The Sealed Citadel

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I know it all sounds very bad," Cally said. "I think the Lannovians might even strike at us, but—"

  Garillar's eyes, which seemed like two caverns chiseled from the stone of his face, sparked with rage. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact. I just spent the last ten minutes explaining it to you."

  "In your travels, did you violate your oath against using the nether to shed another man's blood?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you violate your oath against using your own blood to feed the nether?"

  "Also yes."

  "And did you violate your oath against—"

  "You can probably save time," Cally said, "by assuming I've broken all my oaths."

  Garillar stared at him in naked anger. "Then you have made yourself an infidel."

  "What should I have done? Let the Lannovians kill me?"

  "You should have remembered your vows and returned to Narashtovik to let your superiors see to these troubles."

  "If I'd done that, you wouldn't have Merriwen's book back. You wouldn't even know the threat the Lannovians pose!"

  The Master pounded his fist on the table. "You have only worsened that threat by making the Lannovians believe we are pursuing them and mean to murder their leader, you idiot child!"

  "Are you saying you wouldn't kill her for what she did? This feels wrong! When you're attacked, you should be able to fight back. Even to kill. When you walk away from that belief, it doesn't even feel human."

  "That is the corruption speaking within you. You justify your lust for violence the same way a drunkard justifies his need for wine. It is that very sickness—that poison—that the Order seeks to bring to an end." His voice had been as stern as a father talking to a young son who's just done something very dangerous. He laced his fingers together and leaned back fractionally. "Do you even wish to remain with the Order?"

  "I do. That's why I came back, even knowing no one would be very happy about it."

  "Any one of your violations of the Core Oaths are enough to warrant your immediate expulsion. I feel sick to even hear what you have done and sicker still to think of how the taint you've brought on yourself could spread to your fellow apprentices." Garillar looked down, frowning. "But you didn't set down this path on your own. From the story you told us, it was Sergeant Rowe who shoved you over the threshold and into descent."

  "Even if that's true," Cally said with the distinct and panicked feeling he was a moment away from being crushed in a trap, "I still think it led to good things. Our circumstances were extraordinary and have to be judged as such!"

  "I have heard enough and you have said more than enough. It is my judgment that your crimes were severe—but that you were a child led astray by an adult. You may rejoin the Order as an apprentice once you have completed an appropriate period of the Mind's Fast, to be held within the Wizard's Solution. And for his part in your corruption, Rowe will be whipped—and cast out of the Order."

  18

  As Garillar had proclaimed, they stuck Cally in the Wizard's Solution.

  Theory and practice had proven countless times over that it was immensely frustrating to try to imprison a sorcerer. Any nethermancer with any talent whatsoever could blast his way out of a typical prison cell with a wallop of shadows. You could attempt to thicken the stone or build the walls with metal, but that would only slow the prisoner down. Doors were a massive problem as well, being that locks and bars were even easier to break than walls.

  The only halfway effective method of keeping a sorcerer locked up was to guard him with more sorcerers. But this was both a hassle and remained dangerous, for all it took was one lapse in concentration to wind up with a bunch of dead sorcerers and one escaped one.

  And so, at some point in history, someone in Narashtovik had built the Wizard's Solution. Cally didn't know if it was named for being a solution invented by a sorcerer or as a solution to them, but its design was cruelly wise. Its base was a thick stone pillar rising sixty feet from the ground. The cell itself was wrapped around the top of the pillar: a round room ten feet in diameter with two narrow slits for windows and an extremely steep conical roof. The pillar supporting it ran to its ceiling.

  The cell had an iron door, but that was only used for the initial insertion and eventual removal of the prisoner. Food, water, books, and other supplies were brought up to the cell by the use of a dumbwaiter raised up through the pillar, the center of which was hollow. Naturally this passage was much too narrow for a person to fit into. On cold days, heat leaked up through the dumbwaiter when fires were lit within the temple it was connected to.

  There was a hole set in one corner of the floor—not big enough to fit through, but large enough to squat over—and through this could be seen the final layer of security: the pit surrounding the tower's base. This was full of iron spikes. Because although the Solution was elevated sixty feet into the air, a sorcerer might still be tempted to jump, knowing that if he survived the fall, he could heal the damage dealt by it.

  But it was rather more difficult to survive being impaled by four-foot spikes, as well as convincing yourself to risk the attempt in the first place.

  In a way, it was almost flattering to be held within the Solution. Cally was almost certain no apprentice had ever been deemed worthy of it. He was making history.

  So it was from this esteemed vantage that Cally watched Rowe get whipped and then drummed out of the Order.

  It was a pleasant sunny morning, quite possibly the last such one of autumn. Rowe was taller than his captors and three soldiers were pulling him along with ropes like he was some kind of wild animal. Which at that moment was more or less true: Rowe was cursing and yelling (a little drunkenly, Cally thought), yanking against his ropes, staggering the soldiers as often as they were staggering him.

  They brought him to a low platform where the crowd could watch. Cally had a clear view from one of his windows. Garillar might have arranged that on purpose just for him, but it was quite possible the Solution had been intentionally aligned to give its residents the opportunity to watch as other criminals suffered on the punishment grounds, allowing those residents to better contemplate their own misdeeds.

  Garillar arrived a minute later, standing across from Rowe. His voice was officious and full. "You are charged with the corruption of the youth. The specific charge is that of turning an apprentice in the priesthood against the very heart of Merriwen's teachings, causing him to break both the First and Second Rules. This charge has been confirmed by the testimony of the one who was so corrupted. Your punishment is as follows: thirteen lashes. Once this punishment is complete, you will be immediately expelled from the Order of Healing Shadows."

  Rowe straightened, gazing down on the Master. He was too far away for Cally to make out his face, but his posture was one of pure contempt.

  They tied him to the post and stripped him of his shirt. The first lash landed with a sick snap that drew a line of vivid red from shoulder to hip. Rowe didn't even move.

  But the second lash swayed him. So did the third. The crowd gasped its approval with each stroke. Two of the soldiers who'd dragged Rowe out turned away. The third continued to watch. Rowe made it through the first five strikes without a sound, but grunted with the sixth, which staggered him.

  On it went until the twelfth lash dropped him to one knee, where he stayed for the thirteenth and last. He remained there, head bowed, breathing hard, blood dripping down his back to stain the platform. Cally wanted to reach out with the shadows and erase the red seams crossing Rowe's back, but that would only get them both whipped.

  Rowe lifted his head and laughed, the sound pained and croaked. "They'll come for you. They'll come for you and you won't have the will or the balls to stop them. They'll take what they can use and burn the rest. And in your last moments, you'll see that everything you've forced yourself to believe has been used to slit your own throat. You think you're punishing me by casting me out? You're doing me a mercy
. And I'll laugh when the last of you is cut out like a cancer."

  Garillar motioned to the soldiers, who yanked Rowe to his feet and frogmarched him from the platform. Some of the crowd jeered, but their heart no longer seemed to be in it.

  Another minute and they began to drift away. Until all that was left was a bloody platform and an empty field.

  ~

  After the scene at the punishment grounds, the very first thing Cally did was insist that the Order send a pair of riders south to repay Bartle the farmer his forty lorens. He also provided personal writs for the riders addressed to Nola, Winn, and Yobb, in the event that the scouts were accosted by the Wise Trout. Master Garillar was angered by the debt, but pledged that it would be repaid. Cally was heartened by the thought of the payment allowing Bartle to buy two more horses—and perhaps even, as Rowe had suggested, prove to a potential wife that Bartle would be able to provide for them.

  Cally didn't have much to do after that. Listen to the birds. Watch the people go on about their lives and their work. They didn't seem concerned about threats of invasion. Maybe he and Rowe had worked themselves up over nothing.

  He didn't dare practice the nether. If anyone sensed it, he'd be exiled.

  It was the Mind's Fast, which meant he couldn't even ask for anything new to read. Isolated and high-profile as he was, he wasn't going to be able to convince someone to smuggle him the Cycle of Arawn. Not this time. He expected he was too disgraced for such favors anyway.

  The only work he was allowed to read was the core of the Order's faith: the Declaration of Merriwen. He had read it many times before and approached it with the listless dread of a lazy young man forced to seek employment by his father.

  Yet this time, it felt like reading another work altogether:

  All history is swept with WOE: Venal kings and cruel queens doing as they please, and even those few heroes who gleam as brightly as treasured gems are in time brought low and cast aside, be it by those they have emerged to oppose, or by their own cracks and flaws. And these are not the worst of men, but the very best of them.

  Think, now, on all the stories of horror that we have all heard through tales or gossip, or seen with our own eyes: the killing of a father by his son, or a child by her mother; the slaughter of one land by another for territory or faith; the farmer who lets his field rot rather than feed the beggars starving in the city; the priest who robs his parishioners, the orphaneer who spends the wages meant for his charges on drink and whores, the fear and envy and cruelty and malice that every one of us feels near every day.

  This was not the world as it was nor as it was meant to be. We can cut this darkness from the human heart. We can trim off everything foul and return ourselves to that first pure state given us by the gods. Layer by layer, we can peel off the wickedness that has accumulated on us, becoming a better us, a beacon to the world. And when we ascend to that righteous state, we will look back at what we once were—how defined we were by our hatreds and fears—and we will be shocked that we let ourselves be so monstrous for so long.

  Lofty words. The sort of thing that filled you with purpose and drove you to spread that purpose to others.

  But now that he'd seen a little more of the world, he wondered if the only way the rest of the world would accept Merriwen's purpose would be at the point of a sword.

  He woke in the morning with a sense of unease. He'd been dreaming of traveling alone through strange lands. The Order's stance on dreams was that they were the disordered chaos of the darkness that was the night—that they were, in other words, the madness men's minds would fall into if the corruption of the nether ever completed its sweep of existence.

  Cally had accepted that stance. Yet he'd also noticed that some dreams weren't the pure chaos of a watery monster raising its tentacles to grab you from the depths. Some left you with feelings, or told you stories, that felt true. At first blush, it seemed clear that his dream of hiking through curious forests and spying on lively villages was a reflection of his dismay about being cooped up and isolated in the Solution.

  Typically, however, his deciphering of a dream, if correct, left him with the satisfaction of having solved a puzzle, and the enlightened feel of having completed a work of philosophy.

  In this case, he had no such feelings. If anything he was only getting moodier. The reason why wouldn't reveal itself until he sifted through the shards of what he could remember and he came to the moment when he had left the city. A mile outside it, he'd turned back for a look at it—one last look at its skyline, the cathedral and the castle in its center—and then he'd turned his back on it, and smiled, and hiked on.

  He was thinking of leaving the Order.

  ~

  Later that day, a pair of riders clattered through the gates and galloped across the courtyard. They reined in their mounts at the temple steps, jumped down, and dashed inside the building. Both men had the travel-worn, no-nonsense look of scouts.

  Less than an hour after that, despite twilight nearing, twenty soldiers mounted up and clattered out from the temple in a storm of hooves. They headed south down the streets. Cally had just enough light, and elevation, to see them reach the Pridegate, and continue south toward the fringes of the city.

  Night came. Too dark to read the Declaration of Merriwen, which was all he had to do, he tried to sleep. His mind had other ideas. Rather than becoming unconscious and null, it kept returning to Merriwen's other book. The manuscript titled Understanding the Darkness that Now Befalls Us.

  During the ride back to the city, he'd read it cover to cover, for one prudent reason (to try to learn how to kill the wights if they were attacked on their travels) and for one mildly disreputable reason (he was simply curious to see what was worth all the mayhem the book had wrought).

  To his deep disappointment, he'd been foiled on the first count. There was nothing in the book that told someone wanting to kill a wight how to do so. Or to be more norrenishly pedantic about it, there was nothing Cally was smart enough to see. There were no explicit instructions.

  But it had talked about the nature of the wights. They were—or had been—human. Their creation involved taking a person at the very moment of their death and then using some form of "inner nether" (this wasn't explained in any detail, and Cally had never heard the term before) to warp their shape so that, as they died, they became undead instead.

  In effect, it was a more extreme, and ghoulish, form of reanimation, like Cally used to create his scouts. And reanimation could also create human zombies. Zombies, however, were quite easy to kill: you could chop them up or bash them in just as you could a living person. The wights, then, were something far more sinister and depraved.

  As it turned out, there had been more to the book than wights. The second half of it was devoted to philosophy and theology. Cally had been puzzled and nonplussed by most of it.

  Before the twenty soldiers had just ridden off, though, he'd been staring at the Sealed Citadel. It was a couple of miles away but it had been built on a hill in the middle of the city and its walls and keep were tall enough that he could see them easily. Watching it, a piece of that murky second section of Merriwen's book had leaped out at him.

  "The walls that dam the wights in tight are made not of wood or stone," it said. "The walls that will save us are made rather of will. They will stand for as long as the will does, and no hammer, ram, or catapult may breach them. These walls, unseen, can only be breached by another will, if it is mighty enough: and passing through this breach will reveal the way to undo the demons."

  The passage hadn't made any mention of the Citadel. But to Cally, the reference couldn't be clearer. Whatever knowledge was trapped inside the keep, the Order didn't possess it, did they? The Citadel remained sealed to them.

  He woke to the daylight slicing through the tight frame of his southern window. He'd been dreaming again. He couldn't remember it, it was already too far gone. Instead, he found himself with a memory. Part of it was well-known to him, f
or it was from the day he'd been sent away from his home in Arrolore, but this new memory was a part he'd lost somewhere along the way.

  Along with the little knife his father had given him, his parents had given him some last words as well.

  "I hate that we have to do this," his mother had said. "But I'll hate what happens to you much more if we don't."

  "You have been blessed," his father had said. "Try to use that blessing to do good. But be sure to use it to become great."

  He no longer thought he could do that here.

  He didn't know where else he could go. Setteven, maybe, or somewhere more obscure. For now, the where didn't matter. Just the decision. He would wait out his punishment until he was brought back down to the temple.

  Then he would choose his spot, and he would slip away.

  A pair of days passed in quietude. The temple grounds seemed no more or less busy than normal. Cally sent his copy of the Declaration of Merriwen down the dumbwaiter with its cover face down, the sign that he thought he'd reflected on it enough for now, and was requesting other approved works. Some time later, the dumbwaiter squeaked, delivering three more books he'd also read many other times before.

  He paged through them listlessly but diligently, hunting for any last inspiration to reverse his decision to seek a new life elsewhere. He still hadn't found a reason to change his mind by the time the war came to the city.

  19

  Although he didn't know it at the time, he was among the first to know what was happening.

  An explosion of hooves echoed across the courtyard. Cally cast down his book and pressed his face to the window-slot. A lone rider came to the temple steps, stumbling as he dismounted. A servant threw his arm around the man's shoulder and helped him inside.

  Cally watched a few moments longer. Seeing nothing, he sat back down with his book.