fortress of dragons.html

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.

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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.

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