The Sealed Citadel

by Edward W. Robertson

  Cally only nodded.

  "Anyway. Can't do this right without good intelligence. Time to find out what happened at the village."

  Rowe stood, wincing, and went to join Nola and Winn. The three of them spoke for a minute, then gathered the clan—the part of it that wanted to gather, at least; most seemed uninterested, and in norren fashion, were left free to pursue their disinterest—along with the villagers they'd managed to rescue. Aside from the children, only eight of them had made it through.

  "I am sorry for what happened to your people," Nola said. "And I am also sorry to have to ask you to tell us exactly what did happen."

  A moment of silence held the crowd. The oldest of the survivors, a towering, shaggy norren man in his fifties, stepped forth.

  "There isn't much to tell." He gazed down at the ground. "Or rather: of grief and sorrow, there is too much to tell. But as to what happened, it can all be told within a minute. The monster arrived without warning. It attacked Bram, and he called out for help, but he was dead before that help arrived. We attacked the monster. Our first attacks made it bleed, but after that we hardly seemed to scratch it.

  "Merry was the first to realize that even with the combined arms of the entire clan, the village still might fall. She sent runners to gather and hide the children. It was a good thing she did, because she was right. The village wasn't enough. One by one we fell, and faster than you would believe."

  "When the fighting was over," Rowe said, "did it come back for those of you that were wounded?"

  "It went to find the children. And hunt those who'd escaped."

  Nola crossed her arms. "Why this village? It is not nothing, for it's everything to the people who call it home, but there is nothing to be gained from taking or destroying it."

  Rowe made a small gesture. "That's your answer right there. Point wasn't to take the village. Point was to test out the wight on people nobody would give a damn about." A few of the survivors looked wounded by this, but Rowe said nothing more to take off the sting.

  "Then having succeeded, the Lannovians might not need to do any more of these 'tests.' But they also might, for someone cruel-souled enough to do something like this can't be trusted to follow any norms of right thought. We will warn the nearby clans. You who have survived the attack can travel with the Wise Trout until it is safe to return to your home."

  This concluded the general discussion. Rowe motioned Cally over and, after waiting through a bit of norren chatter, pulled Nola and Winn aside. Yobb joined them, appearing so suddenly it was like she'd walked out of the shadows.

  "This isn't a question of whether it's going to happen again," Rowe said. "It's when. And where. And how many wights will be there next time."

  "That much is obvious," Nola said. "You don't craft a weapon you don't intend to use."

  "We only have one option. We take out their leadership. Everyone who knows how to do this. Before they make too many to stop."

  "Yes, it sounds like you should do that."

  "You think I can pull this off by myself?"

  "I don't, or else you should have already stopped them already rather than letting dozens of innocent norren get uninnocently slaughtered."

  Rowe's voice dropped. "Do you have any idea how serious this is?"

  "Yes, it seems to be very serious, to the point where whole peoples might get conquered or something. But it's because it's that serious that we can't help."

  "Has anyone ever told you people your logic is even denser than your skulls?"

  "This isn't a norren matter," Nola said, perfectly unflapped. "Whoever the Lannovians really want to kill, or enslave, or the like, it will be humans. My clan won't be threatened unless we do something stupid. Like try to stop the Lannovians. One of the most vital norren skills is being able to recognize the difference between when humans are coming to kill us and when they are merely passing through on their way to kill other humans. This is the latter."

  "Then again," Winn said, "you don't need to be norren to know that it is good to stay out of bad affairs. Doing that is why the Wise Trout Clan has existed since long before the Order or the Lannovians have, and why we will still exist long after you're gone."

  Rowe argued on, increasingly angry and red-faced. But for as stubborn as he was, the norren had him beat, and it wasn't close. In time he stepped away, lobbing a final curse at them, and stomped off to the edge of the firelight. The urge to murder left his face within moments. He let out a harsh sigh, shoulders sinking from their aggrieved posture.

  He walked back over to Cally, who'd kept a few steps behind him. "The Trout won't help. Two options left. We go after Minabar ourselves. Or we ride home."

  Rowe had been spittingly furious less than a minute ago and Cally found himself impressed by the man's ability to accept unwanted facts and get right on with it. An underappreciated virtue, he thought.

  "But it would take us a week or more of hard riding to reach Narashtovik," he replied. "Then it would take just as long for anyone to make it back out here. Minabar could create a whole army of wights by then."

  "Right."

  "And the Order might not even do anything. They certainly wouldn't ride out and…take justice. It would violate their core teachings. They'd just go seek redress from the emperor or something."

  "Right."

  "But we can't go after them. There's just the two of us. Against scores of soldiers and a whole bunch of priests. Would we even have a chance?"

  "Yes."

  Cally looked up sharply, then frowned. "Is that to say that theoretically, there's a chance that anything could happen? Just as there's a chance that if I waved a wand at you, I could turn you into a dog?"

  "Can sorcerers do that?"

  "No."

  "We would have a chance. Think about the journey from Narashtovik to the Bowl of Seasons."

  Cally did so, then turned up his hands in surrender. "What about it? It was long and mostly tedious. Except when we were being robbed by norren, when it was humiliating. And in hindsight, it all mostly just feels sad."

  "If I'd been following behind the caravan, and I meant to kill you, would I have been able to?"

  "If you'd run at me blade in hand, a single priest could have locked you in place." Cally tapped his chin. "But you probably wouldn't have dashed right in like an idiot. You'd have waited for me to wander off and relieve myself. Or come at me in the middle of the night. Or any of a hundred other times I wasn't surrounded by the others. You think we can get at Lady Minabar like that?"

  Rowe turned to the north and gazed into the evening gloom consuming the trees. "We might not be able to make it out. But I bet we can make it to her."

  "Then that's what we have to do."

  "Because it's what you want to do? Not because you want to die?"

  "Why would I want to die?"

  "Because all of your friends did. Maybe you think you should have, too."

  "That would be very silly of me. Seems like it would be much more appropriate for me to avenge them. Which is what we're going to do. That, and give a monster a good and righteous stomping."

  Rowe set his hand on the hilt of his sword. "Then we'll choose our spot. And we'll take our shot."

  ~

  They were exhausted from the day's activities and didn't set out until the next morning. While Rowe readied their horses—which technically the Wise Trout had captured as booty, but were graciously allowing them to "borrow"—Cally went to find Yobb.

  She was sitting at the edge of a pond where fish rippled the surface and frogs rested on rocks in the shadows of trees. Her staff was leaned against the rock next to her and she was twiddling about with a little string of shadows.

  "Hello," she said. "Or goodbye, as you are leaving."

  "I came to thank you. For everything you taught me."

  "Should I be thanked if I didn't have a choice in the matter?"

  "Maybe not, but I'm going to choose to do so just in case."

  She smiled, squinting at hi
m. "Then I will choose to say that I enjoyed being forced to do so more than I expected to." She grew serious, tilting her head forward to regard him from beneath her wooly gray brows. "But I don't enjoy this decision of yours, because it is stupid, which makes me fear I've had a stupid person for a pupil. You are like a man who spends one morning catching fish and thinks he's set for life. Do you know how many fish are still left in the pond?"

  "That isn't a very good comparison. You shouldn't want to empty the pond of fish, or else the pond will be empty."

  "It's a better comparison than you understand, but there's no point explaining it to you when you are about to walk away. Do you understand what you're doing? When I took you on, that fulfilled our debt to Rowellen, who had inherited it from Larrimore. If you leave now, there is no coming back, for the debt is forfeited."

  "I wish I could stay," Cally said. "But if we can't stop this, what happened at the village might happen across the empire." He smiled. "Besides, if I do stop it, it'll be because of what you taught me. That means I'll owe you a debt."

  Yobb poked her staff at a frog that had wandered too close. It plopped into the water. "The Wise Trout are strong and need no favors. But maybe there will come a day when the norren people need something from you, and you will remember what the norren did for you."

  Cally nodded, fully intending to. He gave himself another moment, taking in the stillness of the pond, and the master who he might not ever see again. Then he turned to go.

  With the quickness of someone fifty years younger, Yobb rose, putting herself in his path. She lifted one eyebrow, then stretched out her hand. Darkness blossomed within it. She gave it the shape of a killing bolt and hurled it at a boulder forty feet away. The bolt hammered into its side with a great crack, splitting the stone in two.

  "Did you see?"

  "Yes," Cally said.

  "Think on this as you travel. This is your last lesson."

  ~

  Before they left, Rowe convinced the norren to send two of their warriors to Narashtovik to make sure that, in the event Rowe and Cally didn't make it back, the Order would still be warned about the Lannovians.

  Then they rode out. Alone again. On the hunt again.

  The Lannovians threaded north, and they followed. Cally sent his scouts into the skies to see that the way forward was clear, yet he bore the constant dread that a wight was about to erupt from the shrubs and put them to their end.

  The land was largely the same. Cold winds blew through empty woods. Yet there was something darker about it, harsher, as if they had just crossed that border between when autumn bids its long farewell to summer, and when it turns to face the march of winter, knowing it can't win, and that it can do no more than delay its defeat.

  Cally felt just as stark. Perhaps it was simply that things seemed to be coming to an end. But it was also true that his life had never had such depth of purpose, and this brought such clarity of mind that he sometimes had no thoughts at all, perceiving things with the directness that an animal would: the curl of the leaves dying on the branches, the sleekness of the trout resting in the bottom of a pool, the subtle dampness on the air that told him a storm was coming hours before its arrival.

  Yet something ran deeper than that, like a cavern-kept stream that had never seen sunlight. He didn't understand it until his second day of practicing the killing bolts he had learned to use during his battle with the wight. He had now been forced to—or had chosen to?—set aside everything he'd been brought up to believe. He didn't know if he could go back from that, or what he might find to replace it. Maybe there was nothing.

  His spies found the Lannovians and he watched them from afar. Choose your spot, Rowe kept saying, and he watched both their caravan and their camp for patterns, searching for an opportunity to take the next step: Take your shot.

  He watched the landscape, too. Favorable positions to attack from, and, if possible, to retreat through.

  "How will I know when I've found my spot?"

  "Can you get to her without being killed?"

  "I don't think so. Not yet."

  "Then you haven't found your spot."

  He couldn't get too close. Not after the last time. Minabar slept in the middle of camp and of course they kept watch. The mornings were in some ways less guarded as people rousted themselves from sleep and prepared for the day, and he and Rowe discussed their chances and tactics.

  Cally had been taught some math by the Order and Rowe's battlefield analysis reminded him of it. Not in a strictly literal sense (for Yobb would smack him for thinking as much), but in the deterministic bloodlessness of it. Were lives no more than figures on a page? He didn't like to think so. Yet that seemed to be how many, perhaps most, treated those lives, at least when one side's wants clashed against another's, be it the Lannovians at the Bowl of Seasons, or one norren clan's raid against another, or the Gaskan Empire engulfing one territory after another like a spreading mold. Or even like the history of Narashtovik itself, always under attack or pursuing a counterattack, sometimes growing and sometimes shrinking, until the most recent battle, still within living memory, when Merriwen the mighty warrior had fallen, and Narashtovik's heart, the great Citadel, had been ripped out with him.

  Yet somehow, the Order had survived. Within his new matrix of understanding, Cally didn't see why they had been allowed to persist; by the end of the War of Sealing, they'd been so weak it seemed that anyone might take them. Unusual. Perhaps it suggested they were right after all, allowed to survive because of that moral rightness. If not, why hadn't they been wiped out?

  Sheer chance, perhaps. Or some cunning play of the Masters who understood the true math of the world. He wasn't yet sure this math was true, or if it was, why the gods would have made it true. But it did explain why Rowe was at last willing to speak to him, not as a dog in need of housebreaking or a donkey-kicked servant who needed his orders beaten into him, but as some kind of…well, not equal, but someone who understood. For he now understood Rowe: it wasn't so much that Rowe himself was so base and venal.

  But that the world was.

  "I think I see our spot."

  It was now four days since the norren had left them and they had left the norren.

  Rowe leaned forward, eyes hawkish. "What?"

  "Do you remember what we saw her doing the first time we were trying to get the book from her? How she purified herself at the pool?"

  "She's bathing now?"

  "No. But she's anointing herself in the exact same way she did before she went bathing. And there's a whole set of pools not far from their camp."

  Rowe rubbed his unshaven face. "Best chance we'll get. Let's move."

  They took the horses as close as they dared, then dismounted to proceed on foot, leaving their mounts a half mile downstream from the pools. The pools were five in number, each connected to the one beneath it by a waterfall twenty to forty feet in height. As if this wasn't breathtaking enough, the uppermost pool was an opaque robin egg blue, with each one beneath it getting progressively greener, until the fifth and final pool looked like nothing less than green fire, too bright in pigment for there to be a name for it.

  Cally had no idea what the place was, yet he was certain it would be named something like the Giant's Staircase or the Devil's Cauldrons. His instinct soon proved correct: Minabar finished her self-anointment and walked in the direction of the pools, in the company of a small escort of soldiers.

  The moment was coming on so fast. A finger of anxiety pressed up through Cally's viscera. "So we've 'chosen our spot' to be when she's engaged in a ritual of religious purification."

  Rowe looked completely unbothered by this. "Then let's hope our gods like us better than hers like her."

  The last time Minabar had performed the ritual, her escort had stopped out of sight of the pool, leaving her to bathe in assured privacy. This time, however, the soldiers spread out around the terraces, forming a wide, loose ring around it.

  "Stop." Cally crouched, p
ointing down, but Rowe was already following suit, shrinking behind a shrub. "Sentry ahead. Just over there."

  "Is there a way around?"

  Cally watched through the eyes of his moths. "No."

  "Is he moving? Or stationary?"

  "Stationary."

  "Take him down. Don't give him time to scream."

  Cally nodded, feeling as if the bones in his neck were grinding against each other. He scratched his knuckle with his knife. The nether swelled, waiting to be fed. The sentry was standing between two tall trees, gazing blankly into the woods as Minabar made her way alone to the second-highest pool. Cally brought the shadows to his hand. And held them there.

  Rowe leaned forward. "Cally—"

  "Shut up."

  Cally clenched his fist. He brought the nether to it. Shaping it. A missile the size of his little finger, the front tapering to a point. He lifted his shaking hand and threw the bolt forward.

  It sped through the trees without so much as a whisper. Cally willed it toward the sentry's head. It struck true. The man's head snapped back; blood spattered the leaves. He collapsed without so much as a grunt or twitch.

  Rowe set his hand on Cally's shoulder and crept forward. Cally followed. He was less shaken by the death itself than by the quickness of it, the simplicity. He didn't know what it meant that he could do this thing.

  But there was no time to dwell on it. Not just then.

  Snaking through the undergrowth, Rowe put his bow in hand. "I'll take the shot."

  "So I won't have to?"

  "She'll sense your nether coming. Just like she sensed your scout the first time we came for her. Won't sense an arrow until it's sticking from her throat."

  The roar of a waterfall grew ahead. The pool appeared from the trees, vivid turquoise. Broken rocks ringed its edge. Minabar was wading into it, wholly nude, gazing up at the falls. She lowered herself to the water, cupping it in her hands.

  Rowe slid an arrow from his quiver and nocked it. He drew it back and sighted down the shaft. Minabar tipped back her head and poured water over her face. Rowe loosed the arrow.