C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (62 page)

“Here,” he said, and this time the old wizard’s hand reached up and steadied the tankard, and he drank three deep gulps before he breathed.

“Where are my boys?” Cefwyn asked, running short on compassion. The old man seemed less dying than frozen, and warmth was getting back to him. “Where did you leave them?”

“If I knew that, they wouldn’t be lost!” Master Emuin said. “But they’re together. They fell away together.”

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i

THE GRAY SPACE ROARED WITH TROUBLED WINDS. THERE

WAS EVERY DANGER of being cast back to the icy waste, and Tristen kept Cefwyn and Uwen very much in mind, his link to the world. He was alone here, but confused and treacherous as things could become, he had deliberately left ties to draw him back, and as quickly as the bitter cold bit to the bone he drew in a deep breath and set his feet, making his own warmth, that of living flesh.

He had his sword. Unlike most weapons, this sword had value here, even with ghosts. He had his protections, not least in those ties he maintained to the world of Men. He was glad not to sense Emuin in this place. Emuin had not tried to follow him, having no strength to do so, none, either, to tell him what way he had come—but the track Emuin had left in his passage was still clear, a bright trail shredding on the winds.

He followed it, carefully extending his presence from his staying-place in Henas’amef along that roiled, chill breeze through the void that defined that recent passage.

He saw shapes, hazed in the gray. Going farther, he found two horses where no creatures of Men ought to be, and one he knew: they ran in panic, but he drew his sword and parted the gray space to give them their escape into the world they wanted… natural creatures, nothing of the sort this place could harbor long. Their fear had roiled everything around them, and destroyed the track Emuin had made, lines of passage confused and broken.

A shard of ice thrust itself up.
That
place tried to form again around him, and he knew its warning signs, and hurled himself back.

Everything shifted. Every track he had followed was gone, confounded and confused.

“Elfwyn!” he called down the winds. “Elfwyn Aswydd! Answer if you hear!”

A wisp of something wafted back at his call. He reached for it.

ii

AEWYN NEVER YET STIRRED FROM UNCONSCIOUSNESS, OR

WIZARD-CAST SLEEP, or whatever held him in its grip, despite the fall into a snowbank. Sweating despite the cold, Elfwyn hauled him up into his arms, the wind skirling about them and moaning through old trees. He rocked, as Gran had used to do with him when the night was full of noises; but there was no old man any longer, there was no roof over their head. Master Emuin had left them and there was not the least clue where they were, except in the midst of a woods that could be some lord’s copse or the dark heart of Marna itself. There had been no woods, he said to himself, no woods at all near the cottage. And they had no shelter, no way to ride out of here.

“It’s all right,” he said, over and over again, in time with his moving, in time with the worst shrieks of the wind. “It’s just the wind. It’s the trees making that sound. It’s all right. It’s all right, Aewyn. I’m still here; I won’t leave you, I promise.”

Aewyn moved, lifted a hand as if to fend something off.

“Aewyn?”

A hand caught him in the chin, bringing blood to his lip. Aewyn flailed out, kicking and gasping, and he wrapped his arms about his brother, hard as he could.

“We’re not falling, we shan’t fall,” he said, and felt Aewyn’s breath go out of him and come back. “I’m here. I’m here.”

“Otter?”

“We fell, Aewyn. Something hit the door, the old man left, and we fell.”

“Where are we?” Aewyn asked in a hoarse thread of a voice.

“Gods! Where are we?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in a forest. He was going to take us to your father, and then I couldn’t hold on to you, and I did, and we’re here, is all.”

“Freezing in the snow,” Aewyn said, trying to sit up, and wincing.

It wasn’t deep snow here: the trees kept it off, but they were in the edge of a drift, in the dark, in the wind, in a clear spot in the woods.

“Have we lost the horses, too?”

“I don’t know where we are.” Elfwyn tried to get to his feet, managed as far as one knee, stiff with cold. “I don’t think he meant to drop us. He might come back. I did ward us here. I did what I could.” He had trampled a line all around them, and done it three times, on his knees, with the wind knocked out of him. The old man had told him, the old man had chided him about his carelessness with protections. He was not to be caught being a fool again.

But Aewyn lurched to his feet and walked a staggering step or two, which took him immediately outside the sorry little circle he had made, and Elfwyn scrambled up and seized Aewyn’s arm to bring him back.

“Where are we?” Aewyn asked desperately, and turned. Now, above their ragged breathing, there began to be noises in the woods around them. Brush cracked, first on this side, then that.

They were still outside his small circle. Elfwyn pulled him back in, and looking between the trees he saw slashes appear in the snow.

“Go away!” he yelled at whatever it was. “Get back! Get away from us!”

The fog swept in about them both. Shadows moved in it, tall shadows, soldiers with pikes, and swords. He heard shouts, and the clangor of weapons, and the ground seemed to go out from under their feet and come back again with a thump that staggered them where they stood.

The fog broke in a rush of snowy wind, and left them, not in a woods, but on flat, open ground, beside a snowy heap of stones, a tall pillar of stones, in a sea of snowdrifts.

It was a cairn, and a flat stone was set against it: writing on it was obscured by snow, and when Elfwyn brushed the face of it clear…

Andas, it said. Just that.

“Andas Andas-son,” Aewyn said. “The standard-bearer. This is where the standard-bearer fell. Oh, gods, Otter, this isn’t a good place! We’re at Lewen Field!”

All around them in the dim, snow-sifted light, as Elfwyn turned to look, the snowdrifts blew off other cairns piercing the white, hundreds of low hummocks of stone that had gathered snow, looking for all the world like drifts, and unnaturally blowing clear all at once. He seized Aewyn’s arm, and all of a sudden the fog began to close in again about them, in a rush of shouting and tumult, the clash of armed men and the howl of a dark edge so, so close to them…

iii

GONE. TRISTEN REACHED OUT, BUT WHEN HE REACHED

FOR THE BOYS, THE GRAY space shifted again, and things that had been on the left were above him, and things that had been above him were below. The diminishing trail of a living and double presence retreated on winds he himself had generated, just by moving, like leaves in autumn—while around him, everywhere around him, shadows moved.

“My lord!” some cried, and others howled in rage or screamed in fear. Lewen Field, it was, the old battlefield seething with sorcery, and magic. Here, his enemy had evaded him, had attacked those who followed him, bitter, bitter lesson. Now the battlefield teemed with shadows, some beseeching him, some cursing him, some attempting to go home, some to find their lords, their comrades, their brothers: the whole place had gone down in chaos, and chaos bred and broke out like plague, sweeping into the winds.

Darkness lurked here, too, a dark wind, an ominous track. It had come at him in that day. But where it went now, he turned to see.

It eluded him, and swept away on the course the boys had taken—a stalking presence risen between him and them.

But when he risked leaving his hold on Uwen Lewen’s-son and attempted to follow that trail through the gray space, chill winds flung him or it elsewhere. It was as if the harder he reached to take hold of anything, the farther what he sought retreated.

Once more, he made the attempt. Once the faint whisper of presence that was the boy Elfwyn wafted right past him, but when he reached for it, the boy was immediately far distant, like flotsam on another current, trailing blue fire—magic let loose, and part of it within his grasp, a mystery to him.

Elfwyn he might snatch,
might
. But Aewyn was lost if he did that. Aewyn resisted. Aewyn clung to the world, and the result slung the brothers no knowing where, a leaf’s mad course through a windstorm.

The gale narrowed, however. A gap appeared in a wall of shards that baffled him: such a wall had never existed, within his ken.

Winds wailed through that keyhole of a gap, and if the boys went that way, they might be swept through and lost.

Those were wards, he thought. Wards of unprecedented strength, veiling a power that might suck the boys right through: to him it appeared as an impenetrable wall, when most were gossamer, and shredded when he casually reached through them.

He was dismayed—helpless to prevent the boys’ sweeping course toward that narrow gap, and not knowing, if he passed through that one necessary breach, whether he could rescue the boys, or even save himself.

Two swordlike spires of ice thrust up, blocking his path. One cut his reaching hand. Blood fell, and streamed away like smoke. More shards rose.

“Aewyn Marhanen!” he called out, attempting to enlist that recalcitrant mote. But he had not seen the Guelen brother in years, and had nothing to hold to, no inkling how to compel the one resisting element of that retreating image. “Elfwyn Aswydd!”

Suddenly the track of both boys curled away and vanished, more smoke than substance, streaming among shards of ice, bristling precursors of that wall.

The gray space curled up and stretched out again, and all the shards revised themselves. They became part of the barrier.

He might risk it. For two such lives, even so, he might risk that barrier.

“M’lord,” Uwen said, or he thought Uwen said.

Solid as the mortal earth, Uwen was, and long ago, he had given Uwen the command of him. He began to retreat without deciding.

Overheated air met him, like fire, burning his wounded hand.

Blood dripped, Uwen seized him, face-to-face as he caught his balance on solid stone. Cefwyn and Crissand, with Master Emuin, turned in alarm.

“I lost them, too,” he said in despair, and Uwen caught his wounded hand and held on to him, warmth, like the room, and Crissand seized a heavy chair and shoved it under him.

Rest and warmth came welcome. His body was exhausted. And from where he sat, he could look across to Master Emuin, whose face was still unnaturally pale. “Wherever I went, whenever I reached for them, it drove them farther. Well that I came back, before I made matters worse than they are—they stopped, they stopped, somewhere just short of where another power meant to take them. They are fighting. How long they can fight—”

“A book, lad,” Emuin said hoarsely. “We thought it burned… and

’twas hidden in the library wall. It’s come loose in the world now.”

“There was something…” A chill came through his flesh, a memory of that place, and of that blue trail through the winds. He recalled of the Zeide library, a pile of ash, and a basket of burned fragments that resisted every effort to put them back together—fallen to dust, now.

But the boys had fought their fate. Some sort of magic was with them. Magic drew them along the winds, but in their determination—or the determination of one of them—they fought being drawn. That, and at least the one thing of power in the possession of one of them, was how they still held on to the world.

“One book survived,” Emuin said faintly. “One book someone most wanted, time meaning very little to him. Mauryl’s notebook, if I’m a wizard, and Elfwyn has it. He carries it with him.”

Cold settled about his heart, deep suspicion what power would have had the deftness to hide such a thing from Emuin and from him all this time, despite their searching, the deftness to hide it and the patience to wait for years to lay hands on it. Men were born and died, but that ancient soul had maintained a key in the world to get at it. It was not an immortal creature: nor was he, brought into the world for one purpose—to oppose it.

So a book of Mauryl Gestaurien’s had survived, as they had thought— Mauryl, who had taught Hasufin Heltain, but
not
taught him all he wanted.

Mauryl, in his battle with Hasufin Heltain, had called
him
into being at the last. Tristen’s own making might be in such a book. He had looked for that in the ashes they had found in the library, a burning that had not been complete, and in books they had gotten back at the riverside… to no avail. Now there was a book, which no one could find before.

Now, now the key emerged—the boy with the hollow at his heart, the book that was not burned, the burst tomb, and the sister vanished from her tower…

Hasufin had no pity, nor any desire but one: life and power to hold on to it. He knew his enemy, having reached to the depth of him. And Hasufin knew him: if there was one thing Hasufin wanted most in all the world it was to see him out of it… because Hasufin would not have life until he took and destroyed Mauryl’s own key in the world—his greatest spell, his Shaping clothed in flesh, that walked and breathed and held lordship over Ynefel, where, until Tristen was gone, Hasufin could not be.

The blood dripped down from his hand and puddled on the stones.

Uwen was attempting to staunch it with a piece of cloth, but it was cut to the bone. Once he thought of it, he healed himself, only because it distressed Uwen. He was trying to think what else in recent days might be the enemy’s working, the gathering of pieces, the arrangement of items that suited his working.

His and Uwen’s confusion in coming here—oh, that was beyond doubt part and parcel of it: they were not meant to have come here too early. Once things moved, then they could move like lightning.

Emuin could reach this place. Tristan had arrived, alas, just a little later than Emuin, having come farther, he suspected.