After a day of this, he tried talking to the darkness. First chatting, then cajoling, then insulting. But apparently he was beneath the nether, because this too failed. In the afternoon, Minn came by to check in and he asked her to summon it some more. She repeated and he watched until sundown. Yet when she left and he looked by himself, he still couldn't find it.
He persisted. Just looking for shadows. Tedious as hell, but Minn seemed convinced it would pay off. He had doubts, but he starved them best he could.
After a few more days—he wasn't bothering to keep track—Minn watched him watching a pile of shells, then folded her arms. "Care to try something less conventional?"
Blays swung up his head, shielding his eyes from the sun. "More than anything."
"We'll talk over lunch." She wandered into the caves and returned with two bowls of off-white paste. "Eat up. You'll need your strength."
"This sounds ominous." He spooned up the paste. It was thick and warm and had been sweetened with ground-up nuts, but that still couldn't cover the bitter, brackish taste. "For your next recruit, you should consider a chef."
She smiled to herself and ate a great gob of mush. When they finished up, she sat back in the sand and faced the ocean.
Blays did the same. "So what's the big deal?"
"Just wait."
"That sounds like what I've been doing ever since I got here."
She shrugged, perfectly content to sit there until the end of time. Out of amused spite, he resolved to beat her.
A half hour later, his bladder forced him to forfeit. He got up to amble down the beach, but on his first step, his foot missed the ground. He plunged facedown into the sand.
"Oh," he said. "Strange."
"You look like you're ready," she laughed.
"For what?" With difficulty, he pushed himself up on his elbows and blinked at her owlishly. "You drugged me!"
"You said you were ready for unconventional methods."
"I thought you meant whacking ourselves on the heads with a board or something. Why is the sun all shimmery? And the air all...airy? What did you feed me?"
"Nat-root."
"Death root?"
"Don't worry, it's perfectly safe." She stood, extending her arms for balance. "I took it, too."
He was unable to stop himself from repeating her. "You took it, too!"
"How could we communicate unless our minds share the same journey?"
For some reason this struck him as tremendously funny. He tried to get up from where he'd fallen in the sand, but he was laughing too hard to find his footing. On the third attempt, Minn squatted down, secured her stance, and offered him a hand.
He leapt up, clinging to her for support. "It feels like I'm walking on a boat. In the middle of a sea. That is bound and determined to prove to me I'm not a fish. Hey, do you think we could be fish if we tried?"
"You're experiencing loss of balance. Perfectly common with nat-root. Come on."
Hanging onto his arm, as much for herself as for his sake, she led the way downshore to the tide pool. The walk was less than half a mile, but by the time they reached the pools' fragrant edges, Blays felt as if he'd been running for a month. Or possibly two months. His time-sense felt as off-kilter as his balance. His mouth felt unusually large, too, as if it belonged to another, bigger Blays. One who really needed a drink of something wet. The sunlight on the water lent everything a golden halo. He reached out for a yellow beam and discovered it wasn't tangible.
"Watch," she said.
He watched. Inches below the surface, a red-limbed starfish glided over the rocks. Behind it, a trail of black tendrils waved in the water.
"What!" Blays grabbed at Minn's sleeve. "Is that stuff real?"
"What?" she laughed.
"That black gunk. Is it black gunk?"
With extreme focus, she stood up straight and looked him in the eye. "It is."
"I see it!" The little black fingers melted into the rock. Blays clapped his palm over his mouth. "Oh shit, I scared it!"
"You can't scare nether."
"I feel like I probably scared it."
Minn waved a hand in dismissal, but the motion threw her off balance. She windmilled her arms, swearing a cobalt streak. "Less talking, more looking."
He scowled, pressing a finger to his lips. Once she quit giggling, he carefully lowered himself to the slimy stones bordering the pool, braced himself on both palms, and leaned forward. Wherever there was life—an orange fish, a swaying anemone with its many fat fingers, the starfish scouring their way across the floor—there was also nether. It stuck to the creatures like a shadow the exact shape of themselves. He could only glimpse it when they were in motion, separating themselves, however momentarily, from their dark mirror.
"Why does it lag like that?" he said. "Is it lazy?"
"Time feels wrong, right?"
"Right. You are. Time, definitely not right."
"We use nat-root when we want to change the way we see."
"I see," he said, then burst into laughter, although he wasn't quite sure why.
He stopped suddenly, terrified he'd scared the nether away again. But there it was, spread across the pools, trailing in the wake of the fish and the waving claws of the crabs. After a while, he saw it wasn't just stuck to life, but that it was carried in the water, too, a faint cloud that shaded everything in subtle gray. At that point, he was too dumbfounded to do anything but gape.
And then it was gone. The fish were fish. The crabs were crabs. The shadows were nowhere to be seen.
Minn must have seen the look on his face. "If it's passed, we should probably get you some water."
"Or we could take some more."
"Not a great idea. It's not called nat-root just to keep the children from eating it."
He found himself angry that he'd been given sight only to have it taken away. But after their visit to the pool, he knew it was possible. He had seen. There was no reason he couldn't see again.
Meanwhile, the nat-root had taught him that it seemed to be easiest to see the nether in life. From then on, he concentrated on watching living beings, be they animal or plant. Fish in the water. Grass in the wind. Whatever. Sometimes he thought he saw a flicker of black, but it never lasted longer than an instant, so brief he couldn't be sure he'd seen anything at all.
As the days went by, he sometimes considered the possibility he was wasting his time. But even if his abilities never manifested, he was sitting on a beach eating crabs untroubled by anything more than the chill in the wind. He was free.
Except for one question. A week after the incident with the nat-root, Minn brought him hot fish soup for dinner. He ate most, then set the bowl aside. "Why are you doing this?"
She tipped her head to the side. "Because we had extra."
"Not that." He swept his hand around to take in the semicircle of cliffs, finishing on himself. "This."
She thought a moment. "Because you want to learn."
"Of course. I'd forgotten we were in Pocket Cove, public university."
"And I think you intend to keep what you learn secret. Your arrival here wasn't so different from ours."
"How's that?"
She shook her head, then smiled at him. "How is Fall treating you?"
"I'm not sure." To give himself something to do, he spooned up more broth. "I don't think I've seen it since."
"We could try more nat-root."
"Do you think it would help?"
"No," she said. "But we could try."
"I doubt it would last longer than the first time." He set aside the bowl. "I'll keep at it. There's not much else for me to do."
Day after day, he continued to watch the life of the cove. The days grew shorter, the nights colder. He added another layer of weaving to the roof and the walls of his hovel and stuffed a layer of grass between the two mats. Every now and then he saw women leave the caves to tend to nets and cages left in the surf or the lagoon south of the tide pools, but Minn's friends neve
r paid him any mind. He dragged up driftwood and leaned it against the side of the cliff to dry. Minn had long ago lent him flint, and he had his own steel.
That was what opened his eyes—that, and a bit of good old fashioned foolishness. A full month after he'd arrived at Pocket Cove, he jogged to the tide pools to cut loose more mussels for dinner. As he braced himself against the slippery stone and gouged at the bivalves' tight hold, the knife slipped, raking across his left palm.
The cold metal bit into his skin. The sting of salt followed. Blood dripped from his hand and fell into the tide pool, dotting it with small red blooms.
Blays froze, pain forgotten. He laughed.
He ran all the way back to the cave. He parted the leather curtain and hollered inside. "Minn! Minn!"
She showed up a moment later, annoyance darkening her placid face. "You know you can't come in here."
He shoved his bloody palm in her face. "Look at this!"
"Sew it up, you crybaby. You'll be fine."
"Don't you see?" He laughed again, letting the blood slip down his fingers and fall to the smooth stone outside the cave. "I see."
11
The waves frothed and tossed, driven into violent white peaks. Dark storm clouds piled in the sky. The first rains hit as they made port at the cliffside port of Keyote. Dante flung his hood over his head and ran down the gangplank toward the nearest public house. Cee and Lew filed in behind him, cloaks drenched.
Crewing and outfitting a boat to the Houkkalli Islands would have taken longer than the trip itself. Instead, they'd hopped passage on a merchant ship and arrived in port two days later. This time, Dante had made sure to get Olivander's approval on every aspect of the trip. It was funny. Had Cally still been in charge, the penny-pinching man would have insisted they take their own ship—Cally was already paying their people, there would be no sense dropping additional funds for travel via a third party—but if they had done so, the storm would have hit them mid-trip. At best, they would have been delayed by days. At worst...well, there was no reason to think of that.
Lightning crackled across the sky. Dante ordered a pitcher of beer to help warm their blood. They sat beside the window. Inland, clouds swirled and broke against the heights of Mount Siri.
Lew set down his mug with a ceramic clank. "How are you so sure they'll have the answers?"
"They're the Hanassans," Cee said.
"So what? Even the Hanassans don't know everything. Think they know my birthday?"
"Of course not. They only know what's important."
Lew frowned over his beer. "How can they possibly know so much when they've isolated themselves on a mountain in the middle of nowhere?"
"The oracle," Dante said. Cee snorted. He glanced at her. "You doubt?"
"Like a girl hearing she's the prince's first," she said. "The Hanassans get their intelligence the same way the rest of us do: legwork and bribes."
"I've been to the monastery. It's not exactly crumbling under the weight of its finery."
"They trade in knowledge." She sat back and took a slug from her beer. "That's what keeps the boats coming back. It's the lifeblood of the entire island chain."
Dante shrugged. "That and the fact the Houkkallis are located midway between Narashtovik and Yallen."
"I'd tell you to think what you like, but I know you'll do that anyway."
Rain hammered the square, bouncing so fiercely from the roofs of the rounded homes that the whole city was enshrouded in a gray blur, as if it were in the act of lurching forward. The road up the mountain was dirt. In these conditions, mud. They would have to wait out the storm.
Dante secured lodging in the rooms above. Hours later, sleepy from beer and supper, they retired to their beds. Rain drummed above. It stopped in the middle of the night and the sudden silence woke Dante from a dead slumber.
In the morning, they walked into the hills north of town and discovered the path up to Sirini Temple was less of a road and more of a miles-long strip of dirt porridge. They turned around and, after questioning a couple of the locals, wound up at a stable off the main square.
"Three mules, please," Dante told the proprietor, a stout woman who wore outer layers of shiny cotton to shield herself from the constant wind.
"For?" she said.
"Dinner," he said. He leaned over her desk. "For passage to Sirini Temple. The road's no good."
"Then I should charge you triple."
He opened his cloak, exposing the sapphire and silver brooch of Narashtovik that marked his station. "You'll charge me what's fair."
The front door opened and shut behind them. The woman rubbed her nose. "Then you can use what's left over to purchase a sense of humor. My lord."
She kitted them out with three mules, sturdy beasts who plodded through the muddy trail with little difficulty. For half a mile, they passed between farmhouses and fields of mud. Loose straw lay scattered across the furrows, drenched and wind-beaten. Ahead, a forest of firs rose from the hills. Beyond, three white peaks stood shoulder to shoulder. The road led to the tallest.
Its slopes were painted with alternating bands of green. The darker bands were common pines, tousled by the ceaseless winds. The lighter bands were a plant native to Houkkalli: shedwind. Wrist-thick shoots standing ten feet tall, the plants' bladed leaves stayed eerily still even in the most punishing gale. Fox-like statues watched the trail.
The mules swayed on. Though they'd made a very early start, by the time they reached the plateau halfway up the mountain, the overcast sky implied it was nearly noon. Ahead, a grassy plain stood before a basalt cliff. The muddy trail diverged into four smaller paths to four caves in the rock. The last time Dante had visited here, a monk had been sitting out front, eager to send fools home, but today, the grounds were empty, a churned-up mess of mud and standing water.
He rode up to the cliff and dismounted. "Hello?"
The caves were barred with woven shedwind braced by fir frames. Dante knocked on one after the other, but received no response. He backed up and gazed at the silent cliff. He hollered some more, knocked some more, wandered around in search of the monks. He found nothing.
"Suppose they went somewhere to weather the storm?" Lew said.
Dante wiped his nose. "They're mountain people. Surely they're used to suffering worse."
"Maybe they just don't want to see you," Cee said.
"That's a little paranoid."
"Only if you weren't watching. When you flashed your badge at the stables, a boy scampered out the door. His tracks run all the way up here. Now the monks are gone."
"I've never done anything to harm them," Dante said. "All I want is answers."
"These fellows are pretty smart, right? Isn't that why we're here? Maybe they're smart enough to know what you were going to ask—and that you'd force the answers from them."
Dante scowled at the heights. "This is their home ground. We could hunt them all winter and they'd be two steps ahead of us the whole time."
Cee strolled forward, nudging the mud with her toes. "The good news is you couldn't ask for better conditions to follow their tracks."
Lew crossed his arms tight. "The bad news is it's freezing cold and we'll ruin our boots."
"You can always head back to town," Dante said. "Or would Olivander execute you for letting me out of your sight?"
Atop his mule, Lew swore with hair-raising blasphemy. "Of all the world's horrors, there's nothing worse than muddy boots."
"You think?" Cee said. "Guess you've never had shitty boots."
Lew could only close his eyes.
They found the tracks within minutes. Or what Dante took to be the tracks. The monks appeared to have departed single-file, pulling a sledge behind them to erase their footprints. This had left an obvious rut through the mud, but if Dante hadn't already been suspicious that they'd run from him, it might have been enough to throw him off.
It was strange, there was no way around that. But the fact they'd tried to hide their tracks
spoke more loudly than words.
The tracks continued across the grassy field to the left of the cliffs, leaving the monks' passage as clear as dawn. The blades were trampled down, ground into the mud. The wind picked up, colder than ever. The plain angled up, leading to a steep rise that was barely walkable. Soon, the tracks led to a path too tight and rubble-strewn for the mules. Dante got down and Cee helped secure the animals behind a thatch of shedwind sheltering the approach to the escarpment.
The path up the mountain was often bare rock. Where it wasn't, it was snot-slick with lichen and moss. The occasional footprint in this or the patches of mud gathered in the flat spots continued to point the way. The trail grew steeper yet, then swung into a series of switchbacks. Some points were so narrow Lew pressed his back to the wall and edged forward inches at a time. Dante would have berated him, but he was secretly grateful to be forced to slow down. A thick haze clung to the heights. After an hour of slow progress, the mists grew too thick to see the plains below. The upper reaches were just as hidden.
The angle of the rise gentled and the switchbacks ceased. They stopped for a snack and some water; as with any time they left a city, they'd brought enough consumables to get them through a day or two.
Cee plunked down on a rock and leaned forward, stretching out her legs. "Either these guys have gone on a very abrupt and inconvenient pilgrimage, or they do not want to see you."
"They can't have much of a head start," Dante said. "We need to be silent from here on out."
Up to that point, the path had been navigable, if completely unpaved, but within minutes, it reduced in size to a game trail, and not necessarily one traveled by larger mammals. Shedwind grew thickly overhead, providing a leafy pergola. Condensed mist pattered their cloaks. The ground inclined again and the vegetation shrank to moss and hardy clumps of grass.
The Black Star (Book 3) Page 17
