The Sealed Citadel

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Ralls took his knife and began to divide the fish in two, but Kerin seized his hand. 'Three parts,' she said. 'One for you. One for me. And one as offering to Josun Joh.' Ralls smiled, because he had almost forgotten Josun Joh, and it made him glad that Kerin had carried the god's honor to the end.

  "Just as they prepared to eat, they heard footsteps along the bank, and rose to protect themselves. But it was an old man, gaunt and weather-worn. 'I smelled your meal,' he said. 'Please, I am starving. Will you share?' Ralls nodded and gave the old man the share he'd cut for himself. The man and Kerin began to eat, but the old man saw that Ralls wasn't touching the last piece of fish. 'Why aren't you eating? Is there something wrong with it?' 'Yes,' Ralls said, 'what is wrong is that it is not for me, for but Josun Joh.'

  "The gaunt man clapped his hands. 'Hah! Why didn't you say so?' Then he grabbed up the uneaten portion and began to wolf it down. 'What are you doing?' Ralls cried out. He moved to attack the old man, but Kerin began to laugh and cry at once. 'Don't you see? He is Josun Joh.'

  "The gaunt man nodded. 'I am, and you are the last of the Longstride Clan. Many great tragedies have fallen on you. But you have never forgotten me or forsaken me. I have been gone for a long time, but I'm here now, and I have remembered you too.'

  "Then Josun Joh went to the stream, and he gestured with his hand and a score of trout leaped ashore, and he beckoned sweet greens to sprout up from the bank, and the three of them feasted together. As they ate, Josun Joh grew a foot taller, and his body swelled with the strength he had always been known for. 'I can't promise to protect you,' he said, 'because that is not the way that the world works, and if you weren't able to protect yourselves, I wouldn't want you to be of my people anyway. But as long as you trust to me, and teach your children to become as strong as you have, the Clan of Wise Trout will always persevere.'

  "He stayed with them for a month, showing them about their lands and making sure that the two of them ate until they were healthier and more powerful than ever before in their lives. At last Josun Joh married the two of them together, and then he left. From then Ralls and Kerin had many children, and those children found those who were worthiest from the nearby clans, and married them to the Wise Trout. And we prospered like we never had before, even moreso than in the year after our victory over the Snake-Cutters.

  "We have had our troubles since then, for that is just the way of life; good things turn bad, things fall apart, night comes. But those who know how to endure will always put it back together. And so we are still here, among our lands, and will still be here for a very long time."

  This felt like the end of her story, and Yobb's next strike came just as Cally expected it to. He was angry, but even so, he was taken aback by the sheer vehemence of the nether as it flooded into his hands. He thrust it at the assault like a spear.

  If it was a spear, then it shattered like a bad joust. Yobb's attack hit him dead center and sent him flying from his feet. All of her past attacks had been singular, but she surprised him by launching a second. He hammered at it with a brute club of nether. The two energies collided with a crack like stone hitting stone.

  Cally staggered to his feet. "That isn't enough! Beating me until I bleed isn't teaching me! It's just beating me!"

  Yobb laughed at him. "What are you so angry about? You just stopped my attack. I would say that means I am a very good teacher after all."

  Cally felt himself going red—with rage, for once—then froze. She didn't mean he'd blocked the first bolt she'd just thrown at him.

  She meant he'd stopped the second one, the last ashes of which were even now fading away to nothing.

  13

  He held his hands out before him like they had blood on them. As it turned out, one of them did, but that was from earlier. "How did I do that?"

  "That is both a very good question and a very bad one."

  "All you were doing was hitting me. Repeatedly, I might add. How did you know that would work?"

  "Why do you assume that I did?"

  "Because you were doing it?"

  "Because I thought it might work," Yobb said. "Either it would, and that would be good, and we wouldn't have to waste a great deal of days slowly failing as you were failing earlier. Or it would not work, and I would get the pleasure of knocking a young man from his feet. Repeatedly, I might add."

  Cally's chest was damp with blood from her earlier assaults, but the pain felt like a badge of some kind, and so he wore it. "How in nine hells did beating me up teach me to do deep magic?"

  "Maybe I didn't teach you anything. It seems just as likely that this ability was within you all of this time, much as Josun Joh is within every norren who remembers him."

  "That's nonsense. If people just went around knowing things, then we wouldn't need academies. Or universities. Or seminaries. Or apprenticeships. Or any of the other hundred institutions young people are tormented with. I didn't just 'know' how to stop your attack."

  "Why does this idea make you so angry? Very few people know how to use the nether at all, but you do. Were you taught to have the nether inside you?"

  "I had to be taught to use it, yes. I remember it quite well, because it took a whole lot of years and is still happening at this very moment."

  "That is not what I mean and you know it's not what I mean, which means that you are deliberately attacking a different point, because you know that your point is wrong. When a person picks up a bow for the first time, and their aim is already better than someone who has been training for some time, do you deny that the wisdom and talent to shoot their bow was already inside them? If not, where did it come from?"

  "Probably not from their instructor repeatedly shooting them with their bow."

  "Nevertheless, it is inside them, waiting to be found. Just as your own abilities are already within you."

  "You still have to be taught things! Not only how to do them, but the right way to do them. Not just the correct way, but the honorable way. I grew up not far from here, to common parents. Then one day, without any warning, I knew the nether. What if I'd 'reached inside' and learned how to attack things? What if one of my parents told me to rake the yard, and when I wouldn't do it, they hit me—and then I hit them back with the nether? They would be dead, and what would I be? A killer with the blood of his own parents on his hands, and no better understanding of the power I just wielded. Even if these talents were inside me, waiting to be remembered, how can they be good without someone good to teach me how to use them in the way they're meant to be used?"

  Yobb had let him speak this whole time. "Why do you assume that I disagree with that?"

  "Then why are you teaching me things that are so dangerous before you teach me how to use them rightly?"

  "Because you do know how to use them rightly. That's why you're so afraid to learn them in the first place. You know the terror they can bring. The pain they can cause. The wrong they can do. That is why you must be taught to use them."

  He fell back, all of the wrath blown out of him. "But what if I don't want it?"

  "Then too bad!" Her voice roared like a storm; she towered above him as no human could. "That is the burden of your birth to the shadows: and if you shuck off that responsibility because you are too afraid, you will be even worse than the parent-killer you feared becoming when you were young." She grabbed him by the collar of his cloak, and he thought she might strike him, and he leaned forward in expectation. Yet she didn't, though she didn't relax her hold, either. "I can read faces. But I can't read yours. Tell me what path you choose."

  "All right," he said mildly. "Teach me."

  ~

  As it turned out, his hold on the nether was too weak to be taught much more of anything that day. But before his powers ran dry, he repeated his success more than he failed. He left Yobb feeling more proud than he had since Tarriman had given him his healers' badge.

  He wanted to tell Rowe what he'd learned, but the soldier was still out in the wilds, sniffing around
the Lannovians. He'd said he just wanted to figure out precisely where they were going and what they intended to do with the wights. And maybe he did—but Cally also suspected that part of the reason Rowe had been so adamant about getting Cally into training was that it would give Rowe time to execute a plan to retrieve Merriwen's book by himself.

  In any event, Cally was exhausted. He intended to sleep the night through right up until breakfast, yet existence crushed these plans when the first hints of dawn grayed the east and the camp broke into a frenzy of packing and preparation. The man he'd lit the fire for informed him the clan was relocating. They made good on the warrior's claim with the sunrise, heading north at a pace somewhere between a march and a wander. Warriors strung their bows, keeping them at easy reach.

  Cally expected this would mean a delay in his unorthodox apprenticeship, but the norren were so used to traveling that many of them engaged in simple crafts and tasks as they walked, and it wasn't long before Yobb found him and dropped back to the very rear of the procession. They kept themselves just within sight of the others.

  "Did you think more on what the nether is most like?" she said.

  His eyes widened. "I forgot all about that. I'm sorry."

  "Why are you apologizing to me when you're the one you've failed? Tell me you haven't forgotten the talent of defense. Or perhaps it would be better if you have forgotten, meaning that I am obliged to knock you around the forest again."

  Cally grinned at her. "I suppose there's only one way to find out."

  She flicked her hand at him. He hadn't even seen her summon the nether, yet there it was shooting toward him. He could feel the intensity of it and knew that if it hit him it would take his wind from him, along with some of his blood. His strike at it was as clumsy as a chick's first steps from the egg, yet he deflected the attack inches from his chest, spraying his face with heatless black sparks.

  "I expect that your people have their own way of explaining this," Yobb said. "But I also expect your people are as wrong about it as they are about everything else."

  "I'm sure the people who built grand cities and high castles wouldn't have any insight compared to the people who live in smelly tents."

  "Yet the tent-woman is teaching you what the castle-man would not. When you bring the nether to you, you treat it wrong. You try to pack it. You have said the shadows are like water or like air. Would you try to pack water or air together like snow into a snowball?"

  "No, but if I was some sort of air- or watermancer rather than a nethermancer, I suppose that I might."

  "Bring it into the shape it's meant to be at the same time you're summoning it."

  "How exactly do I do that? Or is this another of those things that can only be revealed through a studious process of getting clobbered?"

  "We could try that and see. Or you could just be a bowl."

  "What?"

  "Consider yourself to be a bowl that you are pouring the water of the nether into. Shape the bowl so that the nether is shaped by the very act of summoning it."

  He wrinkled his brow, puzzling this over. But he quickly realized thinking about how this was to be done wasn't going to get him anywhere, and so he sighed and motioned for her to attack him.

  She did so, but with much less vengeance than the day before; her strikes barely stung. The first thing Cally had to understand was that he wasn't really creating a bowl, not in the sense of a mould that guided the shadows into a physical shape. It wasn't so much the shape of the nether that mattered, but rather the composition. Coming up with a bowl for that was mentally tricky indeed.

  Yet it was what he had to do, and so he did his best. As the clan walked onward through the trees, he and Yobb sparred, Cally's defenses becoming quicker, sharper, more refined.

  "You learn fast." Yobb eyed him. "No, I'm speaking poorly. There are many things you wouldn't learn fast at, like becoming a norren. But at this, you learn fast."

  "Are we stopping? I still have the strength to keep going for a little longer."

  "That's because you don't know that if you hold something in reserve, you can practice for much longer, which is better for you than practicing a little longer. Unless you hate practicing. What you should do now is call and shape the nether without spending it." She tapped her staff on the dirt. "Besides, it's always best to keep some piece of your power with you in case an enemy attacks you by surprise."

  Cally didn't know that he had any enemies other than the Lannovians, who were miles and miles away, and anyway didn't think that a few globs of nether would do him any good even if they showed up out of nowhere. But he retired to practice on his own, being a bowl for the nether as he followed at the end of the irregular column of norren.

  His progress felt nothing short of astounding. Within the Order, the Masters would have them spend weeks on every piece of the process. When it came to healing, they had started out on things that didn't even hurt, like hangnails. Next had been scratches and small cuts, like the kind a cat might leave on you when it was playing too hard, and then deeper ones you might need stitches for. After that came the study of organs, humors, illnesses, imbalances, and afflictions, scores and scores of them, if not hundreds. As a whole, it was a process of careful study and training that required years to develop competence in.

  By contrast, the speed of Yobb's training felt reckless. Yet Cally wasn't hurting anyone with it, was he? He didn't feel corrupted. Powerful, yes, but that wasn't the same thing as corruption. As long as he kept a hold on himself. And it would keep him and Rowe much safer on their return to Narashtovik. Of course, when he did get back to Narashtovik, he didn't think the Masters would approve of his new abilities.

  Then again, maybe the Masters didn't have to know about them.

  ~

  Rowe rode back to them late that afternoon. Seeing him, Cally felt a great tension release from his chest—he hadn't quite vocalized to himself that while Rowe was out scouting, there was a real chance the man would be killed.

  Rowe spent some time speaking with Nola and Winn as other clansmen tended to his horse. After several minutes, Rowe walked away while the two norren leaders continued to talk. He didn't seem to want company, except for his leather flask, and Cally gave him some time before approaching.

  "You came back," Cally said.

  Rowe wiped his mouth. "Good eyes."

  "You've been drinking."

  "That's what you do when you come back."

  "Did you see anything while you were out not here?"

  Rowe stared ahead through the trees. "Lannovians are working on something. Bosses are discussing whether they want to get the clan involved." He took another drink. "Learning anything?"

  "From Yobb? It's going well. Very well."

  "You're not being a little ass about it?"

  "If I was, I assume Yobb would be beating me for it. In fact, that's what most of my training's been so far. You'd probably enjoy watching it."

  "Good. You'll need everything she's teaching you."

  "What for?"

  "Whatever's coming for us."

  Cally plodded on for a few moments. "There's something I've been wondering about. Since we got here."

  "Is it why you can't stop asking questions?"

  "When they captured us, you told them that you're the grandson of Larrimore. That your real name is Rowellen."

  "It's Rowe."

  "Yes, I know that's what you prefer, but—"

  "Do you have a point?"

  "Is it true?"

  "I told them no lies."

  "Well," Cally said, eyes darting about in search of how to say it. "Doesn't that make you…nobility?"

  "Not since Larrimore."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He was disgraced."

  "Yes, but what happened?"

  "He was disgraced in the line of duty."

  "That's quite a tale. If you ever grow too old to carry a sword, might I suggest a second career as a bard?"

  Rowe grunted or laughed.
Cally didn't expect to get anything more out of him, but whatever was in the flask seemed to have lubricated the usual tightness of his character.

  "Larrimore was the Baron of Nevennand. When the Varrovar made their second march on Narashtovik—what became the War of Sealing—he was tasked with a battalion of men to hold the Groaning Forest against the Varrovar. They weren't expected to win. Weren't even expected to survive. Just to slow the enemy enough for the other lords to bring their men to Narashtovik in time to defend it.

  "Larrimore did his job. Got most of his men through it, too. He joined the others in Narashtovik. There, he was assigned to the digs at Greenfield. The Varrovar arrived the next day. The fighting was bad. But the city held. It dragged into a siege, lots of back and forth in the outer fortifications. The enemy started the battle in early autumn, but by Lia's Harvest, they still hadn't made it past the Pridegate. The two sides agreed to a three-day armistice to let their men celebrate and feast—as well as you can feast in the middle of a siege.

  "First day and night, no trouble. But in the middle of the second night, Larrimore got a feeling. He went out to scout on his own and sure enough, he found the Varrovar creeping through a hole in the defenses left open after some of the revelers got too drunk. Another minute, and the Varrovar would have been through. Might have collapsed the entire front line.

  "Larrimore rallied his men, ambushed the enemy mid-maneuver. The Varrovar threw down their weapons. Claimed they'd gotten lost and asked to surrender. Larrimore ordered his men to kill every last one of them."

  "Er," Cally said after a long moment. "Then what?"

  "He killed every last one of them."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that."

  "What was he disgraced for? Did they claim he broke the treaty?"

  "He wasn't disgraced yet, not just then. At the time, the other commanders celebrated him for it. But when word got to Merriwen, Merriwen said he'd been too brutal. That Larrimore should have accepted their surrender."

  "And is that when they…relieved him of his title?"