Fortress of Ice

Massive blocks lay scattered outward, the stone walls chipped with the awful force with which those blocks had flown apart, and inside the room beyond, which still held the dry mustiness of a tomb despite the air that blasted in from above, there was only shadow.

Light glowed brighter from Emuin’s hand, blue as day, and showed no bones, nothing but overset chairs, a ledge, and a moldering, dusty cloak.

“She’s gone,” Crissand breathed, from behind them.

Orien Aswydd. The other twin. The dead one, walled alive into her tomb.

“I have to find them,” Emuin said. “I have no choice.”

But who it was he meant to find, he didn’t say. He shoved rudely past them and climbed the steps, struggling with his robes and the staff. They followed him up into the hall above, where the pine torch gave a fitful, windblown light; and suddenly the haunt beside them broke wide open in spectral light, a dark and angry blue, moving with the shadow of wings.

“Find Tristen!” Emuin shouted at them, and stepped off into that place as if it were a doorway.

He vanished. The light from the haunt died, instantly, and left them only the torchlight, and the lingering command.

“Find Tristen,” Cefwyn said, and struck the ordinary stone of the wall with his fist, then looked at Crissand. “Bloody hell, where do we start?”

“The library,” Crissand said. “The library, for a begi

CHAPTER NINE

TRISTEN WAS SURE THAT HE RODE NO LONGER WITHIN MARNA. IT HAD BEEN AN unguessable time since they had slept, waked, and found themselves wrapped in mist, and now Tristen rode far more slowly than he wished, courting no mishaps. This place was not friendly to Uwen, or to their horses, and he kept Uwen close, continually aware of the ice that grew about them.

They changed, these shards of ice. They were sharp enough to pierce flesh and cold enough to stop the heart. They threatened, sometimes rising up suddenly, with a sound like steel sliding on steel.

“They ain’t right natural,” Uwen had remarked, early on, in his calm way. “M’lord, I don’t like the look at all.”

Neither did he, to this hour, to this day—however long they had been caught here. And the icy realm was one kind of a trap for Uwen, but another for himself, a slippage, slow and continual, so that at first he had no memory of entering the place, and now suspected he had no memory of other things more important.

“How long do you think we have ridden today?” he asked Uwen.

“Seems to me it ought to be summat over an hour,” Uwen said. “But I don’t trust my reckonin’ in this place, t’ tell the truth.” They rode in silence a moment, a silence marked by the crash and destruction of a shard, which spawned others. “Is it more than an hour, m’lord?”

“I fear it is,” Tristen said. “I fear—”

But he forgot. He forgot what he had been about to say, and forgot that he had forgotten.

“M’lord,” Uwen said insistently. “M’lord, ye’re driftin’ a wee bit. Ye’ve done that today, time to time.”

He blinked, lost for the moment, then with a chill found he had lost the name of the man beside him, someone who was vitally important to him, someone who was warmth and love itself, and he felt something beyond fear—a loss of hope itself.

The wind blew clear, unveiling a fortress on a snowy hill, and that fortress was built of the ice, a fortress with battlements that glittered like a rusty stain under a wan and fleeting sun.

Here was the first place. Here was the first of all places in his life. It lay far back, far, far in memory. He could only come here when he had forgotten all else. It waited for him.

“M’lord,” the man beside him said.

A wayward gust of mist took the vision away. They were back in the mist again, and the man had leaned from the saddle and seized his horse’s rein near the jaw.

“Ye’re driftin’, m’lord. Come back t’ me. There’s me good lad.”

“Uwen.” He gathered up bits and pieces and drew in a deep, freezing breath. His wards had failed. He had set them about their sleeping place, but their wards had gone down, and let in powers from before Uwen’s time, things long pent, that wanted free. The wards needed straight lines, or circles, even, reasonable structures, but the ice was all an illusion of shining planes. In its very essence, it flowed—was irrational, without Lines, in its depth. Given time, it warped, it bent, it stretched any Line he set on it, and just as readily—it broke, and fractured, making edges sharp enough to draw blood…

“M’lord!” he heard, and struggled to get back to that voice, that Man he had to protect. He knew they were going nowhere. Of a sudden he knew they had gone quite the opposite of where they ought to go, that they had been taken far from where they wanted to be… he could not remember that place, but he knew it was not this place.

Then another voice came, faint and far.

“Tristen,” it called, desperate. “Tristen, hear me. Emuin’s gone. My sons are gone. Tristen, wherever you are, I need you.”

Warmth came with it, warmth that touched him, and reached inside, like the breath of summer.

“Cefwyn?” he said, and reined full about. “Cefwyn, call again. Call louder.” And when it came, faint and torn on the wind: “Uwen, stay close!”

ii

HE’S COMING!” CEFWYN CRIED, HE HAD NO NOTION HOW HE knew it, but he did. Kingship to the winds, he went ru

The whole hall resounded to the confusion of two sets of guards attempting to stay with them—then, crazily, echoed to the racket of hooves within the hall itself, a thunderous clatter on the stones. Blue light flared, and wings beat in alarm as the haunt broke wide open, sending two riders and their trailing packhorses into the dead middle of the hall—not just any horses, the lead two, but heavy horses, one of them black as sin itself and the other a blue roan with a wicked eye.

A rider in silver armor swung down off the black and lit in the hall, looking toward him, a rider whose curiously crafted armor frosted in the air and gave off fog, and the other man, an ordinary Man in black leather, and thickly coated, stepped down from the roan, his armor and helm likewise frosted.

Cefwyn met his old friend Tristen with an embrace, never minding the burning chill of his touch, and stood him back again and looked into gray, wide eyes, a gaze that could drink a man’s common sense and draw him into whatever mad courage.

“My friend,” Cefwyn said, “my old friend. Thank the gods you heard me. The boys are lost out there. Orien’s cell is empty. Tarien’s fled her prison, gods know how. Emuin came here… did you know Emuin is alive?”

“That I did,” Tristen said. “But not where he was. Did Tarien take the boys with her?”

Tristen knew nothing that they had been trying to tell him, only that they were in distress. The stamp and heavy breathing of unsettled horses was all around him, and the steam went up about their bodies. The cold of Tristen’s armor seared his hands like fire.

“Elfwyn found a lost book in the library. I think it must be Mauryl’s book, from the time the books were burned. He left with it, and lost Paisi along the way.”

“Paisi,” Tristen said, glancing aside, and Paisi said, “m’lord,” almost inaudible in the echoing racket, and held his hands in his belt. “It was one o’ them fogs, m’lord, was what it was. He rode right into it.”

“And Aewyn left here without us knowing,” Cefwyn said, “tracking his brother. Then Emuin arrived. Then the stones blew apart, the windows blew open, and Tarien went—Emuin went after her, for all I know. What can you tell me? Can you find my boys?”