Текст книги "Fortress in the Eye of Time"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

So he went back to Mauryl, who was in the yard cutting herbs, and asked him if he could see his elbow.

“Not likely,” Mauryl said. “Nor wished to, lately.”

He began to walk away, rubbing his chin. Then he thought how, lately, he’d felt his chin grown rough, and it itched, and he couldn’t see that, either.

“Mauryl, can you see your face?”

“No more than my elbow,” Mauryl said curtly. The air smelled strongly of bruised herbs. “Stupid question, of course not.”

He went away, noticing, not for the first time, but for the first time that he had ever wondered about it, all the stone faces set in the walls: some large, some small, grimacing visages that had sometimes frightened him on uneasy nights, when Mauryl was angry for some reason and when he sought his room alone; or when the wind was up and creaking in the roofs and the loft, and he was alone, lighting the sconces on the landings. The faces seemed to change with the candlelight when he walked past them, but Mauryl had said they were only stone, and harmless to him.

Some of them had pointed teeth and pointed ears. He had felt his teeth with his tongue and his ears with his fingers, so he was certain enough boys looked nothing like the images of that sort. Some of the stone faces had beards, and looked like Mauryl. Some were smooth-faced. Some looked more afraid than angry. Mauryl’s face went through such changes of expression, and such changes portended important things to him—but the changing statues, Mauryl assured him, portended nothing.

He had been aware, too, in this growing curiosity about faces, that his hair was dark, where Mauryl’s was silver, that Mauryl had a long beard and his face was, until lately, smoother than the statue’s stone; that Mauryl’s hands were wrinkled and his were not—his hands looked more like the stone hands that in places reached from the wall, not the clawed ones, but the hands with fingers. He was aware, now that he thought about it, that his face must be changing in some way, and different than Mauryl’s in more than the beard.

He was thinking about such things when, the next day, he leaned over the rain barrel out by the scullery and saw just a shadow of a boy, hardly more than a shadow, but not, surely, a wicked and dangerous Shadow, as Owl was to the birds.

The shadow was his, true, but he could see in it no reason for his face to be rough or whether it was a good face or a frightening face. He thought that the sun was wrong, and his hair was shading the water, so he moved, and held his hair back at the nape of his neck, but it hardly helped. It was a dark barrel and the sun did little to light it.

But it did seem, looking critically, that his nose was straighter, and his skin was smoother, and his brows were thinner than Mauryl’s. It was like and not like the stone faces. He made faces at the water-shadow. The shadow changed a little, where light reached past his shoulder.

The kitchen door opened. Mauryl looked out. He looked up.

“What are you doing?” Mauryl asked.

“Looking at my face,” he said, which sounded strange. “Looking at the shadow of my face,” he said, instead.

“Clever lad.” But Mauryl’s voice was not pleased. “Do you see all this wood?”

He looked in the direction Mauryl looked, at the large jumbled pile of timbers that had always stood by the door.

“Being such a clever lad,” Mauryl said, “do you see this axe?”

The axe stood by the door inside. Mauryl came out with it in his hand.

He thought Mauryl would cut wood, as Mauryl did now and again:

Mauryl had always said the axe was too dangerous. Mauryl found it hard to work without his staff, but he would lean on it and pull out the smallest pieces and chop them into kindling.

So he stood and watched as Mauryl set one small piece of wood over the bigger one he used for a supporting piece and set to work, leaning on his staff with one hand, chopping with the other.

“You see,” Mauryl said, “first to this side and then to that side.”

Chips flew. He liked to watch. The wood that came out of the gray beams was lighter, and the newest chips were always bright among those that littered the area around about. Mauryl made faces when he worked.

The small piece became two pieces. “Do you see?”  “Yes, master Mauryl.”

“You try a bigger one, if you’re such a strong young man, with so much time to spare.”

He took a fair-sized one. He set it where Mauryl said; he took the axe in his hand. Mauryl showed him how to hold it in both hands, where to set his feet, and showed him how to be careful where the axe swung. His heart was beating faster with the mere notion that Mauryl trusted him with Mauryl’s own work. The axe handle he held was smooth and warm from Mauryl’s hands. When he lifted it and when he swung very slowly at Mauryl’s order, he felt the weight of it as something trying to weigh down on him.

“Very good,” Mauryl said. “Now, always minding where you put your feet and mind the path of the axe, swing it faster this time and aim true. Never chase the wood. If the wood moves, stop and put it back.

Never, ever chase it with the axe. That way you keep your feet out of the way of the blade. It will take your foot otherwise. Do you hear me, Tristen?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, certain that was good advice. Mauryl stepped back and let him try in earnest.

It was far, far easier with the axe moving freely. He struck two strokes, to this side and to that side, and then Mauryl nodded, so he kept swinging, one pair of strokes after another, until the axe seemed to fly like a bird and he tugged it back, faster and better aimed with every stroke.

Mauryl watched him cut his piece through. Then Mauryl nodded approval and said, “Stack it against the wall. And fill the kitchen pan with water when you come inside. And wash before you come in.”

Mauryl went inside again, and he pulled the rest of the beam along the supporting piece and set to work, making the whole courtyard ring to the strokes, because he liked to hear them. The feeling of the axe swinging had become almost like a Word, strength running through him with his breaths and with the strokes. The chips flew wide and stuck to his clothing. He chose bigger pieces, which were no trouble at all for him to lift, and none for him to chop, having two sound feet, both hands to use, and the knowledge in his heart that he was going to please Mauryl by doing far more than Mauryl expected, far faster than Mauryl imagined.

He chopped only thick pieces, after that. He grew completely out of breath. The sweat ran down his face and sides, but he sat and let the breeze cool him, then attacked the pile again, until it made a taller stack than he had imagined he could make.

By then, though, it was toward time to be making supper. He washed the dust and the sweat off him; he washed his shirt, too, hung it out to dry, and flung the wash water away from the kitchen door as Mauryl had told him he should.

Then he filled the kitchen pan, and he ran upstairs to get his other shirt in time to run down again and help Mauryl stir up their supper.

It was the first time he had ever, ever, ever done so many things right in succession. Mauryl came out into the courtyard while the cakes were baking in the oven Mauryl’s small kindling had fed, and truly seemed pleased with his huge stack of very thick wood. Mauryl had him carry a stack of both big and little pieces inside before supper, and after supper he took the dishes and washed them, and came back to sit at the fire and read until Mauryl sent him up to bed.

He was happy when he went to bed, happy because Mauryl was happy with him—he thought that as Mauryl gave him his bedtime cup and sat by him on the edge of his bed, saying how—but he was very sleepy—he was becoming strong, and clever, and he had to study hard to be not just clever, but wise.  “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Do you practice every day with the Book?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, feeling his wits gone to wool. “I read every word I can.”

Mauryl smoothed his hair. Mauryl’s hand was smooth and cooler than his forehead.

“Good lad,” Mauryl said.

It was the most perfect day he remembered, despite the storm that threatened them, late, with lightning and thunder. But Mauryl seemed sad as he lingered, sitting there, and that sadness was the only trouble in the world.

Then Mauryl said, “If only you could read more, lad, if only you could do more than read words.”

He didn’t know what more Mauryl wanted him to do than he had done. He felt suddenly desperate, but Mauryl rose from the edge of the bed as sleep was coming down on him thick and soft and dark, and Mauryl shut the door.

He heard the wind rattling at the shutters. He heard Mauryl’s steps creak and tap up the stairs.

Trying wasn’t enough, he thought as sleep came tumbling over him.

Nothing but doing more than he was asked could ever satisfy Mauryl at all.

It had been a fierce storm, he knew that by the puddle under the kitchen door in the morning.

And when, after breakfast and morning chores, he went up to the loft with his Book and a napkin of crumbs. He opened the door and saw shafts of sunlight where no sunlight had been before. It was bright and beautiful. Pigeons and doves and sparrows were flying in and out of the openings.

But he saw the sodden straw and knew the storm had blown rain through the sheltered places. The little birds were all fledged and flying, but it had been a hard night for the nests.

And, worse, a glance toward the other wall showed a board down between the pigeon loft and Owl’s domain.

That would not do, Mauryl would say. That would simply not do. He feared what might already have happened, and if it had not happened yet, because of the storm raging, it would happen tonight.

He could come and go safely with Owl. The board was not on this side of the dividing wall, it had fallen on the other, so he tucked his Book into his shirt for safekeeping, unlatched the door and came through into the huge barren loft that was Owl’s alone.

There was a hole in the roof, a rib of the roof was down, and slates lay broken on the loft floor. Owl’s den had become drafty and lighter, which he thought would not at all please Owl.

Owl sat puffed and sullen on his perch.

He picked up the fallen board. The pegs were still in their holes, and a little effort put it where it belonged and set the pegs back in their sockets, though not so far as they should sink. He took up a roof slate and pounded with it, and finally pounded the pegs with his fist on a piece of the slate, after it had broken, and the board settled where it had been.

Owl had ruffled up at the clatter and the thumping. Owl refused to look at him, perhaps because he had liked the hole into the pigeon loft.

But there was nothing to do for the hole in the roof, which Tristen found far beyond his skill. He went and looked out, and found the hole a new window, on a side of the keep he had never seen, a view of forest that went on and on, and, as he stepped closer, a view of a parapet of the keep he had never seen.

He wondered how one reached it.

He stepped up on the fallen beam, worked higher, with his arm on the roof slates, and from that vantage, with his head and shoulders out the hole in the roof, he saw a gate in the wall that ringed the keep, looking down on it from above. He saw a dark band of water lapping at the very walls of the fortress and, spanning that, a series of arches. From those arches outward into the woods that lined the far shore, he saw an aged stonework which vanished in among the trees.

He was astonished and troubled. He could imagine the course of the stonework thereafter. He saw a trace of a line among the treetops, where trees preserved just a little more space than elsewhere through the forest.

A Bridge and a Road, he thought, in the breathless way of Words arriving out of nowhere. A Road suggested going out, and then–    Then it came to him that if Mauryl went away then the Road was the way Mauryl would go, through the gate and over that dark water and through the woods.

He felt the Book weighing against him as he climbed down, reminder of a task on which Mauryl had hung so very, very much, and in which he had so far failed. But the Road was out there waiting to call Mauryl away and the Book could prevent Mauryl going, so he held it secret that he had seen the Road, as he feared that he had, by accident, seen something Mauryl had never told him, and which, perhaps, Mauryl would tell him only if he could not solve the matter Mauryl set him to do.

It was not in his power to patch the hole the wind had made. He put up a few boards, but for the most part the holes were out of reach. He had at least, for the pigeons, patched the one that would have let their Shadow in, and the pigeons and the doves as well as Owl would have to bear with the rain when it came.

He said nothing of the hole in the roof when he came down from the loft. He thought Mauryl might be angry that he had seen the Road, and it would make Mauryl talk of going away again: that was what he feared. He studied very hard. He thought that he read Mauryl’s name in the Book, and came and asked him if that was so.

Mauryl said he would not be surprised. And that was all. So when he had studied the codex so long his eyes swam, he read the easy writings that Mauryl had made, and he copied them.

Some things, however, came much easier than others.

“Sometimes,” Tristen said, one evening, brushing the soft-stiff feather of the quill between his lips, while his elbows kept his much-scraped study parchment flat on the table, “sometimes I know how to do things you never taught me. How is that, Mauryl?”

Mauryl looked up from his own work, at least to the lifting of a shaggy brow, the pause of the quill tip above the inkpot. The pen dipped, then, wrote a word or two. “What things?” Mauryl asked him.  “How to write letters. How to read.”

“I suppose some things come and some things don’t.”

“Come where, Mauryl?”

“Into your head, where else? The moon? The postern tower?”

“But other things, too, Mauryl. I don’t know that I know Words. I see something or I touch something, and I know what it is or what to do with it. And sometimes it happens with things I see every day, over and over, only suddenly I know the Word, or I know how words fit together that I never understood before, or I know there’s more to a thing. And some of them scare me.”  “What scares you?”

“I don’t know. Only I’m not certain I have all the parts. I try to read the Book, Mauryl, and the letters are there, but the words ... I don’t know any of the words.”

“Magic is like that. Maybe there’s a glamor on the Book. Maybe there’s one over your eyes. Such things happen.”  “What’s magic?”

“It’s what wizards do.”

“Do you sometimes know Words that way, by touching them?”

“I’m very old. I find very little I don’t know, now.”

“Will I be old?”

“Perhaps.” Mauryl dipped the pen again. “If you’re good. If you study.”

“Will I be old like you?”

“Plague on your questions.”

“Will I be old, Mauryl?”

“I’m a wizard,” Mauryl snapped, “not a fortune-teller.”

“What’s am”

“Plague, I say!” Mauryl frowned and jerked another parchment over the first, discarded that one and lifted the corner to look at the one below, and the one below that. He pulled out one from the depths of the pile.

“Mauryl, I don’t ever want you to go away.”

“I gave you the Book. What does the Book say?”

He was ashamed. And had nothing to say.

“The answer is there, boy.”

“I can’t read the words!”

“So you have a lot to do, don’t you? I’d get busy.”

Tristen rested his chin against his arm, rubbed it, because it itched, and it felt strange under his fingers.

“Mauryl, can you read the Book?”

“You have no patience for your studies today, is that it? You worry at this, you worry at that. How am I to finish this?”  “Are you copying?”

“Ciphering. Gods, go outside, you’ve made me blot the answer. Enjoy the air. Give me peace. But mind—” Mauryl added sharply as he sprang up and his chair scraped the stone. He stayed quite still. “Mind you stay to the north walk, and when the shadows fall all the way across the courtyard—”

“I come inside. I always do. —Mauryl. —Why the north walk? Why never the south?”

“Because I say so.” Mauryl waved a dismissive hand. “Go, go, and leave an old man to his figures.”

“What figures? What do you—”

“Go, gods have mercy, take yourself and your questions to the pigeons. They have better answers.”  “The pigeons?”

“Ask them, I say. They’re patient. I’m not, young gadfly. Buzz elsewhere.”

Another wave of the fingers. Tristen knew he would gain nothing more, then, and started away.

But he remembered his copywork and put it safely on the shelf, far from Mauryl’s flood of parchments, which drowned the table in cipherings, with the orrery weighting the middlemost pile.

He hastened up the stairs, then, rubbing at the ink stains on his fingers, searching for wet spots that might find their way to his clothing or, unnoticed, to his chin, which still itched. He supposed he could ask Mauryl to make it stop, but Mauryl was busy, and besides, Mauryl’s work felt stranger than the itch, which went away of its own accord when he was busy.

–Mauryl, said the Win& and rattled at the tower shutters, rattle, bang, and thump-thump-thump.

Mauryl hardly glanced at the sealed shutters this time. It had been a shorter respite than he expected, and a far more surly Wind. There was no laughter about it now at all.

–Gestaurien, let me in. Let me in now. We can reason about this foolishness of yours.

It was worried, then. Mauryl drank it in and, still sitting, reached for his staff, where it leaned against the wall.

You know you can ruin yourself. This is entirely uncalled-for, entirely unnecessary.

It tried another window. But that was simply habit, Mauryl thought, and thought nothing else, resisted nothing, like grass in a gale.

–He’s asleep, the Wind murmured through the crack in the shutter nearest. I passed up and down his window. Do you truly think there’s any hope for you in this young fool? He knows nothing. I’ve drunk from his dreams, I have, Maury! You wish me to believe him formidable? I think not. I do think not. Not deep, not deep waters at all, this boy. He’s all so innocent.

–Sweet innocence, Mauryl said. But out of your reach. Long out of your reach, poor dead shadow. Poor shattered soul.

–You’ve given me a weapon, you know. That’s all he is. A shutter went bump-bump, and Mauryl looked up sharply, feeling the ward loosen, seeing the latch jump. If you had had the stomach to join me, Gestaurien, we might have raised the Sihhé kings to power they never dreamed off The new lords would never have risen, and you and I would not be haggling over this rotting fortress.

It was more self-possessed than before, more reasoning. That was not  good.

–Mauryl Gestaurien? Are you worried?

–No. Simply not hurried. Patience I have in abundance. I shan’t enumerate your failings, or tell you what they are. Let them be mysteries to you, like the counsel that I gave.

–Your mystery went walking on the wall I saw him there. Such a little push it would take, if I wanted to.

–If you had a body, isn’t that the pity, Hasufin? You’d do this, you’d do that. You’re a breath of air, a meandering malaise, a flatulence. Go bother some priest.

–What was his name, Gestaurien?

The spell-flinging startled him and disturbed his heart, but he turned it with a thump of his staff, rose and thumped the staff against the shutter.

Go away, thou breath of wind. Go, go, even the pigeons are weary of  you.

Softly the wind blew now, prowling, trying this and that window, for a long time.

Far longer than on any night previous.

And the stars.., the stars were moving toward ominous congruency.

Chapter 4

After a dry spell, the rain built in the north and rolled up in a great, towering fortress of cloud, flickering in its belly with lightnings. Tristen saw it from the wall, and knew immediately that it was a dark and dangerous kind of storm, no sun-and-puddles shower.

He said as much to Mauryl, who said, gruffly, So stay indoors, —and went back to his scribing and ciphering. Mauryl had been scraping parchments all morning in preparation for whatever was so urgent, and had just scraped part of one he wanted by accident. Mauryl was not in his best humor on that account, and Tristen walked softly about his chores in the hall.

By evening the storm was crashing and thumping its way across the forest. Tristen made their supper as Mauryl had taught him, managed not to burn the barley cakes, and set a platter of them and a cup of ale at Mauryl’s elbow in hopes of pleasing Mauryl; but Mauryl only muttered at him and waved his fingers, which meant go away, he was busy.

So Tristen had a supper of barley cakes and honey by himself, beside the fire, and since Mauryl evidenced no attention to him whatever, he left the pots for morning, when the rain barrel would certainly be full.

He decided nothing would happen in the evening. Then, Mauryl being so occupied he never had touched his supper, he took a candle, went up the stairs, lighting the night candles at each landing, so if Mauryl did come upstairs to his chamber, weary as he was apt to be, he should not have to deal with a dark stairway: that was Tristen’s thought, and probably Mauryl would complain about the early extravagance of candles, but Mauryl would complain more if he failed to light them.

And he was bound for bed early, which gave him no chance at all of doing something to annoy Mauryl, when Mauryl was in such a mood.

So he opened the door to his room, lit the watch-candle on his bedside, sat down on the edge of the bed and tugged off his boots and his shirt, disposing the latter on the pegs behind the door and laying the Book which he carried on the table beside his bed.

The double candlelight leapt and jumped with the draft from under the door; Mauryl had said that was why the fire moved. It gave him two overlapped shadows and made them waver about the stonework. The floor creaked—it always did that when the wind blew strongly from the north. He had observed that mystery—Mauryl had called him quite clever—on his own.

And while he was undressing, he heard the rain begin to spatter the horn window, as the thunder came rumbling.

He stepped out of his breeches, and was turning down the covers when a great crack of thunder sent him diving into the safety of his bed and drawing up the covers about his ears, in the protection of the cool sheets. A second clap of thunder sounded right over his room as he shivered, letting his body make a comfortable warm spot.

The candles both still burned, the watch-candle and the one that sat always at his bedside. Beside them sat the cup that he was to drink-Mauryl made it for him every evening. But when he had blown out the candle he had brought, and by the light of the fat, dim watch-candle reached out an arm and picked up the cup to drink it—he found it empty.

Well, so, Mauryl had been preoccupied. Mauryl was very busy and bothered whenever he was at his ciphering, which involved lines and circles and a great many numbers that made no sense at all to his eyes. He wondered if he should take the cup down to Mauryl and ask him how to make it himself, since there had never been a night he had not had it, but he supposed that one night would not make all that great a difference. It was a comfortable thing, and Mauryl said he was supposed to drink it all, every night, but he was supposed to have breakfast every day, too, and there had certainly been mornings when Mauryl had quite forgotten, before he had learned to make it for himself.

So he gave a sigh and decided it was like the breakfasts, and that if Mauryl did chance to remember it, and if it were important enough, Mauryl would wake him and have him drink it. He lay back, abandoned and forgotten, and listened to the beating of the rain against the horn window.

But just then he saw lightnings making patterns in the rough horn panes, droplets crawling and racing across the fractured yellow surface, and he realized that the shutters that had turned up shut and latched every evening in his room—as the cup had always been waiting—were not shut. He had not seen it: the light from the candles had blinded him to anything so far as the end of his bed. The lightnings showed it plainly now that he was down only to the watch-candle.

And he knew that he ought to get up in the chill air and fold the shutters across the window and latch them tight, but the thunder frightened him, and the rain did, and the unguarded window did. He was safe in bed. He tain he shout& get up an~ sY, x~xtet xY~x m’xxx~Xt)x~ ~ ~xx~x ~x~’xt xxt~x~ ...

If his eyelids were not suddenly so heavy and his breaths so deep and easy, the mattress gone soft, soft, soft as the water splashed off the window, which was a snug window, and latched, he knew that. He never unlatched it. Water ran down the gutters and down and down to ...

To the cistern, he thought, then, and dreamed of the buckets he had to draw, and how the cistern smelled cool and damp when he took off the wooden lid.., how it was dark and secret and he liked casting the bucket down, not knowing how deep the cistern really was, because the rope for the bucket was not nearly long enough to touch the bottom. He let it drop down and down, with a splash ...

The rain barrel was for the kitchen. The rain barrel was for washing.

The cistern, deep and dark, was a place of shadows ...

... shadows that moved and flowed up like water overflowing, running along the stones the way water ran, flowing up the step and seeping, with the puddle, under the kitchen door.

He waked, in total dark, heart thumping in his chest.

The second candle had gone out.

It might have been the sudden plunge into darkness that had wakened him. He thought so. He heard no change in the rush of rain. The wind skirled about the perilous window; the lightning through the horn cast strange shapes, accompanied by thunder.

Something groaned, as if the timbers of the keep were shifting.

Wind sounds. Night sounds. The fortress was full of creaks and groans and scurryings that seemed loudest at night.

That was because the fortress was old; Mauryl had said so when he had come to Mauryl afraid. Old, well-settled timbers creaked with the changes in weather, and the mice came and went as they pleased in the walls. Owl flew out on better nights.

But he tried not to think of Owl, or Owl’s fierce eyes glaring at him.

Again came that deep wooden groaning, which made him think the wind must be blowing from some direction it never had before. He lay shivering beneath his covers, warm enough, wondering why he was afraid, wishing that he dared jump out of bed very quickly and fling the shutter closed, but he imagined something at the window at just that moment, and himself standing too close ...

He could run out onto the balcony and go looking for Mauryl, but he saw no light under his door, beside his bed. Light always showed far across the floor if the wall sconce on the balcony outside was still lit. It was dark outside his room, and he had no idea whether Mauryl was upstairs abed or down at the table.

The very walls groaned, and the groaning became a bellow that shocked the air.

“Mauryl!” he cried, and flung the covers off and bolted for the door, naked as he was, with that bellowing going up and down the hollow core of the keep. He flung the door open onto dark.

No light shone up from the great hall below: the heart of the keep was dark all the way to the depths and the nook of Mauryl’s study, where lights burned latest. The candles were all out, even the watch-candles at the turnings of the stairs, and that bellowing echoed up from the depths and down from the rafters. He felt his way in panic along the wooden balcony, his hands following the cold stone of the wall, and he reached the turn where three faces were set together. He felt their open mouths and their pointed stone teeth, and groped out into utter blackness for the railing that should come before the steps.

His foot found the edge of the steps instead: he seized the railing for balance. The stairs went both up above and down to the depths from there, and he trusted nothing below. The safe place had to be Mauryl’s room—if it was dark below, then Mauryl could not be there. Mauryl had gone to bed upstairs. Mauryl would tell him it was nothing, just a sound.

Mauryl would call him foolish boy and calm his heart and tell him that nothing could get inside.

He ran stumbling up the steps, felt his way around and around the railing with the whole keep echoing and bellowing about him as if every mouth in every face in the walls had found a tongue at once.

His head topped the steps and he could see, by the light under Mauryl’s door, the floor of the balcony above his. He climbed the last steps, he ran to that door, seized the handle and pulled—but it was barred from inside, and the bellowing hurt his ears, drowned his heart, smothered his breath.

“Mauryl!” he cried, and beat on Mauryl’s door with his clenched fist.

The dark was all around him, and he felt the balcony creak and shake as if something else were walking on it, something shut out, too, in the dark outside Mauryl’s room. That thing was coming toward him.  “Mauryl!”

Something banged, inside, something shattered, steps crossed the floor in haste and the bolt crashed back. The door swung abruptly inward, then, and Mauryl stood, a shadow against the bright golden light that shone through the wild silver of his hair, the cloth of his robe.

The place was all parchments and vessels, charts and bottles on the unmade bed, the smell of ale and old linen and sulfur so thick it took the breath. The groaning was around them, deep and terrible, and Mauryl waved his arm in a fit of rage, shouted a Word–    The sudden silence was stifling, leaving his pulse hammering in his ears—his heart pounding. “You fool!” Mauryl shouted at him, and in utter fright he tried to leave, but Mauryl snatched at his arm and wanted him inside, where he was afraid to go.

Then somehow between the two of them the night table went bump and scrape and toppled over as Mauryl’s hand left his arm, as pottery crashed, as parchments slid heavily out the door.  “Come back here!” Mauryl raged after him.