Rumor said Mauryl had served the Sihh from the witchlord Barrakkth to their fall in the death of Elfwyn deserting them for crimes only wizards understood.
Wizards like Emuin, who would not speak of it, and who, legend now held, had entered holy orders soon after the dreadful night.
Which was not true. Even he could give the lie to that: Emuin had been quietly active in his art and at court in Guelessar for ten years of his own young life, and had taken to the gray habit and religious retreat only latelybut so readily the Amefin took rumor and legend-making to their hearts that the years between events, most of which had transpired in the very midst of Amefel, mattered nothing to the bards: it fit their expectations, that was all that mattered. If the truth did not fit, why, cast it out.
As gods knew they would take this truth with no small stir.
Mauryl dead. And this, this vacant-eyed youth come in his placeone could hear the rumors starting. One could hear the gate-guards gossip to their Amefin cohorts, and the lower town guards to the baker and the butcher, and them to the miller and the pigherds, and from there, gods knew, over the fields to the villages, to the hills, to the Elwynim across the river and the Olmern who supplied the old tower with flour, and back again. By the time it had made three trips, Mauryl would have perished in fire and sorceries. Mauryl would have cast himself in stone. Mauryl would have set a curse on the precinct of the tower to entrap any fool who ventured there, Mauryl would have raised cohorts of the dead
Mauryl would have sent this young man
For what? For what purpose, in the godsʼ good name, did Mauryl send this innocent-seeming creature, and to him? To him, when all Maurylʼs legendary interventions had been to the ruin of kings Mauryl served?
The candle began to drown and sputter in its own wax, the ceiling to dim at the corners. Cefwyn rolled aside and rescued the flame, tipped the wax out, let the candle flare and the wax puddle and dry on the marble tabletop. He did not trust his reason in the dark, and sleep, as he had foreknown, was entirely eluding him.
In the small, secret shrine contained within the Bryaltine fane, Emuin sat on a low bench, hands locked upon each other, and the sweat stood on his face.
His thoughts strayed persistently from the meditations he attempted and other thoughts crept in like hunting wolves, in a darkness that pressed upon the light of the candles. It was a nook of solid stone, all about it thick stone containing other nooks dedicated to other gods, a place permeated with diverse beliefs. It was isolate, it was silent, it was surrounded by other prayers that should have made him immune to fear or to sorcerous intrusion. He clenched his hands and muttered the ancient ritual aloud, trying to prevent the wit-wandering that was suddenly so dangerous, so permissive of fatal indiscretion.
Mauryl, Mauryl, Mauryl, his thoughts ran, with more grief than he had ever remotely thought he would feel for the old reprobate; and for a moment despite the candles blazing at armʼs length on the altar in front of his face the darkness in the shrine felt almost complete. Such was the distress in his soul.
I am the last of us, he thought, trying to foresee the personal, moral import of Maurylʼs passing; and in doing that, met another realization, inevitably that other name: Hasufin.
The sweat broke and trickled down his temples, and his hand moved to the Teranthine sigil at his breast, silver that whether chill, whether hot seemed to burn his hands. He opened his eyes on the candles he had lit and set in a pattern about this private shrine, a pattern itself of obscure significance even in Amefel, whose ancestral roots went deep. There were thirty-eight candles that burned hot and bright, that drowned in light the memory of murder, that drowned in their heavy scent of incensed wax the remembered stink of blood.
But the years ran like water. They trickled through the fingers when a young man shut his fist, and then he was old, and men were knocking at his door at night and showing him a young man whose mere existence told him the extreme, the consummate skill which Mauryl had reached a knowledge which no wizard before him had attained, not counting Hasufinʼs abomination at Althalen. Mauryl had done this created this Summoned this.
Without telling him what he planned. Without asking help.
But did Mauryl Gestaurien ever ask help of him?
Only once.
Damn him! Emuin thought, and caught a breath and smothered his anger in prudent, clammy-handed terror. Even yet, he felt fear of the old manʼs cruel rages. Fear of the old manʼs skill. Fear of the old manʼs deep and mazelike secrecies about his past, his present, his ambitions.
Fearcounting the state of young Tristenʼs wits, or lack of them. Fear of his innocence, his unwise trust. Fear that Mauryl might have fallen short of his ultimate, perhaps killing effort, to Shape this creature, then, and last and cruelly cynical act, passed the flawed gift to him.
Damn him twice.
Mauryl gone from the world. It was thoroughly incredible to him.
It must be done, Mauryl had whispered that night, three generations ago, as men reckoned years. Destroy his body. Trap him where he wanders. Leave him stranded forever. Itʼs our only chance against him.
Gods, how had he listened to Mauryl? How had he broken through the spells that ringed that chamber and that sleeping child, and carrying silvered steel, which should have blasted the hand that wielded it?
I will hold him a time elsewhere, Mauryl had said. Only be swift, and do not flinch. He is not the child he seems. He is not a child, mark me. Not for nine hundred years. Hasufin is the spiritʼs name. The child died fourteen years ago. At its birth.
The body had had so much blood, so much blood. He had never imagined that blood would strike the walls, his robe, his face he had never imagined the feeling of it drying on his skin when for the entire night of fire and murder he was waiting for Mauryl to rescue him from the collapsing wards, an entire night not knowing whether that eldritch soul was indeed banished or loosed within the chamber with him.
Go, get you away, Mauryl had said to him, after. Man of doubts, get you away from this business. Doubt elsewhere. Doubt for those with too much confidence. You will never want for usefulness.
That spirit had, Mauryl swore, gone back to a very ancient grave, dispelled, dispersed discomfited, but not, it had become very clear, destroyed. Mauryl had taken the tower of lost souls and Sihh magics, had held the line for decades against that baneful, outraged soul.
It had seemed it would hold forever. That no more would ever be required of him, at least. Mauryl had not entrusted the dreadful tower to him, nor offered to. Mauryl had not called him to further study. After his obedience, after his survival where all others perished, Mauryl had harshly dismissed him, bidden him live his life in modest quiet afterward and to barrier his soul by whatever means he could.
I shall not call you, Mauryl had said. An end of us. I take no more students. An end of folly, for this generation.
For this generation. For this generation and two more. He had held the truth from two Marhanen kings and taught their heirat once more and less than he wished.
Emuin thrust himself to his feet, limping in the aches and stiffness of old age he had, for a dozen heartbeats and in the grip of potent memory, forgotten. He wiped a gnarled hand across his lips, cast his thoughts this way and that from the path his devotions and his conscience directed as his personal salvation.