The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  The patter of mist intensified. But the shielding shedwind was gone—it was raining again. Within two minutes, the sprinkle became a downpour. Hard sheets of rain pounded the trail, driven by a gusting wind.

  "We're completely exposed," Cee said. "And not in the way that means I'm having fun."

  "It's just a bit of rain," Dante said.

  "And floods." Lew pointed. Uphill, runoff streamed into the trail, coursing down in a muddy froth.

  Dante turned in a quick circle. Since leaving the temple, they'd seen no man-made structures of any kind. They had encountered a few crevasses and overhangs in the rock, but the last one was at least a quarter mile back a trail that was growing more treacherous by the second. With no other options, Dante ran off the path and jogged up a house-sized mound. He got out his knife, pulled up his sleeve, and cut the back of his left arm. The rain rinsed the blood away, but the nether couldn't be confounded that easily.

  The dirt swelled at his feet. He let the mud slide away, then drew the underlying rock into a broad shelf, extending it outward, slightly rounded, with its entry pointed downhill. Finished, he ran beneath it. The others joined him.

  Rain sluiced over the doorway in a solid curtain. Their clothes steamed from the heat of their bodies. They panted, wiping water from their eyes and toweling it from their hair with rags kept safe in inner pockets.

  "There goes our tracks," Cee said.

  Lew wrung water from the cuffs of his cloak. "And our whole hunt!"

  "Try not to sound too happy about it," Dante said.

  Beyond the makeshift cave, capillaries of floodwater joined to become veins. Dante watched it all literally wash away. Downhill, a crow fell to the ground with a strangled squawk. It whapped its wings against the mud but couldn't stand up. It slipped in a torrent and was swept against a crush of brambles. When the water relented a few minutes later, the crow was no longer moving.

  The storm was a coastal squall, blowing itself out shortly. Once it abated, Dante stuck out his palm. Mist settled to his clammy skin. He walked outside, boots squelching. The trail was obliterated. So were entire stretches of mountainside.

  Cee moved beside him. "You know, there's a good chance they don't even have what we came here for."

  Dante blew into his hands. "Then why would they run?"

  "Hell if I know. You believers do all kinds of things that don't make any sense."

  "For someone whose expertise is finding things, you give up awfully fast. Watch and learn."

  Without another word, he walked away from the sludgy remnants of the trail and headed to the brambles. He called to the nether and it leapt into the broken body of the crow, hungry for the fresh death. The bird jerked, twitched its wings. Cally had always said you couldn't get a dead bird to fly, but Cally had never been much for working with animals. Dante had tried, on occasion, and while he'd never succeeded, he'd seen room for potential. He picked up the crow, lobbed it into the air, and ordered it to fly. It flapped clumsily and slammed into the wet grass. He tried again, but it was simply too heavy.

  Well, for one thing, it was soaked. As the others watched, he took it back into the cave and transmuted the nether into raw heat. Steam wafted from the black feathers. Once the crow dried, he took it back outside and threw it into the air again. This time, it was able to glide for fifty feet before it arced back to the ground. Still too heavy.

  "What are you doing?" Lew said.

  Dante got out his knife. "I thought you'd like a pet."

  Cee didn't know whether to look amused or disgusted. Well, if she was going to stick around, she'd have to get used to it. Dante dug the blade into the crow's gut and hollowed it out, letting the entrails fall to the grass. They were no good to anyone now. All he needed was its wings and its eyes.

  This time, when he lobbed it into the sky, it wobbled, glided, and rose.

  "Look at that," Dante said. "I might never have to leave my room again."

  He suspected the next phase of operations was going to involve a high degree of dizziness. He went back to his little cave to sit down. Firmly planted, and sheltered from any more sudden rains, he sent his sight to the crow's.

  The ground rolled along a hundred feet beneath him. Dante's heart leapt. Involuntarily, he sent the bird flapping higher, then got a hold of himself and let it do its thing. The hillsides were a mess of mud and torn-up sward. Sediment flowed around boulders. In places, the floods had swept rocks onto washed-out paths, piling them up at the bottom of slopes. He made the crow bank and glimpsed the top of Cee and Lew's heads far below. He circled around, getting a sense for how people looked from that high up in the sky, then turned it loose to scan the hills and valleys.

  Now and then, he registered Cee and Lew murmuring something to each other, but they knew enough to leave him to his hunt. When he felt himself get chilly, he got up to pace around, but still kept his sight tied to the crow's. At first he had no real plan to the search, letting the crow follow the winds, which were still quite stiff, but he soon found himself wandering over ground he'd already covered. He directed the crow to soar through an ever-expanding spiral.

  It continued to see a whole lot of nothing. Now and then an odd spot of brown or white drew his eye, but whenever he sent the bird closer, it turned out to be a piece of rock or a patch of clay exposed by the storm. Sometimes he homed in on motion, but it was always revealed to be the rush of wind through the plants, or very rarely, a vole or sparrow emerging from cover to see if it was safe.

  He was growing weary, losing his focus. He let the crow land on a boulder, then withdrew his sight, stood up, and rubbed his eyes.

  "That's not the posture of a man who's found what he's looking for," Cee said.

  "No," Dante said. "It's the posture of a man who's spent the last twenty minutes staring through the eyes of a dead bird."

  "Light's getting late."

  He glanced at the clouds. This whole time, his vision had been pointed groundward. He was surprised to see that much more than twenty minutes had passed: at least an hour, maybe two. Yet between battling the winds and swooping up and down to get a better glimpse of suspicious colors or shapes, he'd barely investigated a fraction of the terrain.

  "Get some firewood," Dante said. "We're going to have to spend the night."

  "That idea is so bad I want to take it behind the barn and club it."

  "We don't have a choice. Even if we headed downhill right now, we wouldn't be back to the temple before dark. There's no way we can navigate this mud after nightfall."

  "But you could create a light for us," Cee said. "I've seen you."

  He clenched his teeth. "I'll search until sunset. We'll camp here tonight and head back tomorrow morning. The slopes will be drier then."

  "You're the boss."

  She turned and walked out from the cave. Lew wandered off to lend her a hand. Dante reseated himself and returned to the crow. After a couple false starts, the undead creature was able to take off on its own power, launching from a branch. It soared on the winds, passing over a tight valley of swaying grass.

  Dante frowned. Only parts of the grass were swaying. And it wasn't grass—it was shedwind.

  The crow ceased flapping and banked, bleeding altitude. Through a gap in the shedwind, a man in a soaked robe tugged at the green stalks, lashing them together into a crude shelter.

  Dante's eyes flew open. He let the crow circle a few more times, then had it climb higher and higher to take in vast stretches of mountain.

  "I've found them," he said. "They're close."

  But Lew and Cee weren't; they were downhill, lugging up damp branches, sour looks on their faces. Dante jogged to them and repeated himself.

  "They're settling in," he said. "If we hurry, we can catch them before dark."

  "And then what?" Cee said.

  "We sit down and converse. Like normal, everyday people who aren't chasing each other across the mountains during a potentially lethal storm."

  She looked skeptical. He did
n't care. They hiked through the hills, following a crow-scouted path over solid rock that had suffered little during the downpour. A half hour later, with the light weakening, they crept over a ridge and looked down on the shedwind-choked valley.

  "Let me handle them," Dante murmured. "If they threaten us, don't hurt them unless you're in imminent fear for your safety."

  "I don't want to hurt anybody," Lew said.

  Cee smiled. "Then stay behind me."

  Dante crept down the ridge, crawling through the mangled brush until he got down to where his silhouette wouldn't show on the horizon. His clothes were soaked. His boots were so laden with mud they were three times as heavy. Mud had crept up his shins, too. The smears just below his knees had gone lighter as they'd dried.

  Voices drifted from the valley bottom. The rustle of leaves. Dante's crow alighted in a fir and eyeballed the camp. A dozen monks sat in a loose circle, holding their hands above a large rock as if to warm them, but there was no visible flame.

  Dante paused within bowshot, hidden behind a screen of leaves. The Hanassans were renowned for their wisdom, their knowledge and lore, but some were sorcerers, too. If they perceived him as an enemy and lashed out at him—particularly the ethermancers—he might regret being so sneaky. He already had a few nicks on his knuckles, but he cut his forearm and kept the nether close.

  "Please tell me there's been a misunderstanding." He stepped from behind a tree. "If you really ran all this way to avoid me, I'm afraid of what I've come to ask."

  As he spoke, three monks drew nether to their hands, where it swirled darkly like blood dropped in sluggish water. Motes of ether danced on the fingers of a fourth man. The Hanassans stared as one.

  Dante moved further from cover. "I'm not here to hurt you."

  Since sorcerers needed no weapons to do harm, and actually had a habit of splaying palms and swooping their arms about when they meant to do business, the typical displays of peaceful intentions—hands open, raised, or held before you—tended to evoke hostility from fellow practitioners. Instead, the Gaskan custom among sorcerers was to press your palms together in front of your navel where they could be clearly seen, and any motions of the elbows or wrists would be obvious. Dante wasn't certain whether the display was the same in the Houkkallis (which, like so many other places, was a part of Gask, but hadn't always been), yet he attempted it anyway.

  "And neither are my friends," he finished. Behind him, Lew and Cee slipped from the brush.

  "That's good." A monk took a step forward. Furry leggings showed beneath his cloak, thick with mud. "Would hate for our holiday to be spoiled by violence."

  "What is it you're trying so hard to hide?"

  "What is it you came all this way to find?"

  "The Black Star." Dante moved forward. "Cellen."

  "Oh." The monk lowered his gaze to the leaf-strewn ground. "That."

  "How do I find it?"

  A second monk stared Dante down. This man was much older, a hood draped over his bald head. "What do you want with it?"

  "I don't know," Dante said.

  "Bullshit."

  "That depends on what it can do, doesn't it?"

  The old monk smiled thinly. "What do you think?"

  "One story says it was used to end a drought," Dante said. "Is it an amplifier? Or a pure source?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "I suppose it would mean the same thing in the end." He looked across the monks' faces and failed to find a clue to their mood. He wasn't going to be able to trick or buy the answers from them. His only chance to get the truth was to give them the same. "I believe that good comes from inside us, sparks arising in the hearts of individual men and women. But the most good comes from institutions. From collectives of individuals dedicated to nourishing, growing, and spreading that good beyond themselves. In this way, you can build something to outlast your brief life."

  "Get to the point," the second monk said.

  "A good institution is built over the course of generations. Each leader stands on the shoulders of the last, drawing on the strength of his people to climb a little higher." He paused. "But like Arawn's mill, all it takes is one crack to send it tumbling down. If a single leader has bad balance—poor judgment—he will fall. And his empire falls with him. Isn't that what's happening in Gask now? Eight hundred years to build, and over the course of a single year, the decisions of Moddegan and Cassinder broke it apart. Now Cassinder's dead and Moddegan clings to the splinters."

  The monk's impatience had vanished, replaced by wary curiosity. Dante took a long breath and went on. "Given enough time, every well-meaning order will be brought down by an unbalanced leader. Good can never last; chaos always wins. It's inevitable." Dante drew a breath, then forced himself to finish. "Unless its leader never has to die."

  In the silence, the only noises were the splash of falling drops and the hiss of wind in the trees.

  "Everything must die," the old monk said. "It's the mandate of Arawn."

  "Arawn doesn't," Dante said.

  "Do you think it's good for a man to aspire to be as deathless as Arawn?"

  "If Arawn wants me, he can take me."

  The monks exchanged looks. The first one said something Dante couldn't catch. The older monk nodded and turned to Dante. "We don't know if it's an amplifier or a pure source. Either way, in your hands, it could likely do what you wish."

  "Why does it manifest?" Dante said.

  "We don't know that."

  "Then how can I find it?"

  The old man shrugged his shoulders high. "If we knew, perhaps we would be seeking it ourselves."

  Dante pinched the bridge of his nose. "At least answer me this. If you ran away to hide this from me, why tell me now?"

  "Because you're not the only one who'll be chasing it—and at least your motives aren't greed and hegemony."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  "Besides, we respect those who'll go through hell to attain the knowledge they seek."

  "So Cellen is real," Dante said. "It has the power to do things no person could do on their own. Yet no one in the world knows a single thing about it?"

  "Wrong," the old monk said. "No one in this world knows about it."

  Dante laughed. "'This' world? Am I to travel to the underworld, then?"

  "The underworld would be much easier to get to. Sadly for you, your path lies to the east."

  "The Woduns?" Dante said. "We've already been there."

  The monk shook his head. "Beyond the mountains—and into the forbidden lands on the other side."

  12

  "The answer came to me when I realized I was lousy at this," Blays said. "More accurately, it came to me when I cut myself and bled everywhere. The morbid ol' nether just loves blood, doesn't it? That's when I saw it—and understood that I was seeing it all along."

  Minn frowned. "That might be too profound for me to understand."

  "It's like when we ate the nat-root. At first I could only see it in life, where it was strongest, but after a while, I realized I could see it in the water, too. Turns out I can see it everywhere, root or no root. It's just so subtle I didn't know what I was looking at."

  "You're right, you are lousy at this. And you're even worse at explaining it."

  "You're not supposed to agree with me." Blays leaned an arm against the outside of the cave. "So what season's next? Winter? Or are the People of the Pocket unconstrained by our earthly perspective on the year's cycle?"

  A smile dented the corners of her mouth. "Winter comes next here, too. But first I think it's time you came in from the cold."

  As he puzzled over the apparent metaphor, she pulled back the curtain to the cave. Lukewarm air wafted forth, smelling of incense and cooked seafood.

  Blays met her eyes. "You're sure your friends won't gaff me and throw me out to sea?"

  "It's already been settled. No one wants to see you freeze to death."

  "Now that you mention it, it would be nice to feel my
fingers and toes again."

  He stepped inside. A torchstone glowed from the wall, casting its unblinking light down a bare tunnel. Minn made an immediate right into a short passage that led to a single doorway. Thick drapes revealed a square room ten feet to a side.

  She drew her finger across the air, creating a soft nethereal light. Blays squinted at it, trying to pick apart the energy within it.

  "It's all yours," she said. "Just don't go any deeper into the tunnels."

  A few shelves were sculpted into the walls. A thin mattress lay in the corner. Next to it was a low end table and a rack of candles. Glancing up, he could just make out a hole in the ceiling to vent smoke.

  And there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. "Did you make this just for me?"

  "Don't let it go to your head. It took five minutes." She moved back to the entry. "Wait here. I'll get you some dinner."

  "Is it soup time already? You know, just because you live next to saltwater doesn't mean you need to eat it for every meal."

  She lit a candle and walked into the hall. While she was out, Blays moved around the room, eyeballing it. Not that there was anything to see; other than the mattress, the table, and the candles, there was nothing else there. He had no possessions besides his clothes, a sword, a knife, and the sundries in his pockets. And it felt good. Except for the "one sword" bit. He'd need to find a new one somewhere. Walking around with a single sword was like trying to get by with one shoe.

  Minn returned with soup and a bowl of greenish mush—mulched grass stems. Seasoned by kelp shavings and green onions, judging by the taste. It was warm, though, and the room was an agreeable temperature. Other than fleeting moments in the afternoon when the sun was up and the wind was down, it was the first time he hadn't been chilly since fleeing from Setteven.

  Minn sat on her heels and watched the candle flicker. "You're from Narashtovik, aren't you? What's it like these days?"

  "Are you from there?"

  "No, but I'd heard it's in something of a renaissance. I don't get to hear much of what goes on beyond the cliffs."

  "I guess it is doing well," he said. "It was pretty grim when I showed up several years ago. Now, not so grim. Coincidence?"