The Sealed Citadel Read online

  She snorted and snapped another twig in half. "Do you think it's actually going to change anything? The big meet?"

  "Yes," Cally said. "I do."

  "Why? What's so special about now?"

  "I don't know. Master Tarriman stopped telling me the Order's secrets after I punched his nose off. But look at the way they're acting. They think something big is coming."

  "But that means they've finally figured out a way to tear down the wards."

  "Which means it's time for the Lannovians to come show us how to kill the demons trapped behind them."

  Lora seemed to think about this. As the moment stretched on, Cally felt like he ought to say something, but he didn't know what. Lora got to her feet, gave him a little wave, and walked away.

  There were supposedly bandits in the area, but the soldiers didn't see any that night, nor on their travels the second day. The very existence of bandits confused Cally. Roaming bands of armed men who just…preyed on people? Wouldn't it be easier to start a farm somewhere? To chop wood, and deliver that wood to others for an agreed-upon price? To say nothing of the damage such predation must do to their own conscience! The whole thing was so illogical. He wondered if anyone had ever bothered to sit down and explain this to the bandits.

  Late in the afternoon, they came to a village, stopping to offer prayers and treatment to the sick. Tarriman called Lora over to help him administer to the ill. Cally was told to observe. He did just that, watching both the flow of the nether as it was brought to the bodies of the afflicted, and their awed and humbled faces as the weakness and pain was lifted from the fibers of their being. In the wake of their cure, some stood still, tears streaming down their faces; others fell to their knees, heads bowed. As they thanked Lora, Cally felt a pang of jealousy that was most untoward.

  The next day the road converged on a shallow river, the waters icy clear over the multi-colored stones of its bed. Leafy trees mixed with the ever-present pines, their foliage brightened with all the colors of fire. The group's initial boisterousness had calmed down, but even the lowest of soldiers still marched enthusiastically forth, breaking into smiles for no reason at all.

  The following morning, the road broke from the river, only for the water to sweep about and cut directly across the path a few miles later. A stone bridge spanned it. Canoes rested on the shore and a village nestled among the trees. Hearing that a caravan of armed men was heading toward them, the people had all hidden indoors, but seeing the Order of the Healing Shadows in their silver and black, the villagers came forth in greeting.

  After a bit of merry-making, the ill and infirm were shepherded to the communal boat house. Cally idled near the door, watching as he had two days before. He felt abruptly superfluous. Why had they even brought him on the venture? Was his presence pure symbolism? Proof to the gods that the youth were carrying on the fine tradition of the Order?

  But could the gods really be tricked in that way when one of those youths couldn't be trusted to cure the minor infection a fisherman had suffered after being scratched by his own hook?

  The villagers brought in cots. Tarriman moved his large body among them with surprising grace. After seeing to an old married couple, he moved on to a young man little older than Cally whose left leg was stiff with bandages and splints. Tarriman spoke quietly to the youth, then kneeled beside his leg and extended his right hand. Flecks of nether spun up from the dirt floor and gathered in his fingers. Tarriman touched them to the splints.

  He crouched in thought, then turned to Cally and beckoned. "Cally! Your presence is required for treatment."

  Cally glanced about himself, as if the Master might be summoning some other Cally, then hurried to Tarriman's side. "Sir? What is it?"

  Tarriman lifted an eyebrow. "Was I unclear? I want you to heal this boy."

  "Heal him. Using my ability to heal. Yes, of course." Cally called out to the nether. His hand appeared to be shaking. He slipped the shadows past the bandages. The boy's shin had been badly broken. "Master, aren't you going to put him to sleep?"

  "Weren't you telling me that only makes it harder for you to treat him correctly?"

  Was this a trick? A test of his devotion to their beliefs? The Master's face was inscrutable. Doing some quick moral arithmetic, Cally decided that any harm done by such a trick fell on the deceitful teacher rather than the obedient student, and so he turned back to the youth.

  The youth, of course, being unable to run away, remained right there in front of them, and had been listening to them with something just short of wild-eyed panic.

  "Oh, stop worrying," Cally said. "I know what I'm doing. And if it turns out I don't, my Master does. Probably."

  The youth's eyes went wider. "Probably?"

  Cally ignored him, summoning more nether and flooding it into the man's leg. The break was several weeks old, but the bone's attempt to heal itself had been a mess; if Cally had mended anything so sloppily, he would have been packed off to the Mind's Fast until his teeth dropped out from old age. The safe course of treatment when the body had botched itself so badly would be to finish the mend as it was.

  But that would leave the youth unable to run, and perhaps even to work, for the rest of his life.

  He looked up. Tarriman nodded subtly. It was a test. But of what, Cally had no idea.

  For a long moment, he stared at it, unable to decide. He could have spent a week debating the pros and cons without coming any closer to an answer. With this thought, a different sort of answer revealed itself: he couldn't decide because there was no clear decision, because there was no clear evidence.

  Lacking that, rational decision could not be made: authority was thus remanded to one's judgment. Perhaps even one's instinct.

  Tarriman already knew Cally could make a rational decision as a healer. What he didn't know was whether he could trust Cally's instincts.

  Cally closed his eyes, saturating the broken bone with shadows. Heart thumping, he ordered them to dissolve the misgrown matter of the body's natural mend.

  The youth screamed. It was the type of scream that wouldn't stop until the patient lost consciousness.

  Sweat popped across Cally's temples and back. He brought more nether to him, great heaps of it, pouring it into the fractured shards. The blade-like edges where the bone had broken blurred. The youth screamed so loud Cally took a step back, losing focus.

  Cally tucked his chin and glared into the shadows. They roiled about the bone, and where they touched, new bone grew. It threatened to burst forth into strange and unwanted patterns, but Cally guided it with all the skill he had, coaxing it to mirror the young man's unharmed right leg.

  He finished, pulling back the excess nether and letting it disperse into nothing. His legs were shaking. On the cot, the youth's face was as pale as birch bark and all of his skin was slimed with sweat. His eyes were wide open.

  This time, it wasn't with fear—but with disbelief.

  He swung his right leg off the cot, then gingerly shifted his left. Seeming to feel no pain, he set his left leg on the dirt floor and, face alight with equal parts fear and hope, braced his hands on the cot, and stood.

  The act seemed to disorient the equilibrium of humors within his body, for tears spilled down his cheeks in profuse rivulets.

  "I thought I'd never walk right again," he said to Cally. "Thank you, sir. Thank you!"

  Cally had no idea what to say to this. The young man saved him by laughing and embracing him, then skipping across the boat house to call to his friends in joy.

  Tarriman rested his large hand on Cally's shoulder. "Congratulations, Cally. You've passed your first test. Did you think that when you set off down this road we're on, you'd also set down the road to becoming a true healer?"

  He hadn't. There were times he didn't understand his place in the world. Yet seeing the exuberance on the young man's face, and the restoring power wielded by the Order Cally belonged to, he felt a part of something greater.

  One that he intended
to dedicate his life to.

  ~

  The passing of the test was accompanied by a simple ritual: the sewing of a four-pointed star to his robe. Along with a few more words of congratulation from Tarriman, that was it. Silently, Cally was disappointed. Of course the Order, in its ongoing quest for humility in all things, tried to draw little difference to its various ranks, and didn't really like to think of them as "ranks" at all. He understood that perfectly well.

  Even so, it would have felt good to have a proper ceremony of some kind. Or even just a nice cake.

  His promotion did mean, however, that Cally was now permitted to heal people by himself, as long as one of the superiors granted him permission. He could also give aid to others in an emergency without permission. And that did make him feel very proud of himself.

  Over the next few days of travel, the forests thinned, with long grassy meadows separating one reach of trees from the next. The autumn rains hadn't yet rejuvenated the land and the grass was yellow and grasshoppers sprung away from their advance. Then the woods gave out altogether, and they marched through sparsening grass, the ground broken up by low hills, large boulders, and cracks in the earth, many of them ten or twenty feet deep.

  Lora hadn't spoken to him much since their first conversation, but after his healing in the boat house, the two of them found themselves chatting with some frequency. Not only was she among the more talented of their cohort, but she was quite possibly the prettiest, and Cally didn't think he was insane to think there was something more to their talk than a way to pass the time. In places like Mallon, women weren't allowed to join the priesthood at all, let alone marry, but there were no such restrictions on their Order.

  Even so, he had no idea or guidance on how to proceed with such a matter. But he supposed he was still quite young, and had his calling to tend to anyway, and that things, if they were to happen, would shake out with the passage of time.

  The land dried further. Most of the stream beds were empty, and scouts ranged hither and yon to find those that were still running to let them refill their water skins. In the woods, the soldiers had done some hunting and foraging to supplement their rations, but that looked impossible here. Not unless they intended to spend their evenings roasting crickets and wasps. Still, they were less than a week from Tantonnen, and the weather was neither too cold nor too warm, making for pleasant travel.

  Cally found himself wanting to speak with Master Tarriman, yet despite the countless hours they were all on the march, Tarriman was kept very busy speaking with his fellow Masters and their monks, presumably on the matter of the coming meet. So it was with great frustration that Cally, on finally securing a few minutes to talk with Tarriman, was interrupted almost at once by a dingy soldier.

  "Master Tarriman," the man said. "We've spotted norren. Just a few miles to the southeast."

  Tarriman glanced that way, but their sight was blocked by a lazy hill. "These are the Norren Territories, aren't they?"

  The soldier's eyes looked ready to run the Master through. Cally didn't think the fellow could be much older than thirty, but the weather-wear to his face was so thorough that in some ways he looked older than Tarriman, who had at least twenty years on him. This notion of age beyond his years was heightened by the man's build: he was clearly quite strong, yet there was a gauntness to him, a lankness to his limbs that suggested he had once been something more.

  The soldier spat between his teeth. "They are. That makes us trespassers."

  Tarriman frowned. "We arranged this with them well in advance."

  "With every clan?"

  "With the Territory. We have signed contracts of passage."

  "Got a lot of experience with the norren, Master?"

  "Precisely what are you attempting to ask?"

  "They don't use contracts the way you and yours might. To the norren, you don't use it to agree how to treat each other right. They use a contract to figure out what they can still do to screw you over."

  "That has not been my experience, Sergeant Rowe. Nor the experience of the many scouts and emissaries who cleared the ground for our trip to Tantonnen in the first place. They will honor the contracts."

  "And if another clan's wandered in that hasn't heard of the nice words you put down on paper?"

  "Then I have faith the gods will protect us." Tarriman smiled wryly. "Which they will accomplish in part through my new order to double the scouts and the watch to ensure no trouble comes to us."

  Rowe nodded. "I'll see it done, Master."

  "If you run into them, don't provoke them. I'd rather lose time to a detour than stain this land with unnecessary blood."

  They carried on through the increasingly dusty land. Hawks keened from high above. That afternoon, as they mounted a hill, Cally's eyes were drawn miles to the south. There, a trio of figures stood before a pile of shattered rocks, watching the caravan. They seemed much too big, but before Cally could get a better look, they dissolved within the rocks, leaving him unsure whether he'd seen them at all.

  The night passed in quietude, an uncertain wind ruffling the beleaguered grass as the stars burned fiercely from above. Cally woke to a cool autumn dawn. A legion of clouds marched from the west, steadily conquering the sky. They prepared a quick breakfast and continued down the road, which by now was no more than a lane of bare, cracked earth carrying on toward the south, washed out and gravel-strewn in the low points where the spring melt scoured the land.

  There was very little in the way of cover besides hedges of pungent sage and small copses of pale, thorny trees, and mounted scouts cleared the way for miles ahead. Yet somehow, on climbing out of a defile, the procession found itself face to face with a full band of norren warriors.

  3

  With a series of gasps and the rattle of horse tack, the caravan stopped in its tracks. The norren gazed down on them like beings from an old tale. The shortest of them was as tall as any human Cally had ever seen and the tallest of them looked to rival the height of the mounted soldiers—seven feet or more.

  It wasn't just their height that set them apart. The men wore great beards that covered their faces high up the cheeks, leaving their eyes visored as if by a hairy knight's helm. Their noses were as strong as their shoulders, but their ears were so small and round they were often hidden completely by their beards and long hair.

  They carried wide-bladed spears, and bows that looked too heavy for any human hand to draw. Few had swords and they wore little in the way of metal armor, opting instead for hardened leathers and the furry hides of beasts.

  A norren man and a woman strolled forward a long pair of paces. They were dressed much the same as the others, but their hair, the fringes of their clothes, and the man's beard twinkled with many tokens of glass and steel.

  "You have come to our land," the woman said.

  Tarriman took a step forward, making a small gesture to the others to remain in place. "That is so."

  "By virtue of it being our land, that makes it not-your-land. If it is not-your-land, that means the person whose land it isn't—you—shouldn't be on it."

  "That is understood to us. Out of respect for your territory, we've arranged contracts of free passage through it, with both the One-Tree Clan and the Salamander Clan."

  The woman nodded. "Yes, I see." She looked about her warriors, her brow furrowing. "It's just as I feared. You see, we are neither the One-Tree, nor the Salamander."

  "The agreement was to cover all of their allies as well."

  She furrowed her brow more and turned to the man beside her. "Was I at this agreement, Winn?"

  "No, Nola," the man said. "Or else I would have been there too, and I don't remember going to any such agreement."

  "It seems that we were not there," Nola said to Tarriman. "Which seems also that we could not have agreed. Yet here you are. In our lands."

  Tarriman nodded thoughtfully. "There was an oversight in our arrangements, then. One that unfortunately left you and your people out of conside
ration. But the gods, in their wisdom, have brought us together here to correct that oversight. Let us negotiate a separate deal here and now."

  The woman's deep-set eyes traveled across their cloaks and doublets. "You are from Narashtovik."

  "That is so."

  "Does that mean you are of the Order of the Healing Shadows?"

  Tarriman gave a short bow. "Just so, my lady."

  Nola smiled faintly in a way that Cally didn't like, but the expression was gone an instant later. "It is typical that when someone who does not own the land wishes to cross the land, they will pay a toll to the one who does own it."

  "Our Order is not one that seeks great wealth. But we will be happy to pay you for passage through your home."

  The norren woman turned once more to her partner. "What do you think?"

  "Yes," Winn said.

  "Then we are agreed." She tilted her head at Tarriman. "In exchange for letting you travel onward, we will take everything."

  The Master blinked. "Everything? Surely you don't mean—"

  "You are right, I've made a mistake. We just want everything on you, not everything that you own everywhere. As a sign of our goodwill, you can keep your clothes."

  "My lady, I'm happy to bargain with you in good faith. But to ask everything—"

  She made a cutting motion with her massive hand. "This place is sacred. There is no price high enough to offset the defilement of the holy ground of Josun Joh. If anything, we're ripping ourselves off by asking for so little."

  "I don't think you understand." Tarriman's voice went as tight and low as those times when an apprentice had put himself or others at great risk. "We are not traveling to pay an idle visit or drink some fat lord's excess wine. We are here to do something very important."

  "Whatever it is surely must be less important than crossing our territories without being killed by us. Which is what will happen if you deny the toll."

  "I am a priest of the nether. A sorcerer of the highest rank." Tarriman spread his right hand, shadows weaving between his fingers in thick threads. "You will stand aside or learn to fear my anger."