The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  Minn turned on him. "Should we go? Your whole city is depending on us."

  "That's true. Which is unfortunate for them, given that we can't force Ro and all your friends to march eight hundred miles across the continent and then burrow their way through another hundred miles of mountains."

  "All we have to do is get inside Pocket Cove. If I can make Ro hold a real conversation with me, I know she'll see reason."

  "'Reasonable' isn't the word I'd use for Ro. More like 'intractable.'"

  "I don't believe you'd come up with a plan this good, spend the next six days dashing across the country to see it through, then turn around at the first hint of resistance."

  "Hint?" Blays laughed. "You call destroying our only path into your home a 'hint'? If you tried to rebuild the stairs at this point, what do you think they'd do?"

  "The same thing they would have done to you if you hadn't gone away: bury us in a rockslide."

  "Is that a subtle way of reminding me how much I owe you?" Blays put his hands on his hips and shot a nasty look at the beetle trundling over the tip of his boot. "Well, if we can't get in by going over, we'll have to go around."

  "By boat?"

  "Why not? I mean, besides the fact we don't have one."

  "It wouldn't have to be much," Minn said slowly, working this through. "At the north end of the bay, the sea flows from the north between Fo-o Island and the mainland. From there, it sweeps around the curve of the cove. All we'd have to do is build a raft. The tides will take care of the rest."

  It was growing dark, but Blays didn't waste a minute. They untied the horses and followed the cliffs north, slowing as the light faded. The rock wall curled west to meet the sea.

  "You're sure we can't just build some stairs right here?" Blays jerked his chin at the walls to their left. "We must be fifteen miles away from our last encounter. Surely they're not watching every foot of their turf."

  "No, but they're in tune with it. They have to be. If Gask ever tried another invasion, we have to be able to sense it before the king's army would be able to scale the cliffs."

  Blays found it hard to believe they could keep tabs on so much space, but he kept his trap shut. They'd built this place, after all. Maybe that gave them a special connection to it. Anyway, he and Minn had another plan.

  They set up camp beside the northern cliffs. Surf rolled through the darkness, but the noise was thin, and Blays knew sound traveled far on the seaside air. When morning came around, he saw that he was right—they couldn't even see the ocean—but after a quick ride, they were upon it by early morning. To their left, which was now the south, the cliffs extended into the water and stopped cold. An island hung a few miles off the coast. All they had to do was put together a vessel, then hop into the channel.

  And do a hell of a lot of praying, because there were no villages in sight and Blays hadn't exactly come laden with his shipwright's tools. He had an axe, but it was a hatchet for whacking twine and twigs. It would barely be able to dent the rugged trees along the shore.

  He did, however, have a length of thin rope, the sort of thing you carried whenever you rode out into the wilds. And a whole bunch of blankets and canvas. While Minn cut these into strips, Blays lugged driftwood from the beach and gathered fallen logs from the patchy forest. It didn't have to be pretty. It didn't even have to last all that long; frankly, they could probably make it by clinging to a loose pile of branches.

  He didn't love the idea of dangling in the water across five-plus miles, however. Not only because of the horrible cold, but also the infinitely more horrible sharks. Now that the ocean had had all winter to cool down, maybe it was too frigid for sharks, but chilly waters hadn't stopped the one at Ko-o from spoiling their day.

  They spent the early morning lashing together a platform of mismatched logs. It wasn't the sort of thing they'd be able to sell, but it looked like it would do the trick. They dragged it down to the sand.

  "Are there any wolves or other large predators around here?" Blays asked. "I mean, besides Ro?"

  "Not this close to the sea. Why?"

  "Just curious."

  Leaving the horses tied up seemed cruel—probably because it was—but it was either that or bid them farewell. That, in turn, would mean running on their own legs to Gallador and picking up horses from Lolligan. The return trip would take twice as long.

  He made a silent vow to come back for them. If anything happened in the meantime, they'd have to be another sacrifice to the greater good. Blays shelved the thought and pushed the raft into the surf. The water was testicle-withdrawingly cold, but the waves weren't too bad. After a couple exhausting minutes, they were out in the strait.

  Just as Minn predicted, the current swept them along the curl of the cove, drawing them along at a couple hundred yards from shore. Blays had found flat pieces of driftwood to use as oars, but they proved useless against the waves and tides. They continued in the desired direction, however, the raft twirling slowly, just large enough to keep its surface above water except during the roughest waves. They had to kneel to avoid losing their footing, and the shins and knees of their pants grew sodden.

  His loon pulsed. Blays winced. He'd forgotten to check in with Nak last night. He could ignore it, but that would only raise more questions later. He got Minn's attention and pointed to his ear, then said, "What's up?"

  "Nothing special," Nak said. "Just checking to make sure you hadn't fallen off the end of the earth. Run into anything unusual?"

  Blays curled his arms over his head to try to block out the sound of the waves slopping over the raft. "Nope. Still dead quiet on this front."

  "Oh? You sound preoccupied."

  "We're riding, that's all. Very fast. Should probably pay attention to that, in fact. How about I tell you about it later?"

  He closed down the loon. The smell of salt was dense in the air. A few gulls floated on the winds, cawing forlornly. The raft came around the top curve of the C-shaped bay and swept down the long north-south beach. Blays thought he could see a canoe far to the south, checking the traps or the nets. A couple people might have been standing on the sand across from the canoe, but they were too far away to be certain.

  Not for long, though. Traversing the bay in this fashion reminded him how achingly small it had felt during his brief time there. From one tip of the C to the other, the bay was about twelve miles across, fifteen tops. He still didn't understand how the People could stand to spend their whole lives in such a limited space.

  Seeing it all at once, though, even from the less-than-sweeping perspective of a waterlogged raft less than a quarter mile from shore, it made a little more sense. You could spend years exploring its beaches, its tides, its flourishing pools. Not to mention the Fingers. The mist alone would make each visit feel like coming to a different place. It was its own little world. Its people were, too. He'd hardly scratched their surface. Perhaps they were happier to be able to know their corner of things inside and out.

  Had it been a mistake to leave? Fumbling Cellen straight into the Minister's hands certainly felt like a cock-up of epic proportions. The kind of blunder so bad that all you could do was laugh. Laugh, and start a mad dash across hundreds of miles to try to make amends.

  The thing was, going to Wending had not been a mistake. They'd saved Minn's cousin. Mended family rifts. Foiled Tallivand's attempt to snatch the Almanack and bolster Moddegan's effort to capture the Black Star. All that could be seen as nothing less than a Good Move (capital G, capital M). In hindsight, it hadn't been necessary to continue to Setteven and chase down Kinnevan, maybe, but who knew; if the king's sorcerer had hung onto the norren idol, perhaps he could have beaten everyone to Cellen. Stopping him had been another good move, then. If a lower case one.

  The mistake, if there had been one, lay in going after Dante. There it was, his error glaring like the nimbuses in the quicksilver world of shadowalking. He'd figured Dante would be up to something selfish and egotistical, and thus had to be beaten at all c
osts. But Blays should have anticipated that everyone else pursuing Cellen meant to use it for something far worse than personal gain.

  "What's so funny?" Minn said.

  "Let's just say we'd better get this done."

  The raft floated along the coast. Sub-currents pushed and pulled it this way and that, but it never came closer than a hundred yards to shore, nor further than double that. Blays tried to adjust course with his paddle, but it was as useless as before.

  He set it on the deck. "We're going to have to swim in, aren't we?"

  "Just figured that out?"

  "Will have to ditch our cloaks. Maybe our boots, too. If they refuse to see us, things are going to be crummy for a while."

  Minn's mouth twitched. "If they refuse us, what does it matter what happens next?"

  "Well, there's the fact that, unless Ro's really upset with us, we'll still be alive. And thus in need of not stepping on sharp things and freezing to death."

  "Good thing I had you train barefoot in the Fingers."

  The memory made him shiver. "Hang on. When we were in the Woduns, we were able to shadowalk over the top of the snow. What happens if you shadowalk on water?"

  "You sink."

  "You sink on water, but not frozen water? What kind of sense does that make?"

  "Let me ask Arawn about that," Minn said. "How should I know? You can walk on top of snow in the real world, too. It just crushes down some. If you were able to shadowalk on top of the water, that would be no different from flying, would it? Which we can't do. So I suppose the netherworld retains some of the properties of the physical world it mirrors."

  "Do you swim through nether-water just like the normal stuff?"

  "Not exactly. You'll see."

  They had come a couple miles down from the upper curve. To the south, the sea and beach were now deserted. A wave washed over the raft, soaking Blays' folded legs some more. It was on the miserable side, there was no denying that. Not exactly breaking any speed records, either.

  When they were about a mile from the entrance to the tunnels, a steady diagonal current pushed them closer to land. Blays paddled madly, trying to get them close enough that the breakers would push them in the rest of the way, but as the swells began to bulge, a riptide drew them away. He pulled off his boots, knotted them, and looped them around his neck. Minn saw what he was doing and did the same. There was no saving his cloak, however. He transferred the contents of its pockets to his doublet and dropped it on the deck, where the heavy fabric immediately sopped up seawater.

  The raft quit angling away and resumed moving parallel to the beach. Blays glanced at Minn. She nodded. The surface was too unstable for a running start, so he walked off the edge. Before he hit the water, he delved into the shadows.

  The ocean turned as dark as night, spangled with silver ripples. The water beneath his right foot felt like thick gelatin. He was sinking, but he was able to step forward, his left foot plunging mid-shin into the gummy ocean. The next step took him past his knee. Then he was wading, slogging forward, continuing to sink to his waist. Minn flowed past him. She was doing a crawl stroke, but she seemed to be moving faster than she ought to be able, as if she had a rope around her waist and someone was hauling her in from shore. Blays' momentum flagged. He leaned forward and pawed at the water. He hardly moved.

  The water wasn't helping, but the shadows within it could. He dipped into them and surged forward. It was cold, but not in the heat-leeching way of a wintry sea. He didn't feel all that wet yet, either. Very odd. He thought about going back for his cloak, but he could no longer see the raft.

  He continued toward shore. Rubbery mounds of black water rolled to all sides, alive with silvery foam. It felt like swimming and yet not. With a frown, he wondered what would happen if he inhaled any of the thick liquid.

  Ahead, Minn stood, slogging in to shore, waves tumbling up the sand and shining around her knees. Blays dangled his legs and touched bottom. He followed her in. Once he was above the tideline, he stepped out of the shadows.

  He blinked against the overcast glare. He was damp rather than soaked, but he was tired of trying to make sense of this. He plopped in the sand and pulled on his boots. The beach was still empty. They stood and walked south toward the cave mouth. A stone's throw from the entrance, Minn stopped. There was no entrance. Just blank, slabby basalt.

  Blays cocked his head. "This is it, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "Then where's...it?"

  "They've closed it," she said. "They saw us coming."

  Blays walked up to the wall and knocked where he thought the entry had been. "Well, that's rude."

  "It's their form of mercy. It's what they do when a stranger sails into the cove, but they don't want to kill him."

  "I'm going to choose to interpret that as a positive sign." He glanced over his shoulder. "What are you waiting for? Open it up."

  "I can't."

  "Forget how magic works, did you? Give it a try. For me. So you can tell me 'I told you so.'"

  She set her mouth in a skeptical line, but reached toward the rock. A vertical seam appeared. Rock flowed inward, concaving the wall in a spreading, egg-shaped depression. A moment later, rock poured back in from the sides, obliterating her work.

  "I told you so." She gave him a look and stepped back. "They're watching from within."

  "So what if we come at it from over there?" Blays pointed where his old room must have been located inside the cliff.

  "They'll feel it and stop us."

  "Well, there has to be something we can do." He glared at the rock. Stupid rock, as solid as itself. The seal their antagonists had set up probably wasn't all that thick, but even if he had a tree trunk and a dozen burly men to hoist it, the People of the Pocket would close up the wall faster than he could bash it down. "We know you're in there!"

  "It's no use," Minn said. "They have enough supplies to last for a year without stepping outside. It's standing policy. And as long as they're stuck in there, they've got nothing better to do than keep us out."

  Blays gazed at the basalt wall. Matter in the netherworld only showed some of the properties of its earthly counterparts. Water was sort of watery. Sort of wet. Snow was kind of cold and a little bit soft. What if rock was only sort of hard?

  The certainty that he could walk through it flooded his marrow.

  He stepped into the shadows, then stepped into the wall. And rebounded from it, accompanied by a coconutty whack of his skull. He stumbled back into the real world, rubbing his forehead. "Shit!"

  Minn laughed. "Did you just do what I think you did?"

  He ignored her. His problem was he'd tried to walk through the wall. He should have been trying to follow the nether into it. He vanished back into the twilight realm. The nether rested in the rock as it did in everything else. He felt himself in the nether in the air. In the layer of sand beneath his feet. In the salty vapor that hung in the air. In everything.

  He felt himself in the nether in the rock. He stepped forward.

  He popped out into a round chamber of rock, the pale, nethereal light inside it illuminating the faces of six extremely surprised-looking women.

  "Fancy seeing you here," he said. "How many walls does a guy have to walk through to talk to Ro?"

  The women stumbled back. Without turning his back on them, Blays knocked three times on the outer wall. A moment later, daylight poured inside, followed by a dazed-looking Minn.

  "How did you do that?" she said, chorused by two other people.

  A woman with her red hair in a bun gathered her wits. "You cannot be in here!"

  "Yet here I am," Blays said. "Want to get me out? Take me to see Ro."

  "Not necessary." Ro strode from the hallway leading deeper into the tunnels, jaw clenched. She turned an incinerating gaze on the others. "Who let them in?"

  "No one did." The redhead squirmed. "He walked through the wall. Right through solid stone."

  Ro tightened her hand into a fist and turn
ed on Minn. "You know better than to come here. I am in my rights to strike you dead."

  "Go ahead," she shrugged. "If we leave without you, we're dead anyway."

  "Would be a shame to lose Minn," Blays said. "Apparently she's a hell of a teacher."

  Ro sighed louder than the surf banging up the shore. "Why did you leave us? Weren't you happy?"

  "It wasn't about that." Minn's voice dropped. "A member of my family was being held captive. Without us, he might have died."

  "You know the vows."

  "Like my own name. Please, Ro. Listen to what I have to say before forging your judgment."

  Ro's jaw worked. "Speak, then. Knowing that my judgment is final, and I will not hesitate to enforce it."

  Minn closed her eyes. "That's all I can ask."

  "Outside."

  Without waiting for acknowledgement, Ro strode out the oval door Minn had opened in the wall. Halfway to the surf, she sat in the sand, the wind teasing her gray-streaked hair about her face. Blays and Minn sat across from her. A handful of the others drifted after them like a lost flock, looking to Ro for permission. She nodded and they sat in a loose ring around the three.

  "Everything?" Minn asked Blays.

  "Everything." He winked at Ro. "I trust her to keep a secret."

  Minn leaned forward, tracing her fingers through the sand. "It's a long story. Bear with me."

  She began. Not with their decision to leave Pocket Cove, but with the story of what brought her to it. How she'd been cut away from her family by a father who looked at her not as a daughter or a person, but as a blasphemous witch with no interest in her role as a vessel of motherhood. By the time she concluded the tale of her homelessness, Ro was the only one who looked unmoved. She'd heard this before, Blays decided. Either that or she really was that steely.

  Minn shifted to the recent past. Admitting that she'd kept in contact with her brother made her visibly uncomfortable, but she continued, explaining how she and Blays had chosen to go to Wending to help her cousin. That they'd meant to be gone no longer than a week or two. Until they'd discovered that Cellen was on the verge of its return, and that Moddegan meant to take it.