The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  "The Minister?" Her voice climbed. "What's he doing here? For that matter, what's Blays doing here? How is any of this possible?"

  "Because your boss cuts himself every day of his life." Blays stood ten feet apart from the group. "And he's got a bad habit of leaving the rags he cleans those cuts with lying around in his room."

  Dante glanced at the woman. "You're a nethermancer?"

  "So's Blays," she shrugged.

  "I bet," Dante laughed.

  "That explains him," Cee said, jerking her thumb at Blays. "But what about the Minister?"

  "I have no idea. Maybe he followed our piece of the stone. Or maybe he figured out what we were up to and beelined for Cellen. It doesn't matter why. We have to go after him right now."

  Ast gestured at the falling snow. "We can't follow him in this."

  Dante raised his eyebrows. "If it's not stopping him, it won't stop us."

  "It will be dark sooner than you think. Are we in condition to protect ourselves from kappers?"

  "Blays, when did the Minister take Cellen from you?"

  Blays shrugged. "We ran straight here. Couldn't have been more than ten minutes."

  Dante snorted. "How did you get back here in less than ten minutes? It took us four times that long."

  "Magic?"

  "Their tracks are all over the place. They can't be more than a half hour ahead of us. We're following them."

  "You really expect me to come with you?" Blays said.

  "You don't understand what you just did." Dante fought to keep his voice level. "That man blames Narashtovik for a terrible disaster that befell his people centuries ago. Now, he's going to use Cellen to bring down the mountains. His armies will burn the city to the ground." He walked forward, stopping a couple feet from Blays. "You may not give a shit about me. But you can't let my people face a second war so soon after the first."

  "Are you being serious? Why would he give a damn about something that happened hundreds of years ago?"

  "He's telling the truth," Minn said.

  Blays' head cranked around. "How can you possibly know that?"

  "Because I know what's on the other side of the mountains."

  "We're wasting time," Dante said. "Come with or go home. I don't care."

  He turned and walked briskly along the tracks marring the snow. The Minister's people had headed out double-file—assuming they had turned around, and these were the right tracks—but he could tell there were at least ten of them, maybe double that many. At least two of whom were nethermancers. Meanwhile, he was exhausted. Somburr was good to go, however. Additionally, the woman must have some skill with the nether—she must be from Pocket Cove; they were the only others who could move the earth, and had, in their way, taught him.

  But he'd seen the rift she'd blasted in the earth. She'd sealed herself and Blays in the cave, and she must have tangled with the Minister's people before that. Much of their firepower was depleted. They were outnumbered. And the Minister had Cellen. For all Dante knew, the man could use it to make them all drop dead on the spot.

  He doubted the Minister would do that, though. That would mean forfeiting his attack on Narashtovik. However poor their odds might be, then, they had a chance.

  So he hiked up the hill, trailed by the others, falling snow lining the folds of his cloak and lodging in his eyebrows. The storm was growing worse. Gusts threatened to knock them down or blow them off ledges. The snow whirled so thickly that the Minister's tracks had already begun to fill. Visibility shrank, a dwindling circle of color hemmed in by erratic walls of white.

  He crested the south ledge of the valley and could no longer see the cliffs to the north. Previously, this vantage point would have let him see for miles on all sides, but at the moment, he could see no further than a few hundred yards. They wouldn't be able to see the Minister's group until they were nearly upon them. In the short time it had taken to scale the rise, the sky had dimmed like a dying torchstone. He knew they had to get back to the cave—forget the kappers, the storm alone might kill them—but as the others waited behind him, stamping their feet and sniffling, all he could do was stare into the blank and empty world.

  Blays moved beside him. "Come on. Any more of this, and we'll lose our lives along with the trail." He bumped Dante on the shoulder. "Anyway, you've got a hell of a lot to explain."

  "That makes two of us," Dante heard himself say. He took one last look around. A dozen emotions squirmed inside him, but they were as weak as newborn kits. He turned around and headed back down the trail. Twilight reached the valley before they did; by the time they'd climbed into the cave, and Dante narrowed the entrance to keep out the wind and snow, it was almost as dark outside as inside.

  "Save your breath," he said to no one in particular. "I know we can't follow them. Even if we assume they're headed straight to Corl, we don't have enough food to make it to the other side."

  "It isn't the end of the world just yet," Cee said. "You won your last war, didn't you?"

  "And learned I never want to fight another."

  Ash laughed wryly. "That doesn't sound like the sort of thing a person gets to choose."

  Somburr tapped his fingers against his knee. "Nothing is a foregone conclusion. Not until the Citadel falls."

  "Right," Blays said. "First things first, I don't know half of you. Second, since we're trapped in a hole for the foreseeable future, would anyone care to tell me what happened today? Hard though it is to believe, I came here to prevent disaster, not start a new one."

  Dante rolled his eyes. "Great job on that front. If you hear a sudden rumbling, that's just the end of the world."

  "What were you intending to use Cellen for, anyway?" He screwed up his mouth. "Let me guess. You wanted to live forever. Or make yourself fifty feet tall. Something amazingly self-centered, I know that much."

  "That's irrelevant. All that mattered was keeping it out of the hands of a maniac."

  "Which you were going to accomplish by taking it yourself? Then your goal was hopeless to begin with."

  While they were busy glaring at each other, Cee glanced around the circle of faces lit by the torchstone in the center of the cave. "I'm Cee. I'm the one who found you, Blays. I'd tell you I'm sorry, but I'm not going to apologize for being good at my job."

  Blays laughed. "With that attitude, it's no wonder you fell in with him. Anyway, in case the rest of you don't know me, my name is Blays. And I intend to get the hell out of here—again—as soon as I can."

  The others introduced themselves. After a short silence, Cee glanced at Dante. "So should I fill them in? Any state secrets I should withhold?"

  Dante shook his head. "We're all friends here."

  She smirked, then started in on the story, summarizing long chunks of it: how they'd gone to Weslee for answers, found out about the cataclysm that had changed those lands forever, how the Minister still bore a grudge a thousand years later and intended to repay it very soon. Dante corrected and expanded on a few of her points (she tended to focus on the most relevant facts while excluding bits of enriching context), but mostly let her talk. He was trying to think of their next move, but kept circling back to what had just happened.

  "Holy shit on a throne," Blays said at the end. "In my defense, I had no idea about any of that. Probably because of that whole 'Spirish spies erasing decades of history' thing. If it's any consolation, before coming thisaway, I did thwart Moddegan's plans to take Cellen. I'll pause to receive your thanks."

  Dante looked up. "Moddegan knew about it?"

  "I'm beginning to think I was the only one who didn't. Then again, we don't get a whole lot of news delivered to Pocket Cove. Unless the gull droppings are some kind of code."

  "Hold on a second. Minn meant what she said? Do you really know how to wield the nether?"

  Blays donned his bluffing face, tucking the left corner of his mouth. "I don't know if 'wield' is the right word. More like 'thrash about with, while coming dangerously close to cutting off my own fa
ce.'"

  "Why didn't you tell me you had the talent? I would have taught you."

  "Being your student sounds like a barrel of laughs. Anyway, I had no idea. It took months of practice for me to be able to touch the damn stuff."

  Dante lapsed into silence. He didn't know what to think. He didn't even know if he wanted Blays' help with the Minister. It wasn't just that Blays had ruined everything. That was so far beyond the pale Dante was incapable of holding it against him.

  So much had happened prior to that. They'd gone their own paths. Dante had been named the leader-in-waiting of the Council and had worked for years to make himself worthy of that mantle. All that time, Blays had been away, doing gods knew what. Lyle's balls, he'd become a nethermancer. Dante didn't believe for a second Blays had just discovered that potential within himself. Blays had read the Cycle of Arawn, spent years around Cally and Dante and dozens of other sorcerers. In all that time, he must have felt something.

  Yet he'd chosen not to pursue it. A decade ago, in the forest outside Bressel after Dante had first displayed his powers, Blays had been disgusted and afraid of the nether. He'd nearly run off. Had Blays continued to harbor the illusion that it was "wrong," and had only recently changed his mind, most likely when learning to wield it was to his advantage?

  Or was it much simpler? Had he realized his ability would never be more than a fraction of Dante's, and had hidden it in embarrassment, preferring to become a master of swords than an apprentice of sorcery? Dante wouldn't blame him for that. Even so, it felt like a waste. There was no reason Blays couldn't have learned both. Supplemented his command of the steel with Arawn's command of the stars.

  Perhaps, in the end, neither one had known the other as well as they'd thought. Dante had always hidden certain dreams, like his ambition to follow in Cally's footsteps and extend his life beyond its natural span. Likewise his ascension to High Priest of the Council (which had come much sooner than he'd expected). Still, his dishonesty hadn't come in the form of a blatant campaign of lies. He merely hadn't bothered to mention certain things. If Blays had ever asked, Dante thought he would have told him the truth.

  But it ran deeper than that. Deeper even than the death of Lira, the event that had prompted Blays to run away while Dante lay unconscious in recovery. The problem was simple. Blays thought the world was better than it was. That you could free the norren, or lead a city like Narashtovik, without violence or strife. The war itself had proven that false. You could be a devout pacifist, but when outside forces came to take what was yours—your land, your freedom, your life—you had one choice: bow down, or stand and draw your sword.

  Dante squeezed his eyes shut. The past and present were too sprawling and confused for him to look at all at once, let alone to make sense of. The only thing that did make sense was sleep. And food. They passed around flatbread and the last of the lorbells. With few words, they slept.

  The storm quit a couple hours before sunrise. Its silence woke Dante and he moved to the little porthole, but it was too dark to see much. He managed to sleep a little longer, eventually woken by shuffling noises near the small hole in the wall. It was Blays, and he appeared to be attempting to pee through it. Dante rolled his eyes and swept open the wall.

  Outside, there was no sign of human tracks. Just two lines of deep, round impressions, with a thin, shallow line running parallel between them.

  Ast glanced through the valley. "Kapper."

  "A whatter?" Blays said.

  "Giant monster," Dante said.

  "Is that what those things are called?"

  "Are you coming with us?"

  Blays folded his arms. "Narashtovik's not my home anymore. And I'm not sure how much good I'd be in a war." He kicked around some snow. "But I guess I bear some responsibility to help undo this."

  "Some? You delivered Cellen straight into the Minister's hands!"

  "You weren't expecting him to show up, either. He would have stolen it from you instead."

  "There's no way to know that." Dante went to the ladder to get the rest of their gear from the cave. "All I know is he took it from you."

  While they readied, Ast studied the maps; he'd picked out a path back to Soll the night before, but an extra foot of snow had fallen overnight and the clouds looked like they were ready for more. Grounds that would have been traversable yesterday might no longer be feasible.

  "I want to try this ridge," he said to Dante, tapping the map. "It's going to be hard. We might wind up wasting time and have to turn around. But if we get over it, the glacial valley on the other side will get us out of here before things can get much worse."

  Dante considered the squiggles representing the colossal peaks. "What are the risks?"

  "Same as with any bad climb. But if we take our original route, I'm afraid we'll be snowed in."

  "Minn can move the earth, too. We'll try the ridge."

  Ast took the lead, Dante behind him, the others strung out in a line. They headed up a long incline toward a tumble of short cliffs topped by two great peaks. The ridge Ast meant to summit was strung between them. To both sides of their path, the ground fell away in deep ravines.

  The way forward snaked between any number of apparently impassable peaks. But if they could get across to the glacier, Ast believed that would provide them with a relatively easy walk across ten miles of flattish ice. After, they'd still have a long way to go, but they'd wind up bypassing the worst of what the mountains had left to offer.

  The ridge was only some three horizontal miles away. But Dante had spent enough time at elevation to know that didn't matter. What mattered was the vertical distance—and the willingness of the rocks to let you climb them.

  They reached the cliffs and, after hiking up to two dead ends and backtracking, worked their way up to the plateau above. By that time, it was after ten in the morning. They paused for lunch and to eyeball the path ahead. The clouds were darkening, but so far the snow was falling in such small flakes they could only be seen when they gleamed in the sun.

  The next leg was up a stretch of blue-white ice too slick and steep for more than a rough layer of snow to stick to it. Not wanting to deplete their nethermancers, they hacked their way up with axes; at the roughest spots, they flipped the axes around and hammered their few spikes into the ice. It was rough going, especially with their packs and cloaks, and it took a couple hours to scale three hundred feet.

  Rock walls hung above them. These proved much easier to tackle than the ice: Dante shepherded the others to one side, then drew a staircase straight to the top. At the next cliff, Minn did the same. The two peaks soared to either side, hemming them in. They walked and sometimes crawled across a field of ice, then reached a seemingly impassable fifty-foot rock wall that Dante surmounted in a matter of seconds with another staircase.

  "It would be unfair to claim any mountaineering records for this," Blays said.

  Dante stood back to examine his work. "You can take the wall if you prefer."

  Up top, they found themselves faced with a rough span of cracked ice cemented between projections of bare rock. They threaded through the cracks but were stopped two thirds of the way across by a crevasse that spanned the entire ridge. After walking parallel to it, they found a spot where the gap was less than three feet wide.

  "What do you think?" Blays tucked his gloved hands into his armpits. "Got a spare bridge in your pocket?"

  Dante glanced at one of the rocky upthrusts. "Could melt a door through that instead."

  Cee grimaced, huffing in the thin air. "Forget how to jump?"

  Before he could answer, she tensed her legs and sprung. She landed lightly on the other side, swooping to one knee to arrest any possible slide. Somburr followed. Blays raised a brow at Minn. She snorted and took a long, hopping stride across. Blays followed. Dante readied himself and leapt.

  His lead foot slipped. He fell forward, the chasm yawning beneath him. Blays whirled, snagged his cloak, and fell backward, dragging Dante with him as he
toppled to the ice.

  Blays pushed him off. "Damn instincts."

  They reached the edge of the icy saddle between the two peaks and looked down on a frozen river flowing all the way into the haze of fog and snow miles to the west. Climbing down to this was neither hard nor easy. Up close, the glacier wasn't nearly as smooth as it looked, split with rifts and ribbed with razor-sharp lines of ice. Except for the occasional hole, however, none of this proved to be a real impediment to walking, and they made four good miles before the sun got low enough to force them to stop and find a cliff. There, Dante hollowed out a cave for the night.

  "This is like cheating," Ast said, voice bouncing from the close walls. "I never could have made it up those cliffs. Not without two hundred pounds of rope and another three hundred pounds of spikes."

  Blays chuckled. "That's traveling with Arawn's chosen for you. It's like boxing against a man who doesn't know he's boxing. Because he's asleep."

  "Well, remind me never to leave home without a sorcerer again."

  "A question," Minn said to Dante. "Where did you learn to move the earth?"

  "I figured out your people had built Pocket Cove," Dante said. "From there, it was just a matter of experimenting with the nether until I learned its relationship to the dirt."

  "Do many at Narashtovik know how to do it?"

  "I'm the only one. Would my knowledge of their skill upset the People of the Pocket?"

  "It upsets them when people know they exist," Minn laughed.

  As the sun disappeared, the snow returned, piling down from the sky. The constant wind scoured it from the glaciers, however, and when they resumed the trek in the morning, the thin crust provided little resistance. A long day's travel got them all the way to the end of the glacier. It spilled down a cliff in a frozen waterfall, but Dante and Minn were able to shape stairs down one of its less treacherous declines. A bone-chilling wind blew off the glacier, but that only highlighted the fact it was several degrees warmer in the snowfield they'd descended to.

  Two more days got them out of the worst of the mountains. It was still cold beyond belief, but once they were into the pine forests, the going got much easier. Their load had lightened, too: they'd eaten most of their food.