The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Everything. They're different. Especially the clans."

  She nodded without much interest. He didn't bother pressing the point. As a child, she'd lived among the sheltered and wealthy; as an adult, she'd lived among the society of hermits that comprised Pocket Cove. To her, everyone was different.

  He rode the horses as hard as he dared. He still had plenty of Dennie's money and wasn't shy about spending it on lodging and care for their mounts. Wherever they stopped, he kept an ear open for gossip about Kinnevan and his group, but didn't pursue the matter hard enough to draw suspicion. He already knew the trail led to Dollendun.

  Two days and several hours after leaving Setteven, Dollendun blanketed the hills along the river. Blays hurried through the human side and crossed the bridge to the east shore. Towering norren fished from the rocks. Others unloaded barges at the piers. Minn stared openly, but had the sense not to ask questions.

  After a bit of hunting, Blays found the unmarked pub. It was mid-morning, but the games of Nulladoon were already in full swing—and Forrd was there to watch. Blays moved beside him. Forrd didn't look up. Blays cleared his throat, then elbowed the man in the ribs.

  Forrd turned on him with the momentum of a bull. To prevent the impending head-smashing coming his way, Blays tugged his hood down and winked.

  The norren grinned. "Pend—!"

  "Shh," Blays said. "Can we go somewhere private?"

  "Do you ever not have secrets?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know?"

  Forrd smirked, detached himself from the Nulladoon table, and brought Blays and Minn into a back room that also had a game board. It was unoccupied, however; Nulladoon was a public event, and Blays doubted whether this room was used for private games more than once a season.

  "I'm sorry to impose on you," Blays said once Forrd had latched the door, "but I'm here to save the world. You know how it is."

  "Sounds like my finder's fee is going to be enormous," Forrd said. "I'm all ears."

  "A few days ago, a human male named Kinnevan passed through here. He would have been with a small group—no more than a dozen."

  "If he was human, I doubt he spent much time on the Eastern Bank."

  "He might have. He was heading into the Territories."

  Forrd rubbed his hand up and down his beard, ruffling it. "I'll ask around."

  "Great. Even better if you can find me someone who speaks to Josun Joh." Blays tapped his ear. "Follow?"

  The norren blinked. "How do you know about that?"

  "Through perfectly legitimate means. I'll tell you about it later. Like at a moment when the fate of the land doesn't hang in the balance."

  "I can find you someone who speaks to Josun Joh. But you ought to know better than to think they'll want to talk to you about it."

  "Then it's time to put this cursed name of mine to good use. Tell them it's for Blays Buckler of the Broken Herons."

  Forrd planted his palm on the wall and laughed for days. "That's true? How were you ever allowed to join a clan?"

  "Again, a story for a non-disastrous time. Right now, every minute counts."

  Blays let him know they'd be at the inn across the street under a fake name. In the common room, Forrd cast a lingering glance at the Nulladoon tables, then hit the streets. Blays and Minn walked into the inn and rented a room on the ground floor.

  "I didn't realize they'd be that tall," she said. "It's like being a child again."

  "It's only frightening when they're mad at you."

  He felt like he ought to be running down leads, but he didn't know as many people in Dollendun as he once had, and if Forrd got results as quickly as he seemed to think he could, Blays would be better served staying put where the man could find him. He seized the opportunity to get some of that "sleep" he kept hearing about, sprawling in the oversized norren bed, but was yanked from his nap less than an hour later by a knock on the door.

  Forrd walked in with a woman just as tall as he was. The norren's scaled-up features made it tricky to gauge their exact age, but she was on the younger side.

  Seeing Blays, she grinned, then forced herself to go sober. "How do I know you're you?"

  "If I were Mourn of the Nine Pines," he said, "I might ask how you know you're you. Or you could loon Hopp of the Broken Herons and ask him exactly how far I had to swim to join the tribe."

  Her grin retook its place. Pleased though she was to meet him, like most norren, she wasn't one to take a person's word at face value, especially any words spoken by a human. Gazing steadily at Blays, she sat on the bed and conducted a series of terse conversations through the bone earring in her left ear. In the end, she described him head to toe to whoever was on the other end of the loon.

  She closed the line and looked him in the eye. "You're you. Tell me what you need done."

  "Several days ago, a human named Kinnevan entered the Norren Territories via this city. He's traveling with a small group of men. They may be searching for a stone of some kind. I need them found."

  "Can you narrow down the area?"

  "Nope. Fortunately, I've spent enough time with the clans to know they watch their lands the way a farmer watches after his daughter."

  She laughed. "I'll see what I can do."

  She sat on the bed and muttered into her loon, repeating Blays' description of the men four different times—presumably to four different clans, which was a good start. There were scores of clans, and historically, they'd been the definition of clannish, squabbling over territory, grievances, and differences of philosophy. But during the Chainbreakers' War, Blays, Dante, Hopp, and Mourn had united them, providing them with loons they could use to keep in contact and coordinate their movements against the many tendrils of the king's invasion. Blays didn't know exactly how well that network had held up in peacetime, but unless it had collapsed completely, word was about to spread far and wide.

  "I've beseeched the gods for answers," the woman said. "Now let's see if they smile on our prayers."

  The "gods" apparently had a light schedule that day, because she was back on her loon within ten minutes. Blays listened close, but he couldn't hear the other side at all, and she didn't say much more than one-word acknowledgements.

  "I've just heard from the Clan of the Splitting Sky," she said. "Their territory begins not fifty miles from here—and they saw a group that matches your description just yesterday."

  29

  Dante stood straight up. "Arrested? Nak, what are you talking about?"

  "Somburr says," Nak explained patiently, "that Lew has been taken prisoner by Spirish soldiers. Somburr's on his way back to your loren now. I hope any of that makes more sense to you than it does to me."

  Dante thanked him and signed off. Ast was looking at him expectantly. Cee jogged in from the flat, drawn by Dante's raised voice.

  "Lew's been taken," he said. "I don't know how or why. Somburr will be here in a minute."

  There was nothing to do but stand on the branches and wait. The thin man ran in through the woods a few minutes later, still disguised as a desert shepherd. Dante climbed down the roots of the loren to meet him.

  "Let me save you from asking questions I can't answer," Somburr said. "I was on the Third Loft. Conversing. I heard a disturbance on the Fourth Loft. I heard Lew shouting. I went up to see. They'd blocked the stairs, but from my position, I watched the Minister's soldiers haul Lew up to the higher lofts."

  "Did you see where he was taken?" Dante said.

  "I was unable to bypass the blockade." He spoke in the flat tone of someone used to delivering objective and detailed reports. "When it became clear I could learn nothing more, I returned to relay what I'd seen and discuss our options."

  "What options? We find out where they're keeping him and we bust him out."

  "Confirming to the Minister that we're here."

  "Now that he's got Lew, he's too smart not to have guessed that on his own."

  Somburr's brows tightened. "Successfully freeing Lew will only
expose our strength. The Minister will be forewarned and on watch for us, greatly reducing our ability to achieve our primary objective."

  "I've been eavesdropping on him," Dante said. "I heard him talking about using a raft of corpses to sicken Ellan. I don't think he's the type to make sure his prisoners are getting three meals a day—especially if he's figured out we're from Narashtovik."

  "If he wants us, the logical course is to use Lew as bait. He may hold a public trial. Or declare Lew's amnesty in exchange for us revealing ourselves."

  "He'd never hold to that. He'll execute us the second we turn ourselves in."

  "Did I suggest otherwise?" Somburr said. "What I'm suggesting is that we have time. Time to finish the maps. To see whether there's anything more we can learn about Cellen. Once we're finished, if you're certain it's the right course, we can rescue Lew from whatever stupidity got him captured."

  "It doesn't matter what he did. We're not leaving him behind." Dante closed his eyes and pinched his temples. "I'll get back to the maps. Can you figure out where he's being held?"

  "If they have a prison, it should be simple to locate."

  Dante didn't like his use of the word "if." As Somburr headed back to the city, Dante returned to the squirrel hidden in the map room. He resumed copying, working as fast as he could while staying focused and maintaining his precision. The maps covered a broad swath of land. Skewing one line the wrong direction could send them miles off course.

  "Somburr says Lew is being held in the keep," Nak informed him through the loon. A couple hours had gone by and the yellowing light of afternoon was giving up its fight to penetrate the canopy. "He's trying to learn more, but he doubts that will be possible."

  Dante estimated he had no more than an hour left before he finished the last section of map, but he couldn't wait another second. He tucked the squirrel away inside a desk, then shifted his vision to a second squirrel he had waiting in the canopy above the palace compound. Squirrels were easily the superior choice for navigating the tree-city, but they were a little on the large side, and tended to draw attention when indoors. Anticipating the need for a higher degree of stealth, Dante had equipped this one with a passenger: a dead mouse clinging tight to its back, tiny claws digging into the unfeeling skin of the larger animal.

  He navigated the squirrel through a series of ever-thinning branches until it dangled from the leaves ten feet above the roof of the keep. This was square, shielded by corrugated walls pierced by numerous arrow slits, and empty of everything except a thick layer of leaves. The squirrel let go.

  Being entirely dead, it fell without so much as a squeak. It landed on the sludgy leaves, bouncing once. Dimly, Dante sensed that it appeared to have cracked a leg, but since pain meant nothing to it, that would do little to hamper it.

  A closet-sized stone shack stood in the middle of the roof. A grilled door blocked the entry. The mouse skittered through the bars and down a cramped staircase into a long hallway. Many of the doors were closed. People talked in soft voices behind them. Entirely the wrong feeling for a prison.

  He sent the mouse further downstairs. Two servants walked down the hall, arguing viciously about whose turn it was to hang the wash lines. Dante tucked the mouse into a doorway and waited for them to pass. Once it was back on the run, there ensued many minutes of scrambling about and hiding whenever anyone came near. The mouse's search wasn't entirely at random, but Dante had no idea of the keep's layout or where the cells might be, and seeing everything from an inch and a half off the ground did odd things to your sense of direction and scale.

  As the mouse ran past a doorway, Dante caught a whiff of filth: the commingled miasma of sweat, feces, urine, and sickness that could only be generated by people in captivity. The door was closed, but air flowed through a warp in the jamb. The gap was just large enough for the mouse to squeeze past.

  It crawled out onto an alcove overlooking empty space. At the edge, a ladder stretched from floor to ceiling. Dante moved the mouse to the edge of the platform. The stink came and went. Somewhere below the mouse, a moan carried on the wind.

  The mouse crawled past the platform's lip, clinging tight to the wood. It was currently on the "ground" floor, but a platform hung below it, a couple of notches carved into its surface. Overhead, the ladder led to nothing—it was currently raised.

  Time for a leap of faith. The mouse dangled from its claws, then dropped. Dante's view tumbled and he had to pull back into himself or risk vomiting. When he returned to the mouse, it was standing on the platform gazing dumbly down a walkway fronting a row of cells. These shared walls, but the fronts and backs were enclosed by pitted iron bars, leaving the cells open to the elements. The mouse padded forward. This "dungeon" had been attached to the underside of the massive flat supporting the keep, where the prisoners couldn't offend the residents—nor, if they somehow escaped, could they go anywhere besides four hundred feet straight down.

  Nearly all the cells were bare. Three were occupied by mounds of blankets. Dante located his target by smell, it being the one of the three mounds not decomposing. The mouse ran between the bars of the cell, infiltrated the blankets, looked on Lew's face, then tickled his nose with its whiskers.

  Lew slapped at his face, snorting. His eyes went wide. "Gah!"

  He bolted to his feet, throwing the blankets and the mouse away from him. He pressed himself against the bars, arms spread wide, hunting frantically for any sign of the vermin. Dante now had to figure out how to communicate to Lew that this was his mouse before Lew stomped it flat or booted it off the platform.

  The mouse hopped from the blankets, stood on its hind legs, and waved.

  Lew's jaw dropped. He laughed, his outstretched arms falling to his sides. "Is that...you?"

  Dante made the mouse nod.

  "If you could, I bet you'd be yelling at me right now, wouldn't you?"

  The mouse nodded harder.

  "Well, you shouldn't." Lew folded his arms. "Unless it's with words of praise. Because I know how we're going to find Cellen."

  Back in the round miles away, Dante squeaked in surprise. On the platform beneath the palace, the mouse went stiff and straight, the model of attention.

  "I went to the Spire of the Earths," Lew said. "Well, I didn't. I sent a dead squirrel, just like you. At first I couldn't find a way in, but then I saw rat droppings around back and found their hole inside. Had to fight some of them. Have you ever had to fight as one of these animals? It's crazy."

  He looked around the windblown cell, as if remembering where he was and what he was saying. "Inside, it's like...a library for rocks. There's basalt, sandstone, travertine, pumice, marble—everything. It's incredible. When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by rocks: all these little bits that make up the world. Anyway, they're laid out on these wooden benches and there's a platform you can walk around on to look at them. They've got just about every mineral you can think of.

  "Later, when I went to see Yotom, he told me the Spire is there to help the Spirish remember the ground they left behind. It's a religious thing. We didn't really get into it. Because the squirrel saw something I couldn't understand. On the top floor, it was all marble samples. One piece was black, but it was spangled with silver dots and stripes, kind of like when you're looking up at the night and you whip your head to the side and the stars turn into streaks. I had never seen anything like it and I thought it was pretty, so I got the squirrel to hop up next to it for a closer look. As soon as I came near, the rock gave off this greenish glow. It was very faint, and I thought it might be a trick of the light, or something wrong with the squirrel, so I backed it off, then moved in again. And the glow came back."

  Lew pressed his face to the bars and glanced down the platform. Satisfied they were still alone, he sat before the mouse. "I didn't know what the stone was, but Yotom did. He said it was described, in a long-lost account, as the platform on which Cellen last manifested. It glows in the presence of nether. And they've got a piece of it! Do you k
now what this means?"

  Dante made the mouse nod. His entire skin had begun to tingle.

  "That's when they caught me," Lew said. "When I was heading back from Yotom's. Since then, I've had some time to think. You're going to rescue me, right? Well, you can't. Not until you get the stone. Don't try to argue with me. They'll put me on trial before meting out any punishments. Just be quick and I'll be fine."

  He smiled down at the mouse. Dante wanted to say he was sorry for not letting Lew be more involved, and to promise they would get him out, but the mouse was a mouse, and it was dead, and he had no way to communicate any of this. He made it bow, which made Lew grin, then moved it to the corner, where Lew could speak to him again should anything more come to mind.

  He looned Nak to tell Somburr to come back to the loren. While he waited, he maneuvered a squirrel through the branches to the tower at the end of the flat and located the rat hole in its base. Tufted fur and dried blood littered the dark passage. Inside, thin windows cast wan sunlight onto cuts of stone just as Lew had described. At the top of the tower, he found the silver-veined stone and moved the squirrel close. A green nimbus appeared around the rock.

  Something jabbed his mind, calling for attention. It was the mouse; Lew was speaking to someone. Dante put the squirrel on hold and shifted to the other beast. Inside the cell, the Minister gazed down on Lew, hands clasped behind his back.

  "—to find them," he was saying. "You can be the person who helped us, or the person who worked against us. In which situation do you think you'd be better off?"

  Lew was huddled on the floor, back touching the bars. "I told you, it's just me. My friends were killed by highwaymen."

  "Very plausible. The world's a dangerous place; you never know when all your friends will be killed by bandits. But if that were true, why would you flee to a place that had promised you death?"

  "So I could cross the Woduns. Get home."

  "By yourself?" The Minister pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes shut, and laughed in disbelief. "Either you are very stupid, or you think I am. Then what brought you back to Corl?"