiser of all restraint. As his teacher, I set him limits he immediately disdained. I set him work that was too tedious for his artistry. I set him exercises he overleaped as irrelevant and unengaging to his ability.

This spirit ruled in Galasien. Oh, he was noble-born. He would be a king over Galasien. And as I raised up the Sihhë kings to bring him down, now I bring down the Sihhë because they temporized with him, and nothing less than their destruction tonight will prevent him.

Mauryl had fallen silent, then, and gazed into the fire — a younger Mauryl, he had been, with gray instead of silver about him; and much of gray Mauryl had always been, dealing in powers which he advised his students never to attempt to manage. It will stain the heart, Mauryl had said. Of the soul I do not speak: the corruption of the living foredooms the dead. We are none of us safe.

None of them, in that dreadful hour before the fall of Althalen, had dared breach Maurylʼs inner thought, not knowing for certain, but sensing that Mauryl wandered just then free of the bounds of the room. And true enough, Mauryl had come back to them with a hard face and an iron purpose.

I shall tell you, for the youngest of you, Mauryl said, and laid out for them all an incredible tale, how, journeying to the north, he had brought back the five true Sihhë-lords; how in one night of terror he had brought down the Galasieni and raised up a more potent wizard than Hasufin himself; how Mauryl had, shivering in the heart of the citadel of Galasien, helped the bright towers fall and the people perish, locked within the very stones of Ynefel, Hasufin seeking lives upon lives to increase his magic against the Sihhë-lord who bent his will against him, and Mauryl sealing all the people in the stones of the remaining tower — the Sihhë fortress, after that night: Ynefel.

And long the Sihhë kings had ruled, unnaturally long, as men counted years. After them had come four halfling dynasties still able to keep their power intact, whether by innate Sihhë magic, or by conscious and learned wizardry — until (unnatural and, to a wizard mind, fraught with danger) a Sihhë queen gave birth to a babe that died, and was alive again — a miracle, oh, indeed. But in such unhingings of natural process more things might come unhinged, and all Maurylʼs skill could not pry the queenʼs mother-love (another force of fearsome potency) from a child which cast that terrible shadow in the gray. Talented, the queen maintained — and by the age of ten that child, uncatchable and clever, had murdered two of his elder brothers.

He was a spirit more precocious and more cruel thus far in his young years than, Mauryl swore, the last time this spirit had walked the earth. This spirit remembered its skill, and its former choices, and all…all…moral instruction was wasted on it.

Mauryl had opened the doors of the secret chambers, that heart of Althalen in which the Sihhë housed their greatest mystery, and let the Marhanen, lords of the East, loot and burn and kill without mercy those who escaped the wizardly struggle that resulted; Mauryl had simply cared little, one suspected, that the Marhanen seized the opportunity in the opening of those doors and the theft of something the present location of which one feared to surmise.

Mauryl had persuaded the lords of the Elwynim, who had Sihhë blood in their veins at least as much as the last dynasty, not to attack the Marhanen in the persecutions that followed. Mauryl swore to them that he had not utterly betrayed the Sihhë, that a King should come of Sihhë blood and inherent wizardry — a king to whom magic should be as ordinary as breathing, as it had been to the true Sihhë, who were not Men, as Men were nowadays. And that King-to-Come would save his own.

A Man such as he was learned wizardry as best he could. A Man and a young Man beginning in the craft simply did as elder wizards bade him and tried to guard his soul from the consequences.

Now there were no elder wizards — or, rather, and more troubling still, he was eldest. Mauryl was gone and Mauryl sent him — sent him Tristen.

I think, Cefwynʼs last and pleading message to him had said, that our guest is becoming what he will be, and he remains affectionate and well-disposed. He repays loyalty with loyalty, and is a moral creature. You bade me win his love, old master, and I greatly fear he has won mine in turn. Is this wise? You ignore my letters. I have the faith of the messenger that you do receive them. Why this silence? I need your presence. I need your counsel. Come to Henasʼamef and help me advise this gift Mauryl gave us.

So he came. He had been on his way when that one found him on the road. But it was too late, he began to fear. What Tristen did now, Tristen had chosen to do. He had evaded Tristen so long as he feared Maurylʼs spell was still working in him — hoping for virtue. And now in one terrible day Tristen had learned killing and fled the prospect of meeting with him in the earthly world, where he might affect his heart, and where Men under Cefwynʼs orders or his might lay physical restraint on him.

Tristen had run, whatever his reasons, toward Hasufinʼs domain, for that was the nature of Althalen, running as a deer would run when the dogs were baying at its heels.

No. Not a deer. Nothing at all so defenseless as that.

Tristen was doing what was in him to do, whether by Maurylʼs Shaping or that he was moving now beyond Maurylʼs intent and toward — toward something unpredictable. Sihhë were not natural Men. However they had arisen, out of Arachis as rumor among wizards had held, or from whatever source Mauryl had called them, they were not limited to wizardry and could act without learning. The egg, as Cefwyn put it, had indeed begun to hatch, and once that happened, a man such as himself, who had learned his wizardry as an art, not a birthright, could only keep himself as securely anchored to the world as possible.