Текст книги "Fortress in the Eye of Time"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

There were also the men who had killed Cefwyn’s father. There were reasons aplenty to fear the shade ahead. He vividly recalled the arrows that had flown at him when he had ridden with Uwen, when men very near him had died; and he recalled that track of a horse that had appeared as a dark line in the grass near Raven’s Knob that evening he and Cefwyn had fled from Emwy, a warning of someone besides themselves out and about the hills.

But Heryn must have sent a message to Cefwyn’s father, to urge him to come to Emwy. It was even possible, he thought, that Cefwyn by going to Emwy had fallen into the trap prematurely: if Cefwyn had died there, the King would have come, all the same, to Emwy; and there—possibly—the King might have died all the same, and Efanor would have become King.

That was the way he put Cefwyn’s suspicions together, to explain the uneasiness he had heard between Cefwyn and his brother.

But ifs, Idrys had said to him, counted nothing. It had not happened the way Heryn wished. And Heryn would not plan anything else. Nor, he thought, had Efanor done anything to harm Cefwyn.

It did not mean, however, that the Elwynim Lord Heryn had dealt with were done with their actions.

He thought of that as he rode Petelly further and further into that green shade.

He thought of it with great urgency when, in the mud which the rain had made an unwritten sheet, he saw a man’s footprint on the road, one place where someone had trod amiss, and slid on the mud, and then recovered himself and gone up onto the leaves. He looked up on the hillside where bracken hid further traces.

It might be someone from Emwy village. There were surely reasons for the villagers to be out and about the woods, pursuing their claims of lost sheep, and there were indeed signs of sheep about. But there had been a horse’s track earlier, and he could not but worry about the safety of Uwen following him, along with whatever other men Uwen might have swept up. He was not concerned for himself. But Uwen would not turn back at a sign like this: Uwen would search the more desperately, and come into trouble.

He said to himself now that he should turn back, wait on the road for Uwen and see what Uwen thought, now that he had chosen the meeting, and now that there was something else at issue besides himself. He might persuade Uwen to wait, send someone back, supposing that Uwen came with soldiers, as Cefwyn’s men seemed generally to travel about the land—and if Uwen did, then he might see whether, having gained, however indirectly, the soldiers he had asked Cefwyn to give him, he could stay on the fringe of Marna a time with wise and experienced men under his orders and discover the secrets the woods had. They were important secrets, he was certain, secrets that might tell him much more about himself, and about Mauryl’s intentions; he could talk to Uwen, and Uwen would scratch his head and offer Uwen’s kind of sensible opinions, which were different than Emuin’s, but no less thoughtful.

That was the best thing to do, he thought, and he began to turn Petelly about on the road.

But that gray place flickered across his sight, an uncertain touch like the light through leaves, like a brush of spider-silk across the nape of his neck.

He turned Petelly full circle.

A gray, shaggy figure stood among the trees, in the green light, a figure in ragged skirts, wrapping her fringed shawl closely about her. It was the old woman of Emwy. Perhaps she was the reason he had had to persist on this road—as he might be the reason of the old woman’s coming here, into this perilous woods.

She said nothing. She turned and walked uphill through the bracken.

He touched Petelly and rode him up the gentle slope. He did not trust himself safe from harm in doing so. Nor, he thought, did she trust there was no harm to fear from him, but surely she had some purpose in coming out into this green and gold and breathless forest.

She stopped. She waited by a spring that welled up out of the hill, where someone had placed rocks in an arch. The Sihhé star was carved on the centermost, and one stone was a carved head, while others, separately, had acorns, and bits of vines, and one, a hand. The pieces did not belong together. But they made an adornment for the fountain. Someone had brought them there, perhaps from Althalen, he thought, where there were such things.

“Auld Syes,” he said. He had not forgotten the name. “Why did you act as you did against us?”

The old woman hugged her shawl about her, bony hands clenched on the edges. Her hair was gray and trailed about her face, which was a map of years. Her mouth was clamped tight. Her eyes were as gray as his own.

“Sihhé lord,” she said in a faint, harsh voice, “Sihhé lord, who sent ye?”

“Mauryl, lady.”

She laughed, improbable as it was that such lips could ever laugh. She turned once full about, spread her arms, and her skirts and the fringes of her shawl flew like feathers in the green light. It might have made him laugh. But the feeling in the air was not laughter. It was ominous. The place tingled with it. She bent down and from among the rocks about the spring took a silver cup. She filled it, and drank, and offered the same cup up to him, on Petelly’s high back.

“Drink, drink of Emwy waters, Sihhé lord. Bless the spring. Bless the woods.”

He did not think the drinking mattered so much. He took it from her, and drank the cool water. He gave it back, and the old woman was pleased, grinning and hugging herself, and he felt that tingle in the air that Mauryl’s healings had made. In that moment all the weariness of the road fell away, and Petelly, who had put down his head to drink, brought his head up with a jerk and a snort, the white of his eye showing as he looked askance at the old woman and backed away with more liveliness and willing spring in his step than he had had since last night.

He quieted Petelly with an unthought shift of his knees, and found himself brushing at that gray space again, himself and Petelly both, where white light shone, and fingers of light flowed through the old woman’s fringes.

Came a child through the light, then, skipping through the gray shadow of the woods, as if a mist bad moved in: in the gray place, the child moved, and yet the trees were in that place as well.

–Seddiwy, lamb, the old woman said. Show the Sihhé lord the paths ye know. e know where the good man is, do ye not?

–Aye, the little girl said, aye, mama, I do. I can. I will. The lord ma’ follow me.

The child skipped away through the shadow-trees, playing solitary games of the sort children played.

He was not aware of having turned downslope. But Petelly began to move. He saw nothing but a breeze going along the hillside, a light little breeze that only rustled the leaves of the trees.

Down across the road it went, disturbing the trees on the other side.

He did not trust children. But there seemed no harm in this one, who existed in that gray space which was no place for the innocent and the defenseless, but she had not stayed there long. She was a flutter of leaves and a skitter of pebbles on the lower slope, a little disturbance of the dust, that danced and skipped and danced.

She was a rippling on the water, a bending in the grass. A sparkle through the leaves of a stand of birches. There was not enough of her to catch. She made less stir than Auld Syes did, and that was little.

But, childlike, she did not go straight along the way. It was halfway up a hill and down again, it was in and out a thicket. Silly child, Tristen thought, and did not follow the wanderings, only the general line she took.

And now he had Emwy village on his left. But of buildings that had once stood there—he saw thatchless ruin, gray walls stained with black.

Idrys was going to fire the haystacks, Idrys had said. But there had been worse, far worse than that, done against the village. He was troubled by the sight. He would have argued with Idrys—or whoever had done this.

–Child, he said. Who burned the village.

The faint presence hovered, like the movement of a dragonfly, a quivering in the shadows.

And flitted on again, more present, and angry.

He took Petelly along ways that might once have been roads or paths, toward the south and east behind that fluttering in the leaves—which now was not the only such. Gusts flattened grasses in long streaks.

Petelly, nonetheless, snatched up a thistle or two, and a gust blew his mane and twisted it in a tangle.

Saplings bowed and shook. Three such streaks in the grass combined and a sapling bent and cracked, splintered, showing white wood.

That was more ominous. He had had no fear for himself or for Uwen in his dealing with Auld Syes, but now he began to be concerned, and wished he had gained some word of safety from the old woman, not so much for him but for anyone following him.

Crack! went weed-stalks. Crack! went another sapling, and another and another, an entire stand of young birches broken halfway up their trunks.

–Be still, he said. It was wanton destruction. It proved nothing but bad behavior. Be still, he said, and wished the young chiM to come back again. I have men behind me, good men. Don’t trouble them. They mean you no harm. Be polite. Be good to them.

It might have been a collection of old leaves that blew up then in the depth of a thicket, some distance away. It might have been, but he would have said it was the old woman herself. A single course of disturbance skipped toward it, a bent passage through the grass that tended this way and that way, that sported along a low spot and scuffed through the pebbles. And the ragged-skirted shape of leaves whisked through the thicket and dissolved again, with the little one skipping on where it had been and beyond.

Still the streaks of flattened grass appeared on the hillside, intermittent and angry, and the sun declined in the sky, making the shadows long, his and Petelly’s, on the grass.

But he had come into that vicinity where he had ridden with Cefwyn as they were coming away from the ambush someone had laid for them in the woods—he recognized the hills. They touched on shapes—not shapes arriving out of some unguessed recollection, as the servants said he remembered things, but out of the certainty that he had seen these hills, and he knew where he was. It was near Raven’s Knob, where he had seen the tracks that led around the hill, the warning they had had of men hiding in the hills.

They were near Althalen—though nothing of that Name unfolded for him: just, it was Althalen, where he had been with Cefwyn. He thought that perhaps what guided him now was a kind of Shadow, though a simple and harmless one. He did not take her companions for simple and harmless, and did not want to deal with them after dark fell. But the guide he had sported this way and that with abandon through dry leaves and green grass, and the sun turned the greens darker and more sharp edged with shadow as it inclined toward the hills.

–Do you know this place? he asked of Auld Syes, in the chance that she heard. Cefwyn thinks I should. But what should I know? Can you say?

There was no answer.

Still, there was nothing of the smothering fear he had felt when he had ridden through it before—the very dreadful presence he had felt that night, a Shadow of some kind, maybe many of them, that would keep to the deep places at the roots of wild hedges, and the depth of arches, and creep about at night, frightening and doing such harm as they could.

Mauryl had not told him how to fight against Shadows, only how to avoid them, and that was by locks and doors. He had none such here-and perhaps he was foolish for letting Syes’ child become his guide.

But he did not come now to disturb the Shadows. He came only for the truth, and rode among the old stones, following his wisp of a guide, thinking of the Name, Althalen, trying to coax more pieces of relevance to come to him. But the expectation that did come to him on the wings of that Name was an expectation of pleasant gardens—the thought of halls where elegant folk moved and laughed and met, and where children played at chasing hoops and hiding from each other, much as his guide went skipping through the stones.

He rode Petelly among the mazy foundations of what had been not a fortress like Ynefel but a community of buildings scarcely fortified at all.

It had never had walls. That certainty came to him with the Name of Althalen: it had been a peaceful place, never considering its defense-trusting folk. Gentle folk, perhaps.  Or powerful.

But everywhere about him now, as he had seen at the village, fire had blackened the remnant of windows and doors. He smelled smoke, as where had he not? It might be the smoke of old Althalen; or of yesterday’s Emwy; or perhaps the dreadful smoke of the Zeide courtyard had clung to him and Petelly even through last night’s rain—he was not certain, but he felt a loosening of his ties to the rock and stone around him, a dispossession as if something, perhaps many such things, did not accept him here, as if—smothering fear met him and just scarcely avoided him.

The world became pearly gray. The walls stood, still burned, still broken, and Petelly and he moved all in that gray place, in a shifting succession of broken walls, less substance than shadow here. The burning and the smell of smoke was true in the gray world too. Only the Fear that Emuin had named to him ... Hasufin ... rolled through his attention, and seemed to have power here, power like that tingling of Mauryl’s cures for skinned knees and bumped chins.

That tingle in the air might, he thought, be wizardry, and if it was, he reminded himself staunchly of things as they ought to be: he thought of Ynefel, and, feeling a sudden chill and a sense of dreadful presence, drew back out of that gray light.

Then a wind sported through the grass, an ominous, tree-bending sort of wind which swept in a discrete line across the ground.

–Child! he called out in warning—because that gust made him think of the wind in the courtyard, that had raised the shape of dust and leaves, and he heard the faint wail of a frightened voice, as a breeze skipped behind him, at Petelly’s tail. Be still, child, he said to it. Go back. Be safe.

I know my way now. Go back to your fountain. There’s danger here!

–Very noble, the Wind challenged him, blowing up a puff of leaves.

Elfwyn would have done that sort of thing. And see what it won him.

–Hasufin? he challenged it. If that is your name, answer me.

–Why? Are you lost? Could you be lost? Or confused? You’re certainly in the wrong place, poor lost Shaping.

The wind whirled through the brush, whipped leaves into Petelly’s face, and Petelly reared, not at all liking this presence.

Neither did Petelly’s rider. Begone! Tristen wished it, and the wind raced away, making a crooked line along the ground, raising little puffs of dust among the stones very much as the child bad done, but far, far more rapidly.

It was no natural wind, no more than the other had been. It retreated as far as an old foundation, and a heap of stones, where it blew leaves off the brush.

Then the line of disturbed dust swept back toward them. This is Death, it said. All the Sihhé in this place died, even the children, should you find that sad. Mauryl and Emuin conspired to murder us. I was a child, did you know? I was a child of Althalen. But it did not stop the Marhanen. They murdered all the children in the presence of their mothers and fathers. And Mauryl was one of them that did the murder.

Were you here.

He expected wickedness of it. Now it lied to him. Mauryl would not have killed children.

But the gray place filled with halls lit with pale sunrise fire, and children and all the people were running from the flames. They did die. They burned. They ran like living torches, their clothes set ablaze with that faded light and arrows shot them down.

A young boy lay sleeping on a bed. A man came, one thought, to rescue that child. But the man stabbed the sleeping boy, and that wan face was Emuin.

“No!”

It was wickedness. And a lie. He had pulled at Petelly’s mouth by accident, making Petelly back and turn as he cleared his eyes of dream and wished the brush and the stones back into his sight. Petelly smelled something, or heard something still: even after he had resumed his even grip on the reins, Petelly kept bending his neck this way and that, trying to turn, backing a step at a time, showing the whites of his eyes and flaring his nostrils; but an even hold on the reins and a firm press of his knees steadied Petelly’s heart and kept him moving.

That the enemy would lie and deceive—why should it not? What could a lie weigh against murder?

So he argued with himself, refusing to believe, having learned deception, and having used it himself.

The wind blew dust into his eyes, making him blink them shut on that gray space, but, tears running on his face, he doggedly watched the space between Petelly’s ears, refusing to start at the Shadows that urged on the edges of his sight. He saw the taunting breeze skirl along the dust. It performed wild antics in his path, it danced in the brush, and turning, blasted him with chaff and grass.

–Tristen, it said to him. Tristen, you dare not blind yourself. These are not lies. I do not lie to you. You’ve believed the Guelenfolk, and Emuin. Very foolish of you, though you might not know it. Shall I tell you what Mauryl called Emuin?

He smelled the smoke still. It seemed stronger. He saw shadow-shapes flitting to the stones and through the brush, shapes which he might have believed, except they passed the most delicate thorn-boughs without disturbing them.

–Mauryl called him weak. Mauryl called him timid. Mauryl called him many names. And you rely on him. Not wise. Not wise at all. You surely died here.

–Go away! he cried. Begone!

–Oh, but you haven’t Mauryl’s force, have you? And you should indeed listen. Mauryl was my teacher. And Emuin’s. Dear Mauryl. Do you remember how he served the Sihhé Kings? He betrayed them: they would not let him have his way—so he dealt with Guelenfolk, and conspired with the Marhanens, who were mere servants to the Sihhé. Do you know how I know? I—I was that murdered child, I was the great and fearsome enemy Mauryl dared not face alone, and all this ruin and all this death he made for me, for me, do you hear me. Because Mauryl feared me, he opened the gates to the Marhanen, he pent me in my room, and sent Emuin to do murder. Would you hear more?

–Heryn Aswydd seemed an honest man, he said, struggling to find resistance to the voice that now seemed so aggrieved, and so reasonable.

Heryn twice tried to kill us all.

–Oh, seemed, seemed. The Marhanen seems. Did Mauryl ever bid you trust the Marhanen? I think not. I know Mauryl’s advice. He sent you on the Road, but at Ynefel is your answer, Shaping. I have your answer. All you have to do is ask me.

The voice roared close and swept about him, a rush of wind along the ground. It blasted a growth of brushwood, and laid bare a slab of stone whereon something had burned.

–Oh, many of us, many of us, the Wind said. Hasufin ... said. They burned the dead. They burned the living, did your precious Marhanen.

They meant to leave no charred chip of bone to anchor us to the earth.

But I have found that anchor. Ask! Come! Temporize with your fate. Ask me all your questions! Shall we search for your Grave, Sihhé soul?

Petelly fought the rein, turning and turning, pressed back by his knees.

He saw the gray light, and the towers of Ynefel under shadow as the blackness arced across toward him.

–Then where and when was I born? be asked it, he knew not by what impulse, but it was his question, it was the question only Mauryl knew. Tell me that, or own you are ignorant and tell me nothing at all!

The Wind whipped away from him, breaking branches as it went. It poured across the sky in a scream of frustration and rage.

Then was quiet. Utter quiet. Foolish, he thought, striving to bold Petelly from a wild rush across the ruins. He was aware of another, subtle presence, so faint and so far be all but missed it. He had not driven away the danger alone. This presence had helped him. This presence had given him steadiness when he most needed it.

–Young man! it said, ever so faintly, now. Young man! Be aware. Be away ...

–Master Emuin? be asked. It felt very much like Emuin’s presence, but it was too elusive to see or to catch in this place. In that other world darkness bad enclosed the area of silver gray where he and Petelly stood—all but that place and a patch of brightness ahead of him, and he saw it glow and falter like the guttering of a candle-flame.

–Emuin? he asked, again, not certain that it was, but not daring leave his ally weak and faltering as he seemed to be.

But it was a plump, kindly-seeming man who came toward him from that guttering light, a man he did not know in life—a man who called to him and held out bands in urgency—but the winds caught him away and their reaching fingers missed before ever he thought that there might have been a chance to catch him. He was gone. The encroaching Shadows flowed like water, broke like waves against the pearl-gray of the world.

He felt—afraid, then. Bereft of help. He shook himself and tried to come away from that gray place, fearing tricks.

He sat, trembling, on a shivering horse. Petelly stood with feet braced and head up, sniffing the wind.

He might have done the right thing, he said to himself. He had set the spirit aback. It was unable to answer that simple question, who he was, and what he was—and somehow that prevented it—Hasufin—from mischief. He thought that the child had gotten away from danger. He no longer saw the flitter in the leaves that betokened her presence.

But he thought, strangely, that he knew direction—amid the vast maze of lines of mostly-buried stones that was Althalen. There was presence at the heart of it: he thought so, from time to time, but it was a presence he did not think harmful. He thought rather the contrary, now, that the old man was someone he needed to find, another who had the right and the ability to travel in that gray space.

Petelly had not liked the Shadow that had come near them, but Petelly was not quite terrified, for he had the presence of mind to snatch a thistletop, went, walking along through ripe grasses, along a line of stones that had been a wall.

Some distance he went, down a stream-course he thought might have been the same stream bent back again, perhaps tributary to the Entail, who knew?

“Hold there!” someone cried.

He looked up atop a wall, at a man with a bent bow and an arrow ready to let fly at him. It was a man in gray and brown, and another, appearing in front of him.

Woolgathering, Mauryl had used to call it, when he let his wits go wandering,

“Sirs,” he said, in the courtesy he hoped would prevent arrows flying.

“Good day.” Neither of these was the presence he had felt. He supposed they thought him quite foolish, being where he was, so unaware; or perhaps they thought him a danger.

The one man came closer. “Your sword,” that man said.

“I have none,” he said. “Nor any weapon. Have you a master, sir? I believe I’ve come to see him.”

The man on the rocks relaxed his draw and leaned on his bow. “And whose man would you be?”

“Cefwyn’s,” he said. “And you, sir?”

“Men of Uleman,” the archer said. “The lord Regent of Elwynor.”

Chapter 26  

Sullen, dejected men rose from their seats near the one tent of a fireless camp to lay hands on weapons and stare as, through the deep dusk, Tristen led Petelly in, with the archers walking behind him. Besides the tent, he saw the wagon to carry it, and some number of horses grazing within the ruined wall which surrounded the small camp, a ground with pavings here or there breaking surface amid the trampled grasses: it was some former room, or hall, and of men there were thirty or so, hardly more.

“What’s this?” a man confronted them to ask.

“M’lord,” the older of the archers said, “m’lord, he came unarmed.

He claims to be Cefwyn’s man.”

“A bedraggled sort of emissary. And no attendant? No ring, no seal? A scout, far more likely. Where did you find him?”

The archers gave a quick and slightly muddled explanation, how he had come walking up to their post, how he had not argued with the request to go with them.

The man was not convinced. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Sir,” he said, “I am Cefwyn’s friend, and I’m fully willing to carry messages to him.” He did not add that they were strangers in Cefwyn’s land, and that, absent the weapons, he should most properly be asking them the questions about their intentions and their right to be where they were. “But I came to speak to your lord.”

The man said nothing to his offer, nothing at all, as he turned and went away into the only tent, a tent improbably pitched, its guy-ropes running to the ruined walls, and its pegs driven into earth where they had pried up paving-stones to accommodate them. The Elwynim had been at some great pains to set their tent here, when there was far softer, deeper soil just across the ruined half wall. He found it curious and significant that they had been thus determined to have it inside rather than outside the walls. Lines on the earth, Tristen thought. Someone here knew.

And if the Regent of Elwynor was camped at Althalen, he might well he the one who had killed Cefwyn’s father—and he might be the very lord of the Elwynim with whom Heryn Aswydd had conspired, which cast an even more unpleasant light on the situation.

Of all troubles he had gotten into and of all mistakes he had made, he said to himself, falling into the hands of the Elwynim might be the worst and the most costly to Cefwyn, although so far he could not complain of his treatment. By the archers’ general behavior they were honest men, well-spoken, and not, at least, bandits who fired from hiding and without asking.

The men otherwise stared and talked among themselves and did not venture closer or threaten him. He was wearing Cefwyn’s cloak, with the Marhanen Dragon plain to see: that was one cause of the talk; and he was equally aware of the coat beneath it, which had the Sihhé arms, not plain to see at the moment, but there was no hope of pretending to be other than what he was, and he did not intend to try, thinking it could only make matters worse if he seemed to deceive them.

Finally the man came back out of the tent and beckoned him to come inside, or for someone to bring him, he was by no means certain. He went of his own volition and the archers walked behind him, into an interior warm, lit by oil lamps and partitioned by curtains, one of which was folded back.

He had expected a vigorous and powerful lord—but the two lords present were attending an elderly man who lay on a cot against the back wall of the tent: two other men stood by, guards, or servants; and a darkhaired woman was kneeling by the old man’s side, holding his hand.

“My lady,” said the lord who had summoned him.

The woman glanced around and up. He saw painted ivory, a cloud of dark hair, a crown of violet flowers—and in the selfsame moment he saw on the cot the round, kindly-looking man who had reached for his hand through the light and the advancing shadow.

This was not a wounded leader of soldiers. This was an old man who should be safe under a roof, not out in the elements, and on the wrong side of the river.

And he had not strayed amiss in his riding. He had found the object of his search after answers—he had by no means known what he was looking for, and least of all that he was looking for the Regent of Elwynor; but he had found him all the same, and on an impulse of the heart moved toward him in this world of substance and that of Shadows.

The men behind him pulled him roughly back. The clasp at his neck parted, and the hard-used cloak came off and fell.

“Marhanen,” the young woman said angrily, and then looked up at him. “Oh, dear gods!”

It was his black coat, ruined as it was, with the Sihhé arms embroidered in silver thread.

“Sihhé,” exclaimed the man on the cot. “I hoped, I did hope.”

The old man’s eyes had opened. The look on his face was the same he had had in the gray light, a man of such uncalculated kindness, such affable, cheerful goodness that Tristen wanted at once to take the old man’s hand and draw him back from the dark brink that threatened him. On that thought, gray was suddenly all about them, but the soldiers moved to prevent their touching, although the old man, in this world and that other, reached out his hand.

The woman intervened, caught the old man’s hand instead and pressed it to her. “Father. Father, do you hear me?”

“He—” the old man said, with the gray light of the other world streaming past his shoulders. Tristen could scarcely get his breath, the urgency of that request was so intense, and the shadows were forming patterns in the light, seeming like faces gathered about them, listening.

“Lord of Ynefel. Who are you? Who are you?”

It was the very question Hasufin had asked him in seeking power over him. It was the central question about himself that he could not answer and that Hasufin could not answer. But he had had no fear of this man, on what evidence he did not know, but that his presence in the gray place was most like Emuin, and not at all like the enemy.

“My name is Tristen, sir. I was Mauryl’s student. And lord of Ynefel, yes, sir, I am, so Cefwyn says.”

“Cefwyn,” the daughter said, and clenched her father’s hand tightly, tightly, trying to compel his hearing. “Papa, no more. Send him away. It’s too late for Marhanen tricks. This is no one. Look at him! He’s all draggled and muddy from last night’s rain. He’s just a man, Father, just a man.”

“Lord of Ynefel,” the old man echoed him, seeming to hear nothing of his daughter’s protest. “Are you? Are you in fact Mauryl’s successor in the tower?”

“I suppose I am, sir. But Hasufin holds the tower, so far as I know.”

“Hasufin.” The old man struggled up on an elbow. “Look at me, young sir. Look at met”