The Sealed Citadel

by Edward W. Robertson

  Curling his fingers, Cally drew forth a new thread of nether, this time from within his heart. He didn't think there was anything inherently dangerous about this, for everything was filled with nether, but he handled it as carefully as he might a crystal glass, extending it into what he thought was the fly's miniature heart.

  This produced no effect. Trying to ignore the sinking in his heart, he tried again, fanning out the flyward end of the thread to reach more of its organs.

  On the stone floor, the dead insect uncurled its legs and flapped its wings.

  9

  He soared above the trees, bird-like—no, god-like. He was as high as a cloud. He was free as the wind. He was—

  He was vomiting. Hands clapped to his knees, he convulsed, ejecting bits of apple and Bartle's traveler's sausage across the stone floor.

  "What's upset you?" Rowe said. "Did you witness someone calling someone else a rude word?"

  "I saw the world like birds do," Cally said. "Or, more accurately I suppose, like flies do." He spat a few times. The chamber had smelled of fresh, clean rain, but that was no longer the case at all. "Maybe we should move to another room."

  They did that. Cally's vision was still reeling. This time, he sat down, then thought even better and stretched across the floor. He closed his eyes.

  Though he could feel his nethereal connection to the fly was still active, he was mildly surprised that while he'd been too busy barfing to give it any commands, that it hadn't dropped dead again, or bashed into a tree or something. Instead, it was just flying along in the same direction it had been going before his vertigo had gotten the best of him.

  The Lannovians' homeland was off to the southeast and he sent the fly winging hence to see if it could spot their caravan. While initially the insect had seemed quite fast, this turned out to have been an illusion of some kind, perhaps caused by the scale of itself to the gigantic landscape around it. In fact, the fly was little faster than a walking horse.

  "I think," he said, "that we should start riding in the direction you last saw their tracks. Or find a faster bug. Or both."

  It was still raining, however, which meant they were unlikely to see much in the way of insects until it quit. They mounted up and Rowe led the way onward. Cally found that sending his sight into his scout caused him to lose almost all sense of his own body. Whenever he checked in on himself, he found that he was about to fall out of the saddle. Rowe suggested tying him to the horse. Unable to tell if he was joking, Cally took some time to practice maintaining just enough awareness of his body to stop it from flopping about like an idiot.

  The fly was still ambling along, hunting for the riders and escorts of the Lannovians. Cally supposed he might hasten the hunt by sending multiple flies in all directions, but he doubted he was ready for that, and anyway his link to the one he had was slowly draining his supply of nether. He would worry about multiple scouts if his target proved too elusive for one.

  Every now and then he saw a rider or men on foot along the road, but they were just locals traveling in ones and twos. Emptied prematurely, Cally's stomach began to rumble prematurely, and they stopped for an early lunch.

  "Be on the lookout for water," Rowe said.

  "But we have plenty."

  "It's not the water we're after. Dragonflies. Fastest bug I know." An amused glint took hold in his eyes. "Know what the funny thing is about you people? You literally wouldn't hurt a fly. But the man you worship was one of the most savage warriors of his age."

  "We don't worship any man. Just Arawn, and the other lords of the Celeset that are his equal."

  "Then what would you call how you bow to Merriwen?"

  "Veneration. Of a very wise figure, without whom the Order wouldn't exist."

  Rowe drew his sword and examined its edge. "Wonder if you'd still call him wise if they'd told you all the stories about him."

  "I expect I know more of Merriwen than you do!"

  "Think so? Do you know the story of Merriwen's visit to Soll?"

  Cally gave his apple a dirty look, then bit into it. "Why don't you jog my memory?"

  "Soll. Village in the foothills of the Woduns. A pair of sorcerers had taken it over and were said to be running the place in a bad way. Brutalizing the villagers. Merriwen rode out to it to see for himself. Went alone except for Lana, his traveling companion in those days.

  "His arrival was unexpected. They asked him why he'd graced them, he told them there'd been stories of kappers in the area. Murderous beasts. Villagers insisted there weren't any, but Merriwen said he had to investigate. Was his duty. They said okay. Threw him a feast. Lots of eating, merrymaking. Then, in the middle of the night, Merriwen woke to find the two sorcerers trying to kill him. Lot like what happened at the Bowl."

  Rowe took a bite of sausage and finished it before continuing. "Except Merriwen killed the sorcerers. After he talked with Lana, who'd been able to hear the testimony of the villagers during the feast, Merriwen went from house to house and killed a third of the men in Soll."

  Cally waited for more, then hunched his shoulders. "So what?"

  "He went in against overwhelming odds. Just like we are. He won because he wasn't afraid to use the powers that had been granted to him."

  "Hold on now, how long ago was this?"

  "1189. Old reckoning."

  "Before Merriwen recanted the horror of bloodshed and founded the Order. This whole story is irrelevant!"

  "Know what else is funny?" Rowe took another mouthful of sausage, not bothering to finish chewing this time. "All those villagers Merriwen killed. You haven't even asked what they were doing that was bad enough to deserve death."

  "Well, obviously they were collaborating with the evil sorcerers in some way."

  "Worse than that. They were sacrificing babies."

  "They absolutely were not!"

  "If they had been, was it all right for Merriwen to kill them?"

  "But they weren't. That's just a meaningless hypothetical."

  "What if the sorcerers had just assumed control of the place? Raised taxes on the villages? Took away half their holidays? And those men were just helping the sorcerers keep order?"

  "Then Merriwen should absolutely not have killed them. A sorcerer doesn't get to wield his power to kill hundreds of people over something so trivial as a few holidays."

  Rowe gazed into the distance. "And what if the sorcerers had been kidnapping women from nearby lands? Marrying them off to those men in Soll who pledged loyalty? Forcing these brides to bear the loyalists' children?"

  "I don't know. They could have been jailed, I suppose. Or given a fair trial, and executed through traditional means."

  "Like an axe."

  "Right."

  "Just not the nether."

  Cally glanced at him. "Is that what the villagers had been doing?"

  "If they were, was Merriwen right to kill them?"

  "He must have thought so at the time. But he must not have thought so later, or else he never would have founded the Order." He stood. "Now, don't we have a gang of villains to find?"

  ~

  The fly flew onward, hardly outpacing them. Meaning that it would hardly be catching up to the Lannovians, either. A stream wound past a nearby hill, and they diverted to it. There weren't any dragonflies, but there were a few damselflies remaining despite the lateness of the season. Rowe killed four. Well, in truth he killed several times more than that, but he was able to provide Cally with four that were sufficiently intact.

  Cally reanimated two and wrapped the two others in cloth for later use. They sped through the air like sparrows. Not as fast as a galloping horse, but faster than a man on the run. As he was marveling at their power and his own, lost in the sensation of three winged scouts, he fell from the saddle and thumped into the road.

  Rowe shook his head and looked away in disgust. Stung as much by that as by the impact of himself into the dirt, Cally cut his connection to the fly, which blacked out immediately. By holding tight
to the pommel of the saddle, and switching between the damselflies' sight rather than trying to watch through both at once, he was able to remain functional.

  What he saw was that the wilderness was very, very vast. It was one thing to travel through it day after day, but it was quite another to soar above the hills, woods, streams, glens, and fields. He could see a bit of smoke to the north that might have been Tantonnen, but otherwise the land was all but empty except for the odd yeoman farm or cabin isolated on a hillside. It felt like it could take forever to locate the Lannovians within all that space, but it wasn't yet three o'clock when Cally sat up in the saddle.

  "I think I've found them."

  Rowe didn't look over. "You think?"

  "Almost sure of it. They're wearing the right colors. And there's a lot of them. Yes—we've found them!"

  "Which way?"

  Cally aligned the damselfly to the sun. "West-northwest."

  "How far?"

  "Enough miles that I feel like I'm going to get it wrong. Ten?"

  "How fast are they moving?"

  "Well, no faster than we are. Half their people are on foot. But it looks to be a good march. I may be able to find out exactly how fast by—"

  "Heading away from their homeland. On the march. Something strange here. Take us after them." Rowe nudged his horse. "Be on the lookout for scouts."

  Rowe set a faster pace. It soon proved too much for Cally to ride and pay close attention to his damselflies, but he did the best he could, fearing being upbraided for weakness, until he began to grow more afraid the pace was compromising his effectiveness, at which point he said as much. Rowe slowed without complaint, which made Cally wonder why he'd spent the last twenty minutes torturing himself rather than just speaking up in the first place.

  "If the Lannovians aren't heading home," Cally said, "where are they going?"

  "Don't know."

  "What are they doing?"

  "Can't say."

  "But what do you think they might be doing?"

  "Wizard shit." Rowe kept his eyes on the path. "Whatever it is, it can't be done without the book. Taking that away from them is all that matters."

  Cally supposed this was true, but it was also unsatisfying. The trees had been spotty along the first two or so miles of the fork in the road they were following, but they thickened after that. Pine trees grew on the north slopes of the low hills while leafy trees grew on the south slopes, showing off their autumn colors. It seemed odd for both types to be growing right next to each other but to be unmixed with each other, but he deduced that there was something about the conditions of the northern exposure that appealed to pines, while the southern position offered something in kind to the leaf-owners.

  He wished the norren hadn't stolen his parchment so that he could take notes on such things, but perhaps once this whole mess was behind them, he could convince one of the Masters to let him return here and make observations on what he saw. He thought he might enjoy it.

  "Who are these people?" Rowe said out of the blue.

  Cally drew back from his scouts, glancing around to confirm that there was no one in front of them, and in fact that the nearest people of any kind were a farming family over on the next hill.

  "Well, they look to be farmers. Simple folk. People of the soil. Likely take a keen interest in the weather."

  "The Lannovians."

  "Oh, those people. They're a priesthood from Lannovar. Miles and miles that way." He gestured to the southeast. "I hear they've got quite a nice temple inside their fort, though I've never seen it for myself."

  "What's their relationship with the Order?"

  "Like Master Tarriman recounted, they came to our aid during the War of Sealing. They helped the Order hold off the Barony of Varrovar and their wights until Merriwen could seal himself and the demons inside the Citadel."

  Rowe grunted. "Why did they help you in the first place?"

  "We'd done something for them earlier on." Cally scrunched up his face, pawing through the old lessons. "Gallador? Yes, that was it: years before all this, the merchant confederacy of Gallador attempted to seize control of all trade to the east of them. When their political manipulations didn't work, they hired mercenaries to conduct a literal trade war. Lannovar got cut off and isolated by them, but Narashtovik's sorcerers established a smugglers' route to maintain trade between the two cities. This was enough to keep Lannovar going until the Galladese got distracted by the Gaskans and withdrew. That was the beginning of our friendship together."

  "What were the Lannovians doing before the trade war?"

  "I don't think I was ever taught that. I think their people began as Mallish heretics, originally. Booted out of Mallon during the Second Scour. Then they wandered around the borders for a while before founding Lannovar. I supposed Narashtovik must have started trading with them at some point."

  "You had no feuds with them? No hostility between the two of you since the War of Sealing?"

  "No," Cally said. "Certainly nothing that I ever heard of."

  Rowe muttered something that sounded like cursing. He said no more.

  The two of them were gaining on the Lannovians, but by early that afternoon there remained five or six miles between them. Their quarry was still headed west-northwest. What was over there? More farmland? And then eventually the border of the Norren Territories, where the giants lived in towns rather than traveling about as savage nomads, and past that lay Gallador Rift, the former merchant confederacy that now comprised the southern edge of the Gaskan Empire, and which produced many wondrous herbs and salts.

  Would the Lannovians have any particular interest in any of these places? Could they be acting under the orders of some Gaskan lord, even the very emperor? Cally didn't know what kind of sense that would make, considering that Narashtovik was already a Gaskan possession, but perhaps the emperor would want Merriwen's book for himself and his court sorcerers. That would make sense, wouldn't it? Anything so valuable as to provoke the Lannovians into butchering scores of people who were supposed to be their friends and honored guests might well be important enough to be desirable to the emperor himself.

  "Shit," Rowe hissed.

  They'd just come around a bend in the trees. Not forty feet ahead, a man on horseback was stopped in the middle of the road, his horse turned sideways. A sword hung from his waist and a strung bow was secured to the saddle within easy reach.

  "Hail," Rowe said.

  The rider nodded. His gaze moved to Rowe's own sword and bow, then to Cally, who was unarmed and, in Cally's opinion, perfectly unnoteworthy. Yet the man spent a longer time looking at him than he had at Rowe.

  The rider nodded again, then turned his mount away from them, pressing his horse into a trot. Quick as a striking snake, Rowe took up his bow and nocked an arrow. Without looking back, the rider broke into a gallop; Rowe loosed his missile. It whisked along the road and slammed into the rider's back.

  The man yelled out, spilling from the saddle. Rowe tramped forward. The man staggered to his feet, reaching for his bow. Rowe put a second arrow through his neck.

  Cally whispered as loudly as he could, which meant that it really wasn't a whisper at all. "Did you just shoot a traveler?"

  Rowe leaped down from his horse, hitting the ground and fitting a third arrow to the string. The downed rider wasn't moving, unless you considered the blood flowing from his neck to be part of his corporeal body, in which case he was quite active. Rowe gave him a nudge with his boot, then crouched, pulling a knife from the man's belt and throwing it aside. As Rowe rifled through the man's clothes, Cally delved into the nether within him and confirmed that he was dead.

  "Wasn't a traveler." Rowe tugged up the man's travel doublet, revealing a gray undershirt trimmed with red. "Lannovian."

  "He was one of their scouts?"

  "You were supposed to be watching the road."

  "Do you know just how much road there is to watch?"

  Rowe clenched his jaw, staring at Cally in a
way that would have made him want to turn and run if hadn't he'd just seen what Rowe did to people who tried exactly that. Rowe returned his attention to the dead man, searching his clothes. He took a few small items, pocketing them before Cally could make them out. He pushed the arrow in the man's neck all the way out and broke off the fletching on the one embedded in his back.

  Finished, he stood. "Help me get the body off the road."

  Rowe grabbed the dead man's ankles. Cally had helped move injured people before, but he'd never carted off a corpse, and didn't know where, specifically, to grab it.

  Then again, options were limited. Energized by his guilt for not spotting the scout before they were on top of each other, he took the man by the arms, waddling along after Rowe as they bore the body off the road and into grass still damp from the earlier rain. After traveling much further than seemed necessary, Rowe jerked his chin at a washed-out hollow, and they slung the body down into it.

  Back on the road, Rowe slapped the dead man's horse hard on the rump. It dashed away, then slowed, but continued to walk on. Rowe mounted up and spurred his horse to a trot.

  Cally came up beside him. "What's happening?"

  "We killed a scout," Rowe said. "Scout doesn't come back, you get trouble."

  "Then maybe we should have, I don't know, not killed him?"

  "He'd be halfway back to the Lannovians by now."

  "We don't know that!"

  "It's done. What matters now is what comes next."

  "Which is what, riding toward the people whose scout we killed? To do what, seek forgiveness?"

  "To get your people's gods damned book. Scouts will be expected back by dusk. We'll have a little time after that before they start to get concerned their man went missing. We'll make our play tonight."

  This seemed very hasty, but Cally was now burdened by the tasks of riding fast while also watching through his damselflies to ensure that the Lannovians neither slipped away nor surprised them with any more scouts. They closed a pair of miles before the road grew muddier, obliging them to slow.