Fortress of Owls

“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.

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 foreig

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 thi

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 oh 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. “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, but in the next blink of an eye the wings that spread and bated about him were nothing so i

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.

Therewas 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, hisloft 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 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 i

—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.

Hehad 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.