C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 4 - Fortress of Dragons

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FORTRESS OF

DRAGONS

C. J. Cherryh

By C.J. Cherryh

FORTRESS IN THE EYE OF TIME

FORTRESS OF EAGlES

FORTRESS OF OWLS

FORTRESS OF DRAGONS

CONTENTS

Prologue

Book 1:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

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Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
 
Book 2:
Interlude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
 
Book 3:
Interlude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
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Chapter 7

Chapter 8

LEXICON Concordance for the Fortress Books

CJ. CHERRYH

FORTRESS

DRAGONS

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

either are the product of the author's imagination or are used

fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance

to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or

dead, is entirely coincidental.

EOS An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

10 East 53rd Street New York, New York 10022-5299

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reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written

permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in

critical articles and reviews. For information address

Eos, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Cherryh, C.J.

Fortress of dragons / C.J. Cherryh.—1st ed. p. cm. I. Title.

PS3553.H358F73 2000 813'.54—dc21 00-25811

First Eos Printing: May 2000

Eos Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries,

Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S HarperCollins(R) is a

trademark of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

FIRST EDITION

RRD 10 987654321

www.avonbooks.com/eos www.cherryh.com

PROLOGUE

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A SUMMARY OF FORTRESS IN THE EYE OF

TIME,

FORTRESS OF EAGLES, AND

FORTRESS OF OWLS.

There is magic.

There is wizardry.

There is sorcery.

They are not now, nor were then, the same.

Nine hundred years in the past, in a tower, in a place called

Galasien, a prince named Hasufin Heltain had an inordinate fear of

death. That fear led him from honest study of wizardry to the darker

practice of sorcery.

His teacher in the craft, Mauryl Gestaurien, seeing his student about

to outstrip his knowledge in a forbidden direction, brought allies

from the fabled northland, allies whose magic was not taught, but

innate. These were the five Sihhë-lords.

In the storm of conflict that followed, not only Hasufin perished, but

also ancient Galasien and all its works. Of all that city, only the

tower in which Mauryl stood survived.

Ynefel, for so later generations named the tower, became a haunted

place, isolated within Marna Wood, its walls holding intact the

horrified faces of lost Galasien's people. The old tower was Mauryl's

point of power, and so he remained bound to it through passing

centuries, although he sometimes intervened outside the tower in the

struggles that followed in the lands the Galasieni had ruled.

The Sihhë took on themselves the task of ruling the southern lands…

not the Galasieni, who had become bound to Ynefel, but other

newcomers… notably the race of Men, who also had crept down from

the north. The Sihhë swept across the land, subduing and building,

conquering and changing all that the Galasieni had made, creating

new authorities and powers to reward their subordinates and dealing

harshly with their enemies.

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The five true Sihhë lived long, after the nature of their kind, and they

left a thin presence of halfling descendants among Men before their

passing. The kingdom of Men rapidly spread and populated the lands

nearest Ynefel, with that halfling dynasty ruling from the Sihhë hall

at unwalled Althalen.

Unchallenged lord of Ynefel's haunted tower, Mauryl continued in a

life by now drawn thin and long, whether by wizardry or by nature:

he had now outlasted even the long-lived Sihhë, and watched changes

and ominous shifts of power as the blood and the innate Sihhë magic

alike ran thinner and thinner in the line of halfling High Kings.

For, of all the old powers, Shadows lingered, and haunted certain

places in the land. One of these was Hasufin Heltain.

One day, in the Sihhë capital, within the tributary kingdom of Amefel,

and in the rule of the halfling Elfwyn Sihhë, a queen gave birth to a

stillborn babe. The queen was inconsolable—but the babe

miraculously drew breath and lived, warmed to life, as she thought,

by Sihhë magic and a mother's love.

To the queen the child was a wonderful gift. But that second life was

not the first life, and it was not the mother's innate Sihhë magic, but a

Shadow's darkest sorcery that had brought breath into the child—for

what lived in the babe was a soul neither Sihhë nor Man: it was

Hasufin Heltain, in his second bid for life and power.

So now Hasufin nestled in the heart of the Sihhë aristocracy, still a

child, at a time when Mauryl, who might have realized what he was,

had shut himself away in his tower at Ynefel, rarely venturing as far

as Althalen—for Mauryl felt the weakness of the ages Hasufin had

not lived.

Other children of the royal house died mysteriously as that fey,

ingratiating princeling grew stronger. Now alarmed, warned by his

arts and full of fury and advice, Mauryl came to court to confront the

danger he recognized. But the queen would not hear a wizard's

warning, far less dispose of a son of the house, her favorite, her

dearest and most magical darling—a child who now, by the deaths of

all elder princes, was near the throne.

The day that child should attain his majority, and the hour that

prince should rule, Mauryl warned them, the house and the dynasty

would perish. But even that plain warning failed to persuade the

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queen; and the King, Elfwyn, took his grieving queen's side, refusing

Mauryl's unthinkable command to destroy their own son.

Foreseeing ruin, Mauryl turned not to the halfling Sihhë of the court,

but to the Men who served them. He conspired with the warlord

Selwyn Marhanen, the Sihhë's trusted general, and thus encouraged

Selwyn and other Men to bring down the halfling dynasty and take

the throne for themselves. So Mauryl betrayed the descendants of the

very lords he had raised up to prevent Hasufin's sorcery, and for that

reason Men called Mauryl both Kingmaker, and Kingsbane.

Mauryl insinuated both the Marhanen and his men and a band of

wizards into the royal palace. Mauryl and the majority of his circle

held magic at bay while a younger wizard, Emuin, killed the sleeping

prince in his chambers—a terrible and a bloody deed, and only the

first act of bloodshed that night.

Hasufin's death was the limit of Mauryl's interest in the matter. The

fate of the Sihhë in the hands of Selwyn and his men, and even the

fate of the wizards who had aided him, was all beyond his capability

to govern, and Mauryl again retreated to his tower, weary and sick

with age. Young Emuin took holy orders, seeking to forget his terrible

deed and to find some salvation for himself as a Man and a cleric in

an age of Men.

In those years Selwyn's own ambition and Men's religious fear of a

magic they did not wield led them to rise in earnest against Sihhë

rule: province after province fell to the Marhanen, and their

followers destroyed all that lay outside the approval of their priests…

demolishing even the work of wizards who had aided their rise.

But the district of Elwynor across the river from Althalen, though

populated with Men, attempted to remain loyal to the Sihhë-lords and

to maintain wizards in safety. They even raised an army to bring

against the Marhanen, but dissent and claims and counterclaims of

kingship within Elwynor precluded that army from ever taking the

field. The Marhanen thus were able to seize the entire tributary

kingdom of Amefel (in which the capital of Althalen had stood) and

treat it as a province, right across the river from Elwynor.

But Selwyn Marhanen—rather than rule from Althalen, remote from

the heart of his power, and equally claimed by all the lords of

Men—instead established a capital in the center of his home

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territory. He declared himself king, though not High King, and by his

own cleverness and ruthlessness set his own allies under his heel.

The lords of districts became barons of a new court at Guelemara, in

Selwyn's own district of Guelessar.

From that new capital at Guelemara, Selwyn dominated all the

provinces southward. He as well as his subjects, mostly Guelenfolk

and Ryssandish, being true Men with no gift for wizardry, had no

love of it either—Selwyn because he feared wizards might challenge

him, and his people because they saw magic and wizardry alike as a

challenge to the gods … 50 priests of the Quinalt and Teranthine

sects had taught them. For both reasons, Selwyn raised a great

shrine next his palace, the Quinaltine, and favored the Quinalt

Patriarch, who set a religious seal on all his acts of domination. But

Selwyn trusted the Quinalt sect no more than he trusted wizards, and

established none other than Emuin, now a Teranthine brother, as his

advisor. This he did to balance the power of the Quinaltine.

By now, of all Men loyal to the Sihhë, only the Elwynim had

successfully held their border against the Guelenmen… for that

border was on the one hand a broad river, the Lenúalim, and on the

other, the haunted precincts of Marna Wood, near the old tower of

Ynefel, and beyond the always restive district of Amefel.

So, with that border established, the matter settled… save only the

troublesome question of Amefel, the province on the Guelen-held side

of the Lenúalim River, the population of which was not Guelen-ish,

but close kin to the Elwynim. Selwyn's hope of holding his lands firm

against the Elwynim rested on not allowing an Elwynim presence on

that side of the river… within a population virtually the same in

accent, religion, and customs.

Now the history of Amefel was this: Amefel had been an independent

kingdom of Men when the first Sihhë-lords walked up to the walls of

its capital of Hen Amas and demanded entry. The kings of Amefel, the

Aswyddim, flung open their gates and helped the Sihhë in their

mission to conquer Guelessar, a fact no Guelen and no Guelen king

could quite forget. In return for this treachery, the local Aswydd

house had always enjoyed a unique status under the Sihhë authority,

and, alone of Men, styled themselves as kings, as opposed to High

Kings, the title the Sihhë reserved for themselves and their

successors.

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So now Selwyn had severed Amefel from Elwynor and claimed it…

but at least for this approaching fall season, he foresaw that his own

uneasily joined kingdom of Ylesuin, with barons at least two of whom

had already tried to claim rule over the Guelens, would fall to

internal quarrels the moment he looked elsewhere. If he became

embroiled in a dispute with the Aswydds over their prerogatives, that

would lead to his own barons scheming and plotting while he was

distracted, and that situation might encourage Elwynor to break the

unofficial truce… leading to war next spring from one end to the

other of the lands of Men.

So Selwyn Marhanen quietly accorded the Aswydds guarantees of

many of their ancient rights, including their religion, and including

their titles. By that agreement, while the Aswydds became vassals of

the kings of Ylesuin, and were called dukes, they were also styled

aethelings, that was to say, royal—but only within their own

province of Amefel. This purposely left aside the question of whether

the other earls of Amefel bore rank equivalent to the dukes of Guelen

and Ryssandish lands.

Selwyn thus had Amefel… or at least the consent of its aetheling… by

the first winter of his rule, and he still had ambitions to go further.

But the opposing district of Elwynor formed a region almost as large

as Ylesuin was with Amefel attached, and, undeceived by the

apparent truce, Elwynor's lords used that winter to gather forces. By

the next spring, with Selwyn in Amefel and Elwynor armed and

strong enough to make invasion costly, both sides assessed their

chances and declined battle. The river Lenúalim thus became the

tacitly unquestioned but still unsettled border.

The Elwynim meanwhile, declared a Regency in place of the lost

High King at Althalen. They chose one of their earls, himself with a

glimmering of Sihhë blood, who styled himself Lord Regent, and

waited, taking it on stubborn faith that not all the royal house of the

Sihhë-lords had perished, that within their lifetimes a new Sihhë-lord,

some surviving prince they called the King To Come, would emerge

from hiding or come down from the fabled northern ice to overthrow

the Marhanen and reestablish the Sihhë kingdom. This time the Sihhë

kingdom would have faithful Elwynor at its heart, and all the loyal

subjects, foremost the Elwynim, would live in peace and Sihhë-

blessed prosperity in a new golden age of wizardry.

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The Elwynim, therefore, cherished magic, and prized the wizard-gift

where it appeared. But outside the Lord Regent's line there were far

too few Elwynim who could practice wizardry in any appreciable

degree. Certainly no one in the land possessed such magic as the

Sihhë had used, and there were few enough wizards left who would

even speak of the King To Come… for the wizards of this age had

had firsthand experience of Hasufin Heltain, and they remained aloof

from the various lords of the Elwynim who wished to employ them.

Those few Elwynim who had any Sihhë blood whatsoever were

likewise reticent, for fear of becoming the center of some rising

against the Regency that could only end in disaster.

So the Elwynim, deserted by their wizards and by those who did carry

the blood, became too little wary of magic and those who promised it.

They failed to ask the essential question: why the wizards remained

silent and why Mauryl and Emuin both remained aloof from them,

and thus they failed to know the danger that still existed in the

shadows and among the Shadows.

So the years passed into decades without a credible claimant to the

throne in Elwynor, and without the rise of another great wizard.

Selwyn died. Ylesuin's rule passed to Selwyn's son Indreddrin, who

was a middle-aged man with two previous marriages and two grown

sons.

Now Indreddrin was Guelen to the core, which meant devoutly,

blindly Quinalt. That was his mother's influence. As a young prince,

he had had no love of his uncivil warlord father, but had a great deal

of fear of him. And under this dual influence of his mother's faith and

his father's disinterest, Indreddrin grew up with no tolerance for

other faiths, despite the exigencies of the Amefin treaty… and with a

superstitious fear of wizardry, based on his observation of his father

Selwyn's terrors in his declining years. Indreddrin fell more and

more under the influence of the Quinaltine, and exercised little

patience with his wild eldest son, Cefwyn—for Cefwyn took his

grandfather's example and clung to the Tera'nthine tutor, Emuin (that

same Emuin who had aided Mauryl at Althalen), whom Selwyn had

appointed royal tutor for both his grandsons.

This was no accident, first because of wizardry, where little was

accidental at all; and secondly because Selwyn saw superstition

rising in his son and wished to stop it in the next generation. If

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