Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03 (60 page)

between the benches and the rail, to reach him.

On the dais a figure hurried through the smoke, and Cefwyn turned his head as all the congregation gave a relieved laugh, thinking the Holy Father was late. But it was only a hurrying priest, who spied authority past the railing and came desperately off the platform toward the royal bench.

“The Holy Father,” the priest gasped out, “the Holy Father…”

A tumult had begun, sbme talking aloud, some trying to hush the hindmost. The bride and groom stood staring as, from confidence and security, now bodyguards began to move quickly to their lords, crowding in from the sides.

“… dead,” the priest said. “With evil things,
evil
things around him! And the blood… oh, the blood—”

“Stand in your places!” Lord Maudyn shouted out, that voice accustomed to ordering soldiers in battle. “Everyone stand in his place! Let no one move! The choir may sing!
Sing
!”

Even a king might find himself jumping at that voice; and a heartbeat more Cefwyn hesitated as the priest took off into the smoke, and priests and lay brothers ran after him. Ninévrisë was by him, in whatever danger existed in the place, and where assassination had at the highest of all priests it would surely not scruple to strike down a foreign consort at the center of the storm.

Cefwyn had no true weapon but his dagger, the ceremonial sword more show than blade. Efanor was at Ninévrisë’s other side, armed with somewhat better, at least; and Idrys shouted out Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

orders to the Dragons, who had been halfway to their king when Maudyn’s order had halted them in confusion.

“
Guardsmen
! Here! Now!”

“This way!” Cefwyn shouted, seeing the rush of priests and acolytes around them, men he did not trust rushing this way and that and row after row of guests behind the nobles, and the doors open to the outside.

Immediately the Dragons came around them, curtaining them from the crowd and whatever danger might come from the outside. Cefwyn drew Ninévrisë by the hand, leaving the benches, passing the rail beyond the altar with Ninévrisë close before a second, desperate thought informed him no women went past that holy boundary.

But neither should murder pass it, and behind that rail, Cefwyn well knew, was no mystery of the faith, rather a maze of robing rooms and closets and storages, apt concealment for one assassin, but not for what he more feared, a movement of the crowd itself

—passions were dry tinder in the town, and in narrow halls he had the advantage, places one could hold, places Dragon Guard shields could make a wall, and did, as Idrys shouted the order,

“Stand fast! Let no one through!”

That sealed off the tumult from the great shrine, and left them that of priests within, wailing and crying, themselves smeared with blood. They were near that small room, Cefwyn knew from his own investiture, where the Holy Father robed.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

Idrys and Efanor stayed with them, Idrys with sword bared, Efanor cautiously keeping his hand at his belt. Priests were taking no account they jostled the royal party as they advanced or retreated, one after another straining to see, then turning away in horror at the first glance inside.

Cefwyn was driven, the same, and elbowed his way past weeping, praying priests, still with Ninévrisë’s hand safely in his, and armored men pushing others aside.

His Holiness lay sprawled in his vestments, and if any blood was left in him, between the walls and his vestments, it was a wonder.

Feathered cords were bound about the chair, run to the candle-sconce, back again to the chair as if some spider had done it, and the Sihhë star was painted in blood on the far wall.

“This is sorcery!” a priest,breathed.

“This is
murder,”
Idrys said sharply. “Stay to your praying, priest, and leave judgment of cowardly, murdering
men
to your king and the rightful authorities! Do spirits wear boots?”

Indeed, and Cefwyn saw it: there were footprints in the blood, leading out under their very feet.

“What are those cords?” a monk asked in all innocence.

Cefwyn had no need to wonder. He had seen the like holding charms in the market of Henas’amef, and dangling among the skirts of an Amefin witch, ghost, Shadow, whatever she was.

The star was for the less informed, who would not take the subtler clues the assassin had spread about like largesse.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

“Dismiss the wedding party,” Cefwyn said, cudgeling his shaken wits into order. “See where the tracks lead before they’re trampled over! Efanor! Is Jormys here?”

“Yes,” Efanor said. “He’s here!”

“I appoint him to the Quinaltine for the interim and give him the Patriarch’s authority, temporal and spiritual, in the gods’ name!”

He ran out of breath in the utterance of what was, always before, formula, and now was a weapon in his hands, the king’s power to appoint and dispose. “Advise him so! Set the robes on him!

Meanwhile His Holiness is dead—show some reverence and cover him!”

“Gods save us, gods save us,” more than one priest kept saying, and another wailed, “It’s the gods’ judgment!”

“Gods’ wrath on fools!” Cefwyn became aware he had clenched Ninévrisë’s hand far too hard. “This is an assassin’s doing! And damned unlikely any of this gaudy display is real! There’s no sorcery here, it’s a planned assassination, and who’d hate His Holiness but those blackguard seditionists who prate their righteousness in the street! That’s the source of this!” With relief he saw Efanor appear again with his priest, Father Jormys, and seized on him, gentle, sensible Jormys signing himself in fear and distress at the horror in the room.

“Father,” Cefwyn said sharply, “take charge! I set you over the Quinaltine, as of this moment.”

“My lord king, I protest I am not worthy, or scholarly—”

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

“The king’s choice!” he shouted, his voice what he used on the field. “Our choice! Only the king is anointed to make that choice, and we make it,
we
propose and dispose with the anointment of the gods on our head, and I set my seal on you as His Holiness held the office from my grandfather’s hand.”
Damn you
was not auspicious, and he restrained the breath on which it rode. “
Take

charge
, I say!”

Outcries from the sanctuary drowned the murmur from the inner halls. Wood splintered, light wood. Priceless carved screens stood behind the rail and the altar, and it was an ominous sound.

“Get back!” a soldierly voice shouted, and then Idrys:

“Push them out!”

The Guard moved, and shrieks attended, dim, in the distance of the maze as the Guard pressed intruders back and back.

“ Out of here, Your Majesty!” Idrys shouted. “Take the West Door!”

“The East!” Cefwyn contradicted his Lord Commander, fully conscious Ninévrisë was in danger in any rising, and would not leave him, not the woman who had defended her father against rebels in the hills. He felt the firm grip of her hand and took his dagger from its sheath, pressing it on her with no difficulty at all, and not a word.

Idrys had taken the order, and cleared the halls before them, all the way out into the sanctuary, where the groom’s father, Lord Maudyn, had marshaled a defense that kept the guests to one side Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

and the sanctuary, give or take a few men lying in the aisle, secured.

“Maudyn!” Cefwyn shouted out. “Dismiss the gathering out the maindoors! Proceed in the ordinary order! Sound the trumpets!”

“Your Majesty will not go out there!”

“Sound the trumpets, I say!” The populace was apt to wild rumors enough. The trumpets would carry, gain attention, inform them their lords were taking action and authority still stood. A tide of the common and curious pressed at the doors, against the house guards of half a dozen lords of the realm, wild with speculation and fear, and no slinking of the king to his gates could deal with it. “By precedences, behind me! Take your places!”

But in that same moment the priests, at Jormys’ ill-timed direction, bore the Patriarch’s bloody body out of the sanctum and into the fore of the sanctuary, a sight that brought shrieks from no few even of the nobles, and from wild-eyed lesser priests, who shouted entreaties to the gods. Benches overturned as a score of hands handled the bloody corpse over the rail to the altar itself… where they disposed it atop the wedding colors on the altar, staining them with blood.

“When shall I be married?” Luriel cried, from the assembly of nobles, as if it were some personal affront, and burst into tears.

Rusyn was with her, and she slapped away his comfort, even struck at her uncle Lord Murandys when he attempted to quiet her outburst.

Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

“Your Majesty, the procession,” Idrys said in utter, low-voiced calm. “Now. Your Highness, if you would be so good as to combine your guard with His Majesty’s…”

“Go,” Cefwyn said, and Idrys gave his orders, rapidly and by name, telling off the lords in their order, dispersing other men to archers stationed in secure places Idrys never yet revealed, but his couriers knew.

“Clear the doors!” Cefwyn shouted, and slowly, using pikes gripped along the shafts by several hands, the Guard and bodyguards of various lords opened a gap in the press, and progressively formed a barrier of the sort the crowd was used to at functions, pikes held crosswise, hand to hand.

Cefwyn came out into daylight, affording all the Quinaltine square the sight of a crowned head and the woman beside him.

Down the steps he moved, with dispatch, as hundreds pressed against the Guard’s efforts to open a corridor.

“Quickly now, Your Majesty.” It was Gwywyn, commander of the Prince’s Guard, who reached him, a good man, and a brave one, if obstinate, and having six strong men with shields.

Gwywyn’s sharp voice and the press of shields cleared a wider path along their exposure to the open square.

Then the largest Quinalt bell began to toll: the whole tower rang for weddings, feasts, and calamities, for fire, for proclamations, and for deaths—but there was none of the peal of the lighter bells that should have rung out the wedding party. The sound was only Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

the deep-voiced Passage Bell, which tolled over all the voices,

death and doom, death and doom
. It chilled the tumult to a shocked stillness, and what might happen toward the steps was no longer in Cefwyn’s command. He could make no more haste than Gwywyn’s men, but the nobles behind him did not press, lords and ladies whose only armor in this passage was their unshakable dignity and the expectation that no hand would touch them, no weapon withstand their rank and their rights.

In the same way Ninévrisë moved beside him, a foreigner in their midst, her noble, unhurried bearing a bulwark to his demand for room. No battlefield had ever seemed wider than that dreadful processional ground, blindly around the corner of the Quinaltine, toward the gates of the Guelesfort, shut and secure, and, he prayed the gods, handled by some officer with more than ordinary sense, for there they could be trapped outside and crushed or those gates could open and stay open a moment too long, provoking the crowd to press in. It was hallowed ground, lordly ground: the commons ordinarily would not press them hard; but there were so many, the strength bearing against the guardsmen that of men being pushed and trampled themselves by those behind. Panic surged along beside them, ran like hounds, pushed with the force of a river in flood.

The gates opened. Cefwyn swept Ninévrisë and his brother to the side where he had immediate access to the men managing the gates, and when he recognized the very last of the procession approaching the gates, with the mob surging behind, he gave the Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

order to shut the doors.

The gates began to swing, admitted the very last with a right to be there, and a scatter of dazed commons pushed in by the press, whom the Guard swiftly swept aside and placed under arrest.

Distraught questions abounded, as noble restraint gave way…

Who had done it? Was it sorcery? Was it the Elwynim?

“A sword or a dagger,” Cefwyn shouted over the din. “Sorcery at Lewen field left no blood! I’ve seen the one, and this was no sorcery, by the gods, it was not! Look inside the Quinaltine for the assassin!—Boy!” Cefwyn said, spying one of his pages near him in the press. “Fetch down my armor, to this courtyard! Now!

Don’t gawk! Call any servant who crosses your path, no excuses!

— Captain Gwywyn, good men to see Her Grace upstairs to my chambers and stand watch outside!”

Ninévrisë was no fool, to cling to him when the whole of his kingdom shuddered to the brink of riot; he wanted every encumbrance gone and every weapon around him. But she seized his hand for one urgent warning.

“They’ve killed a priest. What will they stick at now?”

He stopped for the moment, struck with chagrin and guilt at once… for
he
had struck at a priest: no one knew but Idrys, and Idrys’ men. But she accused him without knowing why the priestly authority was in ruin, and in front of the frightened, pious court, he could say nothing more than, “We’ll bring things to order. Father Jormys is in the Quinalt, and whatever else, he’s no Fortress of Owls - C.J. Cherryh - Fortress 03

common priest, and no fool.” Please the gods, he thought, that Jormys is not a fool. He seized on Efanor’s arm, fiercely. “Direct matters at the gate. Your guard, there. See no one passes. I’m going outside. The town needs to see its king.”

“They need him
alive
,” Efanor retorted fiercely, informing him this was folly; but it was the only course, folly for him or not, that might stem the riot before it swept into burning and looting and then to guardsmen dead and commons hanging. They were all safe behind an iron grill and an iron gate, but shouts and screams echoing off the walls outside informed him Idrys was in no such safety—and Cefwyn hurried, without running: a king must not run, must never run, never more than stride, he told himself all the way to the steps, where he thanked the gods a handful of guardsmen was marshaling some sort of order, sending the elderly and frail upstairs.