The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

But it wasn't a collapse or an avalanche. Fifty feet away, from behind a low mound of snow, a kapper stalked onto the ice.

  Dante's pony shrieked. Perhaps he did as well. Somburr rushed forward, knives appearing in his hands. Dante drew his sword. Originally, the raw rib had been heavy and unwieldy, but using a combination of nether and steel chisels (which had gone blunt after two good whacks), he'd shaved and shaped the bone to the desired shape. By the time he'd finished work in Samarand's basement, the sword was three and a half feet long from point to pommel, gently curved. It was thicker than most steel blades of the same shape, but hardly any weightier—and unimaginably stronger.

  He held it from his side and faced down the kapper. The beast dipped its head, swaying its horns back and forth. Ast's pony took a faltering step to the left. The kapper padded forward. A bow twanged behind Dante. With a hard whack, the arrow struck the kapper in the middle of its plated skull and deflected away. The kapper accelerated into a lope. Heart hammering, Dante stepped forward and raised his sword to a guard.

  Another pony screamed, an unnatural, whinnying cry. Lew shouted. Dante glanced back. Two more kappers stalked down the slope behind them.

  "Deal with that one," Somburr said, pointing to the first. "We need to clear room to run."

  Dante nodded and gripped the sword with both hands. Animals skittered on ice behind him; ponies brayed, hooves scraping. One bolted to the left, slipping on the ice. The first kapper dropped its head and rushed Dante.

  He could try to knock a hole in the ice. Send this one plunging to its death and race to face the other two. But he had no practice manipulating ice, and even if it operated along the same principles as earth—and he suspected it would—he didn't know how the rest of the sheet would react if it were suddenly sheared open. He might slip and join the kapper, and any fall sufficient to kill it would surely claim him as well.

  So he leveled his sword and trotted forward. The kapper closed on him, snow twirling past its twin horns. He stopped and planted his feet. Moments before it impaled him, he leapt to the left, slashing at its head with his sword. The bone connected with the kapper's horn. A two-foot spiraled point spun into the ice and stuck there.

  The monster thundered past him and smacked straight into a pony's flank. The animal shrieked. The kapper drove it into the ground, then backed off. Blood spurted from the pony's ribs, dripping from the kapper's intact horn. Upslope, the other two monsters charged through a loose knot of people and ponies. Cee's bow thrummed. Ponies galloped toward the left edge of the sheet, sliding as the grade fell away. Shadows lanced through the air and burst harmlessly against a kapper's armored hull.

  The first beast, now down half a horn, twirled away from the downed pony and romped toward Dante. He timed his second effort better, diving away at the last instant, raking his blade down its side. It bellowed. Dark blood stained the snow. Dante landed on his hip and rolled. The kapper stumbled, snow spraying from the impact of its body. Dante popped to his feet and sprinted toward it. As it found its footing, he whipped the sword into its neck.

  The blade ripped through the plated armor, passed through the flesh like it was no more substantial than the powder beneath their feet, and jarred to a stop against the kapper's spine. Drunkenly, the kapper swung its head around, attempting to face him. Its legs gave out and it collapsed on its face. He yanked the sword clear.

  The scene behind him was sheer mayhem. Two more ponies were fallen, unmoving. As he watched, another skidded on the left slope and fell into an unseen crevasse. A second followed, braying all the way down. One kapper chased two more back uphill. The other charged straight toward Cee while Somburr and Lew maneuvered to either side. She flung herself flat. It bounded over her, kicking snow.

  Dante was already running, sword tight at his side. Nether darkened the air. The kapper ducked its head and squeezed its eyes shut and the bolt caromed from its head, sparkling away through the anarchic snowflakes. The creature opened its eyes. It blinked as Dante's sword ripped into the top of its head.

  A slice of skull went flying, trailing plates and scalp. Dante glimpsed an open, pink bulb of brain. The kapper planted its front feet, skidding through a semicircle that left it facing him. Distracted by its maneuver, Dante tripped. Ice gouged his chest and banged the side of his head.

  The kapper was already upon him. Steel flashed. Ast plowed into the galloping creature, leading the way with his sword. He drove its point straight into the kapper's exposed brain. Its legs went limp. It dashed into the snow, landing on Dante. The breath jerked from his lungs. He rolled, face abraded by snow.

  It came to a rest just past him, its back legs pinning him. He fought free. To his left, the third kapper drove another pony over the ledge. A lance of shadows struck it from behind. It squealed, stiffening, then turned and sprinted up the slope. Lew watched it retreat.

  Dante braced his arm on his knee, fighting to catch his hitching breath. Cee pushed herself onto her palms and shook her head like a wet dog. Ast had been flung ten feet from the dead kapper. He got to his feet, limping.

  Lew glanced over his shoulder, took in the scene, and ran to Dante. "Are you all right?"

  "Knocked the wind out of me," he said. He jerked his chin at the last kapper as it disappeared above the icy rim. "How did you wound it?"

  "I noticed they have a tendency to raise their tail just before they strike. And, well..."

  "He tore it a new asshole," Somburr said, crunching up beside them.

  Dante laughed. His ribs pulsed with pain and he clutched at them. He thought one might be cracked. He eased himself to a sitting position. The ice had scraped his cheek, meaning he had no need to cut himself. The nether answered his summons and he sent it into his ribs. The pain dulled.

  Somburr was already seeing to Cee, who sat in the snow clutching her head. Ast wiped his sword in the snow, lifted his right foot, and rolled his ankle, wincing.

  "Thank you," Dante said.

  "You did the hard part." He nodded to the treacherous left edge, where the three remaining ponies trotted in aimless circles, snorting and twitching. "We need to round them up before any more are lost."

  He sounded more than a little grim. Initially, Dante didn't understand why; while Cee appeared to have been dazed, and he and Ast had suffered moderate injuries, by and large, they'd come through it miraculously intact. But as he called to the ponies, attempting to soothe them best he could, the source of Ast's mood became clear. When the other ponies had fallen, they'd taken supplies with them. Blankets. Tools. Most importantly, food.

  Lew used the nether to fix up Ast's ankle best he could. Cee was blinking and scowling a lot, but she was capable of walking. They walked the three ponies down to the flat, river-like glacier, then took stock of their remaining supplies.

  "I'd say there's enough to stay warm," Ast said. "Not enough to stay fed."

  Dante sighed. "Well, the kappers provided a solution to that."

  "Kind of them, wasn't it?"

  Lew glanced between them. "What are you talking about?"

  Dante shook his head. "Stay here and keep watch."

  Dante picked up a canvas bag of horse tack and dumped it in the snow. Ast joined him as he trudged uphill to one of the fallen ponies. Its eyes were glassy, vacant. Together, they skinned it and cut away heavy strips of muscle, packing them into the bag.

  "What do you think?" Ast said.

  Dante chuckled. "He's never going to eat this."

  Ast shook his head, cheeks flushed with battle. "The storm will be worse in the divide. Can we cross it? Possibly. But if it lasts, there won't be any turning back. There's no guarantee we'll have enough food."

  Dante sat back and wiped his hands in the snow. "It would be a waste to turn back."

  "There's no sense feeding good grain to a dying cow." Ast slipped his blade between the pony's bowed ribs, cutting another slice of red meat and depositing it in the bag. "The kappers are hunting in packs. Next time, we won't have ponies to distract them."
/>   "Do you want to turn back?"

  "Will you?"

  "Show us to the pass," Dante said. "We can find the way from there. Then your job is done."

  Ast scrunched his face, hanging his head over the remains of the pony. "I can't leave you to cross the mountains by yourself."

  "Sure you can. You can literally just walk away."

  "And leave you to die."

  "You saved my life not twenty minutes ago. I don't think the gods will spit on you if you decide you've done your part."

  "I don't give a shit about the gods." Ast looked up sharply, then spat (which meant, unfortunately, that it landed on the blameless pony). "I care about what's right. If you go on, I do too."

  Dante dried his fingers on the inside of his cloak. "I think you believe I'm forcing you to do this, Ast. But you have to understand this is your choice—and that your brain is smarter than any sense of obligation."

  "Surely you know the brain is worth nothing when the heart is troubled."

  He grabbed the bag and stalked downhill. Dante got up and followed him. Under Somburr's care, Cee was able to walk without wobbling, though she didn't say much. He asked if she was all right and she brushed him off. They walked beside the ponies, continuing toward the peaks. The snow followed them, channeled by the glacial valley, dancing along the ice.

  Traveling with two other nethermancers was a luxury. Even with the battle and its aftermath, Dante had more than enough strength to open a hollow in the cliffs for the night, widening it to make room for the three surviving ponies. Once everyone and everything was inside, he closed the entry behind them, leaving three fist-sized holes in the thin rock to let air inside. Being out of the wind and snow and inside a safe room full of warm bodies seemed to relax everyone, ponies included.

  Cee smiled and groaned. "Hey, who thought it was a good idea to pick a fight with three one-ton monsters?"

  "I would have been happy to talk things out with them," Lew said.

  Somburr gazed toward the holes in the wall. "Think what you could do if you could train them for war."

  "Become evil?" Dante said.

  "Or stop evildoers from getting to them first."

  They fell silent, thinking this through. Wind whistled through the holes.

  "I can be of help," Ast said, picking up their conversation on the hill as if it had never stopped. "Weslee is not as unified as Gask—or what remains of it—but I know some of its dialects."

  Somburr smiled. "You know the languages of a land you've never been to?"

  Ast met his eyes. "Who said I've never been there?"

  "You never said you had. Quite an omission, given that no one goes to Weslee. Why would you hide this?"

  "Somburr," Dante said.

  The spymaster gave him a cynical look. "You want your guide in unknown lands to be a man who doesn't want you to know he knows them?"

  "I didn't say," Ast cut in, "because I didn't intend to go any further than the divide."

  Somburr turned on him. "Why is that? Are you not welcome in Weslee?"

  Ast stared him down. "I lost people there. Why do you think I left?"

  "Enough," Dante said. "If Ast knows his way around, if he can communicate with these people, it's a huge boon. We don't need to conduct an interrogation."

  "It's called due diligence," Somburr muttered.

  Dante chose to ignore that. He raised his eyebrows at Ast. "So you can tell us about Weslee. Its people."

  "It's fractured," Ast said. "It has been that way as long as anyone can remember."

  "The former Gaskan Empire isn't exactly a homogenous whole, either."

  "The fact you would compare it only proves how foreign it will be to you." Ast covered his right fist with his left palm and leaned his brow against his hands. "I can't speak for most of it. I can only tell you of those who live in the Eastern Woduns. The Spirish. They fear the ground so much they live in trees."

  Lew burst out laughing. "That's true?"

  Ast gazed at him the way you'd look at a rat you'd hoisted up with your well water. "Should I continue?"

  The monk covered his mouth with his fist and cleared his throat. "By all means."

  "There is no point." Ast turned his back and pulled at his blankets, tugging them straight. "If we make it through, you will see it for yourselves."

  "Please, go on," Dante said. "This is all very strange to us, that's all."

  "The best cure for disbelief is sight, isn't it?" He ensconced himself in his blankets and would say no more.

  In the morning, the cavern was thick with the stink of pony piss and dung. Dante pulled open the cave wall and snow flooded inside. It had drifted two feet thick against the cliff, but in the open fields, the new fall was less than six inches deep, and for now the skies had quit tormenting them.

  In the chaos of the battle, he and Somburr had lost control of their dead scouts. Dante cursed himself. Ought to have raised one of the ponies, even one of the kappers. It could have pulled double duty as both sentry and tireless beast of burden. But it was probably for the best. Such creatures were clumsier than their living counterparts. In conditions like these, the meanderings of a dead squirrel could touch off an avalanche.

  The snow proved surmountable, but it slowed them enough that Ast thought it best to tackle the divide the following day. The peaks looked down on them, blank and forbidding. That night, they found a natural cave that required only minimal modification.

  Dante woke feeling vaguely sick. It was the air, Ast told him. Thin and hostile, it could leave you disoriented if you weren't used to it. He warned everyone to let him know if they were feeling dizzy, faint, or confused.

  They trudged toward the crotch of two great peaks. It was the lowest pass in sight, but there was nothing like a trail, and twice Dante had to shape switchbacks up sheer rises, as much for themselves as for the ponies.

  At its crest, with the wind howling like the souls of the betrayed, they stopped and stared at a sweep of glaciers, valleys, and lesser mountains, abruptly blocked by a floor of clouds.

  "It doesn't look all that different," Lew said.

  Yet it felt like triumph. They had crossed the Woduns. They had reached Weslee.

  16

  Minn grinned at the shadow as if she'd summoned it herself. "If you let it go, can you bring it back?"

  Blays hesitated. The uncertainty he faced felt very foreign. He knew better than most that there were many things beyond his power—most things, to be frank—but his awareness of his limitations tended to make him feel more confident than others, not less. After so much work, such hardship, he couldn't imagine willing the wisp of nether on his finger to fly away. What if he never got it to come back?

  Well then, he supposed he'd find a new way to spend his life. He winked at Minn, lifted his finger, and blew on it. The nether held fast. He'd no sooner gotten annoyed at it than it got the picture and dissipated into the coastal wind.

  "If I can't, I'll never forgive you." He said it deadpan, but her face creased with such worry he couldn't help laughing. By his feet, one of the tiny crabs wiggled its way into the sand. Effortlessly, he drew the nether from it. A black smudge perched on his finger. "How am I doing this?"

  She smiled, teasing. "Ask yourself."

  Figuring actions always spoke clearer than words, he sent it away and called again. But this time he was worried it might refuse him, and so it did. He tried again. It held fast to the crab, hidden in sand.

  Before he could get angrier, he took a mental step back. He'd just done this. And not once but twice. That was no accident, no fluke. How had it first come to him? When he'd accepted the prospect—scratch that, the certainty—of his own death. When he'd opened himself to that absolute end, that was when he'd stepped through the last door of Summer. He'd conjured up the shadows again a minute later, when he'd set down his worries like a pack at the end of a long day. The power relied on something deeper than mere belief in himself, yet it seemed to help.

  And he found
he believed.

  The third time took effort. The conscious opening of himself. A self that included the death of that self. But once he found that place, and breathed in and out, relaxed, the nether curled around his finger.

  "This is very odd, you know." He raised it inches from his nose. "When Dante did this, I'd swear it was through sheer will."

  "You're not Dante," Minn said.

  "I know that," he said, but his tone was a little too hard. The nether wavered. He sighed at it. Fickle son of a bitch. Just as it went translucent, ready to flee the scene, he sighed and accepted this was how things were going to be for him. The nether congealed, darkening to the color of a midnight cloud. "What's next?"

  "Now you learn to put it to use."

  "This might sound like an odd question at this phase, but you really believe that? That anyone can learn to use this stuff?"

  "It's a part of all of us, isn't it? Everyone learns to use their hands and feet. Why not the nether?"

  "Because it's magic. The domain of Arawn's chosen."

  Minn snorted. "That's a lie perpetuated by kings and priests. If everyone could work the nether, they'd have no call to obey their lords."

  "So why don't you go out there and tell the people how they're being kept in bondage?"

  Minn gazed out to sea. "That's not my place."

  "Really? Why isn't your place wherever the hell you want it to be?"

  "It wouldn't change much. If I told you that you could find peace by giving up everything you own, leaving everyone you know, and spending the next five years pursuing the truth, would you do it?"

  "I'm right here doing just that, aren't I?"

  "Under some very unusual circumstances." She glanced upshore, where a flock of gulls had begun to shriek at nothing. "Anyway, you might not be as skilled as your friend, but you are exceptionally speedy. Others would have to sacrifice much more. Many people would like to become great painters, but very few of them are willing to spend ten years of their lives learning to do so."

  "I mean, sure, apparently I've just proven you right," Blays said. "But it's weird to me that everyone has this potential yet so few fulfill it."