The Sealed Citadel Read online

  Winn laughed out loud. "No we won't. For you're with the Order of the Healing Shadows. You won't do anything, you silly little man."

  At last Cally understood. The norren were a match for them in numbers, and each one looked capable of slaying several soldiers apiece. While the Order had many priests with them, they were banned by their faith from using their talents to do harm.

  "Enough talk," Nola said. "You've trespassed onto sacred ground. You can pay the toll with your things, or you can pay it with your blood."

  Around Cally, the soldiers drew their swords with a hiss of steel on leather. Across from them, the norren drew their great bows and hoisted their long spears.

  "No." Tarriman turned to his people. "No, our task is too important to risk in battle over a few material possessions. You will do as she says."

  The norren woman motioned to her warriors, a portion of whom advanced on the humans. The soldiers looked uncertain, but once the priests turned over their packs and pouches, the others followed suit.

  Nola folded her arms in satisfaction. "You will give us your horses, too."

  Tarriman clenched his jaw. "But you're much too big to ride them!"

  "You are right," she said. "But we are not too big to sell them."

  The Master flung his arms wide. "You will at least leave us our weapons!"

  "I suppose that if you die," the woman said thoughtfully, "we won't be able to charge you another toll on your way back home. Yes, you can keep your arms."

  The norren warriors went from person to person, gathering their things into rough sacks. A towering man lumbered toward Cally. Cally expected him to stink but he smelled faintly of herb-infused oils. The norren gestured with a hand big enough to enfold his skull.

  "Uh." Cally shrugged off his pack and held it out. "With my compliments."

  The norren eyed him for anything else of value, but Cally didn't have anything else other than his traveling robe, a small work knife, and the black cord around his neck, which bore both the pendant of the Order, and a charm of the fox of Carvahal that his mother had given to him the morning he'd left home for good. As if drawn by Cally's thoughts, the man's eyes fell on this. But the norren followed their own gods, and he seemed to disregard the necklace as worthless. The warrior moved on to one of the soldiers.

  They finished their looting with professional quickness. Nola gave a final glance around, confirming that they weren't leaving anything interesting behind, then smiled at Tarriman.

  "You have paid your toll and are free to go where you will, except for those of our places that are doubly sacred, which you shouldn't enter until you've gotten yourselves more horses and goods to pay with. Now travel with the blessings of Josun Joh!"

  She turned away. The norren departed, leading the horses, joking and singing to each other. They'd only gotten a short distance away before they seemed to dissolve into the landscape.

  Tarriman had stood as if frozen, but he now pawed at his robes, extracting something from an inner pouch. Cally glimpsed a corner of a book.

  The Master put it away, then lifted his head and cleared his throat. "This is but a small setback. The gods, in their mercy, have spared our lives and granted us our continued health. Let us thank them."

  They bowed their heads in prayer. Tarriman finished and gathered with the other Masters to confer. Cally looked about for Lora.

  "Cowards," a man muttered behind him.

  Cally spun about. The gaunt soldier, Rowe, was gazing off at the huddled Masters.

  Cally's neck tingled. "What did you say?"

  Rowe slid his eyes down to meet Cally's. "I said they're cowards."

  "How dare you say that?"

  "Not much of a dare to speak what anyone can see."

  "Well, what should they have done? Started up a war? Broken every vow we hold dear just for the sake of a few horses?"

  "And our food. Unless you got a taste for dust, there isn't much to eat around here."

  Cally felt himself redden; he hadn't thought of that. "They are only following the laws of the gods."

  Rowe laughed roughly. "You really think the gods gifted you people with the power to bring an army to its knees, and then declared you shouldn't use this power?"

  "I suppose you know better?"

  "I know I wouldn't let a pack of overgrown nomads rob me of everything I own."

  "If you're so certain of your beliefs, maybe we should go enlighten the Masters with them. Your name's Rowe, isn't it?"

  "You're going to report me? Will that make you feel proud?"

  "No," Cally said. "But it might put you in your place."

  For some reason, this made the man smile. "Yeah, go get my beer rations stripped from me now that there's no more beer left to be rationed. Go on! Run to your Masters!"

  Cally flushed again. "Maybe you have nothing bigger in your life than your daily allotment of beer. But the Order is fighting to make this world a better place."

  "Wouldn't really call it 'fighting,' would you? Maybe you'd better learn how before your whole Order's conquered by a fisherman with a scaling knife."

  Tarriman strode toward them, robes flapping around him. "Sergeant Rowe!"

  Rowe straightened, all the scorn blanking from his face. "Master?"

  "Are there deer in these lands?"

  "Where there's land, there's deer."

  "The norren have relieved of us of everything we have to eat. There are no villages between here and the border of Tantonnen. I want you to take four of your men on the hunt."

  Rowe scratched his unshaven jaw. "There'll be more norren."

  "Are you saying you're afraid?"

  "I'm saying don't send anyone you can't afford to not come back."

  Tarriman considered this. "Choose the men most fit for this. And take Apprentice Lora with you, too. She can heal any mishaps you might incur."

  "You priests might have more heavenly things on your mind to notice such base things, but Apprentice Lora is a woman, sir. We'll be gone overnight. Maybe longer."

  "And if your men can't control themselves for one night while the rest of us are starving, see that they don't come back, Sergeant Rowe."

  Rowe nodded, standing a little taller. "Understood, sir."

  He soon left on foot with his hunting troop, including Lora. The rest of the group continued into the endless south. They walked steadily, but their spirit had been taken from them.

  The day was warmer than it should have been given the season. Scouts roamed ahead to ward off norren and search for streams. The wind was silent, as if the very earth was watching them. Now and then a hawk screeched from above, but that only made the silences feel stronger.

  He wouldn't have thought any people could live in such a place, but the norren clearly did, as evidenced by the fact that Cally and the others now had nothing to their name. What lore or landcraft had they honed to survive here? He passed much of the day dwelling on this, yet it was so foreign from his life in the city that he had a hard time coming up with any answers at all.

  Sunset fell, the dust-rimed sky aflame with orange and pink. They made camp in a dry gully. They had no more than a few crackers to share between the dozens of them and Cally went to bed hungry. Then again, he had fasted before. For the first time since leaving Narashtovik, Tarriman cycled some of the monks and priests into the watch, but none of the apprentices were expected to help.

  Dawn broke. There was no breakfast to delay them and they soon got on their way. Rowe, Lora, and the hunters still hadn't gotten back. It occurred to Cally to wonder how the hunting party would even find them, considering they were on the move, but he supposed they must have worked some system out, though much like his attempts to understand how the norren lived here, he had no idea what it might be.

  Mid-morning, one of the scouts at last found a stream, and they diverted to refill their water and wash their faces and feet. This was refreshing, but the boost to Cally's spirits soon died away. They trudged on through the desert. It wasn't as hot
as it looked like it should be, but that was all that could be said for it.

  The sun peaked and began its fall. The road was barely there at all—just a suggestion beneath the sparse, yellow grass—when the soldiers at the front of the loose column cried out in surprise, throwing their hands above their heads.

  Cally cast himself to the ground and scrabbled for the nether in a cold panic, eyes roving to all corners in search of the norren attackers. Instead, a flight of stubby birds burst free of the sage.

  The soldiers laughed, hurrying to nock arrows. They loosed, knocking down two birds, then a third, but the flock was already assembling itself, the birds beating their wings to escape. Soldiers were shouting, gesturing to each other; some got down so as not to spook the grouse any worse while others circled wide, hoping to create a favorable angle.

  But the birds were only flying higher, cutting away from the range of the hunters' bows. In another moment, they would all be gone.

  Cally found, quite to his surprise, that he was running forward. And that the nether was flocking toward his hands in an inversion of the way in which the birds were flocking away from the archers. It seemed to him that he'd had an idea, but the specifics of it eluded him until the shadows launched from his hands toward the birds.

  They flashed toward the grouse like shaftless arrowheads. Monks cried out in horror, unable to turn away from the spectacle of sorcery about to kill a living being. Yet rather than striking the birds, the black bolts exploded in front of them.

  The grouse wheeled, hurrying the opposite direction—and back toward the soldiers. Arrows creased the air. Many missed, but some found their mark, the birds plopping to the dry ground with dusty whumps.

  The birds began to turn again. Cally unleashed a second salvo of shadows.

  "Cally!" Tarriman's voice rang across the field. He needed only a matter of moments to close on the apprentice. "What do you think you're doing?"

  "It seems to me," Cally said, "that the birds had meat, and we don't. I sought to correct the inequality."

  "The First Rule of the Order is that we must not use the shadows to kill. Are you under the impression this law doesn't extend to animals?"

  "It doesn't seem to me that I am killing them, am I? Otherwise there wouldn't be the need to shoot all those arrows at them. Thus it is demonstrated."

  "The subversion of the law, no matter how clever, remains subversion."

  Cally frowned at him, genuinely confused. "Isn't it true that the people pay the Order tithes because of the Order's ability to use sorcery?"

  "Which we use to heal. Not to harm!"

  "But with those tithes, we buy all sorts of things. Including the meat of animals. That means our sorcery is being used to kill, just with another step in the process."

  Tarriman scowled at him, and then at the things he'd just said. After a moment's thought, the Master shook his head. "I'm too hungry to figure this out right now. But you need to be careful of the reason you use to justify your actions, Cally. There is no end to the evil men have done after convincing themselves that their violations of the gods' law aren't violations after all."

  The grouse flew higher still, reaching the very end of the archers' range, then soared away across the desert. The soldiers cheered each other and went to collect their spoils from the all but bare ground. Tarriman called for a halt to the march and they all kicked in to dress the birds, cut gnarled sage to build a fire, and trim branches for roasting.

  In the end, there wasn't much meat. But in times of zero, little felt like plenty. And even the greasiest, wiriest twist of flesh tasted like manna. More than one of the soldiers shuffled over to slap Cally on the back and praise him for his aid.

  All too soon, they got up and got on their way. By the time night fell, they were hungry again, and Tantonnen remained very far away.

  ~

  But they got up and they went on, because that is what the gods wanted of them, and also because the alternative was to sit down in the dust and starve. Or, Cally supposed, to start eating each other, as the norren were rumored to do. But he suspected that doing that might make the gods angry enough to descend and eat them, so marching it was.

  They moved ever south. The day felt a little cooler than the one before, but maybe that was just the cooling of Cally's sluggish blood. He didn't seem to have the energy to think, so he didn't.

  As evening neared, they spotted figures on the horizon. They weren't nearly big enough to be norren, but something looked misshapen about them. But rather than being desert goblins, it was the return of Rowe and his hunters.

  They had caught not one, nor two, but four deer—then cleaned the animals, rigged makeshift packs from their shirts and cloaks, filled these packs with fifty pounds of flesh and organ meat apiece, then lugged it across some thirty miles of desert. It was an act of true heroism, and Cally joined in the cheers for the otherwise raggedy and disreputable soldiers that Tarriman and Rowe had deemed expendable risks. As Cally watched the meat get trimmed and cooked, however, something unpleasant opened in the place where he kept his feelings: he knew that he would never be able to do anything like what they had done.

  People ate until they were falling down. Cally decided this was worthy of imitation. Once the feast had ended, the Masters stirred themselves, applying the silvery ether to the remaining meat in order to extend its freshness the best they could.

  One-dimensional though their new diet was, it remained superior to the zero-dimensional one they'd been subsisting on since being robbed by the norren, and they traveled onward with revived vigor. The land shifted to rolling hills furred with grass, less dry than before, although still far from fecund.

  Two and a half days after the return of the hunters, they hiked to the top of a hill. Before them, the land glowed gold, as if it, and not the sun, was the source of the morning's light.

  They had reached the wheat fields of Tantonnen.

  4

  Nearing their destination put an extra spring in their step. As did the road, which rematerialized as rutted, hard-packed dirt.

  After a few miles, Master Tarriman lumbered up next to Cally. "We're not far from your homeland now, are we? Do you remember this place?"

  "I think so," Cally said, although he wasn't at all sure that he did, which made him wonder why he was saying otherwise. "Yes, it seems like I do."

  There were a few farmhouses scattered around, the first structures of any kind they'd seen in several days. They had just spotted a village and were heading toward it with the intention of buying supplies on credit when a half dozen riders appeared on the road, heading their way.

  The soldiers took to the vanguard, but the riders were wearing the blue and gold of Tantonnen. They drew to a stop before the Narashtovikers, looking dusty but hale.

  "If I'm not mistaken, you would be the northerners," said their leader, a well-built man with a reddish beard. He examined them, mouth half open. "You came all this way on foot?"

  "We weren't always so poverty-stricken," Tarriman said. "A few days ago, a norren clan relieved us of our horses. But they were thoughtful enough to relieve us of most of our burdens as well."

  "Robbery! If we'd known you were vulnerable to such things, we would have sent an escort!"

  "No need, no need. We're here and we have arrived with a better story to tell because of it. All is well."

  Reassured, two of the horsemen rode ahead while the other four escorted the party onward. The fields of Tantonnen seemed endless, the hills like frozen swells of a golden sea. By day's end, they reached the modest town that served as the region's capital, and were brought in to a great wooden hall flanked by numerous posts carved into hawks, coyotes, snakes, and other native creatures.

  "Greetings, Master Tarriman! Greetings, holy Order of the Healing Shadows!" This was bellowed by Baron Trask, the well-fed sixty-year-old man who ruled Tantonnen, which had been a small independent state for most of its history until it had been annexed, mostly peacefully, by Gask several decade
s ago. "What an auspicious day! And what an honor to host you here, under the roof of my own hall, in the service of restoring both your Order and your city to their former glory."

  This was followed by much cheering and hailing and so forth. In time they were seated, and servants brought about wine and a course of cured pork and butter-grilled asparagus. Baron Trask was not himself a Lannovian—in fact, their precise relation to the Tantonneners was somewhat obscure to Cally—but a contingent of them were present in the hall, seated across the table from Tarriman and the other Masters, where they were too far away for Cally to hear any of their speech. They were dressed in gray cloaks trimmed with gold and crimson and they tended to have high brows and long, thin noses.

  Their party was roughly the same size as the Order's, including quite a few people with the bearing of priests, nobles, or both. A merry old man with a wide chin and a ready chuckle seemed to be their regent or high priest, but a good deal of the conversation circled around two others. The woman looked as though she could be past her childbearing years, but she was still quite pretty, with her dark hair pulled back tightly and a welcoming smile. The man was perhaps slightly younger than her, with a sensitive, thoughtful face. He didn't speak often, but when he did, people leaned closer. Cally thought the two of them might be married, but he couldn't tell.

  The main course was roast duck served with two kinds of cheese, one hard and one soft, along with black grapes and a mighty pile of herbs. After the largely scentless wastes, the smell alone was enough to make Cally dizzy—although perhaps that was more due to his three cups of wine.

  He strained his ears as best he could, but couldn't make out any of the conversation among the elders. With the plates reduced to bones, seeds, and rinds, the oldest of the Lannovians rose.

  He spread his hands to the distinguished men and women about him. "Most esteemed guests. I believe it is now time to retire to a private meeting, where many critical decisions will be made, and our shared future enjoined."