Yobb stamped her staff into the trail. "Well? Are you such a poor student you can't walk and speak at the same time?"
"I spent all day thinking about it," Cally said, noting to himself that this wasn't a lie, as he seemed to remember thinking about it in his dreams too. "And I wonder if nether isn't most like metal. Steel. For the iron that makes it comes from unseen places, and its refinement and smelting isn't so much different than how the nethermancer summons and shapes his shadows. These can be made into both tools and weapons. Either way, they're harder than anything. Unstoppable."
"Steel," Yobb said thoughtfully. The air darkened around her as she brought the nether to her long, knobby hand. She closed her hand, packing it tight, then threw it up into the air. It scattered apart like seeds on the wind, or like ashes from a blazing fire. It dispersed further and further until it twinkled away into nothing.
Next she drew a knife from her belt. The handle was carved antler but the blade was clean steel. She underhanded it up into the air. It spun lazily and thumped to the ground.
She bent to pick it up. "Hmm."
"Nothing can be a perfect match," Cally said. "But I thought that one was pretty good."
Yobb watched him with one thick eyebrow raised. The clatter of water over rocks arose without warning. Another few steps and they came to a fast and shallow stream. Flies danced above the ripples.
Yobb nodded decisively, as if she'd accomplished some important deed. "Did you have more to say?"
"I did have one other thought. Maybe the nether isn't quite like any natural force or object at all. Maybe it's most like a person's imagination. Unbound by other rules, you see. Capable of doing just about anything."
Yobb pointed up at the moon, which was nearly full, a clipped white coin against the deep blue sky. "I imagine myself growing a hundred miles tall, and plucking the moon with no more difficulty than I would an apple. Then I throw it down to the earth, where it destroys everything except for the titan that is me. I imagine all of this with no more effort than it takes me to speak the words. This is what the nether seems like to you, who can hardly do anything with it at all?"
Cally reddened. "Then what is the nether like? Why not just tell me?"
"Because I don't want to. We will meet again tomorrow morning. Until then, think more on what the nether is like."
"Why? So you can tell me I'm a fool, then do nothing to help me become less of one?"
"So that one day, the power in your hands will be at least a little closer to the one you surely wield in your imagination."
She lifted her staff. Nether condensed on its tip until the sheer blackness of it became lined with purple. She pointed the staff across the stream. The tip erupted into flame, spewing a rope of twisting fire across the water, steam sizzling away from the heat, the same heat glowing against Cally's face. The fire lanced over the stream and swerved into a dead tree leaning over the opposite bank.
The dry branches exploded, casting smoldering splinters high into the air. The trunk burst apart. The tree cracked and tumbled into the stream, smoke and steam boiling away from its quenched fires. The current dragged its wreckage downstream until it lodged against a phalanx of boulders.
After the interruption of chaos, the air felt very quiet. Without another word, the old woman turned and walked away.
~
After their dinner of greens along with baked trout, carrots, and roots, he tried to find Rowe, but he'd gone scouting to the northwest. Cally hadn't been invited to one of the tents and he slept outside in his blanket as he'd done the night before.
He woke stiff and cold. He used the nether to treat the former. It wasn't yet dawn but a few of the norren were already up, gathering branches to set a cook fire for breakfast. Cally watched them for a minute, then propelled himself forward and asked if he could help.
"I'm not sure that you can." One of the men looked down on him in amusement. "Are you sure your arms won't snap under the strain of the kindling?"
A woman beetled her brow. "Wood is hard. His hands are soft. They will break before his arms do."
Cally could feel the familiar heat creeping up his neck and ears. His instincts told him to mutter whatever he could manage and leave to go contemplate the nether some more.
But something new in him did not want to turn his back and flee. He stared up at the pair of towering norren. "I see I've made a mistake. I should never have asked your permission to be of use." He motioned to the logs they still had from the day before. "Pile those up. There's no need to bother with kindling."
The norren looked openly skeptical, but he was starting to think it was in their nature to want to see how unusual situations would turn out, especially if someone was preparing to make a fool of themselves. They dumped the remaining logs in the fire pit. Cally waved them back, then snapped his fingers. Fire leaped up from the wood, taking hold at once. The smell of smoke filled the air.
The norren watched the fire burn, entranced by it in the exact same way that humans were. Then the man nodded at Cally, and they all went off to their next tasks.
Cally met Yobb an hour after sunrise. She didn't seem to like to conduct their sessions around the others, and this time she brought him to a low hill. Great blocks of cut stone were scattered around its top, layered with mosses and lichen. They appeared immensely old, so old that Cally didn't even know if they were human or norren, and he had a moment of overwhelming vertigo, as if the past were an abyss that he could tumble into and fall forever.
Yobb lowered her hood. "Did you think more on the nether?"
"Yes," he said. "But I didn't think of anything good."
"You can't know what is not good, because you know almost nothing, which is proven by you being a student. So tell me what you thought, and I will decide if it was any good."
"I thought that maybe I was thinking too hard, and that the reason we also call them the shadows is that they're much like shadows."
"Are they?"
"A shadow is only cast in the presence of light. The nether is only cast in the presence of a sorcerer—what one might call an illuminated being, if one was willing to risk a bit of arrogance."
"But."
"But the ether is in many ways similar to the nether, yet it's as bright as the sun. On top of that, shadows don't really do anything, do they? They're just sort of there."
"That is true. But at least it was an unusual thought." She braced her hand on her knee and lowered herself to one of the fallen stones. "It is still true that you do not know anything at all. Yet you have never known what the nether is most like before, either, and that has not stopped you from learning a few things, although not very many things. So perhaps despite your failings in being able to think like a good sorcerer, you can still learn to defend yourself from others who would make you dead. I will lob things that could kill at that boulder over there, and you will try to stop them."
Without so much as a grace period, she shaped a black bolt from the shadows and launched it in a meandering arc toward the boulder. Cally grabbed a fistful of nether, packed it as tight as he could, and guided it into the path of the attack. The bolt blew right through and smacked into the boulder.
His next several efforts went similarly. After that, he tried any number of variations to how he packed and layered the nether. None of it so much as slowed down Yobb's attacks. He began to experiment more wildly, hoping to find something mildly effective that he could then hone, yet had no better luck, even when he tried to use the shadows as a distraction, the way he'd briefly held off the Lannovian priest. It wasn't long before his hold on the nether began to falter.
Yobb suggested he watch her as she formed her attack and then deflected it herself. He did so, but couldn't see any mechanism of how it worked, not even a hint. The morning wore on and Cally's discouragement accumulated. He knew that it was grossly foolish to be disappointed with his lack of progress just two days into it, but he didn't know how many days they could spare—they really ought to be
trying to retrieve the book again, or going to warn the Gaskans, or returning to Narashtovik. It had been nice of Rowe to get the norren to teach him to defend himself to better their odds of making it home, but if he wasn't getting anywhere, they really needed to be moving on.
Sensing his frustration, or maybe just getting bored, Yobb called for a halt. "Would you like to hear the story of how my clan came to be?"
"Certainly." This was true and also Cally was aware enough to know she would likely be gravely insulted if he said no. But mostly it was because they were known as the Wise Trout Clan, which anyone would be curious about.
She took up her staff and walked across the hill, pausing now and then to inspect the weathered carvings on the faces of the ancient stones. "This story is from a very long time ago. And by that I mean that it is a long time ago by the way that norren and humans reckon time, not that it's a long time by the standards of flies or mice, if flies or mice are capable of reckoning differences in time. It was long enough ago that these ruins weren't yet ruins.
"Like all good stories, it begins with a war. The war was between the people that would later become our clan, who were known then as the Longstrides, and those called the Snake-Cutters. It is told that the Snake-Cutters wanted our hunting lands and we did not want to give them our hunting lands. The Snake-Cutters began to raid us, which is the traditional norren method of settling disputes. The enemy was strong and numerous and so they pushed us back across the prairie and the forest.
"The Snake-Cutters had taken our best lands from us, but they still came for us, because they could sense that we were weak, and it is the nature of strong things to eat weak things. We fought them, and our clan dwindled. When it became clear that we stood on the cliff of death, our chieftain Rold came up with our last hope. Again, the Snake-Cutters came to raid us. But this time, Rold tricked them into crossing a bridge over a fast stream. When half the Snake-Cutters had crossed it, Rold's sorcerer Kall dashed it apart.
"The survivors gathered on the bank to face the Longstrides. It looked like it would be a stalemate, but the Snake-Cutters beseeched Josun Joh to come to their aid and finish the war for them. Our people paid their words no mind—but then a whirlwind blew in from the west. It landed before the Snake-Cutters. And it delivered Josun Joh himself, resplendent in his armor that was the bones of his enemies, carrying his hammer and his spear."
Without any warning whatsoever, Yobb lifted her hand. A ball of shadows shot from it and sped toward Cally. He goggled at it in sheer confusion. It struck him in the chest, staggering him three steps backward. It didn't kill him, like shaped nether normally did, but it hurt like a good punch in the gut.
He gaped at her, then coughed. "Why would you do that?"
"Why wouldn't you stop it?"
"I don't know how!"
"The Longstride Clan faced the enemy that was now led by the very lord of the norren and they prepared to die," Yobb said, walking on as if she hadn't assaulted him at all. "But instead of slaying them, Josun Joh flashed among the Snake-Cutters, slashing their bow strings, breaking their spears, throwing aside their swords."
Yobb picked her way along a game trail that snaked across the hilltop. Cally followed, amazed at her behavior, trying to recollect the nature of her attack while continuing to listen to her story.
"The chieftain of the Snake-Cutters fell to his knees. 'Josun Joh! We called to you for aid. Why are you disarming us? Can't you see that will let our enemies kill us?' 'That is exactly why I am doing it,' Josun Joh said. 'You should have asked me to inspire you to fight more bravely, or to inspire you with a diabolical plan. It would even have been better if you had asked me for permission to run away! But instead, you beseeched me to fight for you. This lack of will shows that there is nothing in you worth saving, and it's better for you to be destroyed.'
"Then he went away, and the Snake-Cutters were destroyed. Many of them died and those that didn't die ran away, but in any event it was the end of their clan, at least in our lands, which was all that we cared about. The Longstrides returned to the territory that had been taken from them, and they prospered. When they hunted, deer delivered themselves to their bows; when they went on their raids, they were showered with steel and treasure; with each month that passed, the clan bore more and more children. Until one year and one day after their victory, when came the births of Ralls son of Rold, and Kerin daughter of Kall. And they were the last children the clan would see for many years. Of their own, at any rate.
"It was then that the Longstrides came to hard times, or that hard times came for the Longstrides. The deer vanished from the hills. The trout disappeared from the streams. Even the mushrooms and carrots went away, as if they'd burrowed down deep into the ground, where no amount of digging could find them. But they still had the steel and silver from their year of prosperity, and they were able to trade these things whenever their food ran short. And they still made their offerings to Josun Joh, asking that they might be swifter on the hunt, and more cunning than the fish, and better in all of the other ways that they might reverse their troubles.
"But they were growing thinner. Slower, too. Seeing this, other clans made raids upon them, taking away the last of their wealth. They fled these attacks—only to wander into a drought so bad that they didn't even have enough water to drink. It seemed as though the Longstrides would perish then and there."
Yobb bowed her head. As she reflected on her ancestors' ill fortune, she also flicked her hand toward Cally. A black lump swished toward his chest. This time, he'd been anticipating it, and pulled the nether to him in time to hurl it at the attack. But the attack bashed right through it and bulled into his solar plexus. The impact knocked the breath from him and knocked him into the grass.
He rolled on his side, gasping until he could breathe right again. "Stop that!"
"Stopping that is your job," Yobb said shortly. "As I was saying before your interruption: the Longstrides found themselves poor, starving, and at risk of dying of thirst. They didn't understand it. Even as their prosperity dwindled, they'd been making regular offerings and sacrifices to Josun Joh, who'd proved himself so deserving of those offerings. Knowing they must trust their own strength, they marched north, toward the great city they had heard rested on the side of the sea.
"The land was so dry they had to dig for water along the way, although this wasn't altogether bad, as the digging also stirred up various grubs and moles to eat. They came to the city. It was not so great as they had heard after all, but it was a city, and it was there, and they were let into it even though it was a city of humans and they were norren.
"To live there, they were made to worship the gods of the Celeset, which they did, although they still didn't forget Josun Joh. At last, they found work enough to feed themselves. Being able to feed themselves means that they did not starve. But something else inside them seemed to starve instead, and over the years they lived in the city some of the clan's people dropped dead even though they seemed young and healthy. They missed their land, and more rightly they missed walking in their land, traveling it and knowing it, feeling on their faces the breath of the summer sun and the bite of the winter winds. But for some reason the land they so loved had forsaken them, and that made the hurt even worse.
"The city saved them for a time, but if they had stayed for a long enough time, it surely would have killed them all. Instead war came to the city, and the humans grew fearful of the norren outsiders and threw them out, and so this is proof that war can be a good thing, although norren have always known that."
Without breaking stride or turning around, she launched another disk of shadows at Cally. He had known it was coming, reading some change in her posture, or in the rhythm of her tale, but somehow his prediction only made him angrier, and he lashed at the disk with three quick gouts of nether. It wobbled, splashing black sparks to all sides, but thumped into his chest so hard his teeth clacked shut and his eyes flashed white. He found himself seated. His chest was stinging an
d hot. He reached under his shirt. He withdrew his fingertips and found them dabbed in blood.
He glared up at her and stood. He might have healed himself but he didn't. "Then what happened to the poor Longstrides?"
"Continued poorness. They tried to return to their lands, but their lands had been taken, and every other land seemed to vomit them up like they were a piece of spoiled meat. Some more of them starved. Some fell to disease. Others abandoned the clan and snuck away to join other clans that didn't carry their curse. These were the very worst days of the clan. Days when even the healthy young died and no more were born to replace them.
"It came to be that, thirty years after their victory over the Snake-Cutters, a plague fell over the few remaining Longstrides. By the time it was done, Ralls son of Rold and Kerin daughter of Kall were the only ones left. And they were weakened and frail, so there was not much of them left. It seemed to them that they would soon die too, so they decided to at least die on the clan's ancient land, and so they traveled toward it, and this was so hard on them that they hoped they would die the moment they reached it."
Yobb paused. Cally flinched and snatched up the nether, ready to defend himself, if he could be said to be capable of that at all.
The old woman was only staring off into space again, imagining the hardships of her ancestors. "But Ralls and Kerin endured, because to not endure would be shameful, and it would be twice-shameful to have endured for so long only to falter before they were able to reach this final goal. They had only been children the last time they had seen their land, but when they came to it, they remembered it by the smell of the air and the feel of the dirt under their feet.
"They came to a stream. They had no food and would soon starve and so they used their last hook to fish. They caught one trout. But one trout is not much to one norren, let alone two, and as they cooked it they knew it would be their last meal.
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