Fortress in the Eye of Time Read Online Free PDF

three and four more hit the floor immediately after, and Mauryl caught his sleeve, compelling his attention to a small codex Mauryl had pulled from among the parchments. Mauryl pressed it into his hands and folded his fingers over the aged leather.
    â€œHere is the answer, boy. Here is your answer to all your questions. Here is the way. Learn it. Study it. Become wise.”
    Tristen opened the book to its center. Its pages were thick with copywork, a bold and heavy hand that was not at all like the writing on the parchments Mauryl trampled underfoot, not written in the delicate, rapid letters Mauryl used.
    Someone else copied this, Tristen thought, and although that ‘someone else’ was not the thunderstroke of a Word, it was a thought he had never framed in his mind, a thought that there could be someone else, or anyone else, now, or ever.
    But there had been. There were, in the same way there were, Mauryl hinted, other places. There must be other someones.
    There must be, in those other places, as naturally as there must be a sun over those places and a wind to rattle their shutters, someone like Mauryl and someone like himself.There was more than one dove, was there not, that lived in the loft?
    There was more than one mouse in the lower hall. There were at least six, that Mauryl called sneaking little thieves, and yet put out bits of bread for them, because Mauryl said they were old, too, and moving more slowly now than they had.
    So things had greater numbers than one, and mice grew old, and doves flew out over the woods Mauryl said to fear—and yet came back safe to their roosts in the loft, which had no shutters to bolt. There were many, many of them.
    And someone other than Mauryl had written the copywork in this book, using straight, black letters that crossed the page in rigid dark masses, when Mauryl’s flowed like the tracks of mice across the dust.
    â€œBoy!”
    He had walked straight ahead, thinking of the precious book in his hand, not the stairs before him. He had forgotten, first of lessons, the single step down. He caught himself, at Mauryl’s voice, and made the little step safely, feeling shame burn in his face as he looked back.
    Mauryl shook his head, out of patience with a fool.
    So, shamefaced, he took his little book down to the table where the wall sconces were. He took the waxed straw from the holder and carried fire from the watch-candle, which was his task to renew every night and every morning, and lit the three candles.
    Candles don’t come like dewdrops, Mauryl had said, when once he left the drafty kitchen door open and the watch-candle had burned out. Mauryl had been out of sorts and had him light his straw instead off the embers in the hearth, which ate up half the straw at once, Mauryl grumbling all the while about fools leaving doors unlatched, and saying candles were hard come by, and they should be burning knots of straw by winter if his husbandry was so profligate.
    Winter was a Word, howling white and bitter cold. Straw was a little one, yellow and dusty and hot. Dewdrops heknew from spiderwebs on the shutters, and the old keep had many spiders.
    But where did candles come from, that they were at once so scarce, and yet vanished every handful of days for new ones to fill their holders?
    They were like the little book, written in another hand, evidence of something outside, and of things more than one. Once he began chasing that thought, it seemed clear to him that candles came from somewhere.
    And where then did their clothes come from, when Mauryl said, Mauryl had said it just this morning, that it was one thing to conjure something to do what it would do anyway, and one thing to make things seem better than they were, and quite another, Mauryl had said disgustedly, to conjure a new shirt, which had to come of a good many herb bundles, and which he’d torn on a splinter in the loft.
    Mauryl had taught him how to patch it, and made him do it many