The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  With their supplies of dried food dwindling, they broke pace to forage in the lorens. The trees were easy to climb. The roots made natural ladders, and once the trunk cohered into a solid column, Dante found them spotted with hollows. In the larger trees, these depressions were deep enough to house a person. Or, as they discovered, legions of raccoons, squirrels, birds, and a bear-like, dog-sized creature with the tail of a fox, the eyes of a cat, and—quite disturbingly—the hands of a human.

  The wide, flat branches made reaching the fruits a snap. These were round and pink, with rinds thicker than an orange, and they grew plentifully despite the season. The pulp was thick and cohesive, almost more like a well-cooked porridge than a fruit, in both consistency and flavor. Ast claimed you could live on lorbell fruit alone, but mushrooms grew just about everywhere, too, and they harvested these as well.

  Through two days of travel, the lorens grew higher and higher. Two hundred feet. Three hundred. The above-ground root systems flared like norren yurts built to house an entire clan. Just as Dante was about to ask Ast whether he knew where they were going, distant laughter sounded from ahead. Everyone but Ast reached for their weapons. Ast merely pointed.

  They walked a few hundred feet before the object in question resolved from the trees occluding it. It was the largest loren they'd seen. Creatures moved in its branches. Smoke snaked from the leaves in white columns. For a moment, Dante thought the forest was on fire, but each trickle was discrete, contained. They were fireplaces. He was looking at a house. Strike that: he was looking at a village.

  "We should make camp out of sight." Ast turned to Dante. "You'll come with me to the village. We need new clothes. Ours out us too clearly."

  "Not fans of foreigners?" Dante said.

  "Is anyone?"

  "I should be the one to go," Somburr said. "I speak Third better than anyone."

  "Then it sounds like I need more practice," Dante said. "Anyway, this isn't a vote."

  The spymaster smiled wryly. "It was worth a try."

  They turned the ponies around and set up in a draw a short ways from the towering loren. Dante and Ast hiked toward the tree. Both carried their swords.

  "I would prefer to talk, if you don't mind," Ast said.

  "Considering you're the one who knows how to talk, that sounds like a good plan. Have you been to this tree before?"

  "When I was very young. I doubt if much has changed."

  Wooden hammers rapped from the boughs, muffled by whatever fibrous matter they were smashing. To their left, an irregular circle of dirt was bare and reeking. Ast glanced up and gave it a wide berth. The village wasn't entirely contained within the loren—a number of huts sprinkled the grounds around the tree—but its sprawling roots had been walled up and converted into a hive of houses and shops, with people bustling in and out. A few of the locals watched Ast and Dante approach, but no cries or horns were sounded.

  Ast stepped through a high, triangular gap in the root-walls. The inside was dimmer than the canopied forest, but the people had left enough open spaces in the roots for sunlight to filter through. It smelled overwhelmingly of loam. The streets, such as they were, were designed around the root structures, and rarely ran straight for more than a few feet at a time. It would have been beyond confusing if not for the regular presence of wooden stairs leading to observation platforms where one could have a look around (and take shortcuts across the winding structures).

  Ast wanted nothing to do with exposure like that, though. He approached a vendor who sold mushrooms fried in garlic, onions, and oil. After a short conversation, the woman minding the stall pointed across the market/village, twitching her finger around a bit. Ast nodded, exchanged a few more words, then rejoined Dante and moved on.

  After a few dead ends and turnabouts, Ast found the tailor's. A tarp shielded the front of the shop from any rain that might make it through the roots spoked overhead. The back of the shop was enclosed to allow prospective buyers a measure of privacy. A portly man engaged them, speaking too fast for Dante to follow. As Ast conversed with him, Dante wandered the racks. In general, the clothing was nothing too exotic: you had your standard shirts, trousers, cloaks, overcoats, etc.

  But there was a heavy emphasis on gloves, particularly ones that were either fingerless, or that had rough, high-friction pads over the fingers. He tried on a pair with small claws that snugged tightly over his fingertips. He waggled his fingers and turned to drop some bawdy witticism, but no one was there to hear it and he wasn't about to out himself by speaking Gaskan. He tugged off the gloves and replaced them on their shelf.

  Dante wandered back to observe the intensifying conversation. Ast and the tailor dickered back and forth, pointing at clothes, themselves, and the world at large. After a crescendo of overlapping speech, they went dead quiet, stared at each other, then nodded. Ast passed over a knife and a bracelet and the tailor handed him an armload of clothes. They gave a cursory glance at their new wares, then touched hands. Bargain concluded, Ast turned and walked out from under the tarp.

  "Were those your personal items you traded?" Dante said. "Why not pay cash?"

  Ast smiled sidelong. "Do you think they accept Gaskan silver? They don't even use coins. Metal is drawn from the ground."

  "They seemed to have no problem using metal for tools."

  "People are happy to discard morals in exchange for practicality. But money is symbolic. A pure representation of what a culture values."

  "So all our cash is worthless?"

  Ast shrugged. "We may be able to exchange it in the city. This place is rather backwoods, if you'll forgive the pun."

  On the walk back to the others, Dante inspected the clothing. It was very plain, dyed in drab earth tones, and though he wasn't familiar with the fabric, it didn't take a Weslean expert to realize it was rough-spun and cheap. Unless they found a moneychanger, their purchases would be limited to whatever they could trade for. And most of their tradeworthy goods had been lost in the battle with the kappers.

  Back at camp, Somburr eyed the clothes while Lew gazed toward the giant tree. "What was it like being that high?"

  "We didn't get above the roots," Dante said.

  "Why not? What's up top?"

  "People who look down on attempts to climb the literal social ladder," Ast said. "These clothes will make us look less conspicuous. It will be less of an issue in a big city, where they're used to dealing with plenty of people they don't like."

  "How can they live like that?" Dante said. "Cramped in those roots? It felt like getting squeezed to death by a giant wooden hand."

  "To me, it feels little different than the slums of Narashtovik."

  "Tell me more about the upper branches," Somburr said. "Is this a caste-based society, then?"

  Ast shook his head. "The lorens provide free food and shelter, if that's all you want out of life. It leaves its denizens with too little work and too much time to socialize. But we're here for knowledge, yes? To do business. We can avoid getting sucked into the games."

  They dressed in their new clothes, which more or less fit, and continued past the village-tree. On the other side, a dirt path cut through the forest floor. Ast said it would take them to the capital, a city called Corl. As they walked on, Dante gazed at the numerous lorens and discovered most showed evidence of human habitation. Clotheslines hanging between branches. The whack of axes. People pulling strings attached to the big leaves to dump rainwater into buckets. Living in a tree dozens or even hundreds of feet in the air struck Dante as beyond foolhardy, but there was no arguing with what he was seeing. Somehow, they made it work.

  Between the road and the lack of snow, they made more miles that day than during any three in the mountains. The hills dropped and the temperature rose, staying above freezing. They went by several more single-loren villages, but didn't stop until they'd reached Corl: capital of Spiren, the westernmost district of Weslee.

  There was no mistaking it. The body of the city was comprised of no fewer
than a dozen of the biggest lorens they'd yet seen, massive and ancient, branches interlocking to form bridges in the sky. The central pillars carried spiral staircases around their trunks. A score of satellite trees showed signs of habitation as well. One of these appeared to be entirely dedicated to the lifting and lowering of people and goods, an industrious tangle of ropes, platforms, winches, wheels, ladders, nets, and stairs. People called back and forth from the branches, guiding sacks and barrels up into the tree.

  "I am seeing this," Somburr said.

  "Me too," Lew said reverently.

  "I'm not speaking poetically. I mean I'm going into the city and seeing it for myself." He raised his eyebrows at Ast.

  "I have no authority nor desire to tell you otherwise," Ast demurred. "Shall we stable the ponies? Or sell them?"

  "We'll need them for the way back," Dante said.

  Anyway, for the moment, they had enough money to absorb the stable fees without issue. Ast had managed to swap a bit of Gaskan silver at one of the lesser loren towns in exchange for local currency. Which turned out to be teeth.

  Not just any teeth, of course. The species varied, but all were carved by Spiren's Department of Scrimshaw according to their value: lorens, mountains, or the wolven sigil of the king (a man known only as the Minister). According to Ast, since forgery would be so easy, it was punished by the removal and carving of the forger's own teeth, which were then put into circulation. Somburr had found this delightful.

  Apparently the highest denomination of Spirish currency was the seed of the lorbell fruit; for the most part, they were seedless, but on very rare occasions, one held a round black pit capable of growing a new tree. The version used as money was carved with a highly stylized four-pointed star and supposedly infused with a nethereal signature known only to the court sorcerers. The lucky few residents who found a seed in their daily meal of lorbells were required to bring them into the Department, where they were exchanged for tooth-coins. At a much lesser rate than the value of the seed, of course. But given that the penalty for hiding a loren seed was the same as for cutting down a loren tree, hoarding and forgery were unheard of.

  On its face, it was confusing and barbaric. To Dante, it glared like noon on a pond. It was about the Minister asserting control over the loren, the heart of Spirish life. About claiming it as his and thus co-opting its might and authenticity.

  Spirish political manipulation was beyond the scope of Dante's interests, however. Right now, all he cared about was finding a stable. Ast located one in the root system of an outlying tree and paid its master in teeth. As the ponies were led away, Ast asked the stablemaster something and he replied with what Dante recognized as directions, though the language still moved too fast for him to pick up more than that.

  It was enough for Ast, though. He took them around two lorens to a third perched near the edge of a startlingly deep canyon. The loren's trunk was carved with a six-foot image of an owl, but as the tree continued to grow, it had distorted the image, giving it a totemic feel. People came and went on the staircase wrapping the trunk. Ast headed up.

  The plank stairs had distressing gaps between them, but the treads were deep, the steps were a good eight feet wide, and the outer edge was fenced with posts and rope railings (though these didn't look sturdy enough to stop your fall if you were determined to lurch into them). The stairs wound past a number of landings leading to oval holes in the trunk. These could be enclosed by four quarter-doors, but most were open to the day, inhabited with people kneeling at low tables or snoozing in hammocks tacked to the walls.

  There was very little space in any of them, but Ast said the apartments at this level were a single rung up from the root-slums. Dante supposed the confines of the trunk-rooms weren't as bad as they seemed. Many of Narashtovik's residents lived in tighter quarters than these actual holes in the walls. It didn't matter. After all, the entire city was their home.

  Ast stepped off the staircase onto a branch thirty feet wide. People milled about on its worn surface, talking, laughing, stopping for drinks and trinkets at the stalls and airy shops strung along the branch, particularly at the hub where it forked into smaller sub-branches. The scene was much like a major thoroughfare of Narashtovik or Dollendun. Except most of the stalls were roofed with giant leaves. And there was nothing on the sides of the street except for open air and a forty-foot drop to the ground.

  Lew threw his arms out for balance. "Well, this is terrifying."

  "Quit gawping like a yokel," Dante said. "Those kids over there don't have a problem with heights."

  "Maybe because they've fallen over the edge before. On their heads."

  Ast glanced back at them, scowled, and increased his pace. Lew gritted his teeth and managed to lower his right hand to his side. His left still stuck straight out, wavering any time the lazy breeze sent the barest gust.

  His horror was short-lived. At the first "intersection" of the main branch and two off-shooting but still substantial side branches, a structure claimed the plaza. It was a wooden frame sheltered with shiny cloth tarps, and it stood in the middle of a colossal tree-city, but its function was obvious in all languages: it was a public house.

  Dante wasn't certain of the wisdom of drinking beer while strolling around four stories above the earth, but he certainly believed in the general wisdom of the tavern. They parted the fibrous tarp and entered. Inside, people sat on their feet beside long, bench-like tables, drinking from squat cups. Ast pointed toward a vacant bench. While Dante and the others sat on the leaf-mat provided to preserve their knees, Ast went to the bar, set a handful of teeth on it, and brought them a round of sweet cider that tasted vaguely like bread. He then returned to the bar to speak with the woman behind it.

  Dante had nothing to do but drink and look around, so he did that. The space was not large and he was privy to several of the alcohol-amplified conversations around them. The locals all seemed to be speaking Third, and of course there was the whole tree thing, but the people wouldn't have looked out of place in Narashtovik, pale-skinned and dark-haired. A bit thinner-boned, though. Perhaps they'd spent too long in the trees.

  As he gazed about, Dante got a few looks back, especially when Lew or Cee said something to each other in Gaskan. No one caused them trouble, however.

  Ast came back and knelt beside Dante at the table. "It's difficult to ask about what you wish to know."

  Dante sipped. "So I've discovered."

  "As usual, the monks are those most interested in wisdom. I've secured directions to a temple where they may have some idea what the hell you're talking about."

  Ast had the habit of delivering his wit in the exact same tone he used to present facts, and it was a moment before Dante laughed. "Let's go."

  "First, you must finish your drinks. There is nothing more suspicious than a man who leaves the pub with ale still in his glass."

  Dante recognized this as one of life's deeper truths. He finished his mug and eyeballed the others until they did likewise. Outside, the breeze had picked up, and between that and the alcohol, he had to fight not to wing his arms out for balance like Lew.

  "We have a climb ahead of us," Ast said. "The temple is on the Fourth Loft."

  "You don't say," Dante said.

  Ast glanced back, confused, then did a double take. "I forget all of this is new to you. Right now, we're on the First Loft. The lowest division of this loren's branches."

  Lew risked a quick look up into the foliage. "How high is the Fourth Loft?"

  "Every tree is different. That is one of the beauties of Spiren. Typically, a loft spans roughly fifty feet of height."

  "Is it too late to go stable with the ponies instead?"

  They returned to the great staircase wrapped around the trunk. While there were far more people making this tree home than Dante would have believed possible, the stairway's traffic was light. People seemed content to stick to their own loft, for the most part, hanging out on its various flats (the word Ast used for the fla
ttened branches) before returning to their rounds (the hollows in the trunk) to sleep or catch a bit of solitude before venturing back into the communal areas.

  As they climbed, laughter and the clatter of industry sifted in from all sides. From above and below, too. And from the other lorens. Dante found it difficult to grasp the idea of living in three dimensions. Assaulting such a place would be virtually impossible, too. Not only would you have to fight your way up the chokepoint of the stairs, but you'd have no shelter from all the limbs overhead, fighting gravity the whole way while the city's archers rained hell on you from behind the cover of branches and thick leaves.

  Fire was an option, but it had been showering on an almost daily basis since they'd descended from the mountains, and dew clung thickly to the leaves. A good nethermancer might be able to whack through a loren's mighty trunk, but he doubted any had the power to do so in an instant. And a place like this would have defenses against that, too.

  He didn't know how the Minister or history or culture had conspired to convince these people to live their lives in trees. But a part of him was jealous Narashtovik was so exposed in comparison.

  The first three lofts were indistinguishable to Dante's eyes, but the fourth was insulated by a gap in the stairs. A guard stood at either end, armed with a bow and a short spear with a spiked head that looked capable of doubling as a climbing instrument. Ast paid the first guard a toll and the guard gestured across the space. The guard on the opposite side pulled a lever in the trunk and a set of stairs ratcheted down, clunking into place. As soon as their group crossed, the man cranked the stairs back up, once more separating the Third Loft from the Fourth.

  Ast stopped to ask the second guard something. Directions again. Dante couldn't follow it all, but got the gist their destination was on the outer edge of a nearby flat.

  The toll was only a couple of teeth, but that and unseen social pressure conspired to keep the lofts segregated. Most of the rounds on this level had their doors shut to the eyes of the public. Fewer catwalks and ladders connected the rounds. People's dress was more colorful. Some of the shops on the flats had solid wood walls, roofs composed of woven leaves and sealed with pungent resin. The ground waited two hundred feet below, but even at this height, the winds weren't enough to sway the loren.