Once he had thought it a refuge, once he had thought it holiness, and a sanctuary where a wizard once stained with his craft could find a lodging for his soul that the Shadows could not find or touch.
But now he began to suspect that the good brothers did not shadow the ether not because they were good, but because they had masked themselves from everything, had carefully erased their stray thoughts, had poured out their human longings, emptied themselves of desires and become so transparent an existence that they had not only ceased to be evil, they had ceased to be good. They had ceased to fight the battles of everyday life, and simply weighed nothing. Not a feather. Not a grain.
They had given up everything, until they vanished from the scale of all that mattered, having given away themselves long before any power declared the contest.
There were those who did cast a shadow in the ether. There were those whose presence could become a Place, and whose Places, however many they created in their lives and the leaving of life, were links to the physical world. Advantageously situated, they could make a power both elusive and unpredictable—like Hasufin.
He could recall a young, smiling boy whose shadow had loomed among wizards at Althalen, a Shadow trading on its child’s shape, and on human sympathy and human scruples, Mauryl had argued, when the most of them among Mauryl’s students saw only the child, and argued that its natural, childish innocence might protect them long enough to let them, through moral teaching, change its character.
Then Mauryl had said a thing which echoed frequently through his nightmares nowadays, that innocence answered no questions, nor wished to, and that a very old soul counted on their reluctance to harm the housing it had chosen. No other disguise could have gotten it to that extent through their defenses.
Most of all he recalled how a child’s body had lain still and helpless while the indwelling spirit ranged abroad in the halls of Althalen, killing men armed and unarmed, ordinary men and wizards, old and young, with no difference, up and down the halls, stifling their breath, stealing the force in them for the strength to break the bonds Mauryl had set on him.
That spirit is almost as old as I, Mauryl had warned the six of them that night. My student, yes, he was that, long ago, in Galasien. He was a terror to his enemies, but mostly, most of all, Mauryl had said to them on that dreadful night, Hasufin was a despiser of all restraint. As his teacher, I set him limits he immediately disdained. I set him work that was too tedious for his artistry. I set him exercises he overleaped as irrelevant and unengaging to his ability.
This spirit ruled in Galasien. Oh, he was noble-born. He would be a king over Galasien. And as I raised up the Sihhi5 kings to bring him down, now I bring down the Sihhé because they temporized with him, and nothing less than their destruction tonight will prevent him.
Mauryl had fallen silent, then, and gazed into the fire—a younger Mauryl, he had been, with gray instead of silver about him; and much of gray Mauryl had always been, dealing in powers which he advised his students never to attempt to manage. It will stain the heart, Mauryl had said. Of the soul I do not speak: the corruption of the living foredooms the dead. We are none of us safe.
None of them, in that dreadful hour before the fall of Althalen, had dared breach Mauryl’s inner thought, not knowing for certain, but sensing that Mauryl wandered just then free of the bounds of the room. And true enough, Mauryl had come back to them with a hard face and an iron purpose.
I shall tell you, for the youngest of you, Mauryl said, and laid out for them all an incredible tale, how, journeying to the north, he had brought back the five true Sihhé-lords; how in one night of terror he had brought down the Galasieni and raised up a more potent wizard than Hasufin himself; how Mauryl had, shivering in the heart of the citadel of Galasien, helped the bright towers fall and the people perish, locked within the very stones of Ynefel, Hasufin seeking lives upon lives to increase his magic against the Sihhé-lord who bent his will against him, and Mauryl sealing all the people in the stones of the remaining tower-the Sihhé fortress, after that night: Ynefel.
And long the Sihhé kings had ruled, unnaturally long, as men counted years. After them had come four halfling dynasties still able to keep their power intact, whether by innate Sihhé magic, or by conscious and learned wizardry—until (unnatural and, to a wizard mind, fraught with danger) a Sihhé queen gave birth to a babe that died, and was alive again—a miracle, oh, indeed. But in such unhingings of natural process more things might come unhinged, and all Mauryl’s skill could not pry the queen’s mother-love (another force of fearsome potency) from a child which cast that terrible shadow in the gray. Talented, the queen maintained—and by the age of ten that child, uncatchable and clever, had murdered two of his elder brothers.
He was a spirit more precocious and more cruel thus far in his young years than, Mauryl swore, the last time this spirit had walked the earth.
This spirit remembered its skill, and its former choices, and all.., all ... moral instruction was wasted on it.
Mauryl had opened the doors of the secret chambers, that heart of Althalen in which the Sihhé housed their greatest mystery, and let the Marhanen, lords of the East, loot and burn and kill without mercy those who escaped the wizardly struggle that resulted; Mauryl had simply cared little, one suspected, that the Marhanen seized the opportunity in the opening of those doors and the theft of something the present location of which one feared to surmise.
Mauryl had persuaded the lords of the Elwynim, who had Sihhé blood in their veins at least as much as the last dynasty, not to attack the Marhanen in the persecutions that followed. Mauryl swore to them that he had not utterly betrayed the Sihhé, that a King should come of Sihhé blood and inherent wizardry—a king to whom magic should he as ordinary as breathing, as it had been to the true Sihhé, who were not Men, as Men were nowadays. And that King-to-Come would save his own.
A Man such as he was learned wizardry as best he could. A Man and a young Man beginning in the craft simply did as elder wizards bade him and tried to guard his soul from the consequences.
Now there were no elder wizards—or, rather, and more troubling still, he was eldest. Mauryl was gone and Mauryl sent him—sent him Tristen.
I think, Cefwyn’s last and pleading message to him had said, that our guest is becoming what he will be, and he remains affectionate and well-disposed. He repays loyalty with loyalty, and is a moral creature. You bade me win his love, old master, and I greatly fear he has won mine in turn. Is this wise? You ignore my letters. I have the faith of the messenger that you do receive them. Why this silence? I need your presence. I need your counsel. Come to Henas’amef and help me advise this gift Mauryl gave us.
So he came. He had been on his way when that one found him on the road. But it was too late, he began to fear. What Tristen did now, Tristen had chosen to do. He had evaded Tristen so long as he feared Mauryl’s spell was still working in him—hoping for virtue. And now in one terrible day Tristen had learned killing and fled the prospect of meeting with him in the earthly world, where he might affect his heart, and where Men under Cefwyn’s orders or his might lay physical restraint on him.
Tristen had run, whatever his reasons, toward Hasufin’s domain, for that was the nature of Althalen, running as a deer would run when the dogs were baying at its heels.
No. Not a deer. Nothing at all so defenseless as that.
Tristen was doing what was in him to do, whether by Mauryl’s Shaping or that he was moving now beyond Mauryl’s intent and toward-toward something unpredictable. Sihhé were not natural Men. However they had arisen, out of Arachis as rumor among wizards had held, or from whatever source Mauryl had called them, they were not limited to wizardry and could act without learning. The egg, as Cefwyn put it, had indeed begun to hatch, and once that happened, a man such as himself, who had learned his wizardry as an art, not a birthright, could only keep himself as securely anchored to the world as possible.