The Sealed Citadel Read online

  "Ossodale called him a traitor. Again, Larrimore didn't back down. Almost came to war. But in the end, they reached an agreement. The humans who'd come to live there could stay. Everything else would be turned back to the norren. Including the hills of pink silver. Far as I know, they're still your territory. And you've got him to thank for it."

  Rowe tilted back his head, curling his lip. "Don't get me wrong. Larrimore didn't do what he did because of some love of you people. He did what he did because it was just."

  "Oh," Winn said brightly. "That Larrimore of Narashtovik."

  "After that, the Clan of Lost Bears promised him any favor he'd ask. He never had need to take them up on it. I'm here to claim his boon."

  "That is a nice story," Nola said. "Too bad you people have never done anything else like it. Nice as the story is, though, do you really think you have a right to it just by knowing it? You don't have any claim to Larrimore's Boon."

  Rowe smiled thinly. "Wrong. I'm the only man alive who does. I'm Larrimore's grandson, Rowellen of Narashtovik."

  She narrowed her eyes. "If we are supposed to just take your word on that, 'Rowellen,' then you will have to take my word that I am Larrimore's bastard granddaughter Noellen, and I'm claiming his Boon for myself."

  Rowe reached under his shirt and withdrew a fine silver chain. On its end hung a knob of unshaped silver shot through with veins of pink. "He carried it the rest of his life. After that, my father Valledan bore it. Now I do."

  Nola held the silver up to better see it. "They were nobles. You don't look very noble to me. You look like a common soldier. How is that so?"

  "Doesn't matter. What matters is that you honor the debt and bring me to the Lost Bears."

  "Maybe I believe you are who you say you are. But I can't make the decision to honor the debt by myself. I must speak with Josun Joh. Wait here."

  She turned on her heel and strode away. Winn followed behind her. Cally supposed he and Rowe could have tried to slip away at that point, but there were dozens of norren warriors sitting nearby and it felt like their secondary duty, other than chatting happily and sharing drinks from leather skins, was to keep an eye on the two humans.

  "What did she mean, she's going to speak with Josun Joh?" Cally said. "Isn't that their god?"

  "Yes," Rowe said.

  "And they…speak to him? Just like that?"

  "So they say."

  "Remarkable. What's he like?"

  "Don't know. I'm not a norren."

  "Yes, of course." Cally fiddled with his hands. "What do we need to see their nethermancer for? Are we going to join with them to go after the Lannovians?"

  "They don't have close to the strength for that."

  "Then what do you need them for?"

  "Do you ever stop asking questions?"

  Cally was about to ask how it could possibly be a bad thing to ask questions, then stopped himself. They waited in the darkness, which was pleasant, if a bit on the cold side. A few minutes later, Nola and Winn returned, looking thoughtful.

  "The Clan of Lost Bears can't help you," Nola informed them.

  Rowe set his jaw. "The debt. They owe me!"

  "They can't help you because they're no longer here. After the territories were restored, there were disputes. Over which of us were to roam which parts of them. The Lost Bears did not do well in these disputes. In fact they did so not-well that they eventually fled far south to stop themselves from losing their entire existence. They haven't been back since. For all I know, they're in the Collen Basin by now."

  "Hadn't heard that." Rowe gazed down a moment, then lifted the chain from his neck and held out the pink silver to Nola. "Don't suppose I need this anymore. I offer it as payment for our passage through your lands on our way home."

  "You keep that," Winn said sharply. "It's yours, your treasure and your burden."

  Nola nodded. "We already knew that the Lost Bears were gone. That isn't why I spoke to Josun Joh, and he would have laughed at me if it was. I spoke to him because I thought to myself that there aren't many humans like Larrimore, and that it would be wise for us to encourage more of them. Josun Joh agrees. He also thinks that bad tidings are coming to this land, and that the granting of a modest favor now might save us a great deal of trouble in the future."

  "So if we did have a sorcerer, you might ask her for your boon. And if she thought it was good—and, let's not forget, assuming she exists—she might grant you what you want."

  "It's not for me," Rowe said. "It's for the boy."

  Nola beetled her heavy brow. "The one who both talks too little and too much? What does he need?"

  "I need you to train him."

  Cally jerked up his head. "What?"

  The two norren looked at each other. Then they began to laugh.

  12

  The old woman slid the knife into the wrinkled skin of her arm and drew it downward. It cut easily. The flow of blood was immediate. She blinked, but otherwise showed no sign of the pain.

  She lifted her brown eyes to Cally. "Show me."

  He bowed his head, summoning the nether from the undersides of the orange and yellow leaves. It responded as it always did, but he was stricken with the near-paralyzing fear that he was about to mess everything up. Feeling himself sweating even though the morning was far from warm, he sank the shadows into her arm, surrounding the wound, tying vessels back to their broken ends, meshing flesh back with flesh.

  The flow of blood stopped. The skin sealed smooth, leaving no trace of the injury. Except, of course, for all the blood.

  "Very good," the old woman said.

  Cally laughed nervously. "You're putting a lot of faith in me."

  "You said that you could heal."

  "But what if I couldn't?"

  "Then I would end your training, and strike you, because you are a liar, and I don't teach liars. Unless of course I have some reason to break my rule against not teaching liars. But assuming I didn't, then I would send you away and take care of myself."

  He had hoped that Yobb, being old and wise, would be easier to understand than the other norren. This was obviously not the case. Oh, her words were clear enough, but he was having a devil of a time figuring out whether he was meant to take them literally or the exact opposite. He decided to take them literally, because if he did so and then did something wrong as a result, he would be able to blame her for misleading him.

  "What else?" she said.

  "I wasn't taught this," Cally said. "So it might be cruder than it could be. But I also know how to do this."

  He drew on more shadows, then smeared them over Yobb's eyes.

  "I can't see," she said.

  "Precisely."

  "So this talent is to be used whenever you would like to stop someone from seeing."

  "That's how I've used it so far, yes."

  "How else would it be used?"

  "You could…wrap the shadows around a present you're giving someone. So they wouldn't know what it is until you take the nether away."

  "Instead of blinding a person from seeing, you are blinding an object from being seen. Yes, this is clever. Very good."

  "Ah, thank you."

  "Now," she said. "What else?"

  Cally waved his hand, dispersing the nether from her eyes. "For this one, I need something dead. Just an insect or something."

  "Then you should go and find an insect."

  "Of course." Embarrassed that he'd phrased this in a way that might be interpreted as a command, he hunched down and pawed through the leaves. He was suddenly afraid, indeed almost terrified, that he wouldn't be able to find a dead one, and he'd have to ask her to kill a bug for him, which felt as though it would be humiliating. But he quickly turned up a dead roly-poly half curled up on itself.

  He brushed a patch of ground clear, set the bug down in the middle of it, and held his hand above it. Shadows trickled down from his fingers, stirring the dormant nether within the roly-poly. One of its legs twitched. It arched its back, re
aching out with all of its legs until it was able to pull itself right-side up. Cally had it turn toward Yobb and lift its antennae, waiting for orders.

  The old woman folded her hands, which were gnarled, but in the same sense as a branch she might beat you over the head with. "What can you do with it?"

  "I have control over it. Including its senses. So I can spy and scout with it."

  "If it was a wasp, could you sting people with it?"

  "I don't see why not."

  "Very good. So this is one more thing that you can do. What else?"

  "I can track people's footprints." Cally frowned. "Although I suppose that's using the ether. So that's it, really. That's what I know of the nether."

  "I see," Yobb said. "This is very bad."

  "Among my people, it's considered quite good. I'm the most advanced apprentice among them."

  "How old are you?"

  "I'm fifteen."

  "Do you know what I was doing when I was fifteen?"

  He looked up at her. "Still trying to hunt enough deer to make a pair of breeches long enough to fit you?"

  "I was learning to destroy people like you."

  "Well yes, that's what most sorcerers are taught to do: wield the corruption of the past to spread more misery in the present and ensure the decay of the future. Within the Order, we are taught to soothe, heal, and restore. In order to do that, the process we use must be free of corruption as well. That's why it takes so long to learn. Anyone can take a drink from a muddy river. But if you don't want to get sick, it will take you time to purify the water you draw from it."

  "If that is how it works in Narashtovik then Narashtovik must be a very blessed place, for if that's all I knew at fifteen, I would have been dead by sixteen. You know so little that I will assume you know nothing at all. Now summon the nether for me."

  Cally had already done that each time he'd performed a talent for her, but he obliged, pulling the shadows from the ground and pooling them in his hands. "We practiced proper summoning for a full year. Does my technique meet your standards?"

  Yobb nodded. "I suppose that is fine. When they taught you to do this thing that is fine but unexceptional, did they train you to think of the nether as something else in order to help you conceive of it?"

  "Water."

  "And how is the nether like water?"

  "It flows much like it. It must be channeled with some care, or else it can flood forth in ways that can be disastrous. It's also like a well within yourself that can run dry if you tap too much from it in one day. Mostly, though, it's the manner in which it moves. Seeking the low places, coursing over things, streaming, and so forth."

  Yobb turned to gaze across the grassy valley below them within which a blue stream zigzagged through an audience of trees. "It seems to me that it is also like the air. Wouldn't you say?"

  "I suppose so. Yes, isn't it? For the nether surrounds us just as much as the air does. The flow of it is pretty similar to the wind, too. It's a blessing, as it can bring us rain for the fields, but it can also bring down great storms and destruction. Although the air can't really be channeled, can it? Although to that although, it can: the nethermancer just has to think of himself not as a stream bed, but as a canyon, or a bank of mountains, diverting the wind where he will. Yes, I see many ways to compare the two."

  "If the nether is like the water and also like the air, doesn't that make the water and the air like each other as well?"

  Cally blinked. "I suppose they'd have to be."

  "If you put water on a fire, what happens?"

  "It gets rather less fiery."

  "If you put wind on a fire, what happens?"

  "Well, it gets more fiery."

  "Troubling." Yobb sounded quite worried. "For this makes it sound as though air is not much like water after all. But perhaps we can reason our way out of this. Can you drink air?"

  "If you want to become very thirsty."

  "And can you breathe water?"

  "If you want to become very dead."

  "Damn it!" She pounded her thick fist against her leg. "Not again!"

  "All right, I see where you're going with this," Cally said peevishly. "If the nether isn't really like the water or the air, then what is it like?"

  "What is it like?"

  "Yes, that's the question, isn't it?"

  "And I am saying: that is the question you will ask yourself, until tomorrow, when we will resume again."

  "What, we're done already? But I haven't learned anything."

  "No," she said, "you have learned that you don't know much, and that some of what you thought you knew is false. So in a sense, you are even further behind now than before you came to see me."

  "Look, Miss Yobb—Sorceress—" Cally faltered, realizing he had no idea how to properly address her. "Master, if this is supposed to help me stop the Lannovians, then I don't have much time. I'm ready to learn more now."

  "No, you aren't. If you were, you could learn more now." Yobb reached for her towering walking staff from the tree she'd leaned it against at the start of their session. "But if you insist on being given less time to think, then you had better use that less time to think well. We will meet again before dinner."

  ~

  She headed back toward the camp. Cally felt awkward following behind her after she had dismissed him, and waited for a minute before returning as well. As the norren wandered about their lands, they carried tents insulated with feathers and fur that could be stuffed further with grass or the like, and they had hidden several of these tents among the trees so cunningly that Cally was afraid he'd gone in the wrong direction until he practically walked into them.

  Fearsome though the norren looked, and presumably could be in battle, when they were not smiting their foes, they passed the time with a great deal of non-fearsome behavior. Some fished and smoked the catch on racks, and others foraged about for mushrooms and carrots, but many of them sat about embroidering clothing; carving pieces of wood, ivory, and stone; making line paintings of the land and the camp; and practicing any number of other crafts and legitimate arts, some of which Cally had never seen before. He had assumed they were cruel savages whose idea of a good time was to drink whatever they could ferment and then punch each other until too many of them couldn't stand to continue. Seeing them casually creating things of beauty made him stop and stare.

  Fascinating as this was, however, Cally soon questioned why he had come back to camp, since the only person he could really talk to was Rowe, who knew nothing of sorcery, and everything else in the place would just be a distraction. He turned about and hiked uphill on the theory that a mind moved best when the body moved with it, and that the physical perspective he would gain from the heights might lend him a metaphorical one as well.

  The day got a little warmer and a bit less bleak. Cally reached the top of the hill without gaining any new insights. He liked to figure things out, but the Order hadn't asked him to do that much. The path that would lead them to the return of the unbroken Mill was a narrow one. There wasn't a lot of room for the exploration of questions.

  Yet he didn't seem to be in the Order at the moment. If that was true, he should do his best to entertain all thoughts about what the nether was like, even those that wandered near the precipice of blasphemy. The time for lunch came and went without him partaking of it. He'd always found he thought better when he was hungry. Likely to do with the fact that digestive matter, being earthy, weighed one down. Hence when you were free of that weight, your mind found it easier to ascend to the realm of inspiration.

  He fell asleep for a time. He hadn't meant to do this and he awoke in a panic; the sun was low, casting shafts of orange light through the boughs. He ran back to camp to find Yobb.

  "You're late," she said. "Either you were having very good thoughts that could not be interrupted, or very bad ones and were hoping for one to arrive that would save you."

  "I wouldn't know. For if I'm the type of person to spend hours having nothing b
ut bad thoughts, I might well also be the type to mistake bad thoughts for brilliant ones."

  "This feels true. And the fact that you have had that thought betters the chances that your other ones are good as well." She thumped her staff on the dirt. "Walk with me. I'm going to the stream, and I don't want to fall in and drown. The desire to not fall into things and drown is a common one for people to have, but I would be alone otherwise, and feel that desire more keenly, which might accidentally cause my fears to come true."

  "Okay."

  He waited for her to extend her arm to him. Instead, she lumbered forward, obliging him to take three loping steps to catch up. She appeared to be well into her seventies, at least if norren aged at all like humans, her hair stark white and her robes unable to conceal the norren-relative thinness of her limbs. But she moved with the vigor of someone untroubled by age.

  Now that he thought about it, however, it was possible she was even older than she looked: sorcery had a salubrious effect on the practitioner's health (aside from the part where the practice of sorcery had a high correlation with dying in battle with other sorcerers), and it wasn't rare for them to live past a century.

  You really weren't supposed to be excited about this, at least not within the Order—dwelling on the unnaturally long life before you was unhumble and all that—yet Cally had always secretly felt that this was amongst the biggest blessings of nether and ether, and sometimes let himself daydream of still being alive in another hundred years, having witnessed so much of the history to come. In his most wildest dreams of all, that history included restoring Narashtovik not only to the glory of the days before the wights, but to the heights it had seen centuries and centuries ago, when it had been the jewel of the north.