An impish presence lurched forward inside him, one he'd always carried but wasn't at all welcome in the Order of Healing Shadows. He pressed the tip of the knife against his skin. It gave way with a flare of heat that he felt in the back of his neck as well as his knuckle. A dot of blood bulged from the tiny nick.
He held up his hand. Shadows tumbled toward him in a silent flood. He staggered back, afraid he was about to be swept away, but they came to him as obediently—and enthusiastically—as a lord's dogs called in from the field.
And for one moment, he knew his place within the world.
~
It was as though he'd been kept within a single room for all his life, and thought that nothing existed outside that room, only to find a door to the outside world, where for the very first time he felt the sun and saw the horizon.
The blood alone expanded the volume of shadows he could use in one day by several times over. At the same time, the notion of shaping it as you summoned it cut back on the volume he needed to spend. And with one more small refinement from Yobb—a trick of his breathing—he was able to call the nether that was hiding deeper within the rocks and the trees.
These were the processes she taught him. With these in hand, she moved onto skills.
First came the shadowsphere; the fact he didn't know it already left her in disbelief to the point of contempt. Supposedly it was easy enough that young nethermancers often discovered it by accident. It wasn't much different than the trick he'd been using to blind people: just bring the nether to you and expand it outward into a sphere. This could be used to hide within, or to engulf one or more foes in darkness, or to generally confuse the situation. Very basic, in one sense, but if there was one thing that Cally had learned quite well, it was that people liked to be able to use their eyes, and stripping that from them was among the most disruptive things you could do.
Creating shadowspheres was simple enough that Cally was able to master the basics while the clan was on the walk. He found he could only practice the next skill, which Yobb called roping, when they took their rests, both because it was more concentration-intensive and because it was easiest to do when someone had both feet planted on the ground, as it involved locking a person's feet to that ground. This rendered them unable to run away, or lunge over and stab you, or any of the other advantages that podiacal mobility normally granted a fellow. It was a bit tricky to get right, as it involved synchronizing the nether in the target's feet to the nether in the ground, and Cally worked away on it every time they stopped.
Next, Yobb showed him how to excite the shadows into pillars of striking fire. This was similar to his ability to light simple fires, and he picked it up in less than an hour. The torrid flames produced by her technique could obviously char a man dead, but Cally told himself that they could be used to merely frighten people, or to knock down bridges bad people were chasing you across. Yet he also had to admit that conjuring up a crackling gale of fire was simply a hell of a lot of fun.
All of this activity took up just three days. He spent nearly every waking moment with Yobb. Whenever Cally's supply of shadows ran too short to continue practice, they discussed nether, theology, and norren history. It kept him so busy that he hardly had time to think about the fact there had been no sign of Rowe since their falling out.
At night, though, it was another matter. Even the songs of the insects were foreign to him. Listening to their alien chirr, he wondered how much longer he could afford to pretend that he wasn't alone. At least they were still traveling north, edging closer to Narashtovik. But they were still a very long ways away, and it would be much faster if he took off on his horse. He would give Rowe another day before making a decision. Maybe two.
The next morning unfolded with the unhurried efficiency of norren on the move. They started out an hour after sunrise. The land was starting to rise a little, getting hillier, and the trees were taller, with more moss on their trunks and undergrowth between them. Cally made his way to the back of the column to meet Yobb.
"Today you learn our most vital act as nethermancers," she said. "Today, you learn to kill."
A part of him had been expecting this moment. "I can't do that."
"Yes you can. I'll bet you one being-spared-from-a-beating that you'll know how by the end of the night."
"I mean that I won't do that."
"That is what I thought you really meant. Knowing how to do a thing doesn't mean you have to do it."
"If you teach me to kill, I will surely some day face a time when I am tempted to kill. I won't put myself in that position."
"That is bad reasoning," she said. "For it assumes you won't also have the judgment to make the correct choice when it is in front of you. For a sorcerer, it is just as important to learn proper judgment as it is to learn how to use the nether in the first place, for power without judgment is worse than no power at all. Here we run into a paradox: for the best way to refine judgment is to possess more power."
"And what if I just have bad judgment?"
"That would be possible, but my judgment is exceptional, and I judge that your judgment will become very fine as well."
Cally shook his head. "Teach me anything else, Yobb. But you can't talk me into this one."
She stood over him, staff in hand, nether weaving about her arms. He tensed himself for an assault of some kind, but she just looked disappointed.
"All right," she said. "If you won't learn force, you can still learn deceit. Which to me is worse than force, as it is lying while force is very straightforward and honest, but you're not me, so on we go."
By "deceit" she meant the conjuring of illusions, which she was pretty adept with and Cally discovered that he was as well. Within a matter of hours, he could create simple deceptions like making a bare rock look like it was covered in grass or vice versa. He was in the middle of trying to get the illusory grass to wave about as if it was being tousled by the wind when a scout raced down the column of norren yelling Yobb's name.
The village ahead had been massacred.
15
Houses appeared from the trees like toadstools after a rain. Most norren were nomadic clans like the Wise Trout, but there were some who lived in settled villages instead, and even a few that lived in the human cities along the Gaskan border. Their buildings seemed too tall, especially the doors, and actually everything about them felt quite funny.
Cally didn't have much time to notice the architectural details, however, as the bodies sprawled across the ground commanded that he pay attention to them instead.
Yobb didn't pause as she crossed the boundary from the forest's edge into the village. Cally wanted very badly to ask her if she was sure that whoever had done this was no longer here, but he knew she'd already sent reanimated scouts of her own ahead. She had a team of norren warriors with her, too. Their height, and their spears, made him feel a little better.
The air smelled of blood and offal. There looked to be a few dozen bodies in all, abandoned where they'd fallen. Yobb muttered orders to the warriors, who spread out to hold the ends of the squiggly crossroad. As she made her way to a cluster of three bodies, one of them rolled over and moaned.
Yobb swore, gesturing to Cally and running toward the moaning woman. The patient bore deep cuts on her arms, back, and shoulders. Nether darkened the air around the two sorcerers.
"Do you know triage?" Yobb said.
Cally glanced up. "I know the theory."
"Heal enough to stop death. No more than that. Don't bother about tending to the pain. We may have much more work to do."
Cally nodded, sinking the nether into the deepest cuts. The woman was shivering, her eyes glazed in a way that suggested she had lost a lot of blood. Which was confirmed by the wide pool of it beneath her.
"Who do you think did this?" he said.
"I think," Yobb said, "that we should learn that after we get away from whatever did this."
She checked the other two bodies, then jogged over to a man p
ulling himself toward her from behind a hedge. Cally closed five wide wounds to the woman, but left many others untreated. This went against all of his training to comfort, soothe, and make the patient whole, but in the Order, they usually treated single patients at a time, not…disasters.
He stood, nodding to the two norren warriors standing guard over him. "Bandage the rest."
They looked down at him with mild surprise. He was about to add "please," then clenched his jaw. "She's still bleeding. You need to help her."
Cally ran toward a man he'd seen moving outside one of the homes. Behind him, the warriors crouched to tend to the woman he'd just left.
The man was far worse. His belly was cut and he was holding loops of himself in place. Cally's head grew so light he had to kneel down or risk collapsing.
"Help," the man rumbled. "Help me."
"You'll be fine," Cally said thickly. "You'll be fine. Just a minute."
He drew his knife. The man gazed at it in fear, but Cally just scratched the back of his knuckle and returned the blade to its sheath. Nether swooped up from the ground like the earth was spitting up droplets of black rain. Cally sent it to the man's stomach and closed his eyes, breathing through his mouth so that he wouldn't be able to smell as much.
It had looked bad enough to his eyes. Looking at it from within the nether, it was so bad Cally had the urge to spin around and walk away. But this was his calling and his duty. He began with the severed parts, drawing the pieces together and knitting them back the way they should be.
Things looked better at once. There were many, many other rips and tears, however. Anything internal could kill a man, especially within the gut. The patient was breathing quick and shallow. Bad sign. Hopefully it was just the pain. Cally closed one of the biggest rips, a second, a third, starting at the top and working his way down.
The patient's breathing slowed. Cally opened his eyes, guiding the nether to the last long gash across his skin.
"There," he said. "You're fine."
The norren's face was still pale and sweat-soaked, but his eyes filled with wonder. "Are you really a human?"
"Do I look like the world's shortest norren?"
"Thank you, human."
Cally nodded and swiveled his head in search of the next patient. A figure ran at him from the trees, sword drawn and angled low, ready to be swung. Cally yelped and pulled the shadows to him. The man's face was bloody and grimed, his hair sweaty and matted, eyes blazing from this mess like marbles of ether.
"Cally!" the man hissed—it was Rowe; he was still wearing the same cloak they'd bought from Bartle the farmer, and the sword was the same one he'd been carrying all this time. "Stay right here."
He dashed quietly across the ground toward Yobb. They spoke for just a few seconds, Rowe pointing deeper into the woods and then toward the general direction of where the rest of the clan waited in the forest some ways away. Yobb nodded. Rowe ran back to Cally.
"Move." Rowe ran for the far side of the village.
Cally swiveled his head, running beside him. "Where are we moving to?"
"Eyes sharp and mouth shut."
Rowe's general disposition was such that he'd probably try to infuse a campside breakfast with full military discipline, but Cally had the sense that in this instance he was not crying wolf. Rowe veered off the road and ran behind the houses, most of which were built partially around features of the landscape—living trees as support pillars, or a boulder forming one wall, or dug into the side of a slope—and all of which had well-kept gardens, along with various sheds, shops, and cleared spaces to work on the arts and hobbies that made up so much of norren life.
Rowe came to a dry stream bed and ran alongside it. It occurred to Cally that there were still wounded norren that he ought to be attending to rather than just dashing about. Rowe swore, grabbing Cally's shoulder and pulling him toward the ditch. The pair of them rolled inside it.
Cally clamped his mouth shut. And waited. Brambles and grass lined both banks of the dried-out creek. On the far bank, the growth rustled. A figure stepped to the edge.
Its eyes were huge and watery, darting back and forth to survey the woods ahead of it. Its mouth was abhorrently long and hung as slack as an empty sleeve. One of its arms appeared normal, if spindly, but the other was thick and strong, as strong as an oak, its blunt fingers terminating in long claws. The creature was nude but there were no signs of its sex except for the gnarled male muscling of its trunk and limbs.
It whipped its head to the left, then to the right. It slung itself forward and ran along the bank toward the village, its soft footfalls fading away.
"What was that?" Cally whispered once he dared to make any noise at all.
"You know what it was."
"How did they make one so fast? Are there any others?"
"Only seen the one."
"And it did all this?"
Rowe nodded slowly. He waited another few moments, then rose, gazing behind them, and climbed from the brush-clogged bottom up to the low bank. Nether in hand, Cally followed. Had Yobb gotten the others away in time? He wasn't hearing any screaming yet. That much was good.
After another five hundred feet, Rowe swerved away from the dry stream, running alongside a short limestone slope. He came to a stop in front of a patch of wall that was heavily scored with scratches. The air smelled of fresh stone dust.
Rowe motioned to the scratched segment. "Open it."
"Right," Cally said. "Open the wall?"
"It's a door."
"No, doors have the quality of being doors. Whereas the wall-shaped object before us is a wall."
"And the norren put a door in it. You can't see it because the norren built it and when they build a door they don't want you to see then you're not going to see it. Now find it!"
Cally reached out, searching with his fingernails for a seam in the pebbly gray stone, lost as to why Rowe thought he could do this when Rowe couldn't—and then he flushed, because he was a sorcerer, and Rowe wasn't. Still touching the wall with his left hand, he used his knife to nick his knuckle again, as it had stopped bleeding. The nether came to him in a rush. He sent it into the scratched-up stone.
Even with the aid of the shadows, the seams were subtle things. Yet he could see them clearly enough, a broad oval sliced into the rock, six inches deep with a hollow space behind it. Cally used the nether to search the door's full circumference.
He narrowed his eyes. "You're right. It's a door. But it's not one I know how to open."
"There'll be a catch of some kind. Find it and spring it."
With a moment's hindsight, this was immediately obvious, and Cally wondered why he'd felt compelled to seek permission to search for it. He squared his shoulders and closed his eyes, making another pass around the edges of the door. Now that he was looking for it, the catch was right there, a contraption with the smoothness and sharpness of metal. Two thick hinges supported the door on the other side.
Cally shifted his attention back to the latch, gathering the nether within it and willing the bolt to slide free. He'd never used the nether to move something, however, and when it failed to budge, he had no idea whether that was because of his own incompetence, or because it wasn't even possible. He pushed on the end of the bolt, then wiggled the shadows back and forth, afraid to force it lest he break it.
A norren man bellowed to the south, back toward the village, making Cally snap his head upward. He could spend all day poking and jiggling and get nowhere. With a prayer to Carvahal, lord of tricks, luck, and poor decisions, Cally shaped the nether into a razor-edged wedge, braced it against the base of the catch, and struck it as hard as he could.
It gave way with a muffled ping. The door swung inward as silently as the shadow of a cloud moving across a valley. A face swam from the darkness within. Cally cried out and stumbled away.
Rowe reached through the opening. "Out now. All of you. Quickly."
He stepped back, helping a norren boy out into the daylig
ht. The boy's face was so soft and young he didn't seem as if he could be more than five or six years old, but he was just two inches shorter than Cally. Rowe helped a second boy out, then a young girl; the rest spilled out in a flood of kids, as if the thing keeping them in had been each other and not the door. Cally was about to ask Rowe what this place was, but he realized he could figure that out for himself: just because these norren had settled down in a village didn't exempt them from getting raided by other clans. When an attack came, the adults would hide their children in this shelter, and no one would even know they were there.
Yet somehow, the wight had found them.
There were close to twenty of them in all, ranging from very tall toddlers to extremely tall youths on the brink of their teens.
Cally looked them over. "Are any of you hurt?"
A girl wrapped her lanky arms around herself. "Is it still here?"
"Yes." Rowe set his hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye. "But we're taking you away. Somewhere safe. Are you ready?"
"Give me a second," Cally said.
"Cally—"
"One second!" He turned to the children. "Find me a bug. Something that can fly. Better if it's already dead."
They stared at him in confusion, then crouched down, searching the grass. Cally's heart was athunder in his chest as he prayed that he wasn't about to get them killed, but a girl popped to her feet with a smile and delivered him a large moth, quite dead, wings tattered. Cally cupped it in his palm and breathed the nether into it. He cast it into the sky. It flapped its wings and began to circle them. The children gawked at him.
Rowe made eye contact with Cally and gave him a nod of recognition. Rowe led the way to the northeast, away from both Yobb's soldiers and the larger part of the clan that had waited behind, but they'd circle back to them in time. Once they were safe.
All signs of village or roads vanished behind them, claimed by the forest. Swift-moving clouds reached from the east to hide the sun behind them. Cally kept the moth zigzagging a ways behind their party. He wasn't sure what they'd do if the younger norren grew tired of running, but even the smallest of them was long-legged enough to look able to keep going for miles.
The Sealed Citadel Page 17