The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  He saw Dante and suppressed a flicker of emotion. He nodded to Hopp. "Ready to talk?"

  "I have been ready since I got here." The norren raised his thick brows. "It's your future commander who's caused the delays."

  "Well, we're all here now." Olivander gestured to Hopp's yurt. "Shall we?"

  A more ornery norren might have insisted they stay outside, but Hopp was unusually easygoing for a clan chief, and agreed without issue. He, Olivander, and Dante walked inside a warm, round room of wool blankets and fur pillows. In the corner, an old woman gazed at them from the darkness.

  "She's trustworthy?" Olivander said.

  Hopp shrugged. "More than I am."

  They settled onto the pillows, sitting crosslegged. The familiarity between Hopp and Olivander suggested they had spoken more than once while waiting for Dante to cross the western continent.

  "We have been troubled," Hopp said. "We know our lands like no other, but things have appeared that are strange to us. Lights in the skies. Patterns. Animals we've never seen. Or which, at the least, we can't remember having seen before."

  "Kappers?" Dante said.

  Hopp shook his head. "Kappers never leave the Woduns. Which is why norren never enter the Woduns."

  "Then what are they?"

  "How should I know the name of something I've never seen before?"

  "The power of description might prove helpful."

  "One is like a rabbit," Hopp said. "Except for the fangs."

  Dante stared at him, trying to determine if this was a jest. "Are they aggressive?"

  "Not to date."

  "Either you missed me more than I could imagine, or you came here to tell us about something more than pretty lights and carnivorous rabbits."

  "It isn't a rabbit," the norren snorted. "I said it looks like one. But yes. I came to tell you a story."

  "A story?" Olivander said.

  "An old story. But aren't they all. This story says that, many years ago, lights shined from the hills, from the peaks, from all the high places. The nights aglow with colors never seen by day. Some feared this, and fled to the low places. Others stayed put in their tents. But others were curious. And their curiosity lured them to the peaks.

  "Among these was a woman named Yona. She went into the mountains with a spear and a bow of many arrows, because she may have been curious, but she was also prudent. This was good, because the lights attracted other creatures besides people: the hollen, the crox, the dog-of-six-arms. On her way up the heights, Yona slew more than a few. But this is not a story about how an armed person was able to destroy unarmed animals.

  "So. Each night, the lights streamed above her. Each day, she climbed closer to their source in the sky, until one night she found herself right beneath them. The lights danced close, as if daring her to touch them, but every time she reached up, they flicked away.

  "For three nights she chased them. Once her hand came so close she felt the light's cold heat on her skin. But she was never able to touch them. So she sat on the cold turf and thought. Rains came, soaking her to the bone, but still she sat, reflecting. When night came again, she moved to a pool of rainwater. The lights soared across the sky. She jumped to reach them and again they danced away. She grinned, knelt beside the pool, and touched their reflection in the water.

  "No sooner had she done so than Josun Joh, lord of all things, special guide to the norren, who are his—"

  "I know who Josun Joh is," Dante said.

  Hopp cocked a thick brow. "Does your friend?"

  Olivander glanced around the yurt. "I've heard of him."

  "But you don't know him. So it is good to be reminded. Besides," he glared at Dante, "it is how the story goes."

  Dante opened one palm. "By all means, proceed."

  Hopp frowned at the corner of the yurt, casting about for the thread of his story. "If you're so impatient, I'll abbreviate. Josun Joh appeared to Yona. He looked her from head to toe and said, 'Why did you come here?' Yona shrugged and replied, 'Because there were lights.' 'You found the way to them,' Josun Joh said. 'Now find me the Black Star.' 'What is the Black Star?' Yona asked. And Josun Joh said, 'Just as it sounds.'

  "Yona did as she was tasked. And when she delivered the Black Star to Josun Joh, together they lifted the drought that had blighted the lands." Hopp sat back.

  Dante waited a couple of seconds. "That's it?"

  "That's why I think it is a very old story," Hopp said. "Their endings are never any good."

  "If this is one of your norren metaphors, I don't get it."

  "Neither do I," the chieftain said. "But I knew that you would want to have it at hand, and since it is a norren story, I doubted that you would have encountered it before."

  The yurt was quiet for a moment. Outside, members of the Broken Herons chattered and laughed.

  "Cellen," Olivander said.

  The word tickled Dante's memory. "From the Cycle of Arawn? It's hardly mentioned. And the story is nothing like Yona's."

  "Yet the name is the same. Black Star."

  It was true; Dante hadn't drawn an immediate connection because Hopp had pronounced the word in a norren dialect. He tapped his fingers together. "So these events have happened before."

  "With significant impact," Olivander said.

  "Indubitably. That's why nobody has any clue what's happening and we have to hear about it in a norren story that's as obscure as it is cryptic."

  Olivander gave him the eye. "Hopp, does Yona reappear in any other tales?"

  "Not that I recall," Hopp said. "But I always thought her story was too boring to want to hear any more of it. I'll ask my people."

  "Thank you." He turned to Dante. "Why don't we step inside the Citadel?"

  That didn't sound like Dante's idea of a good time, but he had little choice. He exited the yurt and gestured for Lew and Cee to follow Olivander through the gates to the courtyard. Inside the Citadel proper, Gant moved to intercept Cee and Lew while Olivander and Dante continued upstairs.

  Once inside Olivander's chambers, the big man closed the door and stood facing it, back to Dante. "Where were you?"

  "Chasing rumors of the lights," Dante said.

  "Is that so? To such distant corners of the earth it took you ten days to return once summoned? By the way, who gave you permission to depart on this venture?"

  "I wasn't aware Council members had to seek permission to step outside."

  Olivander turned halfway, his face darkened with disappointment. "Brush this off at your peril."

  Dante lowered his gaze. "It won't happen again."

  "No," Olivander sighed. "It won't."

  "Is that a threat?"

  "Being a leader means making your responsibility the core of your being. In troubled times, everyone in this city relies on you. How can I entrust tens of thousands of lives to someone who thinks nothing of running off whenever it suits him?"

  "I take your lesson to heart," Dante said. "So what would you have me do for our city?"

  Olivander looked up sharply. "I don't need you submissive and defeated. I need you to be the man who earned the head of this Council. Driven. Creative. And defiant."

  "In that spirit, fuck you, sir."

  Olivander snorted. "Very good. Now what were you really up to out there?"

  "I found Blays. The hunt took me across Gask. There may have been an incident with King Moddegan." He winced, then decided what the hell. "There was an incident. I believe it's blown over, but I'll write it up for you. We may want to dispatch one of Somburr's people to soothe any wounds."

  "Should I be angry?"

  "Moddegan had me and let me go, if that means anything to you."

  "Quite a lot. As is the fact you're back, and Blays is not. Not like you to let what you want get away."

  "Well, it's not like him to do anything he doesn't want. My attempt to set things right didn't go as well as I'd planned." Dante glanced toward the window. "In any event, there's nothing more I can do about it. So what about
Cellen? Do you think it's serious?"

  "I have no idea," Olivander said. "And that is why I'm so concerned."

  "I'll look into it." He met Olivander's eyes. "If that's okay with you."

  The big man chuckled. "Do your worst."

  Dante returned downstairs and had Gant round up Lew and Cee. He dispatched Lew to the archives to search for any mention of Cellen or Yona. Once the monk was gone, Dante turned to Cee. "Are you only good at finding people? Or are your talents more versatile?"

  She squinted at him. "Are you asking me if I can find books?"

  "It doesn't have to be books. It can be anything with a record or mention of what's happening."

  "What do you think is happening?"

  "I don't know."

  Cee rolled her eyes. "Sure, you're clueless. That's why you're running after it like a thirteen-year-old who's just glimpsed his first bare ass."

  "Typically, I would dismiss Hopp's story as typical norren obscurity," he said. "But this time, their legend matches what we're seeing." He gazed across the courtyard. "You found Blays. You earned yourself a job. Now find me everything there is to find."

  She saluted mockingly and exited through the front gate. Dante ran upstairs to his room and opened The Cycle of Arawn across his desk. He had whole passages of it memorized and found the mention of Cellen without the need to check the monks' indexes. But that mention was no more than a blink: "And Cellen slipped through the skies, a dark pearl in a black sea, while bright stars flashed on all sides, as common as the sand."

  That was it. There was little to be gleaned from the context, either, a story of sorcerous warfare in an eastern kingdom that had probably never actually existed. Dante read the passage three times, but found no hidden meaning.

  Not that he'd expected it to be that easy.

  Carrying the Cycle, he went into the hallway, walked past the tapestries depicting the White Tree, and knocked on Tarkon's door. The old man met him with a smile and led the way to the balcony, where he'd been drinking tea and watching the city go about its business.

  "What do you know about Cellen?" Dante said.

  "Cellen?" His brows banged together. "About as much as I know about the magical alchemical process that transmutes food into dung."

  The man had to be ninety or better, but his wits seemed ageless. Dante smiled. "Yet you recognize it."

  "Samarand talked about it from time to time. I never paid it much mind. You know how she was about her prophecies."

  Dante nodded vaguely. He'd only known the former leader of the Council for a few months, and at the time, he'd been less concerned with getting to know her than he'd been with exterminating her. She had died by Cally's hand during a highly questionable attempt to summon Arawn himself to lead her followers to victory in Mallon. Her willingness to believe his avatar would appear to her cast shade on anything she might have believed, yet the woman had been a brilliant nethermancer and a powerful leader. Anyway, considering Dante was currently chasing a norren myth, it was hard to be too harsh in his judgment.

  "I never got to know her that well. What did she have to say about Cellen?"

  Tarkon sipped his tea and scratched the back of his ear. "Gibberish, mostly. I got the sense she thought it was a tangible object, something you could take hold of. What stuck with me most is she was most keen on making sure nobody else got it."

  "Why was that?" Dante said.

  "Search me. These days, my memory's a sieve. She never trusted me enough to fill me in on her schemes."

  Dante stood. "If you think of anything else, please let me know."

  "There might be more about it in her rooms," Tarkon said.

  "Cally's chambers? There's nothing left of hers in there."

  "No, her rooms. Downstairs."

  The existence of these was news to Dante. As soon as Gant led him downstairs, past the main basement and the dungeons and into a cramped staircase Dante hadn't even known existed, it was clear that Samarand's trove had been well known to Cally. The old man's notes were all over her collection of scrolls, folios, and notebooks, which filled multiple shelves and several desks.

  There were artifacts, too. Bottles of colorful oils. A bucket of stones and gems. Two complete possum skeletons held together with wires and glue. Driftwood planks carved with foreign runes. Silver goblets and flatware. All of it was cobwebbed, dusty, yellow-gray with age; some of the items were so time-weathered Dante wasn't certain exactly what they were.

  One item stood out like a lantern on a midnight hill. An object Dante had thought long lost: a four-foot rib bone shaken from Barden itself during the battle that had taken Samarand's life. Its edge held a terrible, undulling sharpness. Cally had done some work on it, early on, then declared it required much more study. Supposedly, he'd tasked a team of monks with it, but somehow the bone had wound up down here. Dante couldn't guess why. It would have been just a little useful during the war. Perhaps the old man's mind hadn't been as coherent as Dante thought. Perhaps it had been brought here during the war, hidden out of the way where Moddegan's people would be unlikely to find it. Or maybe Cally had simply stored it here with the intention of returning to it later, but the constant business of Narashtovik had left it forgotten.

  Much of Samarand's collection was quite interesting, but it wasn't what Dante was after. He ordered the servants to help him carry Samarand's prodigious volumes up to Cally's room, then dove into the work.

  For days, he pored over her writing, skimming where he could, but reading closely enough to catch any glancing mention of Cellen. Meanwhile, Lew stacked up one old book after another, bookmarking relevant pages with knotted strings. Cee came and went at odd hours. When Dante's eyes grew strained, he sat back and closed them while she related stories and legends she'd culled from the streets of Narashtovik.

  The problem, however, was that none of these tales were about the Black Star itself. Instead, they used it as a storytelling device, a metaphor for things that were cryptic or obscure. "And so young Hollander became as lost as Cellen," for instance, or "Gena's dreams remained as out of reach as the Black Star."

  The same pattern emerged in Lew's books. There had been a flash of mentions of Cellen four hundred years ago during the High Dwardic Period, but only as that same metaphorical device. Dante could only conclude an influential thinker had dredged up the term from the mists of the past, and other authors had quickly aped it as a way to display their erudition. Not terribly useful.

  And then he found Samarand's notes on Cellen. His hopes soared. Hours later, they crashed like Vosk and his leather wings. While she had been aware of the phenomenon, teasing it out of a skein of classical references, her knowledge hadn't run any deeper than his own.

  In one sense, this was impressive, because she had been working with nothing but rumors and scattered mentions of a thing that, as far as Dante could tell, no one else had even known existed. In terms of useful information, however, there was just a single segment he might be able to use: "Ten years? Total power. Wrest Mallon back to us. But to find it, to brush back the curtain so it will shine like a flame."

  And that was it. The rest was largely the same passages copied from the books Lew was bringing him. Cee's efforts fared no better. During the second week, the stories grew more and more outlandish: "Arawn pulled the serpent Gormor's heart from its chest, and it was so dark that all who saw it went blind. He had no choice but to stick it behind the night sky where no one would see it." Dante began to suspect people were making them up on the spot to earn another payment.

  He burned through the materials in the Citadel and enlisted a slew of monks to help comb the public and private libraries distributed across Narashtovik. Even with so many extra eyes in the search, they turned up nothing of note. Strange, considering how strongly Samarand had felt about it, and how obviously the lights were flaring across the mountains. But maybe Cellen hadn't appeared in a long, long time. Or maybe it was nothing more than pretty lights and didn't deserve a detailed historical a
ccount at all.

  But he thought there was more to it.

  After three weeks of hunting, he strolled through Olivander's open door. "Permission to sail away to foreign lands, sir."

  Olivander looked up from the paperwork he never seemed able to leave behind (the one trapping of the office Dante most dreaded absorbing). "To any land in specific? Or has all that reading finally driven you insane?"

  "Considering I've exhausted what Narashtovik knows, it would make sense to try anywhere else. But I have a more specific idea. The one place that knows everything: the Houkkalli Islands."

  10

  Blays jogged up the staircase through the cliff. Up top, the wind tousled the woman's hair. She stood in place, gazing at him as he wiped sweat from his temples and glanced across the plain far below for sight of Dante.

  "Well?" he said. "Aren't we going to head down to the caves? Meet the other ladies?"

  "I brought you up here because I was tired of shouting," she said. "Now talk."

  "About what? The weather? This fog feels strange, but I assume you're used to it."

  "This is why we don't let outsiders in the Pocket." She turned to go.

  "Hang on a second." He grabbed for her sleeve.

  As soon as he made contact, an icy jolt shot up his arm, paralyzing his fingers into claws. He yelped and jerked back, slipping on the damp rocks. He tipped toward the edge of the cliff. Before he could fall, he sat down hard and remained there, massaging his right hand.

  "That was rude," he said.

  She regarded him impassively. From most angles, she looked as young as he did, but in other moments she looked no less than fifty. "More so than grabbing the clothes of a stranger? If you have more to say, quit wasting my time and spill it."

  "I want—I need—to learn how to disappear. I know you've got more protecting you than these cliffs. What happens when someone approaches by sea? Or one of you decides to take a vacation from the sanctum?"