Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles (47 page)

“even yet. Have ye seen the archivists, either one, man?”

“Neither.” The clerk hitched a double step keeping up with them as they climbed the stable-court stairs. “Unless this is one. It’s an old Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles man.”

“It might be,” Tristen said, as they passed the doors. The way to the archive took them past the lesser hall, and behind the central stairs, into the back hallway.

There were two guards posted over the archive, which ended that hallway, past the garden windows, guards who came to attention and opened the door without question.

Codices were not shelved, but piled on tables. Scrolls were stacked, not in their columbaria, and when he walked to the far side of the room the fireplace that provided warmth to the library indeed held the ends of scrolls and the burned spine of a codex.

“Here’s scoundrels’ work for certain,” Uwen said, and Tristen surveyed the calamity, and the body of the man recently dead, a tangle of robes and white hair curled up as if for sleep, beside a heavy chair and partially concealed by the adjacent reading table.

“This is the senior archivist. There were two.”

“There’s just the one, Your Grace,” the sergeant said, and pointed into the shadows, to a hole the table shadowed. The plastered masonry had been taken apart, revealing a hiding place.

“Find the other archivist,” Tristen said, wanting that very much, but finding it far less readily accessible than Liss… and it was not because of his not knowing the man. The two who had worked here were both old men, both quarreled with each other bitterly. Now they were one dead, the other fled; and there was no apparent reason except Amefin business, the sort of which this archive kept account.

It was not likely Lord Parsynan’s correspondence in the fire: there Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles was no reason for Parsynan to store in the archive any letter he wished kept secret and there was no reason to chisel it out of a wall.

It might be a certain portion of Lord Heryn’s archive. Cefwyn had ordered that sent to Guelemara, along with unique books of history and record, but there might have been something concealed.

“There’s nothing left,” the clerk said, stooping to pick up the burned remnant of the book. He opened it to show only the margin and a handful of words, and charred parchment flaked away in his careless handling. Tristen knelt at the fireplace, carefully extracted the browned yet unburned end of a parchment. It was blank, a margin edge. “Your Grace will soot his hands,” the clerk said, but Tristen reached in among ashes warm at their heart and another, which had burned up and down its length, but which had the scroll top at its heart—crumbling ash, for the most part, and the wax of the seals had surely fed the fire that consumed it.

The salutation was still legible:
to the aetheling
…

He walked to the window, where there was more light, and pried further, into charred black whereon the ink was gray. He made out the words
Althalen
and
Gestaurien
…

And he knew the spidery hand. He had seen it every day in Ynefel.

He had watched Mauryl write and cipher, day after day, endlessly at his work.

The charred portion fell away in his fingers.
Gestaurien
vanished in soot and fragments.

He stood shaken, grieved and angry.

“I want the archivist,” he said, but even knowing that the Guard had Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles had the town gates shut last night and watched the traffic there carefully today, there was no warning to watch for an elderly, unarmed man. “Find me a box. Now.”

“Find his lordship a box!” the sergeant said, but the clerk, hurrying to redeem himself, turned a scroll lectern upside down, and Tristen knelt and carefully laid the fragments in the box it made, piece by treasured piece, as he had never had the chance to collect anything from Ynefel but Mauryl’s direct gifts.

And why these now lay with a dead man he could only half guess: that they were potent, yes; that the archivists had always known they were here, likely; that they wanted to come to him now, conceivable; that someone would have wished to prevent that, understandable.

But did humble archivists turn and murder one another and destroy their charge?

It was conceivable these exceeded what a man could conceal about his person, if he had turned thief. Or they might be all.
Find the
archivist
, was the burden of his thought, but it went out into the gray and lost itself in a town full of similar men, similar lives, only a few that sparked fire, and those nothing, nothing to do with this act.

One was surely Crissand.’ About that one he felt a pang of grief, felt the cold of stone. One was in the East Court, likewise within stone, likely a priest. One was about some business he could not define.

But more subtle, like a fish slipping through sunlit ripples, invisible, something else flicked past his notice.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles And
that
something flickered off toward the east, toward Emuin, toward the monastery, toward Guelessar.

Beware
, he wished Emuin, and all at once rued his decision not to warn Emuin regarding either the message from Ryssand or the messenger to Idrys. He knelt with ruin in his hands and willed it mended, but only a flickering presence answered him, undefined, flickering hither and thither through his recollections, difficult to catch, wary, wily, and not without complicity… he felt so.

The clerk’s face was pale in the sunlight from the windows and utterly sober. “Your Grace,” the young man whispered fearfully. “If I could have been here sooner, last night…”

But the clerk had been in hall, reading the documents. The archivists were entrusted with the integrity of this place. And guards had been at the door… what more could a clerk do, where wizards failed? The deed was done, the second archivist had fled with whatever he had taken away, and Tristen much doubted they would find the man within the town.

Uwen said not a thing. But the sergeant from the detail at the door stood by fretting in silence, as if he, too, were somehow at fault.

“Syllan,” Tristen said, and gave him the burned fragments in their contrived container. “Take this to my quarters, gently, very gently, and be careful of drafts.”

“My lord,” Syllan said, and took it away, leaving them the archivist and the cavity in the wall. The industrious sergeant looked into it.

But it proved empty.

But was the aetheling to whom Mauryl might have once written Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles Lord Heryn? Mauryl had lived long, very long, and all those years might have been in these scrolls, decades of messages flowing between the Warden of Ynefel and the aetheling of Amefel, or things older still.

This entire place had been ordered only as much as Mauryl’s papers, or Emuin’s, which was to say, not at all… and quite unlike the orderly arrangement in that of Guelemara. He had seen the latter, and knew at a single stroke he looked on a library that, like a wizard’s papers, concealed, rather than revealed. The two archivists had detested one another and come to their final disagreement. It was by no means certain that the thief had destroyed all there was of Mauryl’s letters: he could not have left unseen with a great many records. If he had taken anything away with him, it would have been the choicest, or at least the one a Man would most value.

He had ordered a search. He had saved the fragments, for what sharp eyes could learn from them. The junior clerk was too heavy-handed; he awaited the senior, with Emuin.

But hope of finding the thief? It was small. If Mauryl’s work wanted to be found, he would warrant it might be; or if lost, it would be that. He very much doubted a second archivist appointed by Heryn Aswydd could have contrived such a theft on his own.

Where fled?

Across the river, perhaps. But the gray space gave no clues but eastward, eastward, eastward, not toward the river, but toward Assurnbrook. And he stayed very still, not reaching further against resistance. Neither did Emuin.

Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles The Aswydd’s archivist, the thief was, after all.

Uwen came up to stand by him. “Were it wizard-work?” Uwen asked in a low voice. “Is there some danger?”

“None. I think, none. They were old letters,’t was all. I suspect the archivists hid them from the Quinalt, from Cefwyn’s clerks. I suspect there were more of them and the clerk took the choicest to whatever place he’s fled. —But murder. Murder is far too much for fear. Here was anger, a great anger.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time two old men had a fallin’ out.”

He stared at the shadows, at the base of the wall where dark flowed, beneath the tables, around the cabinets, within the wall. There was anger still here, but a muted, sorrowful anger.

“Find a mason,” he said, “and repair the wall. Make it sound again.

Hear me. Do it today, before the sun sets.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said, and went and gave that order to the Guelen sergeant.

Tristen, meanwhile, stared out low windows that overlooked a walk that led to a gate, and through that gate was the other place he treasured, seen dimly, through inside glass no servant had cleaned in years. He saw leafless trees, brown, weed-choked beds on the approach to that gate. And he thought of summer.

“Bury the man,” he said, turning about. “Have the windows cleaned.” They looked never to have been, in the regular upkeep of the Zeide, as if servants were forbidden here. “You,” he said to the Guelen clerk, “stand in charge of the archive. Set all this to rights.

Account of what’s here, books of record and books of knowledge, Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles letters, deeds, and whatever else exists here.”

“Your lordship,” the man said. The clerk stood still and stunned, amidst a library its keepers had set in deliberate disorder. But the clerks yet to come had other things to do, a province and its records, most of which were in this disorder. He had one man, one, to begin the work, and begin it must, before other things vanished.

Tristen walked out the doors then, to the thump of a guard salute at the doors. Uwen and Tawwys trod close at his heels, never asking what he had read, or why he had ordered the ashes taken upstairs.

He invited neither converse nor solace. He was distressed—knew he was angry, but not at whom: at the vanished archivist, perhaps; at Parsynan’s destruction, assuredly; at Emuin, possibly; even at Mauryl, remotely; knew he was afraid—of the scope of the disorder he perceived, certainly; of the disturbance he felt in the gray space, very much so; and of wizardly desertions, absolutely and helplessly.

It was not a conscious thought that sent him toward the doors midway of the short corridor: it was the desire of his heart; it was a flight for rescue in the place that had always given him shelter. The opening of that door brought a flood of icy outside air; and the few steps set him and his guards under a sky clouded and changed from the dawn.

He had come back to the garden… at last, was back in the place that he most enjoyed of all places, a place of winding paths, low evergreen, well-shaped trees, and summer shade.

Indeed, he found in its heart the same neglect he had seen from the library windows, the herbs and flowers brown and dead as everything in the countryside… but he was not surprised. The trees Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles were bare. That was only autumn. Understandably the walks were deserted: the wind blew cold across the walls, two of which were the building itself, and one of which was the library walk; and the other, a low one, it shared with the stable-court. It, at least, was not plundered, and held no dead men or vengeful shadows nor scars of yesterday’s fighting. He had found one thing unharmed, untouched, undamaged. And
it
was the most priceless thing of all.

He walked to the edge of the pond. Fragments of leaves studded the gravel rim, but the tame fish that lived in the pond were still there, still safe… thinner than their wont, but safe.

“No one’s fed them,” he said.

“They sleep in th’ cold,” Uwen said. “But I’ll ask, m’lord. There’s things to tidy here.”

“Will they die if the water freezes?”

“I’ll imagine they stay here all the year,” Uwen said, looking around him, “but these beds is to dig an’ turn two months ago, says this man what was once a farmer, and that says to me there’s gardeners gone wi’ the rest of the servants and not yet at work here, maybe gone back to kinfolk an’ farms ’round about. We’ll find ’em, don’t ye fret, lad.”

He was very glad Uwen called him that. Uwen was as distressed about the library as Uwen could imagine to be, and after a breath or two of watching the water Tristen put aside all anger with the guard, or with the clerk, or anyone remotely involved with the disaster.

The brightly clad ladies and lords of the summer would come back like the singing birds, when the days grew warm again. Things that Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles he remembered
would
come again and the year-circle would meet itself in this place of all places.

Here he could believe in his summer of innocence. He could remember the trees of this garden as green and thick-leaved and whispering to the wind… and that was an archive as important, as intricately written, and as potent for him as the library. This place, failing all others in the Zeide, gave him a staying place for his heart, his imaginings, his wishing—his outright magic if ever Sihhë magic resided in him… he watched a few of his silly pigeons who had lighted on the walk, pursuing their business with their odd gait, feathers ruffling in the wind.

In this place, most of all, he cherished fragile things. And was it a loss, that of Mauryl’s letters? It likely was. It likely was a great loss.

But in a way it kept things orderly… kept lives in their own places, as Mauryl’s place and time was Ynefel, where everything was brown and full of dust, cobwebs, and ruin. It had held such a secret place, in the loft… but that was gone; and with it went Ynefel, and Mauryl.

Now, standing in this garden brown with autumn, he wished this place to be again the way he had seen it, a green heart in the ancient stones. It came to him that something of the kind had always been here, must be here, from the time the Masons laid down the Lines of the garden wall and built the building.