Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh

Author:C. J. Cherryh [Cherryh, C. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780061743931
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-01-23T13:00:00+00:00

The halls upstairs were deserted except for the guards appointed to the various doors. Noise of shouting drifted up from the lower floor, and they walked to the stairs, two of the guards from their own door walking behind them as the guards always did when he went outside.

Half of Cefwyn’s door-guards were missing, too, meaning an empty apartment and the likelihood that Cefwyn had never yet come to bed—or that Cefwyn had had to leave it after that clattering of men up and down the hall.

Cefwyn’s father lay dead. He thought that, however exhausted Cefwyn was, however strongly Cefwyn had rejected the offers of people who wanted to stay these lonely hours with him, it was unlikely that Cefwyn would have slept at all tonight.

But that Cefwyn would be up wandering the halls—he had not expected.

They descended the stairs into the main hall, where soldiers gathered and servants and lords and ladies stood in knots whispering together, weeping, some of them. He smelled smoke, and recalled Althalen, where Cefwyn swore no fire had come since the Sihhë had died there. But this did not seem ghostly smoke. It made the eyes sting.

The noise came from the halls beyond.

“No farther,” Uwen counseled him. “My lord, stay and I’ll see.”

He knew by Uwen’s warning that there was no pleasure to come to him by going any farther. But all safety tonight seemed illusory; and his danger was worse, he had already persuaded himself, in biding ignorant of what happened in the place in which he lived, whether Cefwyn acted or others did without Cefwyn’s knowledge. Defend him, Cefwyn had bidden him swear: and how could he do that in utter ignorance?

Guards stood in the central hall. He went past them unchallenged, and Uwen stayed with him. So did his personal guards, into the main doors at the Zeide’s heart, those that let out into the front court.

Those four doors lay wide open. Their access and the whole corridor was jammed with mingled soldiery and residents of the hall in brocades or velvets or priests’ plain habits. Lamps lit the place, as they did in all places where the wind blew through, but the glow outside the doors was the red glare of a larger fire on vast billows of dark smoke, the stench of which reached far inside the hall.

Voices roared, outside, a wash of sound in which no words made sense.

It was impossible to keep together in the crowd. He plunged past a knot of lords out onto the landing and down the stairs, searching for a clear space to stand, at first, then found himself swept up in the rush, realizing that the crowd was carrying him toward the heart of the disturbance.

“M’lord,” he heard Uwen call to him, one clear, thin voice in that din of voices, but he had found a clearer vantage at the side-facing steps and did not wish to yield it up.

Wind rushed at him in that exposure, cold, rainy wind warmed with smoke. Ash and sparks flew.

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