Fortress in the Eye of Time (12 page)

At least no one threw stones or dishwater at him. A few women standing in their doorways looked at him mistrustfully, and one or two doors shut abruptly—but it was getting dangerously late, and doubtless they were anxious to be away inside, safe from the Shadows.

The Town was not at all like Ynefel. There were so many people, and it was not so clean as he had imagined. Not so noble as he had imagined. Not so helpful as he had hoped. His stomach ached with hunger, and he was afraid of the coming dark. He thought of going up to a door of anyone, man or woman or even child, who looked kinder than the rest, and asking if he could have supper and stay the night—but he feared their anger, too.

Now the sun was gone even from the highest walls, long past that time that Mauryl had always said he should lock the doors and come inside. Prudent men and women were doing exactly that quite rapidly now, and it all said to him that he should find his own shelter for the night, and quickly. Whatever Mauryl feared had not touched him in the woods, so either he had been fortunate, or perhaps Mauryl still somehow looked over him, since Mauryl had had power over the Shadows.

But perhaps, equally to be believed, keeps and towns were the unique abode of Shadows. He saw a great many lurking in the narrow streets and in the rare spaces between houses, and he feared he had never been in such danger in the woods as he was now.

He kept walking, that being all he knew to do while he formed some plan for the night. He became aware, then, of a sound following him.

He looked back in apprehension—looked down into the small, dirty face of a child, a boy with ragged sleeves and breeches out at the knees, who had been copying his steps through the twilight. The boy tucked hands behind him and grinned up at him.

He was hopeful then, but not too hopeful, and ventured a smile in turn. The boy stood fast, rocking on his bare feet.

“Where ye from?” the child asked.

“From the Road.” He had learned to be cautious with Names, ever since the men at the fire, and the first man he had met on the Road.

And sure enough the boy's eyes widened in alarm. “Gods bless, Yer Lordship,—ye are a gennelman, are ye not?”

“Tristen,” Tristen said, fearing the boy would run and accounting that he heard Words of respect, but equally of fear from the boy. He reached out, but dared not touch him or hold him. “My name is Tristen. Is there a place safe to spend the night? Might I stay in your room, boy?”

The boy looked surprised, and began to rock again, hands behind him, then gave an uneasy laugh. “My
room
, Yer Lordship? I hain't got a
room
, but I knows them as has.”

“A place to sleep, something to eat. Please. I'm very tired. And hungry.”

“Oh? So why don't ye go uphill? Up there's for lords like you. Hain't ye spoke to them at the Zeide?”

The Zeide. He looked up at the walls. But Zeide was wrong. It was only half a Word.
Kath
seide. The Kathseide was the fortress of the Amefin—and it echoed with other Words: Eswyllan and Sadyurnan…Hênasámrith…

“I could take ye there, Yer Lordship,” the boy said.

“Thank you,” he said fervently. “Thank you, boy.”

He was profoundly relieved, having met practical-minded rescue at the very last before the dark. The boy, for his part, wasted no time, but bobbed a sort of bow, turned on one bare foot, and swung along extravagantly in front of him—it was more alley than street where the boy led him, darker and fouler yet than the gate-road he had generally been following. Every shutter and almost every door here was shut. But the boy swaggered his way ahead with a bold, a confident step, as a vast, somber sound boomed out, brazen and measured and frightening.

“What is that?” Tristen asked, recalling the hammering and wailing of the Shadows in the keep, and looked up at the strip of fading daylight above them. The sound seemed, like the groanings in the keep, to come from the very walls.

“Naught but the Zeide Bell, Yer Lordship,” the boy said, in a tone that said of course it was that, and he was a silly fool to wonder at it. “The Zeide bell tells folk the lower gates is shut.”

“But not the Zeide gates?” he said, concerned for their safety, and distracted by the thought of Bell, Alarm, and warning. “Are they shut, now, too? Are we too late?”

“Nay, nay, Yer Lordship, she don't never shut most times. Ye follow,—ye follow me, Yer Lordship, is all.”

He caught perhaps half of that, except that the boy would guide him, and no, there was no danger. He followed, reassured and relieved when the alley let out on a broader, cleaner street, upward bound. The boy strode along, and he walked briskly beside him, with hope, now, that things might turn out as Mauryl had wished. There would be some wise man, there would be someone Mauryl knew, there would be stout doors and clean sheets and supper and a bath.

Oh, very much a bath. He could never lie on clean sheets as dirty as he was. There might be hot bread and butter and ale and turnips; but he would be, oh, so content with a piece of bread and a bit of cheese, and he would invite the boy in, who badly needed a bath and clean clothes, too. Surely the wise
master to whom they were going could find something for the boy, a good dinner, a room to sleep in, and the boy could show him all manner of things and talk to him when the master was busy, as wizards often were.

He saw a high stone wall before them, and indeed a gate that swallowed up the street. That—a shiver of recognition came over his skin—that was the Kathseide, he thought when he looked through the gates and saw the keep inside. The fortress on its hill. The Place like Ynefel.

There was nothing crumbling or ramshackle about these stones. There might be grime in the streets outside its wall. There might be washwater thrown carelessly in the town streets, but not here. The buildings below on the hill might be shuttered in fear of the coming night, but the Kathseide's windows showed bright with colors, a beautiful notion. He thought how it would have brightened the old gables and the shuttered windows of Ynefel had even his humble horn window stood unshuttered to the night.

He saw before him what Ynefel might have been.

Except for the people. And women and children.

Except for the smoothness of the walls, which showed no faces, none. It was pristine. Beautiful.

His knees ached as they climbed the last steep stretch of cobbles, this road being steeper than Ynefel's, as the walls were taller than Ynefel's. Within the open gateway he saw stones pale gold and clean, unweathered, a cobbled courtyard, beyond a thick archway, and inner buildings, pale stone glowing in the twilight.

He was looking at that instead of watching around him, when dark movement came from the side and, out of nowhere, metal-clad men suddenly confronted him.

“I brung 'im,” the boy said. “I brung 'im, master Aman.”

He was frozen with fear, facing such grim expressions, like Mauryl's expression when he had done something wrong. The boy was looking quite proud of himself and seeming to expect something of the men, who were holding weapons and waiting, he supposed, for him to account for himself.

“My name is Tristen, sir. Are you the master here?”

One of the men grinned at him, not in a friendly way. The other:

“The master, he wants?” that one asked, leaning on what spoke other Words: Pike, War, and Killing. “Which master in particular, Sir Strangeness?”

“I suppose…the master of all this Place.”

They laughed. But the men seemed to be perplexed by him. The one leaning on the pike straightened his back and looked at him down a nose guarded by a metal piece, eyes shadowed from the deepening twilight by a metal-and-leather Helm. The third, helmless, had never smiled, not from the beginning.

“Come along,” that one said, and motioned with his pike for him to enter the arch of the gates.

“The boy,” he said, remembering his manners, “the boy would like supper, if you please, and a place to sleep.”

“Oh, would he, now?”

“He has,” he said, finding himself wrong, and chased by one of Mauryl's kind of debates, “he has nowhere to sleep. And he wants supper, I'm sure, sir.”

“He wants supper.” The man thought that strange, and dug in his purse and flipped a coin to the boy, who caught it, quite remarkably. “Off wi' ye. And no Gossip, or I'll cut off your Weasel ears.”

Weasel was four-footed and brown.

And there was, clearly, another way one found coins. The guards had coins to give. For himself, he saw no such chances, but he was prepared to go where they asked and wait until the men could make up their minds what to do about him.

“Come along,” said the one the boy called master, and another shoved him, not at all kindly or needfully, in the shoulder. He thought how pigeons fluttered and bumped one another. If this man was indeed master here he seemed a rough and rude sort. But he remembered how the men at the fire had behaved, and how they had grown quite unfriendly once they became afraid of him, and the weapons these men had were far more threatening than knives.

So he thought he should do what they asked and not give them any cause to be afraid; and then, he thought, he might find out whether this man was the master of the Kathseide, or whether he was only master of these men. Perhaps there was someone else, after all, who might ask him inside and talk to him much more reasonably than men outside, and perhaps even be expecting his arrival.

He walked through the gateway, believing they would go through into the courtyard and straightway to the inner halls of the keep, but he was no more than under the gateway arch when the one man dropped the staff of his pike in front of his face and made him stop—a roughness which he was not at all expecting, and which might be misbehavior on their part.

But he was not certain. He might have been in the wrong. He let the other man take him by the arm and direct him toward a doorway at the side in the arch, which his fellow opened, showing him a room bright with candlelight, a plain room with a table and chairs, and another man sitting—curious sight—with his feet on the table. Dared one do such a thing?

Not, he suspected, at Mauryl's table.

“We've an odd 'un,” the helmless man said. “Wants to see the master of the Zeide, he says.”

“Does he?” The man at the table wrinkled his nose. “And on what business, I'd like to know.—Is this our report from about town?”

“Seems t' be our wanderin' stranger.”

“Has either of ye seen 'im before?”

“Never seen 'im,” one said, and the other shook his head. “Truth t' tell, 't was Paisi picked 'im up, led 'im up to us wi' no trouble to speak of.”

“Paisi did. Led 'im up, ye say?”

“I was surprised meself. I figured the little Rat could find what smelt odd, so I sent him out. But I never figured he'd bring it himself. Clever little Rat, he is. An' this 'un—” The man sat half on the table. “Him talking like a Lord,” the man said. “Airs and manners and all. He wasn't at all meetin' wi'
anybody of account in town. Talked to some on the streets, as of no account at all, wandered here, wandered there, ain't no sense to it, by me, what he was doin' or askin'.”

“A lord, is he?” The man slowly took his feet off the table—Mauryl would have been appalled, Tristen decided uneasily. He was surrounded by behavior and manners he began to be certain that Mauryl would not at all approve, manners which far more reminded him of the men in the woods. And from one master, now there seemed two, and they wondered whether he was a Lord, which held its own bewilderments.

But, then, they had brought him in under stone, where he was safer. They might have shoved him about quite rudely, but they had not harmed him.

“And what,” the man in the chair wanted to know, “what would be your name?”

“Tristen, sir, thank you. And I came to find the master of the Kathseide.”

The man frowned, the grim man looked puzzled, and the one sneezed or laughed, he was not certain which.

“Is he the Mooncalf all along? Or only now?”

“A mooncalf in lord's cloth, to us at least. All up and down the town, nothing of trouble nor of stealin' that we've heard yet, and the boy had no trouble to win his copper. But he come strolling up from the low town, bright as brass, and he had to be through the gates sometime today, though Ness an' Selmwy don't report seein' 'im.”

“So how long
have
ye been lurkin' about the streets, rascal?”

“Not lurking, sir,” Tristen replied, he thought respectfully, but the man at his back fetched him a shove between the shoulders. “Walking.”

“How long have ye been in the town?” the foremost man asked, and he was glad to understand it was a simple question, and anxious to lay everything in their laps.

“I came in from the Road, sir. I walked through the gates down below, and the boy led me up to this gate to see the master of this Place before the dark came.”

“Did you, now?” the man said, leaning back again, and one of the other two shut the door, a soft, ominous thump, after which he heard the drop of a heavy bar.

“Paisi certainly done better 'n Ness an' his fool cousin,” the grim man said.

“And how, pray,” asked the man in charge, “did you pass through the gate, sir mooncalf?”

“I walked through, sir.” He remembered ducking behind the cart. He knew he was in the wrong.

“Is that so?” The man brought the chair legs down with a thump and waved a hand at the two who had brought him in. “Is he armed? Did you make certain?”

One man took him by the arm and held him still while the other ran hands over him and searched his belt and the tops of his boots. That began to frighten him, the more when the man, searching the front of his shirt, discovered the Book and the mirror and razor.

“Now what's this?”

“Mine, sir.” He saw the man open the Book and anxiously watched him leaf through the pages, turn it upside down and shake it. “Please be careful.”