Fortress of Owls

  “So ’t is!” Uwen said, from Tristen’s left. “But there’s tomorrow for that.” It was a valiant effort for a shy man to speak out and stem the flood of war talk—but his effort failed, for Lord Durell was drunk enough to propose they should make a foray against the enemy immediately.

  500 / C. J. CHERRYH

  “Deck the bridge at the Guelen camp and have the blackguard’s head within the week!” Durell cried, lifting his cup.

  “To hell with ’im!”

  “I doubt it will be so easy,” Cevulirn said.

  And Crissand, who was no more drunk than Cevulirn, which was to say, not at all, said, “On any cold, clear morning, with a will, we’re ready.”

  “Damn Tasmôrden,” said Lord Azant, and Drumman: “Long live Lord Tristen!”

  Then Emuin, who had had more than one cup himself, and who had blunted Sovrag’s first foray, lifted a hand. “Inappropriate for me to curse,” Emuin said. “And His Majesty has demanded patience of us. And no talk of war tonight.”

  There was a muttering at that.

  “Which,” Emuin said above the protest, “the stars declare is wise! There would be no good outcome of a venture planned this side of midnight. Say no more of it!”

  “And after?” Sovrag asked,

  “Tonight is not for war,” Tristen said, for Emuin’s warning had struck a certain chill into him, and he foresaw that very soon they would be saying things he had as lief not have laid before every visitor to the hall tonight…the Teranthine father was there, and the Bryalt abbot, with the two nuns, the thanes and squires of villages, and the ealdormen, not mentioning their wives, and the guards and servants besides. Any one of them might spread news that might not serve them…whether it reached Ilefínian—or Guelessar and the north.

  But he looked at all his guests, his friends—Crissand, Cevulirn, Sovrag and Pelumer and Umanon, Merishadd and Azant and the earls, and he saw around him, willing and earnest, all the power of the south, all on the verge of motion.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 501

  He saw the ladies, all in their finery, and the meal ended.

  But not the evening.

  It was Midwinter Eve, the night the heavens shifted…and he felt an equal disturbance in the gray place, between one deep breath and the next, as all the hall hung momentarily silent, awaiting the next move.

  “Play,” he said to the piper, ending all discussion. “Move the tables back.”

  Servants hurried to obey, and in high good cheer. For a moment thereafter everyone was disarranged and the squeal of wood on stone and the laughter of well-sated guests alike underlay the music.

  The shriek seemed to go on, shooting through stone, into the earth, wounding the ear.

  Hinge of the year, Emuin had said, hinge of the Great Year and the Year of Years. Shriek by shriek, tables and benches moved, the arrangement of things undone, set aside, drawn back to clear the floor. It was so common a sound. But the gray space roiled of a sudden, and the very air turned to liquid silver.

  Lewenbrook itself was a heartbeat away. So was Ynefel.

  There was suddenly so much chance and harm flying in the wind that Tristen found no quick counter to its malice.

  And when the moving of tables was done, and before the couples took the floor:

  “I wish our happiness and the king’s,” he said, standing, lifting high the cup he held. And wish he did, with all his might.

  “I wish happiness for all of us, when the world is turning round and the new year is coming!”

  “And happiness to you, sir,” said Pelumer, lifting his cup, and so did they all. “To all our lands, happiness and good outcome.”

  “And happiness to the king in Guelessar,” Crissand cried in that moment of warm extravagance, not base 502 / C. J. CHERRYH

  flattery, but the outpouring of a generous heart. “Happiness to him for sending us our lord! Gods bless His Guelen Majesty!”

  “The Guelen king’s health!” said Merishadd, and Azant lifted his cup, and all the rest in a body as Azant added, “And our lord’s!”

  “Hear him,” said Pelumer. “Health to our host, Lord Tristen!

  Long may he prosper in Amefel.”

  “Long may we all prosper!” said Umanon.

  Tristen drew a breath, feeling steadier, as if in such a great number of good wishes from those he counted friends the dark of midnight had passed and the currents of the new year had begun to find a direction.

  How could one do better for a beginning, he thought, than in wishing one another well?

  How could he have any more profound a shift in the currents than for Amefin lords and southerners to drink the health of the Guelen king? He could wish—and so could Crissand, who had set wizardry behind that generosity.

  The piper played, and a handful of the younger folk moved to the floor, eager to dance.

  But one lady in attendance came from the shadows by a column, all in gray and gold, a wisp of a woman gray of hair and hung about with cords and stones and charms.

  The incipient dance paused. Guards moved, and hesitated in doubt. Emuin stood forward, but not far, and the priests rallied uncertainly to Emuin as the woman came.

  But only Uwen set himself directly in her path, as the music died.

  The woman’s gown seemed old fabric and strange, like cobwebs over lace, like gold cloth dimmed by dust. The ornaments that she wore were perhaps costly, perhaps not. She was neither old nor young,

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 503

  and she made a low and graceful bow, sinking into her gold-touched skirts and rising from them like gray smoke from embers. It seemed a music played, but none that the pipers made, a gentle, eldritch air like the stirring of broken glass.

  With a nod and a quizzical look, the woman held out her hand, invitation to the dance. And still Uwen barred the way.

  But on a breath and accepting a challenge, Tristen moved past him, reached out, took dry, cool fingers, moved in stately paces, turned as the woman turned, all to that strange, distant music.

  Within the murmur of consternation the piper took up a wavering tune, the same that filled the air, and the drummer found the hum and thump of a rhythm different than the tune they had played, haunting, majestic measures.

  It was Auld Syes, whose eyes sparkled and whose whole bearing held the dignity of a queen.

  “Lady,” Tristen said, when the measures brought them close, eye-to-eye, and her gaze was dark and deep. “Welcome.”

  But while the musicians played on Auld Syes stopped the dance and stood, breathless and aglow.

  “Lord,” she said then, and made another deep bow, rising again to face him. “Lord of Althalen, of Meliseriedd, of Ynefel!

  High King and lord of all the middle lands! Beware your enemy!”

  “I am no king!” he said doggedly. But Auld Syes backed away from him bowing yet a third time. The candles blew sideways, threatening darkness, and a small shadow skipped around Auld Syes and him alike, then nipped after a tray of honeycakes at the side of the room. A sudden whirlwind ran the circuit of the room, blowing up skirts. The guests cried out in alarm, but the whirlwind ran toward the doors with a laughter like harp 504 / C. J. CHERRYH

  strings, a wind spinning and turning and dancing with a mad, fey lightness.

  For a moment in the gray space, pipes sounded, and a woman ran lightly over a ghostly meadow of gray almost green, a child chasing in her footsteps.

  Auld Syes had left the hall, and as she did the massive doors of the hall burst open, and the doors of the inner hall all at once banged wide with echoes down the corridor outside, one after another.

  Winds swept through, riffling all the candles, then snuffing them, every one, leaving all there in utter dark.

  A smell of evergreen attended.

  “Light!” Emuin cried furiously, over the cries from the guests.

  “Gods bless! Give us light!”

  Men were blind in the darkness, blind and afraid, and still the wind blew. Yet it needed nothin
g but the wish to see, to draw the gray, bright light out of that place and touch the candles with it, and Tristen did that, obedient to Emuin’s wish to lend light. His wish lit the hall not with the warm golden glow those candles should bear, but the icy silver of the gray place, every candle aglow, but casting little light abroad. The candle-sconces all became islands of scant luminance, and the hall outside the open doors appeared as a place of darkness similarly lit, every candle in the hall aglow but doing little good.

  The guests were cast into strange, small groups in that pale gray light.

  Lord Umanon and Lord Cevulirn both had found their swords.

  Of Auld Syes there was no sight nor sound.

  Beware your enemy, Auld Syes had said, but if there was an enemy he had to fear, it was not the darkness.

  But suddenly something reached through his source of light, through the gray space itself, and threat FORTRESS OF OWLS / 505

  streamed like poison through the light he had gathered and set atop the candles.

  That was not the enemy, either. It remained out of his reach.

  He sent challenge back through the gray: he was in a Place, had his feet set, and would fight for these lives if it came.

  “Lord!” a man cried from the open doors, and in starkest urgency: “Lord! The hall! The light, in the hall!”

  The way Auld Syes had trod here had not sealed itself. When the man cried that, all the gray space bid fair to spill in upon them—not baneful in itself, but a cascade too much, too swift, too terrible a knowledge, from every candle in the hall. He steadied it back.

  And neither was that the source of the danger, for danger had followed Auld Syes like a hound on a scent. It sought a Place in the fortress; and now he felt the widening of a rift—a breach in the wards at that place he had never trusted.

  It was from that place the poison came, from that place the lights were threatened; and from out of that gulf the wind buffeted them. It was that spot in the hall, that one most haunted place.

  “Uwen!” Tristen cried as he began to run toward the doors of the great hall, for no other man would he have as a shieldman, and no man else in the world would he trust to beware the Edge.

  In the next instant a hand caught his sleeve, and stayed him long enough for a sword hilt to find his hand. A buffet on his shoulder sent him on.

  “Go, lad!” he heard Uwen say, so run he did. He was the defense Uwen had, the defense any Man of his guests had, and he plunged into the corridor where conditions were the same: the candles there streamed the same silvery gray toward him, spots of light in a dark where Shadows ran, dark small streamers along all the mortar.

  506 / C. J. CHERRYH

  He flung up his hand, called the wards all to life, threatening all that broke the Pattern of the stones, the ancient masonwork.

  At his summoning, a blue glow intruded into the gray sheen of the candles, and a glow ran along the base of the walls, up over doorways…every Line of the old fortress glowed, walls and doorways made firm and real. Shadows that flowed moved along those Lines, obedient, until they began to race toward that Place, that foreignness in the hall.

  Beyond a doubt he knew Auld Syes herself was in danger, as if a thread of her being had come through this doorway, and now, retreating, stretched thinner and thinner within.

  He was aware of the great mass of the ancient stone around him, and of the presence of friends at his back: he reached the old mews, that most haunted place, the place where the wards were least firm—and in and out of which the winds rushed.

  He settled a tighter grip on the borrowed sword, felt with a sweep of his left arm for Uwen’s presence where Uwen would always stand. He was there. He felt Cevulirn and Crissand likewise near him, wizardous and detectable in the gray space, more than the others. Emuin, too, was there, reaching toward him a strong and determined power, in an attempt to hold the wards…

  But the blue light grew, source of the winds that battered and buffeted them.

  There, there within the old structure, the Lines were almost overwhelmed, and there if dark could glow, this did. Shortly before the struggle at Lewenbrook, he had stared into a vacancy and faced the rousing of countless ghostly wings.

  So the rift began to grow, and grow, and he knew what he would face.

  FORTRESS OF OWLS / 507

  “There it is,” he said. “Where it always was. It’s open.—Emuin? Do you see?”

  “I see it,” Emuin said, and others crowded near.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Uwen. Stay here. Keep the others safe.”

  “No, my lord,” Uwen’s voice said flatly, at his very shoulder,

  “Lord Crissand’s close behind ye; but he ain’t your shieldman an’ I am, beggin’ his pardon, an’ lord Cevulirn’s. I’m wi’ ye, so go on.”

  “Bear a light!” Crissand called out, and the answer came back, “There is none!”

  “Then find one!” Umanon cried angrily. So yet another of the lords had followed him. “Gods bless, man, find one!”

  No light would serve, not here, and he needed all his strength. The light he had lent the candles everywhere in the hall he gave up, so that the dark came down in the mortal world and overwhelmed the corridor in which they stood. Men cried out in alarm. But the blue of the Lines and the blue of that Place shone the brighter in the darkness, guiding him forward.

  He could not say he walked. He held the sword half-forgotten in his hand, and it seemed now instead of the solid stone of the wall, a slatted, airy structure through which blue light streamed. That was the old mews as they had been. He advanced, knowing Uwen’s presence at his side one moment and then gone abruptly as he walked beyond the solid stone of the existing wall and the Place within the walls opened wide.

  Blue light softened to something near moonlight, just enough to see by, sifting through rafters and broken beams of a ruined gable end.

  Perches stretched along either wall of this place, and above him wings stirred and whispered. To his first impression it was the sound of his pigeons, and safe,

  508 / C. J. CHERRYH

  but in the next blink of an eye the wings that spread and bated about him were nothing so innocent. Cries came to his ears, birds of prey, hawks in great numbers, and the scream of wood on stone and the shriek of the birds and the shriek of the wind were one and the same.

  The hawks pent here, scores of them, were ghosts out of a Place and a Time all but forgotten, and if they were tame at all, were tame to hands long dead.

  Yet had Auld Syes gone this way?

  Was it after all a doorway, that broken gable, a breach in the Lines that Were, admitting him to Lines that Had Been?

  He saw before him a Place within a Place, and a Door that had never quite closed, perhaps on purpose.

  There was the entry, there, in the heart of the moving wings and the haze of the streaming light that cast a glow on pale, black-barred feathers, on mad, wild eyes and open beaks that seemed to shriek forth the sound of winter storm.

  The semblance of snow flew then, a battering storm half-obscuring the light, and when it ceased…

  When it ceased it was not the old mews about him now, but the loft, his loft this spring in Ynefel, and the fluttering wings were only his feckless, faithful pigeons on their rafters.

  He had come home. Mauryl would be below, at work at his table, elbow-deep in his charts of stars and movements of the planets, all of which pointed to this night.

  He was in his loft again, and the blue glow of moonlight brightened to sky, and latest dusk, and his birds were coming home, arriving by ones and twos, stirring up dust and old feathers.

  He had no names for them, had never thought they needed names, no more than the aged mice who dwelt in FORTRESS OF OWLS / 509

  the wall of the downstairs hall, near Mauryl’s table. But oh!

  he knew them, and welcomed them, and for a moment the place opened wide to him, in utter innocence and happiness.

  He flung wide his arms and turned to see the familia
r pattern of sky and broken boards…no need to ward such places, Mauryl said, for they were only holes. The Lines of Ynefel had stood firm despite those gaps, and Mauryl had remade the wards every evening—

  —warding his window for him, too, at the foot of the first bed he remembered: his little horn-paned window, beneath which the first sinister crack had come into the wall. The rain had written patterns on it. He had, never knowing what he did or undid.

  He stopped turning and stood still, heart skipping a beat as he recalled that widening, dreadful seam. He was sure now beyond all question that the ruin that had brought Mauryl down had begun there, proceeded there, worked there until there was no way for the wards to hold. Hasufin in his assault on Mauryl’s tower had come to that window and pried and pried at the stones, trying his young dreams, stirring up the shadows that were all too frequent there.

  He had been the weakness in Mauryl’s defense: he, his dreams, his curiosity, his tracing random, foolish patterns on the window, amid Mauryl’s wards.

  His room was below him. His bed. The stairs that led down, led there, to that room with the window.

  And he knew at the same time he was in the old mews at Henas’amef, in the Zeide, near the new great hall.

  He still remembered how he had come here. It was so easy here to forget his very life, to lose the thread that bound him to Uwen, and Emuin, and all the rest. He kept firm hold of that memory, clenched it like a guiding thread—he knew the way…no, not back, back was too little a word. He knew the way home, and his home was no longer here, was not this 510 / C. J. CHERRYH

  loft, this hour, this dim evening last spring.

  He knew at any moment a youth might come up the stairs.

  That youth would bring a candle and a book, the Book, which at that time had been a mystery to him, but was not so now.

  Nor were the secrets in that book secrets any longer. He knew why he had felt vague fears of presence when he lived at Ynefel, so now he knew what at least one ghostly presence was.

  And if he knew when he had been afraid, he might predict, perhaps, the sites and times of his visitations to Ynefel; and by that, he might come here again.