Текст книги "Fortress in the Eye of Time"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

He hurried alone for the central stairs, those past Cefwyn’s room, supposed Cefwyn’s guards, absent from their posts, were inside with him, perhaps preparing to take him to safety, and he was halfway down the steps when he heard Cefwyn call out to him from above.  “Tristen! What’s burning?”

Cefwyn, without his guards, was standing in a dressing-robe, holding to the newel at the landing. He began to answer, but all of a sudden Cefwyn just—fell down, and his hand slipped on the steps, and he kept falling.

Tristen raced up the steps and stopped Cefwyn in his arms, but there was blood on the steps and blood on him, and Cefwyn had fainted.

Booted feet came running down the steps from above him. “M’lord,

–” Uwen began, bending to offer help.  “Where are his guards?”

“I don’t know, m’lord, Idrys—”

“Find Idrys!” Too much was going wrong. He feared to take Cefwyn downstairs, exposed to a confusion without guards, without the protections that hourly surrounded him. “Wherever the fire is—Idrys will be there. Find where it’s burning. I can carry him. Hurry!”

“Aye, m’lord!” Uwen said, and ran past him down the stairs.

He tried to pick Cefwyn up. He almost could manage it, though Cefwyn was utterly limp, and the wrong way about on the stairs. But by then Cefwyn’s guards had come running down the steps from above, and helped shift Cefwyn head-upward so he could get his knee and his arms under him and rise on the steps.

He carried Cefwyn up the steps as the guards attempted to help, white-faced and trying to express their contrition, to him, since Cefwyn heard nothing, but he turned his shoulder and went past them, fearing that his carrying Cefwyn might hurt the leg further. Cefwyn was a still, loose weight, hard to keep safe as he maneuvered through the doors of Cefwyn’s apartment. His boot slipped a little on the floor and he realized it was blood that made his foot skid. He maintained his hold on Cefwyn’s yielding weight, the air hazing dark about him, maneuvered him through more doors, into his bedroom and with a last, difficult balance and rending effort, laid Cefwyn down carefully on the bed.

At that moment Annas appeared, took one look and began calling out rapid orders to pages to bring water and linens, while the guards attempted to explain to Annas they had been trying to assess the danger from the smoke coming up the other stairs, that they had believed Cefwyn asleep, that they never otherwise would have left.

Pages came running with towels. Then Idrys arrived on the run, smelling of smoke, his face streaked with soot. He had a quick look at Cefwyn’s leg, and ordered tight bandages.

“The physician is on his way,” Idrys said.

“He fell on the stairs,” Tristen said, still out of breath. “He heard the alarm—”

“Where in hell were the guards?” Idrys demanded, pressing a linen wad against the wound, and the guards again attempted to explain—but Efanor came through the doors, cursing the guards and demanding to know what was happening.

“The kitchen’s afire,” Idrys said shortly.

“—Happening to my brother, sir!”

“Stupidity!” Idrys said. “Damn it, where is the man? Annas! I need linens! —He fell on the stairs, my lord Prince. We’ve sent for the surgeon.

If you would help His Majesty, Your Highness, see if you can stir the surgeon out of hiding. He only lately attended master Emuin, of another fall on the stairs—he’s probably in his residence. He wasn’t at the fire.”

Efanor, without another word, turned and left.

“We’ll have the damned priest in here next,” Idrys said. He had a pad of linen pressed to Cefwyn’s wound. Blood soaked the sheets. The endmost stitches had burst. It was not all red blood that came out. “Damn it! Lord Tristen! Go out into the hall, set a guard over Emuin, Prince Efanor, and the lady Regent—gods know, it may rain frogs next.”

“Yes, sir,” Tristen said, and went out and caught one and another servant of his own and had them find out what was happening downstairs.

He sent one of Cefwyn’s distraught guards upstairs to order the guards watching over the lady to be alert and to make no such mistakes—he thought that the guard might be especially passionate in urging the point.

He had one of his guards to fill out the number at Cefwyn’s door and sent another to put extra guards with Efanor, who was searching, he hoped, for the physician.

Rain frogs. Idrys meant ills of every improbable sort. It was too much calamity. He tried to reach Emuin. He called to him, in that gray place, from where he stood; but Emuin was waging his own struggle—and when he would have joined it, Uwen came up to him in mid-hall. “His Majesty’s come awake,” Uwen said. “But he’s not well, m’lord, he’s not real well. The captain said you might ought to come quick.”

He all but ran to Cefwyn’s apartment, and Idrys was still at Cefwyn’s bedside. Cefwyn was absolutely white, but his eyes were open. The physician had arrived, the same that had stitched up Emuin.

“Tristen.” Cefwyn reached out his hand and Tristen took it, wishing the pain to stop and for the wound to be well, but clearly it did no good.

Cefwyn’s mouth made a thin line and sweat broke out on Cefwyn’s white face.

“I can’t do what Mauryl did,” he said in a low voice, only for Cefwyn.

“I wish I could. Mauryl could make the pain go away. And I’ve tried.”

“Emuin says you’re not a wizard,” Cefwyn said. His grip was painfully hard. “I don’t call on you to be. Is the fire out?”  “Kitchen grease, Your Majesty,” Idrys said.

‘Td at least expect something more exciting,” Cefwyn said. Cefwyn all but fainted, caught a breath and several more, before he asked:

“Emuin. Where is Emuin?”

“Stairs have lately turned hostile,” Idrys said. “Master Emuin fell, m’lord King. He will mend, but he’s in no better case than you.”

Cefwyn seemed to have fallen asleep, then, but he was so pale, so waxen-looking.

“It’s as well His Majesty should sleep,” the physician said. “Close the curtains. All of you. Out. Away, m’lords.” He set out a jar on the bedside, full of something noxious and something white and moving.

“You,” Idrys said, “take that from this room, sir.”

“The wound is suppurating, Lord Commander. The flesh is corrupt.

The maggots will keep it clean.”

“There will be no damned maggots, sir. Out!”

“The flesh is corrupt. I tell you that you are trifling with his life!”

“Get him out of here!” Idrys said. “Get master Haman.”

“I shall go to the prince.”

“Go to the devil!” Idrys said. “I’ll not have your hands on him! He’d have been well by now if you’d the talent of your damned maggots.

Out!”

Tristen drew a long breath as the man gathered his bottles and left.

“His Majesty don’t like the Lord Physician, m’lord Commander,”

Uwen ventured, head ducked. “He wouldn’t let ’im near Lord Tristen again, he swore not.”

“With good cause,” Idrys said, and adjusted pillows under Cefwyn’s knee. “Go! Out! The lot of you! Annas has business here. The rest of you—out!”

They had gotten the fire in the kitchen out, so Uwen said, by flinging sand on it, which had been Cook’s notion. Cook’s hair had caught fire and three of the boys were badly burned: there was sand all over, brought in buckets from the smithy, and every pot and wall was blackened with soot. The fire had broken out, the report was, while the night-cook was asleep.

“Wasn’t nothing going on,” Uwen said, “except the morning bread risin’, and then by what they say, the grease-pot was overset and it run down into the coals. After that, it was merry hell, m’lord. They don’t know if it was some dog got in, that knocked it over, or what, but Cook’s just damn lucky. It’s sausages from the courtyard, campfires and kettles for us tomorrow. It’s a rare mess.”

Tristen paced the floor, with nothing better to do—there was nothing he could do. Emuin was holding out on his own and cursed at him for a distraction, saying there were untoward influences. The ether is upset, Emuin insisted, which he did not understand, but he remembered the pigeon and the latch rattling, and with the dark outside the windowpanes, he paced and he looked for the intervention of the enemy in all that was going on—he feared to attract Hasufin’s notice, but feared Hasufin was laughing at all of them this moment. If a window-latch could rattle, he said to himself, a pot might rock and go over.

He had not prevented calamity, he with his little attempt at magic. He felt his failure keenly, and wondered whether he was not in fact responsible for the calamity. And from time to time he went across the hall and asked the guards how Cefwyn fared, but there was no news, except that master Haman had come and looked and said he could bring up a poultice they used on the horses, and he could stitch it up, but that was all that lay in his competency.

According to the guards and the gossip in the hall, Idrys had then said,

“Do the horses generally live?” and Haman had said, “Yes, sir,” and Idrys had had Haman bring what he had.

It did not please Prince Efanor, who sent the physician back with two of his guard and ordered Idrys to accept his treatment. Idrys had told the guards and the physician they were in danger of their lives if they meddled further.

So they had gone back to Prince Efanor to report that.

A long time went by, in Haman’s comings and goings, in the drift of smoke from the downstairs—many rooms had their windowpanes ajar, letting it flow out, but the smell of smoke clung to everything, and the servants were bundling fine clothes into linen wrappers and sealing the doors of chests and such with wadding. Emuin seemed better, at least so his servants reported, and had called for tea, but had headache and did not want to be moved, cursing his servants and telling the good Teranthine brothers that he wanted them to go light candles in the sanctuary.

What good would that do? Tristen wondered when he heard it, and wondered whether Emuin was in his right mind, or hoping for this salvation of his. He went down the hall to see Emuin, and Emuin was indeed better in color, but seemed to have lost substance, if that were possible.

“Sir,” he said. “Did you want more candles in here, or what can I do?”

“I want the brothers to light the candles,” Emuin said, and confided to him then so faintly he could hardly hear: “to get them out of here before I go mad. Is it dawn?”  “Not yet.”

“Do you feel it—no! don’t look there. Stay out of that Place. Something’s prowling about. It’s here. Gods, it’s here.”

“I feel something dreadfully wrong. The air is wrong, sir.” He went down to his knees and caught Emuin’s cold hand in his—but Emuin did not move his head at all from where it rested, and seemed in great pain, perhaps not hearing him, as no one else ever had heard him when he tried to say the most desperate dangers. “It doesn’t ever stop, sir. It’s getting worse. I had my window rattling. And one of my birds killed itself.”

“He’s reaching out,” Emuin whispered, so faintly he might not have heard if he had not had his ear close. “He wants me. He wants me to die, apostate from the order—he wants me very badly. He wants me to die here, in this place—and damned to hell. Useful to him. Another steppingstone.”

“Mauryl used to speak Words, and the tower would feel safer, at least.

Do you know any of those Words, sir?”

“I haven’t the strength right now to think of them. Let me rest awhile.

Let me rest. My head hurts so.”

He brushed his fingers across Emuin’s brow, ever so gently, wishing the pain to stop. But it was impudent even to try with a wizard such as Emuin was. “If my wishes help at all, sir, you have them.”

“They are potent,” the whisper came, but Emuin’s head did not move, nor his eyes open. “They are more potent than you know, young lord.

Potent enough I could not die. Damn you!”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and took it for an old man at the edge of sleep, and in pain.

“Cefwyn,” Emuin said then, seeming agitated. “Watch Cefwyn.

Young fool.”

He did not know which of them Emuin thought the fool, but he said,

“Yes, sir,” and got up and left for Cefwyn’s room.

But the guards, very quiet and very correct since Idrys had had private words with them, said only that the King was in some pain, and that Idrys had said he might come in whenever he wanted.

He thought that he might visit Cefwyn, but there was a sense of ill everywhere alike, that same sense that he had had before, and he seemed to bring it with him.

There was a commotion on the stairs then, a number of men—Dragon Guard—came up the steps and kept going, to the next floor, as Cefwyn’s guards and everyone else looked anxiously in that direction.

But not just men of the Guard. Efanor. The priest, all with very determined mien. Lord Commander Gwywyn. Why to that floor? was Tristen’s first thought, and then: Ninévrisé.

Efanor had objected to her presence. The priest disliked Elwynim.

Gwywyn had begun with his loyalty to Inereddrin. “Uwen!” Tristen called out, and to the guards:

“Tell Idrys. Efanor is going against the lady. With Gwywyn. Quickly.”

He ran for the stairs, following the guards, who reached Ninévrisé’s floor just ahead of him. He hurried along behind them, overtaking Efanor and the priest, who were among the last, along with other priests, some carrying candles and some silver and gold vessels.

“Lord Prince,” Tristen said. “What is the matter?”

“Sorcery,” Efanor said, and a disturbed look came over him. “But you would know.”

“Yes, m’lord, I would. And there is no need to disturb the lady.” He saw the Dragon Guardsmen, with Gwywyn, sweep the mere sergeant of the Prince’s Guard aside from Ninévrisé’s door, along with the rest of the guards. They were going inside, and Tristen went to prevent harm to the lady, as, past the invaded foyer, a handful of frightened Amefin servants were trying to stand between Ninévrisé and a Guelen prince, armed soldiery and a priest of the Quinalt.

“There she is!” the priest called out from among the hindmost. “There is the evil! There is the sorceress!”

“No, sir!” Tristen said, and pushed his way past the soldiers and the Lord Commander. “This is wrong, sir!” he said to Lord Gwywyn. “No.

I’ve called Idrys. He’s coming. Wait for him.”

“Idrys is bewitched the same as the King!” the priest cried, “and this is a Sihhé—don’t look him in the eyes! Arrest him! Arrest the lot of them!”

Gwywyn’s face betrayed deep doubt. Tristen looked straight at him, but the priest was pressing forward and flung ashes at him, which stung his eyes, and the guards went past him, as the servants cried out in alarm.

“What is this?” That was Idrys’ voice, and of a sudden something thumped heavily against the wall and clattered down it—a guard in Idrys’ path. “You! Out! The rest of you get out of here! Good loving gods, have you lost your senses?”

“You have clearly lost yours, Lord Commander!” Efanor shouted at him.

“I hold you accountable—I hold you accountable for my brother’s life!”

Idrys shouted back. “The King is not dead—damn it, put those weapons away!”

“No!” the priest said. “You have brought the King under unholy influences, Lord Commander, among them this man’s! Arrest them, and the women!”

Idrys moved, spun about and set his back to the wall and his side to Tristen, and that quickly a dagger was in his hand. Tristen did not want to draw. It seemed to him once that happened there was no reason, and he only moved to prevent the guardsmen getting past him, men who showed no disposition to want to lay hands on him. The men of the Prince’s Guard that Idrys had brought were pushing and shoving those of the Dragon Guard who had come with Efanor and Gwywyn. On Idrys’ side was Uwen, who shoved his way through and stood with a drawn sword facing Gwywyn and his men, followed in rapid succession by Erion Netha and Denyn Kei’s-son—armorless, wild-haired, with shirts unfastened, both carrying swords unsheathed. They and men behind them, all of the Prince’s Guard, looked as if they had just waked and seized up weapons as they could.

“Hold, all!” Idrys said. “Damned fools! Your Highness, His Majesty is well enough. And he will have you to ask, sir, whence you made this illadvised assault. This is utter foolishness! Put the swords away, I say! Put them away!”

“I do not take your orders, sir!” Efanor said. “Until I hear the King’s word and see his eyes, I do not believe you—and I will have the physician, not a horse-surgeon, attend His Majesty, and other matters I shall set right, beginning with the inquiry into why an accident in the Bryalt shrine, and why the fire, and why His Majesty my brother is lying in peril of his life within hours after a betrothal that gave away far too much to an Elwynim witch!”

“Accuse me of sorcery?” Ninévrisé cried. “Oh, very well, dear sir!”

She snatched up a small book from off the sideboard and held it aloft. “I have your gift, my lord brother-in-law, I am reading your gift in search of your truth and your faith! I had not known it came with such other behavior!”

“Don’t listen to her!” the priest was shouting, and Ninévrisé:

“Oh, well, and am I so dangerous? I have dismissed all my men! I have trusted you! I have His Majesty’s sworn word for my safety and his personal grant of these premises for my privacy!”

“This is enough!” Gwywyn was saying, appealing for reason and truth, but the words were starting to echo, with the priest shouting, and Ninévrisé shouting, and of a sudden men were shoving one another again, and steel rang on steel, as came a stabbing pain at the base of his skull, Emuin’s presence.., drawing him in, warning him.., such as he could hear ...

Small and angry, something in the east.., close at hand. Deadly dangerous. A step in the dark, a burning of candles, candle-flames, not orange of fire, not blue of amulets, but smoldering black, with a thin halo of burning white, smoke going up in thin plumes above them ... above a fluttering of wings .... shadows and wings ...

–The east, he heard Emuin say. Harm ... against the King. The stairs. The east stairs by the grand ball ...

He could not get breath to speak, he could not think past the pain, except that he could not desert the lady, he needed help, and he snatched Ninévrisé by the wrist past Uwen and Erion, with the outcries of the servants in his ears, with Efanor bidding them stop him, and men attempting to do that, but Uwen and Erion were there with drawn swords, holding off a number who backed away from them, as he whisked Ninévrisé past the priest, past Efanor and Lord Gwywyn and in an instant in among the Prince’s Guard.

But that was not where he was going, blinded by headache and so afflicted by Emuin’s pain it all but pitched him to his knees. He reached the stairs. Ninévrisé was crying out questions. He realized he was holding her too tightly, and let her go, wishing her to come with him. Hearing Idrys and Gwywyn shouting at each other above, he ran, and she ran with him, down and down the steps–    He was aware of alarm in the lower hall, then, people staring in fright as they passed, people trying to intervene with questions. He saw the east stairs in front of him, and he did not need Emuin now. He knew. He felt it, a small tingling in the air, but a presence, nonetheless, that had taken alarm.

“What is it?” Ninévrisé breathed, hiking her skirts, trying to overtake him on the steps as he reached the floor above. Orien’s guards looked at them in startlement as they came.

“Sirs,” he said as calmly and reasonably as he could, and hoping pursuit did not overtake them. “Open this door. Now.”

The guards did as he ordered. He had never been past the foyer of lady Orien’s rooms. Now he went past those inner doors, with Ninévrisé and the guards, as women inside cried out in alarm. In the opening of both inner and outer doors, cold wind gusted through a window-panel wide open to the night, and carried on it a stinging, perfumed smoke. Candle flames wavered in the gale, and flung shadows about a group of black-clad women with astonished faces, horrified looks.

In front of them were candles on a table, a basin of something dark, severed red braids and a sprig of thorns. Among those women he felt presence, and chief of them he sensed was Orien Aswydd, who faced him with her face stark and hard, in the flaring light of a single candle. All the other candles had gone out.

“Damn you!” Orien said, and indeed there was a flash of gray and a tingle in the air.

“Is this Orien Aswydd?” Ninévrisé demanded. “Is this Orien Aswydd, who killed my messengers?”

“Get out!” Orien cried at her, then, in fear, “Keep away from reel” for Ninévrisé brought anger into the gray world—Ninévrisé started for her and women scattered, and Shadows scattered around them. It was not good to feel. It shivered through the air, it set all the gray to rippling like curtains, fluttering like wings. It welcomed anger.

“No!” Tristen cried, and seized the table edge, overturning it in the way of the women, and the candles and the basin and all went over in the light from the door. Fire flared in the spilled wax on a woman’s skirts, and shrieking, the woman tried to smother it.

In that firelight metal had flashed in Orien’s hand. He saw it, spun Ninévrisé back as Orien came past the end of the table, and evaded her as another woman drove a blade past him. She did not aim well, he thought, and in the slowness of such moments and without difficulty he caught the woman’s wrist—in near darkness: one of the guards had smothered the burning cloth and the other stopped the women from fleeing. He took the knife and let the woman who had attacked him go, at least to the keeping of the guards.

But Orien also had gone down in a pile of dark skirts and Ninévrisé was standing on Orien’s hand with one slippered foot. There was another knife, as the guards were finding the women in general so armed; and Ninévrisé trod hard on the hand when Orien tried to claw her ankle and tried to overthrow her by dragging at a handful of her skirts.

Tristen bent and took the knife from crushed fingers, then took Orien by the wrist, pulling her not entirely gently to her feet.

“Damn you!” Orien’s eyes burned with rage and with fear. She fought to be free and he let her go. “Damn you!” She spoke Words, but no sound came. Wind blasted into the room.  “Good bloody gods,” one guard said.

“I think you should take her away from here,” Tristen said. They were Names she had spoken. He did not know what they attached to. He found no image of them but dark. The air felt far less dangerous after that gust, but a cold wind was still breathing through the open panel.

“Shut the window, sir. I think it’s far better shut.”

“On my soul we had no idea, m’lord,” the chief of the guards said unsteadily, while the others held the women—there were five of them—at bay in a corner backed by shadowy dark drapes and gilt cord. The light all came from the hall, the doors open straight through, but that itself was dim. Came then another touch at the gray—but that was Emuin, glad despite the headache, glad to know what was happening, though Tristen felt a fine sweat on his skin and felt the room go around only in that instant of awareness.

“Content to be the Marhanen’s chattel,” Orien said, nursing a sore wrist. Her face was lit strangely by the remaining candles. It seemed no longer beautiful, but ominous and terrible, the countenance she turned to Ninévrisé. “You above all others should be ashamed.”

“Your Grace of Amefel,” Nin6vrise said with utmost coldness, “you have made a very grave mistake.” And to the guards: “I would call the Bryalt. I have no intimate knowledge of this sort of thing. But I think they should see this room, these women, and these objects before they are removed. There are some of these things very surely of harm. I know what things like this mean. They are banned in Elwynor. I assure you, sirs, I have done none of this, nor ever did my father.”

The four guards were not the only ones present now. There was Lord Captain Kerdin, and Prince Efanor who came in clutching an amulet and trailing a number of Quinalt priests.

“It was sorcery,” Efanor said. “It was black sorcery. Arrest them.”

“I trust this time you don’t mean me, Your Highness,” Ninévrisé said.

“Or Lord Tristen.”

“No, Your Grace of Elwynor.” Efanor’s expression was strained. “I fear we did mistake the source. But if you knew where to go—I ask why you waited so long.”

“Your Highness,” Ninévrisé began in exasperation.

“My lord Prince,” Tristen said. “I could not find the source, and I am

Sihhé; master Emuin scarcely did, and he is a wizard.”

“He is a priest,” Efanor said harshly. Tristen recalled how Idrys had said never argue about priests with Prince Efanor, and did not argue the point.

“I think your priest should make prayers in this room,” he said, not seeing how it could do good or ill, but that it might please Efanor. “But first I think they should close this room and let wise men and Emuin decide what to do with these things.”

“This is a nest of evil,” Efanor’s priest muttered, “and these women should be burned.”

The women some of them began weeping. Orien did not. “No, sir,”

Tristen said respectfully, and added, knowing he posed them a quandary of authority, “I think His Majesty the King should decide what to do with them.”

That silenced them.

“Take them to the guard-house,” Efanor said. “Set a guard on them and light candles all around. Your Grace of Elwynor, my apologies.”

“I do accept them, Your Gracious Highness,” Ninévrisé said, and offered her hand, which Efanor hesitated to take, then kissed gingerly.

“Thank you, Your Highness. If you would take me to His Majesty, please, I should much be obliged. I’ve had a fright.”

“Lady,” Efanor said, and, which Tristen would have thought very improbable upstairs, he watched Efanor with the lady on his arm walk out past the priests and the guards, in all good and fair grace.

He looked then to the Lord Captain for wisdom in the matter.

Kerdin looked quite dubious himself. But Tristen thought Ninévrisé had acted very wisely, since she had put Efanor on his best manners.

More, she had not embarrassed Efanor when she might have. And Efanor knew it.

He knew when he had seen something wise. He could admire it, at least. And he saw the guard gathering the women to take them to the guard-house, for which he was very sorry: he had been there himself, and Orien would not like it.

She stared back at him with no apology. And he supposed she was angry about Lord Heryn. He thought she was very brave to have attacked Cefwyn where there was at least one wizard to have seen it, and he did not think that sorcery had broken master Emuin’s skull.

“I think,” he told Uwen and Captain Kerdin in that thought, “that there is someone in the Bryaltine shrine who attacked master Emuin. It might not be one of the brothers, but I don’t think master Emuin slipped on the stairs. I think there was someone helping Lady Orien, someone there and in the kitchens.”

“If master Emuin gets well,” Captain Kerdin said, “I don’t think I would like to have been that person, Lord Warden, and I fear he’s the most likely besides yourself to find out who. But I’ll ask the abbot and the kitchen staff who came and went.”

He cast an uneasy glance about him, at the room, at the women.

Orien’s glance still smoldered. There was still harm in her. There was still the anger. He felt it as, finding nothing for himself to do, he thought he would also like to be sure Cefwyn and Emuin were safe, and went out into the hall and down the stairs. Uwen stayed with him, saying something about how Prince Efanor had been willing to listen to Idrys, finally, and how Gwywyn and Idrys had gone together to see Cefwyn, whether he was well.

But as he came into the lower hall he had that same feeling, that dread feeling he had had when of a sudden he had known direction to Orien’s ill-working—and it was the same direction.

“M’lord?” Uwen asked, as he stopped. Uwen’s voice came from far away. The sense he had was overwhelming, that it was there, down that hall, on the lower floor.

“My lord?” Uwen said again.

It was that end of the hall that had distressed him when he had first come, that place where the paving changed from marble to older stone.

Lines. Masons’ lines.

“Stay here,” he said to Uwen, and when Uwen protested regarding his safety: “Stay here!” he said, and went, alone down that hall, past other people, past servants. “Get away,” he said to them, and servants, looking frightened, moved quickly.

He walked all the way down the hall, to that place where the pavings changed. He saw the hall hung with old banners, and looked for the lines, such as he had seen at Althalen, at his very feet.

The lines were scarcely there, scarcely a pale glow. He looked up, up at the bannered hall, and heard the rustling of wings, hundreds of wings.

He saw the stirring of Shadows hanging like old curtains, perching on beams, spreading wings like vast birds, and the whole hall shifting and stirring with the darkness that nested in every recess. Wings began to spread, Shadows bated and threatened him, and he stepped back behind the fading safety of the line, wishing for a Word such as Mauryl had used, a spell, whatever it was that Mauryl worked.

–Tristen, came Emuin’s voice. Tristen. Stay back. Hold on to me ....

Do not let me fall. Hold me!

–Yes, sir, he said, and was aware of Emuin near him in the gray space, and was aware of Emuin growing stronger and stronger and that blue line at his feet growing brighter and brighter, until it blazed, until it turned white, and the Shadows were only banners, and the place fluttering with wings had gone away ....

“M’lord!” Uwen said, having disobeyed him, having come, with his sword bare in his hand, to stand by him looking at a hall full of faded banners. “Is summat here, me lord? Is it somebody hiding here?”

Master Emuin was alive. Emuin had retreated until he could only dimly feel his presence, but something had changed in that presence. It was far, far warmer, far more vivid, of far more substance, if one could say that in the gray realm.

He had never seen Mauryl. He had never heard Mauryl in the way Emuin had shown him to do—and he thought that Mauryl might have been fearsome in this place. Emuin was not—at least, not toward him.