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

across the courtyard, and he knew that on any ordinary day he should be inside and off the parapets and out of the courtyard by now. He was thinking that when the wind suddenly picked up, skirled up the dead leaves from a corner of the wall, and those leaves rose higher and higher, dancing down the paving stones toward the tower.
    And back again. That was odd for a wind to do. It was a chill wind as it touched him. The pigeons, while he read, had deserted the courtyard stones, seeking their towers for the night. The shadows, while he read, had come into nooks where no shadows had been at noon. The faces in the stone walls seemed more ambiguous, more ghostly and more dubious than they appeared by day.
    Be certain, Mauryl had always said, that the shutters and the doors are bolted every night.
    Be afraid of the dark. When the sky shadows, be under stone and have the shutters closed and the doors well shut. Have I not said this before?
    He shivered, with the Book folded in his hands, his handsbetween his knees as the wind danced back again. He looked up at the color stealing across the sky. The faces set in the walls changed their expressions with the passage of shadow. Now they seemed to look down in horror.
    He looked up at the walls above his head—and saw Mauryl’s face above him, stone like the others, wide-mouthed and angry.
    He stumbled off the middle step, fell on the bottom one and picked himself up, staring at the face in horrid surmise—backed farther and farther across the courtyard stones, with Mauryl’s face among the stone faces he had seen in the walls from the beginning of his existence here, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed as if Mauryl could at any moment scream in anger or in terror, either one.
    â€œMauryl?” he said faintly, and somewhere within the hall timbers fell with a horrific crash and splintering. Another balcony, he thought. “Mauryl?” he cried aloud, daring not admit he still could not read the Book. There must be an exception. There must be a way out. “Mauryl, what shall I do, Mauryl? Please tell me what to do!”
    He heard slates fall inside, a lighter, sharper-edged ruin.
    A cold skirl of wind went past him.
    An immense mass of something crashed inside and knocked the door shut, as if someone had slammed it in his face. He stared in shock, terrified.
    He had no recollection, then, of turning away, except he was walking toward the gate. Reaching it, he tried not the heavy bar but the lesser one, which closed a gate within the gate; that was enough to let him out. He shut it once he was through, and asked himself foolishly how he should bar it, and then—against what should he bar it? and protecting what? Mauryl had set great importance on locking and latching doors, but it was far beyond his ability to seal this one against harm. He turned and faced the bridge and the river, and the forest beyond it, already shadowing toward dark—and could only set out walking on the Road. Go where you see to go, Mauryl had said. Take the Road that offers itself.And he did, over the rotten boards and stonework of the Bridge that spanned the river Lenúalim.
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    The water was dark beneath the gaps over which he walked, clinging fearfully to the stones along the edge of the high-arched bridge. The river looked murky green in the deep shadow and made patterns on its surface, swirls and ripples which on another day might tempt him to linger and wonder; but haste and dread overwhelmed all curiosity in him—haste—clinging to an ancient, crumbling stone railing, and with old mortar sifting from under his feet. If he should fall, he said to himself, he would slip beneath that surface, where it must be as cold and as dark as the rain barrel or the cistern, and where all that Mauryl had done with him and all that Mauryl had told him would come to nothing: he could not be so foolish.
    A moaning sounded behind him, as if the gate had opened. He cast a look over his