The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  The day waned. Dante gave the orders. Blays couldn't see any of it, of course, but twenty miles away, a few hundred heavily armed and well-trained troopers set out at high speed. As Dante continued to watch through the eyes of his furry little minions, Somburr, Ast, and Cee briefed Blays on what Corl was like. This was probably extraneous, but on the chance they got separated and Blays had to make his way down to the ground alone, it would be eminently useful. He'd seen a number of tree-villages on their way through Spiren, but it was hard to imagine one as dense as Corl.

  "You were right about the password, Somburr," Dante muttered after sundown. "But I've got the new one."

  The minutes trickled by. The troops reported in with their progress: they'd advanced eight miles so far and estimated they'd arrive by midnight. Right on schedule.

  Blays would have liked to get out and walk about, burn off some of the energy threatening to drive him wild, but now wasn't the time. And yet, much as had been the case when they'd begun their trek into the mountains, he didn't feel as nervous as he thought the situation called for.

  Stars fought for air with the canopy, but were soon overwhelmed by a solid sheet of clouds piling up from the east. Rain spit through the leaves in scattered drops.

  "Ready?" Dante said.

  Blays looked up. Was it midnight already? "Would it matter if I said no?"

  "Of course it would. You're the keystone of the bridge."

  "Then if I'm wobbly, best to dash across as fast as you can."

  He descended to the forest floor with Dante and Somburr. The rain had thickened, hissing on the tree tops. He was glad. Rain gave them every excuse to keep their hoods up.

  Within a few minutes, he could see the lights shining from the branches of the lorens, constellations of life brought down to earth. Smoke hung in the damp air. Before they got too close, Somburr stopped and closed his eyes. He and Dante became different people. Blays' sleeves and even his hands changed shape.

  "Well, that's distressing," he said.

  "From here on out, no more Gaskan," Dante said. "We're Spirish soldiers. We're cold and wet and we just want to get back inside."

  "That part won't be hard to fake. Pretend I said that in Weslean."

  Dante glared at him, then moved on. More lights sprung from the branches, but besides the sough of the rain, the woods were disturbingly quiet. They came to a set of roots webbed with housing and headed up the stairs. The smell of dung and hot lorbell oil wafted from below.

  The stairs curled around the trunk. Flats stretched to all sides, supporting shacks and tents. About eighty feet up, they came to a gap in the stairs. Dante exchanged a few words with the guard there and a crossing was lowered into place. Blays kept his eyes forward. They moved on.

  Higher up, the quality of the housing improved. Voices babbled from public houses, disembodied in the thick, damp air. They were allowed through another crossing, then a third. Blays was glad he couldn't see the ground. Even though the stairs were clearly the great road of the tree, there were few people on them. Most of the citizens were being kept home by the hour and the rain.

  A long, long ways up, they walked out on a flat and followed it all the way to another tree. The staircase there sported at least double the guards. They looked soaked and miserable and none of them said a word until Dante got to a convoluted trio of retractable platforms. A man in a dark beard grunted something. Dante mumbled back the password. The man turned and gestured and stairs cranked into place.

  It felt more than a little crazy that they were doing this, actually walking into the home of their greatest enemy, without being scrutinized by more than a few words from the occasional soldier. Then again, it was more than a little crazy that Somburr had them wearing illusory disguises, that Dante had stolen the password with the help of an all-seeing dead squirrel, and that, for an encore, Blays was about to pop out of sight and walk through the walls of the heart of the capital. He had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop from giggling.

  Above, the boughs grew dense with structures. Dante met his eyes and nodded. They came to another checkpoint. Dante gave a different password. A tall soldier with deep-set eyes came forth to inspect them. He said something Blays couldn't understand, but his tone was clear enough. Dante replied, but the man went on staring. To Blays' right, Somburr scratched the corner of his left eye. Blays said "yes" in Weslean. The soldier nodded, said something else to Dante, then stepped aside.

  They stepped out onto a flat thick with buildings. Most were dark, shuttered against the storm. All but a few were walled with wood. Blays had never laid eyes on the Minister's home, but it wasn't hard to guess which it was.

  They moved past the palace. Somburr gestured them into the shadow of a long, narrow building stretched along the edge of the flat. "We're on the west side of the structure. Do you recognize it?"

  Blays reoriented himself versus the map he'd memorized. "Got it."

  "We'll be right here," Dante murmured. "Do your thing and be quick about it. It's freezing out here."

  Blays grinned and vanished. Inside the nether, each drop of rain shined with its own inner gleam. He felt the shadows shifting behind him as Somburr darkened the air around himself and Dante. Blays walked lightly across the open space between the storage block and the palace, undisturbed by the motion of two soldiers off to his right.

  Blays approached the palace wall and passed straight through it.

  He found himself in a room cramped with books, a mobile ladder leaned against the shelves. This wasn't the room he'd meant to enter: Dante's map was so small that, although Blays had come in exactly where he'd meant to (just to the right of the two windows), he'd wound up in the adjoining room instead. But both fed into the same hallway. He jogged into it, feet all but weightless on the floor, and followed it to the staircase.

  At the upper landing, a man stood in the darkness, alone and motionless. Blays' hair prickled. Pure instinct, of course. He was invisible. He smiled at the man and walked right past without drawing so much as a flinch.

  The stairs fed him out a different direction than he'd come in, and Blays took a moment to adjust his internal compass—he'd only been inside for a minute, and could afford the time to eliminate potential mistakes. Once he thought he knew where he was, he walked briskly down the hall and through a series of foyers. Ahead, two soldiers stood in front of a closed, iron-banded door. Blays moved to their right, resisting the urge to tap one on the shoulder, and dissolved through the smooth stone wall.

  Candles fluttered from mantels and desks. The room was cluttered with books, figurines, scrolls, metal cups, and bone carvings. Lodged in the nether, Blays would have to bang directly into any of it to knock it down, but he moved with care through the tight, makeshift walkways between the bric-a-brac. Neither seeing nor hearing the Minister, he headed down a short hall, emerged from the nether to make sure his senses were accurate, and pressed his ear against the bedroom door. Beneath the distant drumming of the rain, he heard steady breathing.

  Blays tried the handle and found it unlocked. He snapped back into the nether. Silver glowed beneath the blankets of the sprawling bed. He could feel something else, too. A denseness he'd known before. Cellen.

  He moved beside the bed to confirm the man in it was the Minister. Dante and Somburr had spent a lot of time harping on the intensity of his eyes, but those were now closed. Black hair, sharp features. Anyway, it had to be him. No one would be crazy enough to employ a body double, then let that double sleep on top of the Black Star.

  Blays now faced the dilemma he'd been stuck on for days. Kill the Minister? Or rob him and leave him be?

  The equation held both a practical consideration and a moral one. On the practical side, killing him would ensure his silence during the theft. But it wasn't easy to kill someone in perfect silence. Even if Blays cut the Minister's head off in one swipe—and he couldn't, not with him lying in bed—the stroke of the sword would be on the crunchy side. The head might roll around. The body mig
ht thrash. Say Blays got blood all over himself. Would it become visible as soon as it left his person, e.g. on his tracks? He thought it might.

  On the moral side, it sounded like the guy was an asshole's asshole, but it was never fun to kill a person in their bed. Blays wished very deeply that he could stop killing altogether. Leave that for the assholes. Like the Minister.

  But he knew the only reason he was having this internal debate was because he was trying to talk himself into it. The Minister had to die, there was no way around it. His departure from the world would make that world better. His people's lives stood to be substantially less shitty if they wound up with a non-maniac for a leader. Just maybe, they'd move on from this "Narashtovik is the root of all our problems" nonsense and deal with their actual issues.

  Anyway, you didn't have to lop off a man's head to get him to quit existing. The heart worked just as well, and with a lot less mess.

  Still in the world of quicksilver, Blays drew his knife and leaned over the Minister. Gently as the morning dew, he drew away the blanket. The Minister slept in dark underclothes. He was on his left side, right arm across his chest, but the pathway to his heart was clear. Blays hovered above him, moving the point closer, then drove it home.

  The Minister surged upright, screaming.

  Blays jerked back, losing hold of the knife. The blade's handle twitched in time with the man's heart: the Minister had shifted at the last instant, turning an immediately lethal strike into one that might take minutes to kill him. Blays would finish that in a second. Still hidden in the nether, he moved to the head of the bed and snatched the bag beneath the pillow. It was as small as a coin purse, but felt as heavy as a keg.

  The Minister vaulted to the floor, knife still embedded in his ribs. White light flared across the room. Shadows drew to his hands in great flocks. Blays' heart roared in his ears. He should have known.

  The Minister's eyes cast about, burning with rage, then seemed to lock on Blays. Blays turned and fled out the open door. He bashed into a table, spilling a crystal pitcher to the tiled floor. It crashed and burst in a bloom of shards. The Minister followed him out. So did a wave of shadows as powerful as the swells of a storm-whipped sea.

  Blays ran through the outer wall of the Minister's chambers. A moment later, the door banged open.

  "We're under attack!" the Minister shouted. "Everyone to decks. Shoot strangers on sight!"

  Men hollered orders across the palace. Lanterns flared. Boots thumped. Blays barreled down the stairs. A gang of soldiers headed up them and he turned his shoulder and pressed himself flat to the wall. As soon as they passed, he tore down to the ground floor and sprinted through the halls. He tripped on the churned corner of a rug and sprawled on the ground, but the contact was so light it barely stung. He glanced over his shoulder. No sign of the Minister.

  He got up and ran for the library. Past its window, lanterns painted the platform with light. As Blays neared the library's outer wall, a dark shape moved over him. He stepped through the wall—and seemed to step out of the shadows, too. They withdrew from him with the suction of a receding wave, pulled away by the enemy behind him. With no more nether to walk in, Blays popped back into the physical world. He faltered.

  Mechanical bows snapped from the balconies. Blays lurched forward.

  "No!" Dante screamed from the darkness.

  It was the last thing Blays heard.

  39

  Lights blinked to life across the windows of the palace. Shouts rang throughout the flat, muffled by shutters.

  "Something's wrong," Dante said.

  Somburr didn't look his way. "You think?"

  "Should have left my mouse in there." Men were moving onto the palace balconies, bearing their strange cross-shaped bows. "Moved it out when—"

  A figure materialized outside the palace walls. It was too dim to make out his face, but given how he'd showed up, it could only be Blays. Bows clicked and snapped, sending two-foot bolts slamming into the flat.

  Dante bit his cheek until he tasted blood, flooding his hands with shadows. "No!"

  A black lance shot from the deck and struck Blays in the back. Blays pitched forward on his face. Dante was too shocked to speak. He ran from cover. "Blays!"

  "Stop it!" Somburr hissed.

  Blays hadn't moved since falling to the ground. Two bolts stuck from his back. Others protruded from the surface of the flat. Dante reached out to him with the nether, but there was nothing to mend. His heart had stopped.

  A bolt flew past Dante's face and tocked into the wooden ground. He whipped out his hand, shredding the soldier with a pulse of nether. Weapons clacked from the balcony. Projectiles sailed past. Dante enveloped the whole thing in a ball of darkness. Men shouted in surprise.

  A felt bag lay beside Blays. Dante picked it up, but it was empty, its mouth open. He glanced to all sides. Above him, the shadowsphere was torn away, ripped down by a Spirish nethermancer. Shadows sizzled toward him. He scrabbled back, meeting them with a blunt swipe of his own. The forces burst against each other. An iron bolt tore through his cloak, pinning it to the flat. Dante yanked it free and backpedaled from Blays, who was surrounded by a red stain, the blood diffused by the pouring rain.

  Another missile of shadows arced at his chest. Again he met it, but it bashed his defenses to splinters. He turned and ran, jagging side to side to throw off the archers. The doors of the palace flew open. Twenty men charged across the rain-slick flat with a roar.

  Still tucked against the storage building, Somburr sent black darts flying across the night. Men grunted and fell. A horn blasted from the palace. Within moments, men were shouting up and down the platform.

  "Come on!" Dante said.

  Somburr fell in behind him. Dante headed straight for the edge of the flat, leapt over its short rail, and soared into empty space. Somburr's cloak flapped behind him. Branches tore at Dante's clothes. He shielded his face, slowed by the mats of leaves, and slammed onto the roof of a building on the flat below. As he slid down the wet woven leaves of the roof, Somburr impacted above him. A soldier grunted and plummeted through the open air; he'd missed the roof and the platform below it. He tumbled into the gap between the flats, screaming as he went. Dante slid to the edge of the roof and dropped to the flat with a squelch of rain.

  Somburr joined him, looking spooked but unhurt. "What just happened?"

  "Blays is dead, Cellen is gone, and the Minister is a nethermancer of the highest order."

  Somburr was silent for one second. "We have to go back. Nothing is more important—"

  "Don't you think I know that?" Dante snarled. "That flat is crawling with soldiers and the Minister could be a match for either of us. We had no choice."

  He oriented himself and took off running toward the trunk of the tree. Men were yelling back and forth from the palace flat, but Dante was screened by walls of branches and leaves. Somburr had maintained their illusion of soldiers' garb. Faces peeped from windows, but saw them as nothing more than two of the Minister's men responding to the call of the horn.

  "Don't tell me you're giving up," Somburr said. "Not after this."

  Dante's head beat with such fierce rage he could hardly speak. "We need to get back to the ground."

  They ran full tilt toward the trunk. Men in green uniforms raced up the stairs. Dante hit the stairs and ran down, veering around the upward traffic. Shoulders jostled him. Somburr produced a sealed letter—another illusion—and bore it before him like a burning brand. The troops gave them a little more space.

  They made it all the way to the three-part checkpoint without issue. There, the tall man whose eyes seemed chiseled into his face stood before them. "Password?"

  "Parakeet," Dante said.

  The man cocked his head. "Emergency password."

  "See you in hell," Dante said.

  The man stepped back and shouted, "Intru—!"

  Dante blasted a hole through the center of his chest. He staggered back, toppled over the platform
ledge, and dropped toward the next turn of the staircase far below. As Dante engaged the pawl, lowering the stairs, Somburr whipped a spike of shadows into the three soldiers taking aim at them from the bottom of the crossing. A bolt flew over Dante's head and vanished into the branches. The stairs finished descending. Dante tripped another pawl and sprinted toward the second platform. As the first began to rise up, the third and final platform began to sink into place. He and Somburr slid onto the second. For the moment, they were alone, but there were bodies at both ends of the crossing. The third stairs lowered with agonizing slowness. While they were still mid-descent, Dante jumped on them and ran across.

  They had barely made it around the curve of the trunk before they ran into more soldiers.

  "Someone killed the watchmen!" Dante said. "Secure the area. I'm going for help."

  He continued down before they could ask questions. Quickly, he looned Nak and Mourn, ordering the troops to rush to the heart of Corl at maximum speed. High above, the horn went off again, a mournful bleat in the nighttime rain. An argument carried down from the checkpoint. Dante got off the stairs onto the flat connecting it to the other loren and jogged past the houses as fast as he dared. A drunk watched him pass, slack-jawed, bottle forgotten in his hand.

  Rain spilled from the leaves. Dante's breath hung in the air. The flat grew darker and darker. After a minute, he had to slow to make sure he wasn't about to trip.

  "Does this look wrong to you?" he said.

  Somburr eyed him. "Wrong for what?"

  "For the crossing. To the other loren."

  Back near the trunk, torches flapped. Voices rose, soldiers asking questions. Somburr's face paled. "This isn't the crossing."

  "Then where are we? Why did you let me go this way?"

  "I assumed if you were going to the crossing, you would go to the crossing." He pointed into the branches. "It's up there."