The Sealed Citadel by Edward W. Robertson

Author:Edward W. Robertson [Robertson, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2019-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

13

He held his hands out before him like they had blood on them. As it turned out, one of them did, but that was from earlier. "How did I do that?"

"That is both a very good question and a very bad one."

"All you were doing was hitting me. Repeatedly, I might add. How did you know that would work?"

"Why do you assume that I did?"

"Because you were doing it?"

"Because I thought it might work," Yobb said. "Either it would, and that would be good, and we wouldn't have to waste a great deal of days slowly failing as you were failing earlier. Or it would not work, and I would get the pleasure of knocking a young man from his feet. Repeatedly, I might add."

Cally's chest was damp with blood from her earlier assaults, but the pain felt like a badge of some kind, and so he wore it. "How in nine hells did beating me up teach me to do deep magic?"

"Maybe I didn't teach you anything. It seems just as likely that this ability was within you all of this time, much as Josun Joh is within every norren who remembers him."

"That's nonsense. If people just went around knowing things, then we wouldn't need academies. Or universities. Or seminaries. Or apprenticeships. Or any of the other hundred institutions young people are tormented with. I didn't just 'know' how to stop your attack."

"Why does this idea make you so angry? Very few people know how to use the nether at all, but you do. Were you taught to have the nether inside you?"

"I had to be taught to use it, yes. I remember it quite well, because it took a whole lot of years and is still happening at this very moment."

"That is not what I mean and you know it's not what I mean, which means that you are deliberately attacking a different point, because you know that your point is wrong. When a person picks up a bow for the first time, and their aim is already better than someone who has been training for some time, do you deny that the wisdom and talent to shoot their bow was already inside them? If not, where did it come from?"

"Probably not from their instructor repeatedly shooting them with their bow."

"Nevertheless, it is inside them, waiting to be found. Just as your own abilities are already within you."

"You still have to be taught things! Not only how to do them, but the right way to do them. Not just the correct way, but the honorable way. I grew up not far from here, to common parents. Then one day, without any warning, I knew the nether. What if I'd 'reached inside' and learned how to attack things? What if one of my parents told me to rake the yard, and when I wouldn't do it, they hit me—and then I hit them back with the nether? They would be dead, and what would I be? A killer with the blood of his own parents on his hands, and no better understanding of the power I just wielded.

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