The bow twanged, but there was no way for her to hear it over the blatter of the falls. Yet Minabar dived forward, plunging under the water and spraying a wave of shadows behind her. The arrow slashed harmlessly into the pool.
Cally grabbed the nether in both hands, bulging his eyes at Rowe, who had already nocked a second arrow and was calmly watching the waters and waiting for a head to emerge.
"Is that you again?" Minabar's voice rang across the waters, but there was no sign of her—she'd surfaced behind a string of mist-damp rocks. "The man who looks like he's got too much skeleton for his skin?"
"Distract her," Rowe hissed. "Circling around for another shot."
Cally's eyes darted to all sides. "Wrong fellow," he yelled back at her. "I hope you're not surprised to learn you've made more than one enemy!"
Rowe had already disappeared to Cally's left, wending his way through the jumble of stones.
"Have I?" Minabar sounded completely unworried. "Or are you just another poor soul from Narashtovik? You sound a little young. If they're sending boys after me now, I don't think they're long for this world."
"What is it that you think you're doing? Ambushing your own allies? Then butchering a village of innocent norren? The Lannovians used to be honorable. You helped us survive a crisis that could have destroyed us. Why have you made your people so inhuman?"
He thought he heard a snort, but it might have been the falling water. "What's happening now is the fruit of a tree that was planted before either of us was born. You should have gone back to your city, child. You should have told them what you had seen—and that their only choice is to flee. Too late for that now. For any of you."
Cally glanced to his left, trying to catch a glimpse of Rowe. Why hadn't he taken his next shot? For that matter, why hadn't Minabar called out to her sentries? And for that matter, why hadn't she stormed out and laid waste to them with her nether? Frightened of turning herself into an archery target? Again, then, why not yell to her soldiers?
"You'll see," Minabar said. "You won't have to wait long. They're coming for you."
An arrow zipped through the air and whacked into the rocks. Mist roiled from the base of the falls. Two figures appeared on the lip of the pool above them. Neither were human.
"Wights!" Cally screamed.
The two creatures leaned forward, as if about to leap down into the pool, but there was wariness in their horrid faces. Instead, they skittered down the steep slope, rocks tumbling behind them.
"You were supposed to work on the wards, not the wights." Minabar's voice climbed in contempt. "You brought this on yourselves!"
The pair of wights were spilling down the rocky hillside. A human would have fallen, breaking every bone he owned, but they weren't doing more than stumbling.
"Rowe!" Cally popped to his feet and ran.
A third arrow hissed over the pool. As soon as it was in flight, Rowe's boots thudded behind Cally. The wights hit level ground, windmilling their asymmetrical arms to keep their footing. Cally flicked out his hand, rooting their feet in place, which caused them to topple and slam their faces into the ground.
Nether moved behind him. Cally shaped his defense, but the shadows weren't coming toward him, but to the wights, dissolving their bonds. They pulled their legs free and dashed after Rowe, who had almost caught up to Cally. Cally formed a killing bolt in each hand and fired them behind him. Each one hit one of the wights in the forehead, but they did no more than break open the monsters' skin. And the next effort would do even less.
Rowe caught up to him. "The falls. Only route out."
Cally didn't need to ask what he meant. The wights were faster, far better able to navigate the decline down to the next pool. He ran straight toward the edge where the turquoise pool funneled into a waterfall of its own.
He jumped.
The emerald green water of the next pool hung beneath him. Then it came at him in a rush. He closed his eyes, bracing himself for the crunch of his legs. He shot into the water. Its coldness punched him in the gut and he sputtered. The water churned in his ears as he kicked upwards. He broke the surface long enough for half a breath before the current sucked him back under.
He broke free of the fall's churning and bobbed up. Rowe appeared a few feet away, his dark hair clinging to one side of his face, his eyes mad. They kicked toward the calm shallows at the opposite end of the pool. Cally stretched his neck. The two wights stood on the ledge they'd leaped from, their burning eyes and slack mouths forming the picture of murderous outrage. They loped along the edge to the defile down to the emerald pool.
"Not going to make it," Rowe said. "Can't kill them?"
An arrow whizzed past Cally's head. He grunted and ducked, much too late; the sentries had arrived, firing on them from above. "I can hardly scratch them!"
"We're dead." Rowe jinked to the side, an arrow plinking the rocks where he would have been. "Was a good try. You're less useless than you used to be."
"Thanks."
The wights came to the flat ground surrounding the pool they'd leaped into. The creatures wouldn't quite catch them before the next waterfall, but after that, he and Rowe might as well not bother to leave the water.
Cally sucked in air. "We're not going to die—but we'll make them think we have. Don't come up for air!"
Rowe shot him a confused look, but they were already at the next ledge, pebbles clashing underfoot. Cally jumped as far as he could, bringing nether to both hands. He whipped a string of it across Rowe's shoulders, opening a long bloody cut, then did the same to himself. The lash of the shadows was so cold he choked.
The grass-green water of the fourth pool zoomed up to greet him. He forced in the biggest breath he could take. He pounded into the water, the falls thundering just behind him, filling the frigid liquid with bubbles and currents. He reached out for the nether within Rowe. Rowe wasn't moving, but his shadows were. Good. Cally stretched his mind through their veins, sweeping away the want for fresh air just as he might sweep exhaustion from his muscles. He got most of it, but he couldn't eradicate the need altogether.
His body surfaced on its own, face-down. He let the current take him, feeling himself bleeding into the water. He had no idea if the archers were still shooting at them, although they were two pools away now and would have a hard time hitting anything. He cleansed the breathlessness from the two of them again, then groped out into the nether on the shore to his right.
He could feel the wights there, their presence as obvious and menacing as a figure in a dark doorway. They might have waded out to make sure the two floating bodies were in fact dead, but they hesitated at the water, just as they'd been hesitant to jump into it before. Cally hadn't been positive this would happen, but it had seemed like better odds than the one hundred percent chance the wights would rip them into strings of human yarn if he hadn't played dead.
The current sucked them onward, into the last waterfall. He tucked his chin and got in a good breath as the water hung in the air alongside him, falling neither faster nor slower, which was the strangest thing: as if he and Rowe and the spilling water were all embedded within the same pane of glass as it moved over the wider pane that was the world.
He splashed down into the hyper-green pool. The undertow was the most vicious of them yet and his head pounded for air, every heartbeat like a mallet on his brain. At last he surfaced, and so did Rowe, and the nether moved within them both.
He let his head roll sideways and risked taking a breath. This cleared his mind enough to at last remember that he still had his moths in the sky. He brought one close enough to confirm that neither the wights nor the archers were still after them.
They were bruised, bleeding, and half-drowned, but they were alive. Yet there was no triumph in it. They had failed, and he didn't need Rowe to tell him that Minabar would never let them get that close to her again.
17
The trees parted and the city came into being before them.
Cally's heart l
ifted. A part of him had thought he'd never see the immense spike of the Cathedral of Ivars again, nor the stout block of the Sealed Citadel across from it. The two rings of walls, inner and outer, that had saved the people in so many wars, and failed them in others; the glimpses of the bay glimmering between the buildings; the quiet emptiness of the houses outside the Pridegate.
These old homes were abandoned now and had been for many years, half-claimed by moss and weather, but they spoke to a time when Narashtovik had prospered, and suggested that such a day could come again. On the spot, Cally vowed to restore it, even if it took a hundred years.
Rowe stopped his horse. "What are you going to tell them?"
Cally had been thinking about this on and off ever since they'd dragged their waterlogged carcasses out of the stream, waited for nightfall, circled back to their horses, and then began the long ride home. The surviving Masters of the Order needed to be told of three things: the attack at the Bowl of Seasons, the Lannovians' creation of the wights, and his last conversation with Lady Minabar, when she had hinted that there were deeper roots to this than any of them knew—and that Narashtovik's involvement might not be over.
Beyond that, however, did they need to know what he had learned, what he had done? He didn't see why. That would only bring him more woe, which he hardly deserved.
Yet he no sooner settled on this than a sense of revulsion welled within him. To pretend that he'd stuck to the rightful course of an apprentice would also be to pretend that he hadn't been there when Master Tarriman and Lora and all of the others had been slaughtered. To pretend that he hadn't given his all trying to get the book out of the Lannovians' hands, or that when they found the murder in the norren village, it hadn't been his forbidden skills that let him save twenty children from death at the claws of a demon.
For all the Order's ideals and virtues, that hadn't kept its priests safe. Not out in the wilds of the world. Cally would be what he had become.
"I'm going to tell them the truth," Cally said. "All of it."
He watched Rowe for signs of approval or its opposite, but the soldier just nodded, and rode on.
They weren't questioned as they rode through the Pridegate. Cally doubted the guards even knew who he was. He had no renown in the city and he'd lost his uniform a long time ago. Rowe led the way to the House of Twelve, the temple where the Order had lived in exile since the loss of the Citadel. The guards at the courtyard gate didn't seem to know Cally, though he knew both their names, but their eyes lit up once they saw Rowe.
"You gangly bastard," one of the guards laughed. "We thought you were dead!"
Rowe embraced him, clapping him on the back hard enough to dislodge a lump of steak from the man's throat. "The norren came?"
"Not two days ago. Of course whatever they had to say was for the ears of the Masters alone." He gestured south. "What's going on out there?"
"Trouble. Demon trouble. The boy—Cally. He needs to speak to whoever's in charge now."
"That'd be Master Garillar. This way."
He brought them to the front steps. The main part of the House of Twelve was a squarish building, large but humble in decorations, and rather than being dedicated to Arawn, it was there to honor all twelve gods and goddesses of the Celeset. Out front, a large embroidered banner was switched out each month to honor a different god.
Cally was taken aback to see that the banner had already advanced to Carvahal. Had they been away that long? But it wasn't just the reminder of how long he'd been away that struck his eye wrong: it was that Arawn was the high lord of the Celeset, at least among the northerners. His banner should always be flying, with the others rotating out next to his.
Inside the building, which smelled as always of dust and burning traynor leaves, the guard explained the situation to one of the servants, who motioned Rowe to be taken deeper into the temple, and led Cally upstairs to a room he'd never been to before. One wall was lined with books, another with tapestries bearing a flattish style of art that seemed very old.
A large semi-circular desk was positioned in the middle of the room, its ends tapered so it almost resembled a crescent. The servant settled a chair between the desk's two horns and motioned Cally to sit. He then left the room.
The room had no windows and the silence was so stifling Cally could hear a low keening sound that seemed to be coming from within his own head. A couple of minutes later, the door swung open and the servant ushered in Master Garillar, along with a man and a woman in scribes' robes and a haughty-looking monk Cally had seen around the temple grounds but knew nothing about.
Garillar was fully bald, his scalp creased, his jaw as square as a brick. He was sixty years old but his solid body hadn't yet gone to fat. The apprentices assigned to him bemoaned his severity, which often burst out into pure wrath, and Cally had the sense many of Garillar's peers disapproved of this trait as well, as his temper and temperament veered counter to the Order's ideal of a priest as a compassionate, approachable, and forgiving figure. But whatever his flaws, Garillar made up for it with saintly asceticism. There were rumors that when Garillar felt his soul was in need of purification, he would allow himself to eat nothing more than potatoes—and not only did he insist they go unsalted, but he didn't even cook them.
Garillar seated himself at the center of the desk, facing Cally. Both scribes took chairs to his left. With almost identical motions, they produced parchment, quills, ink bottles, and blotting sand. The haughty-looking monk sat to Garillar's right.
Garillar rested his palms on the desk. "Callimandicus."
"Cally," Cally said.
The scribes' quills scratched.
The Master didn't bother to correct himself. "You are here to deliver a full report of everything that has happened since Master Tarriman departed the city. Begin."
"We had no idea what we were getting into. But here is what I saw."
Cally told his tale. Many of the initial details, like when they'd stopped to heal the ill at the little villages outside of Narashtovik, now seemed irrelevant. But they were among the last good works Tarriman and the others had been able to bestow onto the world, so Cally included them to honor the dead. For the same reason, he told them how the Wise Trout had robbed the caravan, and Master Tarriman had restrained himself from violence: even though Cally now considered most of the Order's rules deeply stupid, no more than a roosterish display of righteousness with no true virtue behind it, still, they were the rules the men and women of the Order were supposed to abide by. That Tarriman had stuck to his principles knowing it would cause himself to suffer would cause everyone to speak well of him.
It had been his intention to stick to the facts without commentary and let his betters judge the events for themselves. Yet as he recounted their arrival at the Bowl of Seasons, the speeches and feasts, and at last the treasonous moment when the Lannovians had washed the floor in the Order's blood, Cally broke off, gazing at the neat stonework of the floor.
"I don't wonder why I survived," he said, his voice catching, threatening to crack. "I survived by two causes. The first cause is dumb luck—or through the fortune of Carvahal, whose motives can never be guessed, and are often nothing good. The second cause is that I wasn't important enough for anyone to make sure I would be killed. I'm here, but in many ways it isn't through any fault of my own.
"But that isn't a very interesting question, is it? The more interesting question, which you can only ask yourself once you've accepted the reality of what happened, is why didn't the others survive?"
Garillar swung his dense eyebrows together. "They were ambushed by villains with corrupted souls. That is why they died."
"Yes, treason is treason, and our people would still be alive if the Lannovians hadn't fallen into it. But they're corrupt because the world is corrupt! That's what we believe, isn't it? That the Mill of the heavens rains evil on us? Except it's much worse than rain, because there's no shelter from it any more than there's shelter from our own blood.
&nb
sp; "If we understand this, don't we need to be prepared to face it? Not just prepared to defend ourselves against it, but to stomp it out? You might defend your granary from rats, but if the rats get in, you don't shrug your shoulders and give it over to them. Not unless your goal is to create more rats. And if you are a rat-maker, then you're no better than the rats, and in fact you're worse than them, because thanks to you, now all of your neighbors have rats to deal with, too.
"But of course we aren't talking about rats. Rats are just a nuisance. We're talking about humans. Strangers. Demons. I've been out into the wilds, and the rule of the wilds is different from the rule of the temple. In here, in the temple, virtue alone is respected, so it's more than enough to simply be virtuous. But in the wilds, virtue is nothing—and worse, it makes you the prey and the enemy of those who don't have virtue, or who possess a form of it we don't recognize. If they have power and you don't, your virtue is destroyed. Their dis-virtue wins and spreads. Therefore, beyond your own walls, virtue is nothing if it isn't alloyed with power. The power to protect it, and the will to destroy threats to it. Isn't this true? After the Bowl of Seasons, how can it be argued otherwise?"
He'd gotten to his feet. One of the scribes was watching him curiously, nose uplifted, while the other scribbled away like she was trying to scrape the patina from an old brass plate.
"You are a child and your philosophy is irrelevant," Garillar said. "Continue the story with no further digressions or face immediate discipline."
A shadow settled over Cally's heart. He seated himself once more, and keeping his voice level, explained everything else that he'd seen and done until his return to the city.
"We did recover Merriwen's manuscript," he said. "But Rowe is of the opinion, and I think it's a good one, that it's too late for that to matter."
He motioned that he was all finished. Across from him, Garillar pressed one fist to his mouth, his other hand spread wide on the desk's surface. Speechless.
The Sealed Citadel Page 20
