The Sealed Citadel Read online

  "It marks you as belonging to the Order. So does mine. As long as we're in hostile lands, keeping them can only get us killed."

  "Or stop us from freezing."

  "Get a fire going."

  Cally put his hands on his hips, but this, like all of his other protests, proved ineffectual. "Are you sure we have to do this? Can't we just…leave them somewhere? And come back for them later?"

  "Start a fire, boy."

  Cally muttered something that was borderline blasphemous and went to gather up some tinder and the drier fallen branches he could find. He heaped them in a loose pyramid in the shallow pit Rowe had dug in his absence, then beckoned the shadows to him, lighting a steady flame from the tip of his finger.

  Rowe glared at his hand. "What do you think you're doing?"

  "The thing that you asked me to do. Over the course of your service to the Order, how many blows to the head have you taken?"

  Rowe looked as though he was considering delivering one to Cally. "No sorcery. Start it the real way."

  He reached into his pocket and flipped Cally a small, well-worn wooden box. Inside was a C-shaped curl of steel not unlike a squished horseshoe, along with a flattish hunk of gray stone, chipped thin along one edge.

  Cally knew that it was flint and steel, but that was about the extent of his knowledge—that, and he hadn't gathered enough tinder for such a project, as the nether was strong enough not to need much at all. He pulled up some dry grass and poked it beneath one edge of the twigs he'd set down. Then he pulled some more, and then a bit more, just to be on the safe side.

  "Leave some for the cows," Rowe muttered.

  Cally blushed, but it was too dark to be seen. He kneeled above his pile of grass and took up the tools. The piece of steel had curled knobs on both ends like the cross-bar of a lord's sword. He took hold of one of the knobs, gripped the chunk of flint by its fat end, and scraped the two together.

  Not a single spark fell to the waiting grass.

  He scraped again, a little harder, then rubbed them back and forth. Still no sparks. Not daring to look at Rowe, he drew the tools apart and struck them together, holding back somewhat so the flint wouldn't crack against the tough metal. Getting nothing, he tried again—and this time, perhaps due to a bad angle, or perhaps due to the fact he couldn't see a damn thing, the flint skidded over the steel and directly into his knuckles.

  He called out, throwing down the piece of metal and sucking on his bleeding finger. Rowe laughed, looking happy for possibly the first time Cally had ever seen.

  Rowe spat to the side. "You don't even know how to strike a fire, do you?"

  "I can do it in a split second with the nether, which I'll note you can't use at all. Why would I need to know how to work a chunk of rock when I have the shadows to do it for me?"

  "Because there might come a time when you don't."

  He was struck by the sudden suspicion Rowe wasn't doing this to teach him anything, but to rather to humiliate him. "I already know how to start a fire. If you insist it has to be lit like a savage, why don't you do it?"

  Rowe gave a shrug and beckoned. Cally passed him the tools. Rowe slid his fingers through the curls of the steel, which turned out to be grips, leaving the long straight portion braced against his knuckles. Holding the flint still, he struck the steel against it much harder than Cally had. Large sparks fell into the wadded grass.

  None took, but Rowe hit the stone again, then a third time. One of the sparks landed and began to smoke but couldn't quite light. The whole enterprise looked as simple as Cally initially thought it might be and he was dismayed that he hadn't experimented longer to figure it out for himself. But it was too late now, wasn't it?

  "Wait," he blurted. "Show me how."

  Rowe looked up, taking his measure. Then nodded. Without bothering to speak, he slowed down his motions, displaying the angle of his strike, once, twice, three times. He handed over the metal and the stone. Cally took them up, gripping each as Rowe had, and glanced the steel against the flint.

  "Has to be a lot harder than that," Rowe said.

  "I was just getting a feel for it," Cally muttered.

  He was about to do a few more practice strokes, then decided to hell with it, and gave the flint a good bash. Red flecks dropped into the grass. One began to smolder right away. Rowe watched him flatly. After a moment of internal panic, Cally lowered his face to the grass and blew gently on the spark, midwifing it into a tiny flame.

  The rest of the grass caught fire as if waiting for it. The twigs nestled above accepted the flame, if grudgingly, and passed it along to the branches. Rowe shepherded it along with a few pokes from a long stick. As usual, he was silent, but for once it didn't seem to be the silence of judgment and contempt, but rather the particular reverence, almost holy, of people watching a fire come to life.

  Once it looked ready to burn until it ran out of fuel, Rowe took up their black cloaks, which were a little worn and dirty from travel but still fine garments, and tossed them where the fire burned hottest.

  "We're not of the Order anymore. Not as long as we're out here. Got me?"

  "I do," Cally said.

  Yet if he was no longer an apprentice priest of the Order, and Rowe no longer its armsman, what were they? Bandits? Outlaws? Two men seeking righteous justice? Or just crude vengeance?

  The fire moved slowly along his cloak, as if caressing it. In time, it reached the badge of the four-pointed star Master Tarriman had granted him just a few days before. Cally's heart cried out then, but it was too late: the flame had already taken it.

  ~

  Rain woke him while it was still dark. This annoyed Cally, for they still didn't have any real shelter, but it seemed to infuriate Rowe, who stomped about their pathetic little camp cursing with language strong enough to curl a goat's ear.

  "On your feet," he spat. "We're going to the Bowl."

  "But it's—"

  "About to have all their tracks washed away by the rain. Move!"

  Cally obeyed, rolling up the blanket they'd bought from Bartle and getting Junie ready to ride. They got underway, Rowe still muttering about how they should have gone to the Bowl the night before.

  They'd only been in the saddle for a minute before the first bolt of lightning split the night, followed by the bang of its thunder. Cally flinched even though he'd known it was coming. Junie didn't seem to mind. By any reasonable standard, Cally hadn't gotten nearly enough sleep, but he felt good anyway, light in the saddle, as if he'd shed a weight or been reborn.

  "Where are you from?" Rowe asked out of the blue.

  "Arrolore," Cally replied brightly. It was the first time he could recall Rowe asking a personal question. "And what about yourself?"

  "We're travelers from Arrolore. Ten days ago, your parents left to see your sick grandfather. Never came back. I'm your uncle. Mother's side. We found your father. Dead. Still searching for your mother. That's the story we tell if anyone asks."

  "That is a tragic and rather gruesome story."

  "That's the point. The more we make them pity us, the more we can get away with."

  It was a good three miles to the Bowl and the rain and lightning accompanied them all the way there. Rowe led his horse on a trail that ran south past the lip of the Bowl. The trail sloped down to a crossroads.

  Rowe took the west fork, stopping after a hundred feet and dismounting. "Give me some light."

  Cally brought the ether to his hand, casting pure, pale light over the road. The hard-packed dirt was smudged by the rain, the ruts puddled with water.

  Rowe crouched, eyeballing the road. "Followed them this far. But there are other forks after this one. Got no way to track them."

  Cally nodded. "Could there be something in the Bowl?"

  "Like what?"

  "A clue. Of where they've gone. Or something."

  Rowe looked like he thought this was as stupid as streaking across an active archery range, so it was a testament to the desperation of their situa
tion that he agreed to go inspect the Bowl. They left their horses at the top and descended to the dark and silent center where, two days before, they had hosted a scene of feasting and friendship.

  Cally braced himself for the worst, but all of the bodies had been taken away. They searched the wide space, finding nothing except the furniture. The passages and rooms in the stone walls showed no clues either. Sheltered from the rain, the floors of some of the rooms were still stained with blood, smelling of sickly iron.

  By the time they finished looking around, the sky was beginning to grow light and the rain had dwindled to a sprinkle. Rowe returned to the Bowl proper, gazing across the emptiness as if they could have missed something.

  "Could head for their territory," Rowe said. "But that's no sure thing at all. Got the feeling if we let the book get away from us, we'll never see it again."

  "Still, their own territory seems the most likely place they've gone, doesn't it?"

  "Not to me. Couldn't say why. But after this, I don't think they just head home."

  "If we head down the path we know they started down, perhaps something else will turn up. It seems better than nothing, doesn't it?"

  "No." Rowe's habit of refusing to explain his thinking was among the most annoying things Cally could imagine. As if reading his thoughts, Rowe turned on him with a dark eye. "You said you never learned how to use sixers?"

  "I'm just an apprentice. They never taught me that."

  "Not what I asked. Asked if you'd learned."

  "I suppose I've watched the Masters do it a few times. I've heard them talk about it a bit, too. But I've never tried it for myself." Cally shook his head. "But even if I could, I couldn't. It's forbidden."

  "Do you see any Masters around?"

  "No, but—"

  "Just their blood. So honor that blood by tracking down the ones who spilled it."

  Cally blinked, stunned by the bluntness of this and also by the suggestion that he should pursue knowledge before his Master-approved time to do so. Sorcery was not something you just fooled around with. You didn't just go out and practice it the way you might teach yourself to play the flute or shoot a bow. It was dangerous beyond all measure. This was made explicit by the very fact that the nether was nether. If one handled a degraded and corrupt substance by oneself, without the proper guidance, instruction, and initiation, it was inevitable that one would be corrupted and lowered by it as well.

  Yet he wasn't looking to explore all of the mysteries of the nether on his own, was he? He just needed to try one trick (which he would probably fail at anyway) in the service of what could be a great boon to the Order. He further supposed that, for the time being, he was no longer wearing the symbols of the Order anyway. Didn't that exempt him, at least in part, from their rules?

  This was possible. But it was also possible that he had already been corrupted, and the temptations of the shadows were even now leading him into damnation.

  "I'll try," he said, trying not to listen to the tiny scream of panic somewhere inside him. "I'll need insects. Flying ones. The sturdier the better, I'd think."

  Rowe squinted up at the gray and drizzling sky. "Birds won't work?"

  "This process—assuming I am even able to execute it, which I rather doubt—doesn't place a living creature under my control. Instead, it requires that the life has been taken from a creature, which I then reimbue with a simulacrum of life—one that's false and clumsy. In short, dead birds are too heavy and flappy."

  "Bugs it is. Normally, I'd advise you to look in the direction of the nearest shit. But flies like blood, too."

  Rowe strode across the floor of the Bowl and into the tunnels that laced the walls. With unerring accuracy, he headed straight toward one of the rooms that bore a rusty brown stain on the ground. Just as he'd predicted, the day's first flies were crawling about on it. Cally wondered if the blood was Master Tarriman's.

  Rowe jerked his chin at them. "Have at them."

  "I've already gone too far in agreeing to reanimate them. I don't dare to kill them. You'll have to do it."

  Rowe rolled his eyes. There didn't appear to be any dead flies lying about, and he didn't waste time searching for them. Instead, he pulled off his belt with the rhythmic slap of leather through its loops, then lashed it down on one of the flies, flattening it to the ground.

  "All yours."

  Cally sputtered. "I can't work with that."

  "You said get you a fly. There's your fly."

  "That's no longer a fly. It's a smear. Does that lump of reddish paste look like it's ready to do a lot of flying?"

  Rowe gave him an unreadable look. The other flies had taken to the air with the crack of the belt but were settling back onto the dried blood. Rowe shucked off his cloak, then untucked his long shirt and stripped it off. As he twisted the shirt into a rat-tail, his arms seemed as hard as roots. He sighted in on his potential victim, cocked his elbow, and snapped the shirt forward.

  The instrument was as fast as a whip, but its tip was still soft cloth. It hit the fly and knocked it away from the blood without so much as dislodging a leg.

  Rowe lifted his eyebrow.

  "Yes," Cally said. "That would seem to be fine."

  Fine, of course, other than the fact that he had almost no idea what he was doing. He crouched over the tiny corpse. He poked it, yanking back his finger as soon as he touched it. He brought a dab of nether into his palm and sank it into the shiny black insect. Its interior was still. It was every bit as dead as it looked.

  It was true that he'd never been taught to make use of the undead scouts, but he had been in the presence of Master Ullibard when the priest had needed to get a message across the city as quickly as he could. Rather than dispatching a rider, he had scrawled a note on a little square of parchment.

  Then, to Cally's great astonishment and mild disgust, he had reached into his robes and withdrawn a thin wooden case. The case was loosely packed with cotton, and inside the cotton rested six intact but dead dragonflies. Ullibard selected a red one, extended his hand above it, and sent the nether inside it.

  Cally knew he wasn't supposed to watch any sorcerous process that he hadn't been expressly invited to observe, and he managed to stop himself from watching too closely. Yet he couldn't help but notice how Ullibard had cast a layer of nether across the dragonfly as one might cast a fresh sheet across a bed, and had then sunk pin-like bits of it deep inside the insect's body.

  On the off chance it was just that simple, Cally did exactly that with the fly: stretched out a dab of nether, wrapped it around the carcass, then rolled the shadows into hair-fine strands (he thought there'd been four of them) and pushed them inside the fly.

  The fly remained quite dead.

  He added another strand of nether to the first four, sinking it into the fly and watching for any signs of progress, then repeated this with a sixth, seventh, and eighth strand. It seemed at this point quite clear that a lack of strands wasn't the problem, unless of course it was and that if he stopped trying more now that he might go off in a completely wrong direction and never find the answer at all, and so he poked in one after another until he was up to fifteen, and was then satisfied that it probably wasn't a lack of strands after all (although he would not rule out returning to the strand-problem if other routes proved failures as well).

  Well, so much for the easy way out. He sat back on his heels, rubbing his chin. After the lesson of the previous night, it occurred to him that the stroking of the chin with the fingers might be the human analogue of striking steel against flint, both of which, if done skillfully, generated light, of a sort. An interesting thought, which in itself lent evidence to the chin/hand theory, but not really what he was going for.

  Yet this comparison, the finding of similarities between disparate objects, inspired him to examine other similar objects in search of differences. To wit, the differences between a living fly, and his dead one.

  He shifted his focus into one of the live flies blotting up th
e crusted blood. The nether within it moved in subtle patterns. Some circulated with the insect's blood, but much of it moved about more like ocean waves, swelling and dipping, waxing and retreating.

  The dead fly, by contrast, showed almost no movement of its nether, just a slow expansion and contraction not unlike breathing, which was how it moved within all inanimate objects. What if death was caused by the interruption of the nether's flow? Cally took the shadows inside the corpse and coaxed them forward, doing his best to duplicate the motions within the living one. He thought he did a pretty good job of it, but as soon as he stopped prodding it along, the nether drifted to a stop and resumed its breath-like cycle.

  He could feel Rowe's eyes on his back. This did not help. Just in case he'd bungled the process at some point, he withdrew all of his nether from the bug, then repeated the wrapping and pinning gestures, following this with the recirculation of the shadows through the body.

  Again, nothing.

  While his past observation of Ullibard's work seemed like it ought to be helpful, it was also possible that it was completely misleading him. In this spirit, Cally tried several other methods, more or less at random: flooding the body with nether, and seeing if this would kick it into unlife; draining the shadows within it and replacing them with new ones; pulling the nether from one of the living flies and inserting it into the dead one.

  None of these efforts provoked so much as a twitch of an antenna.

  It suddenly felt very foolish. Worse, it felt unfair. From what he'd read of the Cycle of Arawn, there had been boys and girls who'd been allowed to explore and accomplish far more despite having far fewer years of training than himself.

  He jerked up his head, scrabbling to catch his newest thought as if it was a raw egg rolling off a table and plummeting toward the ground. In the Cycle, there was a fellow named Jack Hand who spent more or less his entire career reanimating dead things. Almost exclusively rats, in his case, but presumably the mechanism was the same between different types of dead things. The Cycle spent almost zero time explaining how its voluminous nethermancers did what they did, but that was likely the very reason the line had stuck with him: "Then he held the darkness in its heart just as he held it in his own: and the rat opened its eyes, and it rose."