The Sealed Citadel

by Edward W. Robertson

  Five minutes later, the bells of the House of Twelve's main tower rang forth. Bells from the city's other cathedrals answered. Soldiers dashed out the doors of the temple and into the streets.

  He pressed his face to the narrow window, which had no glass, just a shutter he could close if it was cold or stormy. Below, officers bawled orders to their men. Cally already knew it wasn't a fire or a riot. The men were moving like some of them were about to die.

  It was late in the afternoon and sunlight lay on the roofs and streets in warm yellow pats. Groups of monks and priests hustled from the temple grounds. Like the soldiers, all of them were heading south. The courtyard grew quiet, although this seemed to be less due to lack of urgency than to lack of people left to make any noise.

  Horns blew from the south. Cally had only heard such horns twice before. Once when a band of nomads from regions unknown had swept into the outskirts of Narashtovik, stealing what they could and riding back out before the guard had time to offer up more than initial resistance. And later when a small Gaskan army had marched on the city without warning—though not to invade, as it turned out, but to help celebrate the ascension of a new Master to the head of the Order.

  The horns blew again. Their message was as clear as any words.

  The Lannovians had come.

  Cally opened the dumbwaiter and leaned his head in, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Hello? Hello?"

  He allowed a more than respectable duration to reply, then tried again. "Can someone get me down from here? I'm a healer and I can help. I also have the fear—and I think you'll see that it's quite reasonable—that if something bad happens to the temple, I might have a hard time getting down from the prison specifically designed to make it impossible to get down from!"

  More nothing. He called to them a few more times, but there was no response. Maybe they were ignoring him. Much worse: maybe they were all already gone.

  He went back to the window. Smoke was rising from the southwest. It looked to be just past the Pridegate. The sun was starting to set and a cold marine wind blew in from the sea. People ran through the streets, returning home and slamming their doors. Soldiers were still heading south, but they were now mingled with irregulars. Militia. Cally didn't see how the Lannovians could have raised a proper army in so little time, but then again, Narashtovik wasn't what it had been in eras past, and he didn't know what sort of force it could muster, either.

  He couldn't see much of the Pridegate but what he could see rippled with soldiers. When the wind was right, a dull clamor reached him from the south. The sun dimmed fast, sequestered behind fast-moving clouds coming in from the sea. The ring of battle grew loud enough to hear at all times. It was an unnerving noise, hundreds of voices raised in anger and pain and strife, all mingled with the swash and crash of weapons being wielded to kill. It didn't sound human—it sounded demonic.

  The battle stayed at the Pridegate throughout the long twilight caused by the smothering clouds. Cally knew nothing of warfare outside of a few stories, but he hazarded the guess that when an assault met a wall and then stalled there, it meant favorable things for the defenders.

  Dazzling white light flashed from the wall. Cally's heart began to bounce around. A second flash followed, then a third and a fourth. He'd seen the exact same flashes in miniature during his duels with Yobb. The screams reached him a few moments later.

  "Bad," he muttered; with no one else to talk to, he'd begun talking to himself. "Immense badness."

  The lights of sorcery snapped a few more times, then petered out. Cally squinted against the coming night. A blast as bright as lightning glowed across the wall.

  After a delay like thunder after the flash, the roar came to him. Not just of voices. But of stone breaking apart and dashing across the streets. At the wall, or more accurately the pile of trash and rubble where a very nice wall had once stood, torches streamed into the city.

  Cally yelled down the dumbwaiter some more. No answer. In the streets, the torches of the Lannovians spread like rivers of orange stars. Three separate fires sparked in the neighborhoods between the Pridegate and the Ingate. The city looked to be crumbling before his eyes. One of the terms of his rehabilitation was that he was banned from using sorcery of any kind, but he imagined the terms of the contract were nullified in the face of full-scale invasion. He needed to find someone and remind them he was trapped up in the Solution. By virtue of this same fact, he couldn't do so himself.

  But one of his little scouts could.

  At that very moment, a moth was flapping around the ceiling. Cally drew back his shoulders, summoning the nether to his hand. After so many days without it, its touch felt like a cool swim after a hot hike. He stilled his mind, shaping a single drop of shadows into a weapon precise enough to kill the moth while leaving it intact enough to use. He took aim. Exhaled. And launched the bolt, which hit the moth so hard it sprayed the bug's guts across the ceiling.

  Cally blinked in dismay.

  "Demons!" Down in the courtyard, a man ran headlong toward the main building. "They have brought the demons upon us!"

  Wights. Inside the city. Each capable of slaughtering a whole troop of norren while suffering little more than a scratch. And how many had they brought with them? Supposedly the Order knew how to kill them, but whatever their method, it had taken years to cleanse the Citadel of them. They quite obviously did not have years to repel Lady Minabar's attack.

  Merriwen's book promised something much more effective. The flaw with this, of course, was that the Citadel was still locked behind the same wards that had kept the wights trapped within it.

  But the book seemed to provide a solution to that, too.

  He cast about for other insects. Out in the city, the advance of the torches had slowed, but there was still screaming from other pockets of the city. It made no sense. Without meaning to, he imagined Rowe yelling at him, telling him it did make sense or else it wouldn't be happening, and then the insight hit him: the Lannovian soldiers were regrouping or consolidating, and their advance was slowing as a result. But the wights had no need to consolidate, and thus were roaming as they pleased.

  Except the screams weren't distributed randomly. They were advancing toward the House of Twelve. He needed out. Now.

  Problem: he'd just messily disintegrated the only bug in his cell. He pressed himself to the window, searching for others, then yelled down for help. No one answered.

  He didn't have time to wait for a bug to show up. He needed to bring one to him now. Which he might actually be able to do. Clearing his mind, he brought a line of ether to him and let it take its natural form as a glowing white light. He hung this just inside the window. Within a minute, a moth was fluttering around it. As carefully as he could, he wrought a needle of nether and brought it down.

  It died exactly as he wanted it to. He reanimated it and sent it flying across the spike-filled pit to the upper floor of the temple where the Masters kept their quarters. He located Garillar's balcony (he'd seen the Master out on it now and then) and flew in through the window.

  Garillar's rooms were empty. All of them. Cally sent the moth back out the window and into the neighboring quarters. No one was there, either. A second moth had come to the light of the ether and Cally slew it and sent it down to the meeting halls in the lower floors. But these were empty too.

  Whether to fight the Lannovians or flee from them, they were all gone. They had left him to rot. He supposed that meant it was his job to un-rot himself. Not just to save his miserable life—but because Merriwen's book was lying on the desk in Garillar's room.

  So then. How to get himself out of the place designed to be impossible to get out of? Jump? No, terrible plan, unless the plan was to kill himself horribly before the wights could kill him even more horribly, in which case it was the perfect plan. Climb down? Less suicidal idea, but an order of magnitude more delusional. Think!

  Smash part of the Solution to the ground until the rubble piled high enough to jum
p down to without dying, or at least high enough to cover the iron spikes? He didn't think he had nearly enough stone for that. Or nether. He could try to borrow some stone from the pillar holding him up, but the stupidity of that plan was self-evident.

  But maybe there was another way the pillar could help him.

  Lacking his knife, he bit the inside of his lip until he tasted copper. The shadows lunged toward him. He ran the dumbwaiter until it was at the very bottom of the pillar and the counterweight was at the top. He sent the shadows down into the darkness and, still hanging tight to the cord, cut it right where it tied to the dumbwaiter.

  Freed of its weight, the counter attempted to fall, but Cally held fast, and cut the cord above it. The counterweight hurtled downward, landing with an echoing boom. This was incredibly loud, but if anyone was around to come investigate, he would welcome them to do so.

  He drew the long cord out into the cell. It was not as thick as he would have liked. Then again, it also wasn't the ladder he would have liked instead, or better yet, the collapsible staircase he would have really liked. But the cord was what he had, so it was what he would use.

  He moved to the north-facing window, then thought better and took two long steps back. He could still taste the blood in his mouth and the nether practically poured itself into his hands. Uncertain if it would work, he lifted his hands, fingers spread wide, and hurled the nether into the sides of the window.

  The rock exploded outward, sailing into the air and rattling down into the spike-filled pit.

  Cally laughed at his hands in wonder. "That was great!"

  He now had a rope to climb down and a hole to climb through. What he didn't have was a means of connecting these two elements of success. The interior, being featureless, had nothing to tie the rope to. However: as he'd just learned, the creative application of destruction could provide solutions to all sorts of seemingly intractable problems. Drawing a bit more nether, he drove a spike of it into the wall next to the window. Which just busted the main hole that much wider. But on his second attempt, he punched a small, relatively neat hole next to the big one.

  He looped the end of the dumbwaiter cord through it and tied it tight. He took a look out his new escape hatch and swore. The ground was a long, long ways down.

  But the screams to the south were growing more northerly by the minute. He cast the cord out the window, unfurling it all the way to the ground. After asking himself if there really wasn't another way to do this—there wasn't—he sat on the ragged ledge, hooked one leg around the cord, held tight, and swung out into the empty air.

  The first part, he thought, was likely the most dangerous. The cord didn't snap immediately, and so he lowered himself as quickly as he could, using his rope-wrapped leg as a brake. The pillar holding up the Solution was just a few feet away from him, but it was completely smooth, nothing to grab hold of. If he fell, that was it.

  But the ground grew nearer and nearer, and the likelihood of his death retreated further and further, at least for the immediate short term. The wind was starting to smell like smoke. Less like a campfire and more like burning buildings.

  The lower end of the dumbwaiter extended beneath the base of the pillar, meaning the cord was long enough to get him all the way to the bottom of the pit. All he had to do was lean around one of the spikes and then his feet were touching solid ground. He smacked his rope-sore hands together and turned to look up at the ledge of the pit, which stood twelve feet above him.

  He hadn't really thought about this part. He supposed he could blast hand- and foot-holds into it, but while that would be the most enjoyable solution, he had a bad feeling he needed to conserve his nether this night. Ah: a pair of stone hitches near the corner of the pit. The ones they used to brace ladders against when servants needed to clean or maintain the pit. There was no ladder there now, but Cally used the nether to snip the cord free from the tower, then tossed the cord at one of the hitches until it looped over it. He knotted the cord and climbed free.

  He stood on the platform overlooking the pit and grinned, feeling like one of the rogues from the Cycle of Arawn. The nether was a hell of a lot of fun when you were actually allowed to use it. Probably the exact reason the Order was so stuffy about it.

  The downside to being able to use the nether, however, was that it made you more responsible for things. Like saving your city from demons. Using his moth to make sure nothing unfriendly was lurking in the courtyard, he crossed to the temple and snuck inside.

  The building was silent. Frighteningly silent. He rushed up the stairs to the top floor. Master Garillar had locked his door, but Cally produced a skeleton key—a small rod of nether—and laid waste to the lock. The chambers were dark except for the moonlight cutting through the tall windows, but the moth had already shown him where the book was. He took it up, the familiar smell of its old leather and vellum. Using a sliver of ether for lighting, he opened it, paging around to find the portion that described the formless "walls"—and, he thought, how to take them down.

  It only took him a minute. The passage was just as he'd remembered it. He'd forgotten, however, about the line that came next: "But when the walls come down, it may herald the end of everything you hold dear."

  It sounded prophetic. As if it had been predicting the Lannovians' invasion. Cally read on, hunting for anything else indicating that Merriwen had been predicting this day.

  He froze. Out in the hall, where he'd sent his moth to look out for anyone returning to the Masters' chambers, two wights emerged from the stairwell.

  Both looked much the same as the one he'd been chased by outside the norren village: the thick and heavy right arm, fingers tipped with killing claws; the large, straining eyes; the dangling, empty mouth. One of the demons stopped outside the stairwell. The other loped straight toward Master Garillar's unlocked door.

  Cally closed the book and clamped it under his arm. He snapped off the bit of ether he'd been using for light just as the wight entered the antechamber. Silently, he hid under the desk. His mouth had stopped bleeding some time ago. He bit the inside of his lip again and pulled the nether to him, cloaking his hidey-hole in shadow.

  Cally sent the moth to the entrance to Garillar's rooms. The wight seemed to have little difficulty navigating through the darkness. It hurried to Garillar's bedroom, but reemerged moments later, heading for the study—where Cally was at that very moment hiding. It walked along the bookshelves, trailing the (nearly) normal fingers of its left hand over the volumes' spines. Twice, it leaned in and sniffed the books. Dissatisfied, it swung about and strode toward the expansive desk, which was littered with books of all kinds.

  It pawed at them, lifting one after another to its face. The thing's breath whistled through its loose-hanging lips. A dim smell of decay wafted from its body. It huffed and took a long step back from the desk, staring at it, eyes white in the moonlight.

  It was going to find him. He was sure of it. Could it sense the nether? No, couldn't be, or else it would have already investigated the shadows wrapped around him. Despite the chill air, sweat trickled from under his arms. He gathered a dollop of nether the size of the end of his thumb, shaping it into a small bolt. Using the moth's sight to assist him, he sent the bolt into the furthest reaches of the Master's bedroom, driving it directly into an unlit lantern on a stand next to the bed.

  The lantern shattered. The wight whirled, running toward the sound of tinkling glass. Cally had hoped the disturbance would draw the wight from the hallway as well. Carvahal bestowed him with no such luck. He swung from beneath the desk and hurried to the balcony, stuffing the book inside his shirt.

  The courtyard hung fifty feet below. Very much wishing he'd kept his rope—and making a mental note to always keep rope—he climbed over the wrought iron railing and lowered himself as far down the side of the building as he could. Stretching himself to the limit, the next balcony was still a good two feet beneath his feet, but this was one of those problems that just had to be accepted
for what it was. He let go.

  He didn't try to catch the rail below him with his feet, opting to use his arms instead, as unlike his legs, they had been designed for grabbing. He hit hard, the pain jolting up his upper arms and wrenching his shoulders, but hung on. Once he'd recovered a bit, he pressed his luck and tried it again with the floor below. His left elbow bashed into the next railing. Stars of pain streaked through his head. Somehow, he clung tight with his right arm. Once it felt like he could do so without dying, he climbed over the rail onto the balcony.

  There were more balconies all the way down the building, but sticking to them would display a single-minded lack of creativity unbefitting of the nethermancers of the Cycle of Arawn. Instead, Cally simply walked into the empty chambers attached to the balcony, made sure the hall was clear, and, leading the way with his moth, took the stairs down to the ground floor.

  There was at least one more wight out in the courtyard. He exited through a side door and into the twisting streets west of the temple grounds, an old neighborhood known as the Plugs. A rat skittered away from whatever it had been gnawing on. Cally killed it, feeling a spike of remorse at wielding the nether against a living thing: then the feeling was gone, and he was reanimating the rat, sending it trotting ahead while the moth flew higher to watch from above.

  People were still screaming. The smell of smoke came and went and he could see several fires burning, although none was yet threatening to spread to other buildings. He sent the moth high enough to confirm the Lannovians had pushed entirely past the Pridegate. They had, but they hadn't advanced as far as he'd expected or feared. Silver and purple light crackled where the Order's priests opposed them. Soldiers charged and clashed.

  He emerged from the Plugs onto a boulevard that led straight to the Ingate. A few people were scurrying around, mostly headed to the north and east, hoping to leave the city before the enemy claimed it entirely. Probably the smart move. Unlike what he was doing.

  He reached the Ingate, fifteen feet high and studded with small towers. Guards rose at his footsteps.