But if Emuin waited until the enemy did more than rattle the windows of the Zeide, then the threads he had seen going out of Ynefel would be very many, and very dark. And that was not good advice.
He had been at two places where he had felt the Shadows most powerfully. He had gone on Mauryl’s Road as far as Henas’amef, but he thought now, tonight, that Henas’amef was not, after all, the end of his travels, only a resting-place, a place to learn. He could not rest too long, or remain too safe—Mauryl had not brought him into the world to be safe; he knew that now: Mauryl himself had not been safe. Mauryl had been fighting an enemy all unknown to him, an enemy that had finally overwhelmed him, and now, though he had never yet been able to read Mauryl’s Book or understand Mauryl’s reasons, he knew at least something of Mauryl’s fight.
The rest of the answers were not, he assured himself, at Henas’amef. He had been closer to them at Emwy than he had been anywhere since he had left Marna, in that place where the Emwy road came closest to Ynefel.
Chapter 23
Train was a misery, pouring off the tent, finding ways under the edge to soften the ground around the stakes. The holy brothers had already been out in the rain, struggling to reposition the stakes at the end of the tent, and a man who had not begun his life’s work as a priest reflected that prayers and the brothers’ inexpert efforts did less for tent-stakes than minor wizardry could. Sit in the shelter of this rock, good father, rest yourself, good father: leave the tent to us, good father, in the gods’ good grace, father.
Emuin was more and more tempted to fix that corner stake himself, suspecting that the good brothers would not feel a twinge or a tingle in the air if he did.
But there were powers in the air tonight that might. He did not think that they had reached as far as Arreyburn, but he was not willing to wager on it.
“Rocks,” he called out finally, impatient, and wishing he had closer attended the setting of the tent in the first place. He had trusted woodcraft in two seventh sons of some town mayor, gods save him, and let them position it when the gale came down on them and drenched them.
“Pardon, father?” one asked, rain-drenched gentility.
“Rocks. Good bloody gods, boy, you set the left-side stakes in a runnel down the damned hillside, what do you expect?” He brushed past the pair and slogged into the rain himself, gathered up three sizable wet rocks from the hill and jammed them, one after the other, tightly up against the three tent stakes and trod on each of them, hard.
After that he retreated, drenched, inside the tent, stripped off his sodden clothing, and seized up a relatively dry blanket to wrap in while he pulled off his boots.
He had a change of clothing in the baggage. The good brothers among whom he had been in retreat had given him no hired guards, who might have known how to set a tent. The hired guards had been off seeing to the protection of ten brothers going to the blessing of the harvest in this end of season, and the assessment of land-rent for the abbey’s tenants.
Collecting the annual rent was a mission occasionally fraught with high passions, and occasionally beset by banditry, and the soldiers were reasonably called for. The abbot had not anticipated a message from His Highness or, now—if one believed Tristen, and he did—the King, bidding him come to a place and a danger he had tried very hard to avoid.
The brothers shivered in modest propriety in their wet robes, scorning the tyranny of the flesh. They lit the lamp after its overset in the collapse of the tent end: they were at least good for that. The oil had not caught fire, their tent had not burned down, and the brothers thanked the gods in their constant muttering of, “Thank you, sweet gods, thank you, dear gods,” that could drive a man to desperation. The muttering, as of doves, increased in times of trouble. They blessed the lamp, they blessed the tent pole, they blessed the oil-sopped carpet that, with the mud, was going to have the lot of them looking like mendicant friars by morning.
“In the gods’ good name, sit down and be warm, brothers. Don’t press against the canvas. It makes leaks.” Emuin tucked his own dry blanket around him, and wished the lamp oil had not had attar of roses added. It gave off a cloying perfume that had the closeness of the grave to a man who was holding the grave at bay with such difficulty tonight.
The pair settled. They heard the beating of the rain on the canvas.
Thunder boomed, and the good brothers made prayers, quietly, at least.
But true gods, unlike spirits, did not permit themselves to be summoned, did not manifest at a wizard’s whim—or a priest’s—did not answer a mortal’s demand; and did not know, perhaps, mortal needs, or mortal fears. Even the Nineteen, They of Galasien, the hidden gods, were wisps in the ether, a breath, an unanswering, unanswerable riddle.
And a wizard-turned-priest began to ask himself—then what earthly good were they? Were they more or less than Hasufin? Was that what wizards prayed to, and what the Elwynim held sacred? He no longer knew, and now doubted his years of prayers and all his attempt to save the old lore.
Inéreddrin dead, Cefwyn King—and Tristen set at liberty in the midst of it: none of the news that had flooded toward him by earthly messenger and unearthly summons could give a wizard-priest peaceful dreams. He felt the danger in the ether, where Tristen’s every disturbance of that expanse of dream and substance gave advisement to the enemy which sat gathering forces at Ynefel. Every breath of wind through the insubstantial realm informed the power they least wished informed, and Tristen had no inkling what a powerful presence he was there. Tristen could not see himself—Tristen could not see the disturbance he made, could not, at least, understand that his manifestation was not ordinary, that it shouted to the heavens and drew attention. He was Sihhé. He was indubitably Sihhé, and that power was born in him—if he had been born. That power was in his bones, if he had had them shaped in anything but the womb of air and Mauryl’s will.
If he had ever personally doubted since he laid eyes on Tristen, it was only regarding the order of presence he had to deal with—not its potency.
No, Tristen was not a wizard. He did not need to be. No, Tristen did not work magic. Tristen willed things, and the ether bent, bending the earthly realm with it—even when Tristen was unaware he was doing it.
Like a young man, Tristen had reached out to the only elder he saw; or he, like an old fool, had sensed the troubled ether and reached first.
He could not now remember how it had been—but he had become ensnared, and then Cefwyn had, and after him, others, the ineffectual gods save them.
Now Tristen had begun searching the mortal earth for a force he could not master in the unearthly realm, searching—although he was certain Tristen did not know it in so many words, and likely did not think of it in anything like the way a wizard thought of it—for points of Presence in the earthly realm where the enemy was most vulnerable.
And where the enemy was consequently most powerfuclass="underline" unfortunately.
One went with the other.
If Tristen would not be so rash as to dare assail Ynefel itself, still there were even in Amefel places almost as fraught with the enemy’s presence.
He could name one very dangerous site without an instant’s hesitation.
The boy was on the road. He caught impressions now and again as an unskilled presence tried to keep from attracting notice and achieved—if not the opposite—at least a very qualified success.
The boy—the Shaping, the Sihhé-lord, the power that a dying and desperate master had released on an unsuspecting world, where men thought that priests could hold back the dark without being shadowed by it—was looking for answers in a physical realm that could only lead him to trouble. There were places of potency. But in very truth, there was no dark to hold back—at least—the dark that there was had no wellspring and no dividing line that this wizard had ever found. The dark that he knew was general. It was ubiquitous. It had its frontier in every soul that lived and had lived, and the good brothers yonder in their goodness were a pale, powerless nothing if he cared to look. They were all but invisible in the ether, as all but a few of the Teranthines were invisible.