The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  "They took our money," Lew said. "I barely had any food. I knew I could find lorbells here."

  "Right. Throughout the entire forest. In fact, they are easier to find out in the wilds than they are here in the capital." He raised his brows.

  Lew's mouth quivered. "I thought I could find a guide to get me through the mountains."

  The Minister sighed, lowered himself to a crouch, and crawled forward on his hands and knees until his face was inches from Lew's. "I don't like liars creeping around my home. I'm going to put out my hand. In it is your only chance to save yourself. Will you take it?"

  Never taking his eyes from Lew's, the Minister extended his hand.

  Lew shook his head, a single jerk of his chin. "I can't give you what you want."

  "You speak remarkable Third for a Gaskan. Has one word you and your people told me been true?" The man stood, gazing past Lew and into the open air beyond the bars. "Make your peace."

  He stepped out and locked the grilled door. A man and a woman waited on the platform, observing; Dante could tell at a glance they were nethermancers. After a moment, he recognized Ferrin, the blond woman the Minister had been speaking to earlier. They followed the Minister down the boardwalk.

  "Should I have tried to kill him?" Lew whispered once they were gone.

  The mouse shook its head.

  Somburr appeared across the woods. He was still negotiating his way up the tree's roots when Dante's attention was jiggered again. This time, it was the squirrel. Footsteps echoed up the hollow chamber of the Spire of the Earths. He moved the squirrel behind a jagged hunk of red rock. The footsteps reached the upper level and continued across the planks. The Minister lurched into view. He gazed down on the black and silver stone for a full minute, then turned and walked back down the stairs.

  Dante related what Lew had discovered to the others. "This is the last piece of the puzzle. At the very least, we can find Cellen by using the glow of the stone. But I expect I can follow the nether inside it directly to the platform where Cellen was last used—and where it will return."

  "According to a single, long-lost, apocryphal account," Somburr said.

  "I just watched the Minister walk into the tower and confirm the rock hadn't been disturbed. Anyway, you're the one who tipped Lew off to the Spire of the Earths."

  "That's because I'd already learned the Minister spends so much time there. It is incredible what a soldier will tell you when you're wearing a woman's body." Somburr got an odd look on his face, chuckling. "Ingenious hiding spot. Mixed in with a bunch of other rocks in a temple no one cares to visit."

  "Here's the plan. We have to steal the rock—but if the Minister knows it's missing, he'll kill Lew on the spot. I'm going to see if I can make one that looks like it and swap them. If not, I'll carve a piece from inside it and take that. Then we go get Lew."

  "He's a nethermancer, isn't he?" Cee said. "Why doesn't he just bust himself out?"

  "I'm not sure he's got the juice," Dante said. "Even if he did, they've got the prison isolated beneath a flat. He's got nowhere to go."

  Somburr laced his fingers together. "There are no branches above the Spire. The only way to get to it is by passing through the palace grounds. I bet you are wishing you knew someone who could make you resemble one of the Minister's soldiers."

  Dante laughed. "Would be even better if you could make us invisible."

  "Impossible. But I will make us look like soldiers—on the condition that we bring the stone back here before we go for Lew."

  "Are you trying to give me an order?"

  "I'm making it clear that I will not participate in any plan that exposes Narashtovik to unnecessary risk."

  It would be within Dante's authority to insist Somburr do as he was told, but he didn't think a battle of wills would help them toward their goal. Dante had some ability with illusions, but nothing like Somburr; he couldn't pass himself off as a soldier. Anyway, deep down, he didn't disagree with the man. Lew and the stone might be on the same loft, but if they went for Lew while the stone was in their possession, they could lose both.

  They would secure the stone first. In addition, that meant Somburr wouldn't be able to accompany him to retrieve Lew. If something happened to Dante, he'd need Somburr to escape with the stone and put it to use.

  To minimize the chance of discovery, they'd pose as citizens until they neared the palace loft. This would mean paying the tolls for multiple lofts, but during his time in the city, Somburr had scrounged up some of the teeth they used as currency. Dante wasn't inclined to ask how.

  Once they neared the palace, they'd find a quiet place to switch their appearance to soldiers, then enter the palace grounds, wander in the direction of the Spire, wait until they were alone, and break inside. The Spire was padlocked and bolted, but that was no barrier to them. Once they were inside, Dante could have the stone (or a piece of it) in moments. Then all they had to do was walk down from the tree and deliver it to their loren.

  After that, Dante would be on his own—Cee volunteered to assist, but he turned her down. Through some combo of stealth and force, he would get Lew back. Cover of darkness would help. If he had to, he'd use a blade of nether to sever the head of every guard in his path, sending them tumbling into the night.

  He never got the chance. As afternoon faded to evening, a disturbance on the prison flat returned his attention to the mouse. In Lew's cell, an unnecessary number of soldiers were lifting him to his feet, checking him for weapons they had obviously already relieved him of.

  "They're moving him," Dante said. "Don't know why."

  "This isn't good," Cee said.

  Somburr pushed his knuckles against his mouth. "Our priority is the stone."

  Dante twisted to look at him. "I know that."

  "Do you?"

  "You could go up there. Disguised."

  "And do what? It will take me ten minutes to reach the tree. Twenty to climb to their loft. If something happens, how do you get to the Spire without me? Prayer?"

  Dante bit down on his lips so hard he tasted blood. He knew better than to argue. His resistance was token, an appeal to a conscience that was irrelevant. He was putting on a show for Ast and Cee. More likely, for himself. His knowledge of this only made him feel all the more helpless.

  As the soldiers departed the cell, Dante directed the mouse to leap onto Lew's boot and climb up his pant leg. Lew shivered but didn't make a sound. They marched him down the walkway and up the ladder, which had been extended down to the cells; once they had entered the alcove to the keep, a soldier hauled the ladder back up with a clang, particles of rust drifting down.

  "Are we going to see the Minister?" Lew said. It sounded like a fishing expedition, more for Dante's benefit than for his own information, but the soldiers said nothing.

  The troops took him down the spiral staircase wrapped around the loren's trunk. After descending one loft, they turned off onto a flat groaning with people. Torches flapped from its sides. The crowds watched the procession with wary hunger. Near the end of the flat's usable surface, before it forked into a dozen round branches hardly thick enough for a man's feet to rest on, the Minister stood alone, hands open from his sides.

  "Our nameless, homeless guest," he said. The soldiers brought Lew to the edge of the crowd and shoved him forward. Lew stumbled, catching himself ten feet from the Minister, who closed on him one step at a time. "Ready for your trial?"

  A mile away, Dante glanced across the round. "They're putting him on trial. Lyle's balls, we've got one sixth of the Council of Narashtovik right here. We have to do something."

  "In what way does this change the logic we built our plans on?" Somburr said.

  On the wide, flat branch high in the sky, Lew forced himself to straighten. Dante dropped the mouse to the top of Lew's foot, but everyone was oblivious, watching the faces of the two men.

  "I haven't done anything to anyone," Lew said.

  The Minister pushed out his chin, nodding in agreemen
t. "Who said you had? Last time I saw you, I ordered you never to return. It doesn't matter if you think you've harmed anyone. You're a foreigner, a liar, a malcontent. Do you declare me unsound to issue orders?"

  "Of course not. The heavens saw fit to grant you the responsibility of this land. I could never question their judgment."

  Torches flapped in the evening breeze, drawing a shine from the Minister's eyes. "Then you agree my pronouncement was just?"

  Lew lowered his head. "I do. But I hope my circumstances are worthy of exception."

  "So justice is justice only when it's bent?" The Minister glanced across his people, who remained silent. "You were exiled on penalty of death. A little bit of bad luck, and that excuses you to return to the one place you were banished from? You are accused of trespassing in Spiren. And here you are."

  He grinned and patted Lew's shoulder. Lew smiled, hesitant. The Minister jerked him forward and ran pell-mell toward the edge of the flat.

  "No!" Dante screamed.

  Lew grabbed at the Minister's clothes, but the silky black fabric eluded him. The Minister heaved him off the branch and dropped to his knees, skidding on the smooth surface. Lew's voice pitched up in panic, fading as he fell; still clinging to his shoe, the mouse looked up into a tangle of branches, a horde of faces fading in the distance, eyes white in the light of their fires.

  "Don't let him do it!" Lew shrieked, and then the wind of his fall tore the breath from his lungs.

  Dante stood, lurching toward the entrance of the round. Cee grabbed his cloak. He might have turned on her, but he was lost in the vision of the branches whipping past the mouse's sight, tearing at Lew's clothes. Then came a thud so loud Dante felt it in his bones.

  The mouse's vision tumbled, tail over ears, and went dark.

  "He's..." Dante moved to the side of the branch and clapped his hand to his mouth. The back of his tongue stung with the taste of vomit.

  "I suppose you'll want to kill him." Somburr's voice sounded a thousand miles behind him, as if it were fighting through an endless sea.

  Dante couldn't keep the quaver from his voice. "How did you guess?"

  "Do you want to cut out his heart? Then take from him what's dearest."

  Somehow, this hammered the hot fragments in Dante's chest into a single blade. He wanted nothing more than to storm up the spiral steps of the Minister's loren and cleave everything and everyone in half until the ground was thigh-deep in bleeding bodies. He thought he could. The soldiers would be nothing to him. The Minister had his house wizards, but they were amateurs, charlatans; Dante would tear them apart like slices of bread dropped in a lake.

  But this was a fantasy, an indulgence of his ego. His path led to the stone, and then to Cellen. There could be no detours.

  Dante climbed down to the ground and found a boulder, a sloped hunk of limestone furred with round nodes of springy green moss. He reached into the nether and a bowl-shaped hunk of rock became an agile fluid. He could make it shift and flow as he pleased, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't force it to take the sparkled hue of the stone in the Spire of the Earths. Not wishing to exhaust himself, he gave up and returned to the round. As darkness fell, he finished copying the last of the maps. Ast sat before them, arms planted to either side, as if he needed to brace himself for whatever he was going to see within the pages.

  They spoke very little. The hoots of owls hung in the air. Around ten that night, Somburr stood and Dante joined him. The man muttered to himself, shadows whipping around his hands; in a blink, Dante's clothes took on the look of Spirish garb, the baggy leggings and sleeves. The tan on the backs of his hands paled by three shades. Somburr had been replaced by a stranger, a man whose blank features could find no purchase in Dante's memory.

  They got down and walked through the forest. Lanterns twinkled from the lorens. Laughter hung in the air, the snap of cooking. He smelled the caramelized, citrus tang of frying lorbells. At the base of the loren's main trunk, the roots reached down like the fingers of an enormous hand, trapping the lanterns of the residents like fireflies too weak to fly away.

  They reached the central tree and walked up the staircase. Wood smoke hung in the air, hazing the leaves. The ground fell away, but the babble from the roots followed them. Traffic on the stairs was light. The few people they passed glanced at their faces, registering them, then dropped their gazes to the next steps, politely ignoring them.

  At the first of the toll bridges, Somburr passed a handful of teeth to the watchman. He waited in silence as the stairs creaked down and landed across the gap with a dull thud.

  Five lofts up, Somburr began to glance around. He stepped off the stairs onto a quiet flat that was free of structures, left open as a public park/farm. They moved behind a wall of leaves. Somburr mumbled again and their clothes became the green uniform of the Minister's men. They returned to the stairs. At the three-part bridge beneath the palace loft, a soldier eyed them up and down.

  "How's it been?" he said.

  Somburr shrugged. "Quiet."

  "Beats the alternative." The trooper watched them, as if trying to decide whether to ask why they needed to go upstairs, then gave a little sigh and moved to the drawbridge mechanism.

  Hanging lanterns washed the grounds in light. The flat that housed the Spire was dim by comparison. Its first stretch was populated with shacks built in a circle around a central pillar venting smoke into the boughs above. Soft talk and singing filtered through the shutters. Dante adopted the alert boredom of a sentry, glancing from one shack to the next as he and Somburr headed across the flat.

  The buildings ceased, replaced by manicured branches sagging with lorbells. Bins of rainwater lined the edges of the flat. Clotheslines crisscrossed the air. Dante had the impression the Spire had once stood alone, but as the city grew, the sacred space had been carved up for mundane use.

  A series of posts bisected the flat, connected by gut-high ropes, preserving a bit of that space from further encroachment. Across eighty feet of empty flat, the Spire of the Earths waited in the night. The flat ceased just beyond it. Dante glanced back, confirming they were alone, crossed over the ropes, and walked into the shadow of the tower.

  The door was barred, padlocked. Dante could have struck it in half with his sword, but the noise would have rapped across the entire loft. Instead, he poured nether into the metal, heating it; as it began to glow, he wrapped it in a ball of black nether. As soon as the metal grew soft, he drew his bone sword through it. The chain fell apart with a clink.

  Inside, the stones and the stairs were suggestions of matter in a chamber as dark and void as a dreamless sleep. Dante edged his way to the staircase, clinging tight to the railing, and headed to the top floor, where there was no canopy to interrupt the moonlight slicing through the glass windows. It glinted on the silver flecks and stripes of the fragment of rock.

  It was a rough cube about a foot to a side. Dante picked it up, grunting, and turned it over. He intended to take a four-inch cube from the bottom. Once he had his piece, he could draw a layer of stone back across the gap, sealing it up. The Minister would notice the locks had been broken, but when he came to ensure his prize was safe, he wouldn't see a single thing amiss.

  Dante brought the nether winging from the corners of the room. A cool glow surrounded the block. Dante moved inside it like a knife. As soon as he touched it, blinding green light surged across the room.

  30

  Blays' heart leapt. "The clan's sure? They saw my target?"

  "People who fit the description? Yes," the norren woman said. "Is the clan sure these people are your people? Of course not. They've sent scouts after the men to see what they can learn. Do you know wildsign?"

  "Afraid my chief neglected to teach me that one."

  She stood. "Then I'll go with you."

  "What, just like that?"

  "You made us free. If it's in my power, it's yours."

  "I don't know how to put this. They're on horseback, right? And, w
ell, you're a little big for conventional horses."

  "Josun Joh has seen fit to provide me with a replacement." Sitting on the bed, she stuck out her legs and waggled her feet.

  He couldn't help laughing. "Then show us the way."

  Her name was Aldi, and after a brief stop at her shack on the east end of town, they were on the road, riding/jogging amid the smell of pines and dew.

  "All right," Minn declared once Dollendun lay behind them. "Is one of you going to tell me what just happened? How did she find out where Kinnevan is?"

  Blays shrugged. "Magic."

  "And who is Josun Joh?"

  "Norren god. Like Arawn and a couple of his buddies rolled into one."

  Minn drew back her head. "She didn't actually..?"

  "Speak to him?" Aldi said. "Don't you speak to your gods?"

  "Daily. That's why we had to look for the help of a complete stranger to take us into the wilderness."

  "This is merely the biggest secret in norrendom," Blays said. "As far as I know, anyway. The way they keep secrets, I wouldn't be surprised to learn each one of them is actually two tiny people stuffed inside a giant person suit."

  Aldi looked at him sidelong. "We're not."

  "Good to know." Blays turned back to Minn. "You should probably pretend you didn't see any of this."

  Minn shifted in the saddle. "Sounds like home."

  Aldi wouldn't have been able to keep up with a full gallop, but her long strides easily matched the horses' trot. They sped through the evergreens covering the border of the Norren Territories, miles playing out behind them, resting every two or three hours. After some twenty miles, Aldi left the road and jogged east through the woods, a thin layer of pine needles coating the ground. The afternoon dwindled. Abruptly, the woods gave out, and they entered a rhythmic stretch of low hills and tall grass, trees lining the streams winding through the up-and-down land. The Norren Territories encompassed a vast swath between Narashtovik and Tantonnen, covering topographies of all sorts, but when Blays thought of the homes of the clans, he always imagined these undulating hills.