The Sealed Citadel

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Stop there and identify!" one shouted down to him.

  "I have been sent by the Order!" Cally yelled. "I must be let through!"

  The guard leaned forward, holding his lantern high. "If you're with the Order, why are you dressed like a gods damn beggar?"

  Cally glanced down at himself. This was true: he was, technically speaking, currently suspended from the Order until the completion of the Mind's Fast, and so they'd dressed him in something that was practically a sack. He opened his mouth to politely argue with them, as a good apprentice would do, then understood there was a more effective way.

  He opened his palm. With a flourish, he spewed flames into the air. "Know many beggars who can do that?"

  The soldier grunted an apology, then bellowed at his subordinate to open the gates, as if that poor fellow was the entire reason for the delay. Cally nodded at them as he walked into the plaza beyond.

  Once the gates were hidden behind a line of buildings, he broke into a run. The neighborhoods within the Ingate had once been the most prized in the city, but many had been abandoned since the loss of the Citadel, both out of fear of being too close to what lurked within it and as part of the general exodus from Narashtovik following the Citadel's closure.

  But many lived here still, and much of its beauty remained: soaring towers of black granite and white limestone; temples held up by carved columns; cathedrals with sharp spires and cross gargoyles; statues of heroes who looked strong enough to challenge the gods. All a reminder that, through everything, Narashtovik had endured.

  He made straight for the heart of it all: the plaza between the Cathedral of Ivars and the Sealed Citadel. Under supervision, he'd been there before. But never alone. And never at night. Entering the plaza, he slowed involuntarily. The walls of the Citadel stood twice as high as the Ingate. The keep within them looked strong enough to withstand an army of sorcerers.

  Cally came to a stop thirty feet from the gates. A shiver passed over him, followed by a wave of physical repulsion that threatened to push him back until he turned around and ran.

  And he might have, if not for the weight of the book anchoring him in place.

  He drew himself up and walked toward the gates. Even when he delved into the nether, he could barely see the wards, just a shimmer within the stonework, but he could feel them at once. It felt as if it would be dangerous to come in contact with them. Like wet skin touching solid ice. Then again, it would be quite a lot more dangerous to let himself get ripped apart by wights, wouldn't it? He lifted his right hand toward the gates.

  Something stirred from the corner where the gate met the wall, provoking Cally to cry out and take a small hop.

  The man pointed a long sword at Cally, but stayed seated. "Who goes there?"

  "Rowe?"

  The tip of the sword wavered. "Cally?"

  "What on earth are you doing here?"

  "Defending the Citadel. As I swore I always would."

  "You smell like rum."

  "That," Rowe said, "is because I've been drinking it."

  "Well, get to your feet. We're going inside."

  He laughed merrily. "No we're not. Only ones who can do that are the Lannovians. The city's doomed. We're just playing out the string."

  "Have you even seen their army? It isn't nearly large enough to subdue the entire city!"

  "With their troops? No. But the troops aren't the problem."

  "The wights. Once they've killed the last of our priests, they can terrorize the city as they please. There'll be no stopping them."

  "Whatever you think is behind these wards, the Lannovians are after it, too. That's what this whole thing has been about. That's why the original agreement was for the Order to learn how to take down the wards and for the Lannovians to kill the wights trapped behind them."

  "Because the wards aren't the important part. It's the wights."

  Rowe nodded. "Whoever controls the wights—the power to make them or the power to kill them—controls what's inside the Citadel."

  "When Tarriman exposed that the Order had figured out how to kill the wights, the Lannovians decided they had to kill the Order."

  "Wasn't how they intended to do it. Too blatant. Sooner than they wanted, too. But it worked. Whatever method your priests worked out to kill the wights only works when they're trapped behind the wards. It isn't fast enough to matter in battle. By dawn, the Lannovians will own the city. And the Order will be dead."

  "Yeah, I've had similar thoughts. But if all of this is true, what are you doing here? You can't possibly think you can stop them yourself."

  "Don't intend to. I'm just here to die well, doing what I said I would do."

  "How terribly noble of you. But while you're being noble, and useless, I'm going to beat the Lannovians to the punch and get inside the Citadel."

  Rowe laughed some more. "You're a fool."

  "Then shut up and watch my foolish back for me."

  Seized by a sudden rush of anger, Cally turned from the dumb drunken soldier and stopped just before the gates. The doors were twelve feet high and made of solid iron. The wards buzzed along their surface, prickling his skin. It was more irritating than menacing, but this in itself was disturbing. Many many priests had tried to undo the wards down through the decades, and while most simply failed without consequence, or at most walked away feeling a bit dizzy, nauseous, or out of sorts, every once in a blue moon, the wards lashed back. Some had been maimed physically or mentally. And two had been killed.

  Once more, Cally bit his lip enough to taste blood. He brought the shadows to his hand, reached out, and placed his palm against the doors.

  A sharp sting raced up his arm, which went rigid; for one sickening moment, it felt as though he'd never be able to pull his hand loose. He leaned forward, summoning far more nether until it whirled about his entire body and rose higher than the doors. The conventional knowledge within the Order was that the wards were by their very nature immune to attack, and the only way to bring them down was to follow them to their source and destroy it. A few other Masters held that all things that existed bore weaknesses within them—for when Arawn's Mill had cracked, everything had cracked with it—and that destroying the wards was a matter of identifying those faults and prying them apart.

  But if Merriwen's book was right, it wasn't the technique that mattered. It was the will.

  Cally focused his, pushing harder against the door and swamping it with the shadows he'd gathered. The wards twitched in a way that almost felt…mocking. Scowling, Cally drew back. What if the Masters were half right? He pushed forward again, flooding the nether into the wards like water seeking cracks. At the same time, he willed himself to push the gates wide, to walk right through them.

  The tingle of the wards' presence diminished exactly as they would if they were bored with him. Or even disappointed. A prong of shame goaded the base of his skull: to think that he had somehow discovered something from Merriwen's book that everyone else had overlooked. That he could simply waltz up to impenetrable sorcery that scores of Masters had been studying for dozens of years and just brush it all aside.

  But that's what had to be done, so it didn't really matter if it was impossible or not. He would keep trying until the moment the enemy came for them, and he and Rowe would die beside each other at the gates of the home that had been lost to them.

  He pulled his nether back from the surface of the wards and clenched it in his fist. Brute rage welled up his skull—rage at both the Lannovians' betrayal, and the Order's allowing of it. He shaped the shadows into a thick curved blade and swung it into the wards with all his might.

  They rang just like a gong, the noise vibrating through his body like the crescendo of the temple's choir. His eyes widened, waiting. Slowly, the noise faded. The strike had left a long silver scratch against the translucent wards, but this faded along with the ringing sound, until there was no sign the scratch had ever been there, and the plaza was silent once more.

  Cally clo
sed his eyes, waiting for Rowe to laugh at him.

  "The hell?" Rowe said.

  A sound like a sudden gale rushed through the square, but Cally felt no wind on his skin. The gates—not just the gates, but the entire Citadel—shimmered and rippled. With a pop that Cally felt in his bones, the wards fell, and vanished.

  Before the wards could think better of their decision, Cally pulled on the gates. Enormous as they were, and as long as it had been since they had been used, they opened soundlessly, almost weightlessly.

  For the first time in two generations, a living soul entered the Sealed Citadel.

  20

  Cally took three steps inside and came to a stop. The hair stood up along his arms and neck. He was inside. He was inside the Citadel.

  With a scrape, Rowe got to his feet. He stood in the gateway, blinking at Cally in drunken wonder. "You brought down the wards?"

  "Told you I would," Cally said.

  "No you didn't. How'd you do that?"

  "Will you still come with me if I tell you I don't know?"

  Rowe took on a look of utter and almost pained confusion, as if Cally had just asked him what year the moon was. "It looks to me like the gods have opened a way for us. Would be stupid to ignore it. Gods don't like being ignored. Puts them in a smiting mood."

  Cally took a few slow steps forward, taking in the block of the keep and the multitude of outbuildings: stables, smithies, storage, a monastery. None of them used since decades before he'd been born.

  Rowe had put away his sword, but he kept it loosely sheathed. "Where are we headed?"

  "Ah," Cally said. "The question so good I don't have an answer to it."

  "There's a saying among certain types. If you want to steal the jewels, check behind what's locked."

  "The keep. Merriwen's rooms will have been on the top floor."

  "You're sure?"

  "Very. Sorcerers are incredibly paranoid. If something bad starts happening, they want to be alerted to it by the screams of those below them."

  Half of the trees and shrubs in the broad courtyard were dead, but the other half had gone wild, stretching tall and wide and shaggy, bursting through the cobbles to claim more space. Cally maneuvered around and beneath the reaching branches, trying not to crackle the dead leaves lying everywhere.

  Something slapped the stone ahead and to the right of the keep. That something was unmistakably the sound of feet. More than one pair. Without looking to Rowe for guidance, Cally got down, worming under a tangled nest of shrubs that smelled dizzyingly of rosemary. Rowe was already doing the same.

  The footfalls didn't sound like boots. They sounded bare. Figures rushed along a path twenty feet away. A chill ran up Cally's spine. Despite the darkness and the thickness of the brush, there was no mistaking the wights.

  He tried to run a count. At least thirty, likely more. They swept past like a school of predatory fish, rushing out the gates. In less than a minute, the courtyard was as silent as it had been when he'd first stepped into it.

  "Those came from inside the Citadel," Cally whispered.

  "Thought your Masters claimed they'd killed them all," Rowe muttered.

  "It seems the Masters let their optimism get the better of them. The wights must have gotten tired of getting killed and went into hiding."

  "Bet they're none too happy about being cooped up and attacked for decades. Suppose they come for us?"

  "I suppose we should make sure to let that not happen. Shall we?"

  He rolled from beneath the rosemary, brushing twigs and dirt from his peon's garb. The courtyard looked empty enough, but he sent his moth and rat out first to check the truth of that. Seeing nothing, he advanced on the keep. A mosaic was laid in black and white before the building's main door, a thirty-foot circle divided in twelve sections, each one marked with one of the sigils of the Celeset. At the top of the circle, Duset, Arawn's double-rivers, stood largest and grandest.

  The keep's front door was wide open. Cally drew a handful of nether to him and walked toward it. Rowe grabbed his arm and shook his head. He motioned to the undead rat. Cally nodded and sent it through the doorway first.

  It was far too dark to see the other side. But the rat's other senses were more than sharp enough to report that it was instantly impaled and torn apart. Cally's connection dropped dead.

  Cally gave a quick shake of his head. Rowe moved to the shadow of the keep's wall, sticking to it as he circled around the building. The keep was immensely tall even for a fortress and it felt as though it might topple and crush them at any minute. They came to a side door, but Rowe skipped it in favor of a broken window a little further ahead. Cally sent his moth in first. It wasn't attacked, but that could well have been because it wasn't big enough to be worth attacking. Cally sucked more nether. Heart thundering like a summer storm, he stepped inside.

  He wasn't instantly murdered. He was in a sitting room of some kind, and when he continued to not be murdered, he beckoned Rowe inside. Sword drawn, Rowe joined him.

  Cally let his eyes adjust. The keep smelled a bit musty, but was mostly neutral. "How'd you know the front door would be trouble?"

  "It was left wide open."

  "And? The wights are the only things living here, and I don't think they're well-versed in the social niceties."

  "Had a bad feeling."

  "You know," Cally said, "so did I."

  He led the way past crusty felt chairs. The walls and corners were scattered with paintings and statues that he wished he could see in detail. The sitting room led to a great hall with a dais at one end and three rows of tables stretching from one side of the room to the other. The moonlight through the high windows had a strange gray quality—the glass was shadowcut, the panes stained in shades of gray and black, undoubtedly beautiful.

  Cally wished very badly that he could look about, explore the art and wonders that had been lost for so long. But he also thought the pleasure of doing so would be noticeably lessened if, while doing so, he was ripped apart by demon-souled monsters. Anyway, even if he got out of here, he would almost certainly shortly die fighting the Lannovians, so that pleasure would be as short-lived as himself.

  He hurried onward, hunting for and finding a stairwell. It was pitch black inside. Gritting his teeth, he closed the door behind them and lit a spark of ether.

  He ascended, light in one hand, shadows in the other. Rowe made almost no noise behind him. After a hike that left him winded, they came to the top floor. Cally snuffed his light and opened the door. Once he was reasonably sure the hallway they'd entered was empty, he brought back just enough ether to see by.

  Tapestries hung from the walls, yellowed and brittle with disrepair. The Citadel had been closed for decades. So where had the grime come from? Was time itself a physical substance that accumulated on objects—and people—as they aged?

  Ornately carved doors lined both walls, spaced widely. The chambers of people of importance. Cally had no idea which was Merriwen's, but every door had a different symbol painted on it. Guided by a stroke of intuition, Cally went from door to door until he found one whose symbol was almost an exact match for the one on the cover of the book he still carried: a rose of peace.

  "This was Merriwen's room," Cally murmured. "Suppose it's full of horrors?"

  "Scream if there are."

  Cally tried the handle. The door was stiff in the frame, but it didn't feel latched, and he forced it open just before he was about to ask Rowe to give it a try. The quarters contained more curtains and bedclothes, and a thicker smell of mustiness washed from the room, as if it had been holding its breath and was now exhaling.

  Rowe closed the door behind them. He no longer seemed all that drunk. "You think there's something in here to kill the wights. Another book?"

  "Well," Cally said. "It could be a book, yes. Or a weapon. Or a…something."

  "A something."

  "The book's very vague on the matter. Purposely so, mind you. Merriwen wouldn't want such knowledge fal
ling into the wrong hands."

  "Heavens forbid the wrong person learn how to banish a demon."

  Cally grunted and gave himself more light. He made a quick sweep of the various rooms, eyes out for anything obvious, but if it was obvious, he was too dull to see it. He'd imagined that the chambers of someone as elevated as Merriwen would be both pious and esoteric, ascetic yet belittered with strange mystical objects. Yet his rooms looked more or less like any of the Masters', albeit with quite a lot more books, and one room that, judging by the scorch marks and bits of rocks and bone, had been used for nethereal experiments.

  Seeing no glowing spears or talking swords, Cally turned to what looked to have been Merriwen's main reading and writing desk. The ink bottles and blotting sand had the same patina of age as everything else. Cally scanned what looked to have been Merriwen's final document, but it was some philosophical treatise about the terrifying dread of contemplating irreversible decisions, and he saw no mention of wights.

  None of the other documents on the desk did either. Yet there had to be something. Even if Merriwen hadn't gone so far as to paint a sign saying "This is what you want and this is where it is," he'd clearly been researching the matter for some time, and would have records and notes. Anyway, the very book Merriwen had written had said the answer was here!

  He inhaled sharply, looking to Rowe. "They're coming."

  Just as had happened in the House of Twelve, a wight was running down the hallway toward their rooms. It was hunched forward so the claws of its overmuscled right arm all but scraped the ground.

  Without a moment's hesitation—meaning he'd thought through this possibility in advance—Rowe led them from the study, through a dining room, and out onto the balcony, which gratified Cally. To the north, the moon glimmered on the bay. The distance to the ground beneath them felt like an abyss.

  The balcony had no cover besides a chair, an end table, and a small tree, long dead. Rowe swung a leg over the railing and climbed to the other side.

  "Not this again," Cally groaned.