The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  But he would have done it even if he'd looked exactly the same.

  A year later, through methods so sly his spies in the city hadn't heard a single credible whisper linking it to him, Blays' dealings and intrigue had knocked out several beams from the House of Moddegan. He'd caused the bankruptcy of a baron and two usurers who'd funded the war. The divorce of Baron Hallibard from the bloodthirsty baroness. The murder/suicide of Lord Weddiben and his wife—who had become pregnant while the lord was on business in the Middle Kingdoms.

  Blays had felt guilty about this last outcome. Then his right hand Taya, who had once met him on a Wending rooftop dressed all in blue, told him that at the end of the Chainbreakers' War, rather than freeing their norren slaves, the Weddibens had put them to death.

  All told, three years had passed since he'd fled from Narashtovik. He wouldn't call them good years. If you were to ask him if he were happy, he'd laugh. But he had found purpose. That was more than most men could say.

  He was currently playing a long and elaborate con on Dilliger, who was not only a duke, but Moddegan's sister's second son. Lolligan believed that, if Dilliger were to lose his fortune—a fortune loaned him by Moddegan—Gask would teeter toward insolvency. The instability could turn a rebellious splinter of the court against the king. After the losses and failure of the war, Moddegan's influence had faltered while his rivals made strides toward the throne. With the right pressure and a bit of luck, he might be toppled. While Blays and Lolligan kept their hands sparkling clean.

  Thus this ludicrous ruse, culminating in a bone-breaking ride down a hill, all for the purpose of smearing a helpless rabbit across a lawn that must take days for the servants to trim. Blays—Pendelles, to his oblivious marks—shook his hair from his brow, gripped his mallet, and nodded to the servants holding the ropes attached to the blocks in front of the board's wheels.

  The servants yanked the chocks clear. Blays' cart lurched forward, quickly gaining momentum on the trimmed lawn. He bent his knees and gave an experimental turn of the cart's handles. It responded violently, yawing to the side. He dropped his weight and let it right itself.

  "Not as easy as it looks, is it?" Dilliger shouted into the mounting wind.

  "Treacherous as Houkkalli Bay!" Blays replied.

  The cart rattled and jolted and banged. The mallet felt long and awkward. Blays took a practice swing and nearly fell into the grass. He scowled and tried again, spreading his feet and leaning away from the direction of his swing. Much steadier. Dilliger laughed. As they neared the hutch, Blays made a series of slight adjustments to his handlebars. It was extremely sensitive. It didn't help that they were barreling down the hill at a speed that could only be described as "heart-bursting."

  Moments before they reached the hutch, the servants swept open the doors, reached for the lanyards around their necks, and blew into wooden whistles. Two rabbits—one brown, one white—dashed onto the trimmed grass, got one look at the two men jouncing toward them, and fled downhill.

  "Run!" Dilliger whooped. "Run run run!"

  "So that's where the creative name came from," Blays said.

  The rabbits opened up ground on the one-man wagons, bolting twenty feet ahead. They had hardly ridden down half the hill, however, and as the bunnies' initial sprint flagged, the carts began to close. Dilliger crouched, angling toward the brown rabbit. His tires kicked over a stone, swerving his cart. Expertly, he tweaked its course back on track.

  Blays lowered himself as well, increasing his momentum. Dilliger closed on his mark, cocked his white mallet, and swung.

  He clipped the rabbit's tail. Spooked, it burst forward, zagging toward the fence. Dilliger swore and veered toward it at a shallow angle. They were now three-quarters down the hill, coming fast to the flat ground before the ditch. Blays matched pace with the white rabbit, hanging eight feet behind it, timing its strides. His hat flapped, loosening. He yanked it down around his ears and his cart wobbled wildly.

  The brown rabbit moved away from the fence in arcing hops. Dilliger pursued, widening his stance on the bouncing plank. He drifted near the rabbit and swung. Catching sight of his motion, the rabbit cut back toward the fence. Dilliger's stroke whooshed through empty air. He tried to correct his swing, leaned hard left, and toppled from the cart in a spray of sod and curses.

  Uphill, servants cried out. Blays grinned and bent down, nearing the white rabbit. The slope was beginning to gentle. In another couple seconds, it would level into the final approach to the canal. He'd be bleeding speed all the way.

  He flung his mallet to the side. "Whoops!"

  The rabbit streaked on. Blays leaned forward, passing it, then leapt backwards from his cart. The shocked bunny bounded straight into the air. Blays snatched it up, tucked it to his chest, and came down on his shoulder, rolling head over heels, hanging onto his hat with his free hand. He came to a stop on his backside and scruffed the rabbit. Head spinning, elbows and knees scraped and grass-stained, he stood and held the animal aloft.

  "Your booze is mine, sir!" he called uphill.

  Dilliger had managed to arise from the torn-up turf. He cocked his head expectantly. Blays walked to the fence, held the rabbit at arm's length, and dropped it on the other side. It gazed up at him with its button eyes, dazed, then turned and bounded into the tall grass.

  Dilliger dismissed his hovering servants and limped downhill. "You let it go."

  Blays shrugged. "That jack was the finest runner I've ever seen."

  "Per the rules, you're to strike it. It's customary to celebrate a Run victory with an immediate grilling session. My gods, we don't even have a winner!"

  "I thought it would be more productive to let it loose to spawn more rabbits for future games."

  "Rabbits are cheap." Dilliger knocked grass from his hair and gazed at the canal. Blays' tiger-prowed wagon had careened straight into it and was currently floating on the green water. "Shall we get cleaned up? Have another drink?"

  Blays smiled and bobbed his head. "Certainly."

  He accompanied the duke back to the manor. He'd made a mistake. Allowed the Blays to pierce through the Pendelles. As if a bunny meant anything compared to his revenge.

  Despite this, he doubted it would matter. Money always won out in the end. And the bargain he was offering Dilliger was far too sweet to refuse.

  Inside, he stripped off his sweaty clothes and rinsed in a tub of hot water, refusing the servants' assistance—not out of modesty, but the fact he didn't want anyone getting a close look at the scars he'd earned during the war. It was paranoid, to be sure, and inconsistent, given how readily he'd taken advantage of the servants' labor so far, but he could no longer allow any room for mistakes.

  Bathed, dressed, perfumed, and trimmed by the manor's barber, he headed back to the sitting room for another drink and yet another period of extended downtime while the duke busied himself with the various duties, real and fake, that made dukes look so damned important. By the time Dilliger arrived and invited him to the main table—a solid slab of pink-veined marble—it was in that lazy time between afternoon and evening, and all Blays had accomplished on the day was riding down a hill without dying.

  There were more drinks, followed by trays of smallfoods (quail eggs, roasted garlic and mushrooms, oysters shipped in from Yallen) and conversation about next month's annual horse race at the palace. Just when Blays was beginning to think he'd have to spend another day in this over-staffed nightmare, Dilliger swirled his drink, swished it around his mouth, swallowed, and fixed Blays with a look.

  "I've let you dangle long enough, don't you think?"

  Blays smiled vaguely. "In front of a big investment, the boldest man can get skittish. I've sat on the hook for longer."

  Dilliger chuckled. "Well, sooner or later, I may have some actual work to do. I have a few questions for you."

  "Of course."

  "First, how did you ever forge such a connection? The norren would rather hack off their own legs than do business with some
one connected to the capital."

  Blays had a cover for this, of course, but he took a moment to think. These were dicey waters. Because the goods in question were of norren origin. Until their little rebellion three years ago, the Norren Territories had been a vassal state of the Gaskan Empire. Entire clans had been owned as slaves by men just like Duke Dilliger. The clans had emerged from the conflict victorious, but with great losses. Relations with their former masters in Setteven were not what you'd call chummy.

  Yet, perhaps out of some perverse sense of guilt, Setteven's bluebloods had taken a shining to the norren people's art, which was as voluminous as it was well-crafted. And none was more coveted, and thus more expensive, than bossen.

  Technically, "bossen" referred to a wide spectrum of clothes: gloves, leggings, shirts, jackets, and so on. What united them were the manner of their construction. Through a fiendish process of tanning and stretching, each piece of bossen was made from a single piece of seamless leather. Deerskin, usually, though norren being norren, others specialized in cowhide and sheepskin; one enterprising tailor had even made headway with the hides of sharks. Human tailors had managed to duplicate some of the simpler forms, but anything more complex than an open-ended tube remained the domain of the norren masters.

  Who didn't give a shit how much Setteven nobles offered to pay now that norren were recognized as "people" and thus capable of being paid.

  Blays, however, had friends in every corner of the norren lands. He had access to as much bossen as he could afford. If he could catch Dilliger in the craze, filling his warehouses with the prized clothing, it would be a simple matter to flood the market with more before Dilliger had the chance to offload it—thus ruining him, as well as everyone else who'd speculated in the bubble-market.

  Blays was connected to the norren. The duke wanted the goods that connection provided. But if Blays, as Lord Pendelles, appeared to have achieved that connection through unscrupulous means—say, supporting the norren during their war effort against Dilliger's uncle—it would mean the end of his scheme on the spot.

  "For years, I've done business with a norren chieftain," Blays explained. "She's a rather unique woman who was initially promoted to her position due to her philosophical stance on the benefits of open commerce. She considers it a moral failure that her fellow norren might be hesitant to let the product of their sweat fall into corrupt humans hands. Thus, acting as my middleman is a righteous act."

  Dilliger tipped back his head. "Don't the norren craftsmen know she's going to turn around and sell their wares to humans?"

  "She is very convincing!" Blays laughed. "And you would be amazed how well the simple buffer of a norren middleman can assuage the stings of the conscience. They don't know I'll be the one buying their bossen. As far as they know, it'll be sold to the Clan of the Wheezing Goose."

  "They call themselves the Wheezing Goose?"

  "It's just an example."

  "Then you're lucky to have found her." The duke drank from his mug. "What about quantity? Anyone looking to make a venture of this would have to have enough to make it worth their while."

  "Naturally, supply is limited." Blays said. "Though not as much as you'd think. I've been accumulating it in preparation for the right buyer."

  "When do you expect to have your supplies at hand?"

  "The main wagon arrives next week." Blays allowed himself half of the smile fighting for his face. "How much were you interested in acquiring? Order enough, and I can offer a discount as steep as your Run-hill."

  "Acquiring?" Dilliger's eyebrows shot up. "Afraid I've stamped you with the wrong signet, chum. I was just curious to hear how you handled the norren."

  "You can't be serious. Why field my proposal if you had no interest in pursuing it?"

  "I had every intention of pursuing it," the duke said, a hint of warning in his eyes. "Unfortunately, while you were in transit here, my circumstances changed. Disagreeably. I held hope some detail in your proposal would render it feasible for us to do business despite my fresh hardships, but that is not the case. Regrettably, I must decline."

  Blays was too stunned to speak. Like that, months of preparation—and his closest shot at toppling the throne—vanished like yesterday's rain.

  3

  Dante shouted and grasped wildly for the nether. The kapper thundered through the grass. It lowered its horns. Dante sent a bolt of raw shadows straight at the center of its forehead.

  It impacted with an anti-flash of pure black. The kapper charged on without breaking stride.

  Dante dove to the side. A spiral horn snagged his thigh, shredding his pants. Pain lanced up his leg. He cried out and thumped to the grass. The beast trampled past and swung about through a wide turn. Dante drew on the nether. His first effort had been weak, but now that it had blood to feed it, it surged like a storm-swollen creek, wreathing his hands in darkness. As the kapper charged anew, he struck it again.

  And again, the shadows dissipated on impact. An audible hiss fried the frigid air. Cold pins prickled Dante's scalp and spine. With the rasp of steel on leather, he drew his sword. As it closed on him, he flung himself out of range.

  It flew by. The wind of its passage smelled of pine sap and bog-rot. The creature might not be able to climb cliffs, but it looked perfectly capable of bashing down trees—it was armored like an eight hundred-pound pillbug, as solid as a rhino but with the predatory grace of a tiger. And it was apparently impervious to nether.

  The only tree branches in reach were dried-out and spindly. Likely to snap if Dante put his weight on them. His only chance was to run into the trees and try to outmaneuver the kapper as he returned to the cave in the cliff.

  He sprinted from the crest of the bald hill into the woods. It closed on him, feet pounding soil. He juked behind a pine. Branches snapped behind him, spitting splinters. Overhead, the strange lights played on, painting the woods in blazing pinks and greens, causing the shadows of the trees to waver on the frosty ground. Dante weaved around an ancient fir and jumped down a short ravine, skidding to a stop in front of a wall of brambles. He turned his shoulder and burst through a thin spot in the growth. Thorns scraped his hands and cheeks.

  With the lights in the sky to guide him, he knew he was headed in the direction of the cave, but he was still a few hundred yards from sanctuary. Even as he had that thought, the kapper leapt down the ravine behind him, landing so hard Dante felt the impact in his soles. A storm of thrashing erupted behind him. Robbed of its momentum, the kapper had become mired in brambles. Perhaps its armor was too thick to feel the thorns and that's why it didn't cry out. Whatever the case, its silence was more unnerving than any howls or roars.

  With a few seconds of freedom, Dante quit dodging around trees and ran pell-mell toward the cave. As he sprinted away, he tried to grasp the nether inside the kapper, meaning to shred its lungs and heart, but reaching for its insides was like reaching toward a pool of water and banging into solid ice.

  But there was more than one way to skin a kapper.

  By the time it tore free from the brambles with a crash of twigs, he'd opened a lead of a hundred feet. The monster galloped behind him, gaining swiftly. The dark wall of the cliff bobbed behind the pines. He wouldn't make it before the monster was upon him.

  "Dante?" Lew's voice carried through the trees.

  "Stay there!" he shouted.

  Still running, he called the nether from the darkness. Fifty feet from the cliffs, with the kapper crashing through branches and saplings, Dante whirled. The kapper bounded forward. It would be on him in a moment. He thought about striking for its small bright eyes, but dropped to one knee and punched the hard, frozen earth.

  A crevasse zigzagged from his hand. Brown pine needles cascaded into the gap. The ground cracked apart with a groan of rock. The beast snorted and tumbled into the pit.

  Dante stood, breathing hard. His heart felt like it would knock through his ribs. A cloud of dust drifted from the crack. Loose stones clacked to the bot
tom. His gashed leg throbbed. Keeping the nether close, he edged up to the pit and illuminated its bottom.

  Dust motes twinkled in the pale light. Twenty feet down, the kapper lay on its side beneath a patina of pebbles and sand. A shard of basalt spun down and plinked off the creature's plates.

  "Dante?" Lew called.

  "I'm fine," Dante replied over his shoulder. "The kapper—"

  A flood of stone rattled from the pit. The kapper surged to its feet, shook off the dust, and leapt up the steep wall, claws scrabbling at the loose rock. Impossibly, it pulled itself closer to the top.

  "Oh, come on!" Dante said.

  He might have struck at it again, or opened the rift even further, dropping it from a height that would crack even its iron-hard shell. But he was wounded, weakened, and panicked. He ran toward the cave, meaning to hole up, catch his breath, and assess the situation from a location where he wasn't in imminent peril of being impaled on spiral horns.

  Grass flew from his heels. Before he'd made it twenty feet, the kapper heaved itself out of the pit and lumbered after him. Its footsteps thumped closer and closer. It snorted from its blunt, triangular snout. Dante dashed through the pines, scratchy branches lashing his face. The kapper tromped down hard, planting its weight, then made no sound at all.

  Dante threw himself flat. The beast flew over him, limbs extended, fat fleshy tail sailing behind it. With a great crack, it smashed into the bole of a towering pine, its horns spraying bark. Dante spat dirt from his mouth. The kapper's left horn had punched straight through the pine. Dante vaulted up and ran past it. Only then did it roar, a bone-shaking honk that nearly froze him mid-stride.

  A lantern flared from the cave. Dante launched himself at the cliff face and raced up the ladder he'd drawn into its side. Above, Lew craned from the entrance, eyes wild. Dante reached the opening and threw himself in.