The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

At a snowfield, Dante retook the lead. As he marched through the crunching ice, he became lost in the dream of connecting Narashtovik, Tantonnen, Gallador, the Norren Territories, and everything that had once made up Eastern Gask with a perfect network of roads. Travel times could be cut in half. Such an effort would take him years by himself, but the People of the Pocket could accomplish it in a season—and Cellen could do it in an instant.

  Logically, it would be better to extend his life and spend part of it uniting his allies with roads than to burn Cellen in such a manner. But the potential was what sent his mind spinning. He could build aqueducts down from these very mountains, expand Narashtovik's underground sewers across the whole city, clear miles of fields for farming. He was certain Ro would take her people back to Pocket Cove the instant this was finished, but there was nothing to stop him from training others to move the earth, was there? With just a dozen monks working every day, he could revolutionize the lives of tens of thousands.

  But that was for the future. In the present, he had to deal with the Minister. He withdrew from such fancies to keep watch on the forests and the ridges. A single kapper attack or avalanche could ruin everything.

  Throughout the day, the People of the Pocket cut a swath across and through a series of screes and cliffs. By the end of the day, they were closer to their destination than to Soll. The scouts pointed the war party to a pine forest protected on one side by a cliff. There, for their final act of the day, the People conjured a semicircle of twenty-foot walls, enclosing more than enough space to house the whole camp with room for latrines. They quickly strung up tents and erected yurts. Men hacked down branches and cleared the ground. In a blink, fires blazed. The camp was filled with the smell of smoke and roasting meat.

  Dante found Ast warming himself by one of the fires. "How far are we?"

  Ast looked to the east, but the blank wall blocked his sightline. "We could only have moved faster if we'd flown. We should be at the site by noon tomorrow."

  It took Dante some time to get to sleep. He was too busy envisioning the next day. When he got up, the only lights were the coals of the fires and the stars overhead. He moved along the walls and checked with the soldiers watching the darkness. None had seen or heard any sign of kappers.

  They ate and packed their shelters. The People pulled down a section of wall and the procession moved on. The day began dazzling and sunny, but by late morning, a carpet of cloud muffled the sky. The world seemed to dim. Dante was staring up at it trying to gauge whether it was about to snow when Ast announced they'd arrived.

  The site he'd chosen to begin the tunnel was on a stretch of level ground. A series of steep rises hung above it, followed by countless miles of snowfields, ravines, and glaciers. It was a good site, and Dante said as much. While the scouts dispersed to make sure the area was as desolate as it looked, the troops went about gathering wood from the surrounding pine forest. The crack of axes filled the day.

  Ro approached the rocks and got to work.

  The first step, which would go on to consume the remainder of the first day, was devoted to hollowing out the staging area: the huge caverns in which everyone, including the animals, would shelter and wait while the People of the Pocket worked on the tunnel.

  Because, as it turned out, there were a few minor logistical issues with gouging a hole through scores of miles of mountains while simultaneously attempting to pass a small army through that hole. The People of the Pocket's timetable was aggressive, but it was still going to take multiple days to craft the passage. Even if they were somehow able to conjure the entire tunnel instantaneously, the distance between them and the other end was going to be something like eighty miles, possibly longer. The troops would have to rest and sleep more than once to get through it. Yet making the tunnel wide enough for them to rest at any point along the way would slow the People down tremendously—every foot they cleared to the side was one foot they could have spent moving forward.

  Instead, he and Ro worked out another option. Rather than a spacious tunnel of uniform width, they'd keep it as tight as reasonably possible. But there would be two giant caverns built into it: one here, at the start, and one in the middle, reachable on a full day's march. A second day of travel would see the army out the other side. Smaller caverns, roughly the size of a large room, would augment the tunnel every ten miles, allowing space for those who needed it to rest mid-march without clogging the passage.

  The rock before Ro melted inward, flowing away in a potent, heatless rush. Two women stood beside her, casting nethereal light into the growing space, though Dante doubted Ro needed the illumination. He expected she could operate entirely by feel. The cavern was soon wide enough to walk into. As Ro continued to expand it straight back, others moved in to open its sides.

  "We're sure the whole mountain's not about to fall down?" Blays said.

  "They know what they're doing," Dante said. "They'll feel it if it starts to get...collapsey."

  "Well, just a friendly reminder that I'll be sleeping in there. I have a secret vulnerability to being crushed by thousands of tons of rock."

  "At least it would be over fast."

  Dante walked into the cave and let his mind move into the rock. As the open space grew and grew, he felt the faintest tremor in the nether. After discussing it with Ro, they decided to amend the chamber to include a number of pillars. Just in case. Dante handled these, fighting the urge to make every curve and surface smooth. It didn't have to be perfect. It just had to keep the snow (and the mountain) off their heads.

  He went outside for a break and saw that many of the soldiers were watching the cave in awe. Pale lights flashed between the pillars as strange women reshaped the Woduns with mere thought. Dante stopped to watch, too.

  Their guesses as to how big the cavern would need to be were just that—guesses—and as they neared completion, they brought in a few dozen of the troops and mounts to see whether the space was sufficient. Men lugged in firewood and supplies while some of the women of the Pocket installed fire pits, chimneys, ventilation shafts, and downward-sloping latrines in the outer wall.

  With so many people, the process moved at incredible speed. The cavern was complete by mid-afternoon. The People of the Pocket moved their efforts to the tunnel itself, boring an eight-foot-wide passage into the inner wall, working two at a time while two more followed with compasses and plumbs to ensure the passage was kept reasonably straight and level. Dante volunteered to help and was added to the queue of women. Their talent varied wildly: some were only able to carve out a hundred feet of tunnel before tiring, while others walked for a quarter mile, rock dissolving before them the whole way, until at last they smiled faintly and stepped back, allowing the next to take their place. It was impossible to tell exactly how far they progressed, but Dante thought they'd made it at least five miles through the mountains before their strength was spent.

  By the time he got back to the main chamber, many of the women and some of the troops were asleep. Fires burned in the pits, heating and lighting the front of the cave. There was a bit of smoke, but most of it channeled up the flues built into the wall.

  Ro was among the last to return from the tunnel. Dante went to greet her. "This is incredible. We're moving much faster than I expected."

  "It will slow as we get deeper." Her voice creaked with exhaustion. "But thank you. Now where's dinner?"

  The last thing they did before nightfall was shrink the outside entrance to the exact size where a man could get through it but a kapper couldn't. Thus protected, they screened it with tarps to keep out the cold.

  Dante found Blays and Minn eating dinner. "Exciting, isn't it?"

  "I've lived with these people for years," Minn said, "and I've never seen anything like it."

  Blays rolled his eyes. "Let's not pat ourselves on the back so hard that we're too worn out to drill our magical tunnel."

  "Thank you for bringing them." Dante smiled and went to bed.

  When he woke, his first
sensation was the smell: the cavern was rank with the dung and urine of horses and mules. The sweat of men, too. He peeked through the entrance. The troops and beasts had trampled the snow, but the kapper tracks were unmistakable. He went for his sword, widened the opening, and stood vigil with the other members of the Council while the soldiers went to stretch their legs and exercise the animals.

  The women were already at work on the tunnel; he heard the first of them had risen at midnight. As the tunnel lengthened, he understood why Ro had thought their progress would slow down. It was a long ways for them to walk and growing longer by the moment. But while the tunnel was much warmer than outside, it was still chillier than the main cavern. Not to mention cramped and featureless. He thought about suggesting they create two additional great halls along the way instead of one, but the People worked on, tireless, uncomplaining. When his turn neared, he started down the tunnel. Walking by the light of his torchstone, then the nether, with his breathing and footsteps echoing off the close walls, it took him three hours to reach its end.

  The day after that, it took him half a day to reach its terminus. There would be no going back to the great hall that night. At multiple points along the walk, he'd heard the trickle of water and felt drafts of cold, fresh air; the People, noticing the staleness, had driven ventilation shafts up to the surface.

  They finished shaping the second sleeping hall and continued on. That night was his most miserable: the chamber had no fireplaces, poor lighting, and little company besides the women, who very well might have been on orders to minimize their contact with him, given their standoffishness. He spent the night tired and alone.

  He felt better as soon as he got back to work on the tunnel. With no sunlight or any other markers of the passage of time, the day entered a compressed, trance-like state. As soon as his hold on the nether grew weak, the annoyance and dissatisfaction of non-work swelled inside him. He looned Nak to send word to Somburr and the troops. It was time for them to move.

  To stave off his moodiness, Dante hung around the ever-advancing end of the tunnel. The women were deathly serious at times, appearing as incapable of joking as they would be of pulling a stump out with their teeth, but when they were alone together, they made fun like anyone else.

  That night, he stayed with them in one of the sub-chambers they'd built along the tunnel. He put in his work, then backtracked all the way to the second hall, where the troops had arrived the night before. Some of them looked a little rattled, and the norren appeared less than pleased to be stuck underground in tunnels that felt even smaller to them, but there were no signs of panic. Dante let them know that they should be on the move by the next morning.

  Not that he knew when "morning" was. He hadn't seen sunlight in days. Even his sleep schedule had become haphazard. To refresh the nether faster, and to pass the time, he was getting much more of it, curling up in his blankets whenever he thought he might be able to nod off.

  His lack of time-sense was why it came as such a surprise when, many hours later, as he stood at the end of the tunnel waiting his turn, a blade of sunshine slashed through the curtain of stone. A wave of frozen air came with it. He looked out on Weslee.

  38

  Everything about it felt different. The air. The temperature. The light. Even the ground somehow felt like a foreign country. He couldn't explain how, exactly. But for the first time since crossing from Mallon into Gask, he was looking on someplace new. Even if that newness was a barren, rocky snowfield, it was pretty damned exciting.

  A scout came to spell him on the ridge, informing him the People were readying to depart. Blays jogged back across the hills. The flat spot outside the tunnel was filled with a melange of men, norren, mules, and horses. The People of the Pocket were gathered in a loose cluster by the passage's entrance. Dante was there, too. On seeing Blays, he smiled and went to confer with Ro.

  "I know you said this wasn't about debts," Dante said. "But if there is ever anything that I, the Council, or the city of Narashtovik can do for you or your people, we're yours to command."

  Ro gazed to the east. "Just remember why you're here."

  That sounded a tad ominous, but also like one of those things Blays wasn't privy to because he was no longer the hammer hanging from the Great Dante's belt. He decided to let the important people worry about it.

  Instead, he found Minn and grinned. "Been out for a walk yet? It's like another country."

  "Not yet." She smiled wanly. "And I don't think I'll get to."

  "Why..?" His grin fell to earth like a pigeon with a heart attack. "You're going back with them."

  "I'm not sure what use I'd be here. They're still my people. I think it's time to rejoin them."

  "Well."

  "Is there a reason for me to stay?"

  He gazed up at the western peaks. He could have fabricated any number of excuses to keep her around, including a few that might be halfway true. But the fact was they didn't need her, not really; for her talents, Dante surpassed her at jerking rocks around, and while she was a superior shadowalker to Blays, he could handle himself well enough. True, it never hurt to have another nethermancer around, but she was outclassed by the members of the Council who were present, and they'd brought a dozen monks besides.

  All that was here for her was unnecessary risk for a city she had no ties to. That was it.

  "You're right," he said. "You should go back with them. When this is over, I'll drop by the cove to tell you how it played out."

  She touched his arm. "I'd like that."

  As if Ro had been waiting for them to conclude, she nodded to the People of the Pocket. They filed inside the tunnel. Within a couple minutes, they were gone.

  Dante crunched through the snow beside him. "Ready to go?"

  "Ready to fling myself at a hateful madman in possession of the world's most powerful object? Let's ride."

  The plan, as he understood it, was loose but sound. Move everyone to a safe, out of the way spot near the borders of the Spirish forest, then keep the body of the troops there while a few heavy hitters snuck into Corl and skulked around to figure out where Cellen was. Once that was established, they'd send in a lean, stealthy strike to try to liberate it while simultaneously moving the troops close enough to respond should the strike result in disaster. Then, with Cellen in hand, they'd rush to the tunnel, close it behind them, and abscond back to Narashtovik.

  It remained to be seen whether actual events would resemble that plan in the slightest.

  The army marched across the snowfields. Human and norren scouts moved ahead. According to their guide Ast, they were several days from the nearest real settlements, but if a single traveler spotted them and spread the word, the whole thing could be stillborn.

  They didn't see a soul for the first four days, however, and as far as they knew, they managed to elude detection all the way to their base camp, a pine-filled valley in sight of the first lorens towering above the lesser trees. As troops went to gather lorbells and replenish their dwindling provisions, Dante called together those bound for the infiltration of Corl: Somburr, Cee, Ast, Mourn, Blays, and a handful of scouts. They gathered under the pines, out of earshot of the others.

  Dante gazed between them. "In one way, this will be easier than it sounds. The Minister will have it on him at all times. I guarantee it."

  "Difficult to get to him in his compound," Somburr said. "But if he leaves, we'll have a real opportunity."

  "Is he arrogant?" Blays said. "Stupid?"

  Dante shrugged. "Probably the former. Definitely not the latter. Why?"

  "Because his people have waited a thousand years to get their hands on Cellen. Unless he's unbelievably arrogant, dumb, or some combination of the two, there's no way he leaves his little treetop castle."

  "Until it's time to smash Narashtovik." They all thought about that a moment. Dante bit his lip. "We should count on that coming sooner than later. His army must be close to assembled. Once it's ready, he'll be shuffling thousands o
f troops in. It'll be impossible for us to miss. I think the conservative approach is best: watch carefully and wait for opportunity."

  Dante passed out funny-looking clothes with loose sleeves and legs, along with cinches for the wrists and ankles. He promised they were Spirish, but as Blays dressed, he suspected it was a prank of some kind.

  They moved east into the forest. From a distance, the lorens looked pretty tall, but Blays soon found that was a trick of perspective: in fact, they were gigantic. Bizarre roots, too. Like a tangle of horrifically enormous worms holding a race to see who could get out of the ground fastest. Dante warned them that many of the trees were inhabited, some with entire towns. He'd explained this before, but now that Blays was seeing the trees in person, he understood it on a whole new level.

  They marched for a couple of days, following the roads like the innocent travelers they weren't. Dante, as per his habit, had killed a couple of genuinely innocent forest mammals, sending them ahead down the path to ensure there was no sign of soldiers. Just as Blays was beginning to wonder if they were leaving their own troops too far behind, Dante, Ast, and Cee stopped to confer, pointing off into the never-ending woods.

  "Corl's just a couple miles from here," Dante said. "We'll find an unoccupied tree, then get to work.

  They did just that, locating a loren that was on the small side, relatively speaking, and climbing up its roots to shelter in the hollows circling its trunk. There, "work" turned out to be everyone sitting around while Dante ordered a dead mouse to climb piggyback on a dead squirrel, then sent the squirrel bounding into the brush.

  "I think," Blays said after ten minutes of near silence, "we may have brought too many people."

  Dante waved a hand, distracted. "If the only 'people' at risk are a couple of dead animals, we should consider ourselves lucky."

  He was right. Even so, it wasn't a whole lot of fun to sit around in a damp tree with a bunch of smelly people while Dante gazed blankly into space.