The Spear of Stars

by Edward W. Robertson

  All the water was gone except for ponds and puddles. The ground was featureless muck studded here and there with long white bones. Dante stood unsteadily. To his right, an endless stairway climbed into the sky. He began to ascend.

  The ground diminished beneath him. The stars sparkled overhead. A long time later, light peeped from the top of the stairs. It grew a little with each step, shaping into a rectangle of light. He came at last to a shining doorway. Shielding his eyes, he stepped through.

  ~

  He stood in a blank land. Mists swirled around his knees. Next to him, Blays and Gladdic stood up from the table they'd been playing cards on.

  Blays placed his hands on the small of his back and stretched backward. "What took you so long? We've been waiting here for…well, I'm not really sure how long, given how this place works." He motioned to the playing cards. "But if we'd had money to play with, by now Gladdic would owe me about three kingdoms."

  "The Pastlands tricked me," Dante said, checking and confirming he'd successfully brought the Book of What Lies Beyond the Land of Cal Avin. "Even worse than they normally do. It was like they had no intention of ever letting me leave."

  Gladdic nodded, hunger gleaming in his eyes. "What did you see?"

  Dante described it to him, both the monk's cabin that he'd been brought to on previous entries to the Pastlands, and then the false awakening: the siege of Bressel and his journey from it.

  "The shipwreck alone was set to delay us from reaching Cal Avin by weeks," Dante said. "And I'm sure it was only the first of countless setbacks. Most likely, I was never going to reach Cal Avin, and was intended to forget all about it in the course of other adventures."

  "But what is the purpose of these delays and forgetting? What have the gods arranged the Pastlands to accomplish?"

  "Before, it's seemed to be a way to work through your most powerful wishes and fears, to prepare your mind for the acceptance of death. But this time felt different. I'm not sure what it means." Dante reached down and stirred a stray tendril of mist. "What about you? What did you see?"

  "Something much different. I found myself in a simple room. It looked not unlike the study in a monastery. At the end of the room were two doors. Although they were unmarked, their meaning to me was immediately clear. The door on the right was to live. And the door on the left was to die."

  "Then what?"

  "I dwelled on the question for some time. Then I stepped through the door on the right. And found myself here."

  "What, that's it? No tricks? No diversions?"

  "I can only tell you what I saw. And I am convinced that if I had taken the second door, my death would have been real, and I would have passed into the Mists not as a visitor, but as a man arriving at his new home."

  "The more I learn about you," Blays said, "the more I reach the inevitable conclusion there is something very wrong in your head."

  "What about you?" Dante said. "See anything unusual?"

  "Nope, same as always. I was a kid again, and I was saving the younger kids from the trouble they can't seem to stop getting themselves into."

  "Well, we're here. Have you started looking for Palo?"

  "We have not moved from this spot," Gladdic said. "We were not certain that we would be able to find you if we should remove ourselves from the place where we arrived."

  Blays swept up the playing cards. "Plus it hardly seemed fair for us to go do all the work while you were goofing around in a fairytale."

  "I suppose we have no idea which direction to go." Dante gazed about the cloudscape. It was spangled with small stands of trees and outcrops of rock, some of which were high overhead while others seemed to somehow be far below their feet. "But I further suppose that if Palo was killed in Bressel, then he'll be in whatever the here-equivalent of Bressel is. We'll just will ourselves toward the city—if there is one—and start asking around."

  He started off toward the only cluster of pine trees he could see, intending to use them as a landmark. As he walked, he gathered his will and insisted they arrive at Bressel.

  Their previous trips to the Mists had all been in the Plagued Islands, and the landscape had been tied to that of the area, with no hint of other geographies. In fact, some of the Dreamers believed the Mists were unique to the Plagued Islands, and that if you were to die in Bressel, say, or Setteven, or Corl, you would experience an altogether different version of what lies beyond.

  Yet at first blush, the Mists of Mallon seemed to be more or less the same. Sure, the trees were pines and birch rather than palms and boat-trees and the like, but just as they'd seen in the islands, this place had the seemingly random patches of landscape. Not to mention the ever-present mists themselves.

  The mists in front of them parted, revealing a shallow stream bedded with small round rocks of every shade of blue. They waded across it, sending silver insects skating across the surface and golden fish streaking beneath it. When they reached the other side, Gladdic turned to look at it a while longer.

  "Did you trip and fall into the water without us noticing?" Blays said. "Or are those tears running down your face?"

  "This place." Gladdic's voice caught. "In my deepest heart, I never believed that I would be admitted to Taim's Garden, for I had committed far too many wrongs to face anything but punishment. But I am here! I am seeing it! It is not what I was told that it would be…yet it is beauty itself."

  Tears ran freely down his cheeks. He watched the stream another moment, then turned and carried on, smiling beatifically. His expression was nothing short of rapture. And why not? He was being allowed to witness one of the gods' deepest mysteries. His reaction was the natural one, wasn't it? That Dante hadn't felt the same way on first seeing it only implied that he was too earthly by comparison. Perhaps that was the nature of those who followed the nether, but perhaps Dante took too much for granted. How many of the living had been allowed to see this place? A few dozen in all the world?

  Next they passed through patches of grass, with wildflowers whose petals shined like translucent gems. Now and then strange animals seemed to cavort at the edges of Dante's vision, but whenever he turned to look at them, they vanished into the swirling vapor.

  They hiked up a ridge of clouds. At the top, they stopped and gazed down at a vast city bisected by a river that looked like flowing mercury on its way into a crystalline blue sea. At first glance, it very might well have been Bressel, but that illusion only lasted a moment. Instead, it looked not like one city, but like a score of them all chopped up and tossed together, with each district as distinct from the next as the Redoubt was from the rest of Bressel.

  "Suppose this is it?" Dante said.

  Blays peered down at it. "It looks like a big fat city. And it also looks a lot like Bressel. But if you'd rather play it safe, we could spend a few weeks wandering around the Mists looking for something that looks even more like Bressel."

  They descended the hill toward the city. Now that they had come to a settlement, the mists largely dissolved, reduced to occasional tendrils. A road opened underfoot. At first it was rutted dirt, but the next section was cobbled, followed by a portion of red brick, and then flat black stones.

  Instead of slums, the houses outside the city were simple farmhouses with small plots divided by fieldstone walls, their yards filled with lush green gardens. The city gates were wide open and there was no sign of any guards. The plaza beyond held numerous merchant stalls. These were busy with people, as they'd be at any major city, yet something about them made Dante pause.

  They all spoke Mallish, but there were multiple accents Dante had never heard before. Some of them dressed strangely, too: rather than the doublets and trousers common among burghers and nobility alike, or the blouses and tough, shin-length pants often favored by laborers, many of the wealthier-looking types were dressed in tailored robes with cinched waists and wrists, while the peasants were draped in shapeless frocks.

  Blays cocked his head. "Are those men wearing dresses?"
>
  "They are frocks," Gladdic said. "Not unlike a longer and looser jabat."

  "Well, they look awful. Maybe that's what got them killed."

  "Foreigners?" Dante said.

  Gladdic shook his head. "Bresselmen. For that is how they used to dress two hundred years ago."

  At a second glance, their faces did look Mallish. Noticing this, Dante kept his eyes peeled for the pale, elfin Tanarians, but he saw none on their way across the square.

  "Anything strike you as odd about these fellows?" Blays gestured to a group of men and women discussing the price of carved little wooden boxes. "Aside from their gruesome taste in fashion."

  Dante nodded. "For people arguing about how much things should cost, they seem remarkably not mad at each other."

  "There's hardly any shouting at all. I suppose there's no getting worked up over a few pennies when you have infinity years to earn more." Still walking forward, Blays turned in a circle. "I'm not seeing any Tanarians. Suppose we should ask where they're hiding?"

  "You're going to ask? How?"

  "I've been giving it some thought, and I think I would walk up to him and use a few of my sentences."

  "Given that the Tanarians just conquered this city, and may have killed some of the very people we're about to talk to, the locals might not leap at the chance to help us."

  "Interesting theory. Let's put it to the test."

  Blays strolled up to an awning where a man was selling bins of berries of all colors of the rainbow, many of which were not, at least in the physical world, ever in season at the same time.

  "Hello sir!" Blays smiled broadly and bobbed his head. "I was wondering if you could tell me whether there's a Tanarian neighborhood in this city?"

  "Tanarian?" The man screwed up his face. "What in nine ways is a Tanarian?"

  "A person from Tanar Atain. It's down south along the coast. I wouldn't recommend visiting, though. Not without something to keep away the mosquitos. And the liches."

  The merchant looked down at the ground, smiling like he couldn't figure out whether Blays was putting him on. "Ah yes, Tanarians. Heard something about them a few weeks past. But I can't say as I've ever seen one of them."

  Blays tried a few more questions, but the man had nothing to offer. Blays walked away looking confused, but that didn't stop him from approaching the woman at the fishmongery two stalls down. She said that she hadn't so much as heard of a Tanarian in the city, either.

  Gladdic met this news with a furrowed brow. "How can this be so? No fewer than a thousand Tanarians died in the upheaval. Perhaps twice that many. Those here should at least know of their presence. Could they have already passed into the Worldsea?"

  "That doesn't feel right," Dante said. "Almost everyone spends at least a few years in the Mists, and lots of them stick around for decades. Surely some of the dead would still be here."

  Blays glanced up at a passing flock of black-headed gulls. "Unless the Mallish decided to kill them all a second time. Maybe they keep to their own district. Let's take a stroll and see what we can find."

  They exited the square and made their way through the city streets. The buildings around them were whitewashed wood that looked more or less like those in contemporary Bressel, but after a short walk, the architecture changed in a snap to stout brick structures. There were still a fair amount of these in Bressel, but they were timeworn, whereas these looked like they'd been erected within the last year.

  After this came a section of smaller, humbler wooden houses with thatched roofs. Almost all the people here wore the shapeless frocks they'd seen earlier and spoke with an accent almost but not quite like anything Dante was familiar with.

  "It isn't just the buildings that are different," he said slowly, thinking it through by speaking it out loud. "The people are from different eras, too. It's like they share the city as a whole, but when it comes to their homes, their customs, they stick with what they knew in life."

  Blays continued to make inquiries with anyone who looked willing to chat, including shopkeeps, a fellow out sweeping straw from his stone porch, and a woman leisurely pushing an empty cart on some errand, but they just shook their heads, or looked down with puzzled smiles, as if Blays was babbling sheer nonsense.

  Region by region, they made their way across the city, but no matter how far they walked, they got nowhere in finding a Tanarian. For all the walking they did, Dante's legs were much less tired than they should have been. After a while, he got so lost in observing the different architecture, fashions, sculptures, murals, and customs that he almost forgot what they were doing there.

  For it was one thing to realize, as did everyone who set foot in Bressel, that it was a thriving city in a mighty nation, a metropolis of hard-working and creative people. Yet it was quite another thing to see, in person, how it had been like that for centuries: how much history and culture they'd given birth to, how much work and how many lives it had taken to attain the state that most people now took for granted.

  It gave Dante no small measure of pride to know that he had been born to these people and traditions. For perhaps the very first time, it also made him sad that he'd been induced to leave them.

  The daylight waned. They turned a corner and found themselves in the Colleners' district, with blond-haired people walking about between buildings of mud bricks. In Collen proper, most of their structures were the same gray as the earth they were fired from, but nearly every shop and house here had been dyed yellow, orange, or light blue, giving the quarter a cheery, welcoming look.

  Blays' eyes homed in on a building with a sign bearing a painting of a jackrabbit hoisting a mug. "Look at that! I'd been wondering how this place could claim itself as paradise without any damn pubs around. Let's go find out what heavenly beer tastes like."

  Dante objected, but his efforts were entirely futile. They entered the common room, which was half filled, mostly by the golden-haired Colleners who made up a nontrivial portion of Bressel's population. The air smelled like wood smoke, roasting corn, and fresh beer.

  There were tables, but Blays made for the bar, ordering a round of red ales. The barkeep poured three tall mugs and slid them across the damp wood with practiced expertise.

  Blays took a long slug and clapped down his mug. "Now that was worth the trip right there."

  The barkeep chuckled through his mustache. "The trip? Is that what you call it?"

  "Oh, we're not dead. We're just visiting."

  "Just visiting? Sounds like it must have been a blow to the head that did you in."

  "Making sport of me, eh? I demand satisfaction. Lucky for you I'm willing to forgo a duel if you'll answer me a question."

  The barkeep quirked his mouth. "What's that, sir?"

  "We're looking for a group of people known as Tanarians. Have you heard of them?"

  "The Tanarians?" The man wrinkled his smudged brow. "Thin fellows where you can't always tell the fellows from the lasses?"

  "Ah, then you have seen them!"

  "Not myself, but I heard a great deal of them showed up not long ago. But it was like as soon as they got here, they up and vanished."

  "They left? Where to?"

  The man shrugged. "Couldn't say. All I know is that nobody's seem 'em since."

  Blays pressed him for more information, but the barkeep didn't even have any good rumors. They finished their beer. Blays paid up—he'd brought coins along in his pocket the same way Dante had brought the book—but the barkeep didn't seem to care too much about the color of what he got.

  Outside, Blays scratched his head. "What's going on here? Were the Tanarians here or not?"

  "I don't think the barkeep would have just made that up," Dante said. "Besides, he knew what they look like without us telling him. They were here at some point. We just have to keep searching."

  They hit the streets again. The sun dimmed. Posts on the corners of the larger streets lit with soft blue light, but this hardly seemed necessary, as there were no urchins or footp
ads about, and even the drunks seemed amiable. As the night deepened, Dante feared they'd need to find lodging—which would be tricky, as it was his understanding that if you went to sleep in the Mists, you'd remove yourself from the Dream—but none of them were yet getting sleepy.

  The streets thinned of people. They questioned the few who were left, but they all answered the same: they knew nothing of the so-called Tanarians. Soon there was almost no one out at all, and they were reduced to walking briskly from quarter to quarter, searching for Tanarian houses, or their waterways and boats, or any other hint of their existence.

  Dawn came with no further clues. Dante still wasn't tired, but the sunlight hurt his eyes. He stopped to rub them. "I know this might sound crazy, given that we've been searching for hours without finding any indication the Tanarians are here, but I'm starting to think the Tanarians aren't here."

  Gladdic cleared his throat, having not spoken in some time. "Then where might they be instead?"

  "I don't know. But locations in the Mist aren't fixed the same way they are in our world. I think we might be able to will ourselves toward the Tanarians who died in Bressel—and with any luck, find Palo with them."

  No one had any arguments against this, so they headed toward the city wall, following its curve to a gate. They exited and walked through the farms. Once these were behind them, the fog arose once more, with most of the landscape blotted out except for odd bits of trees, turf, and ponds.

  "There isn't even proper land out here," Dante said. "Just little bits of it. Free-floating fragments."

  "Those are some keen powers of observation," Blays said. "Have you ever considered opening a university?"

  "But back in the city, or even the farms, they were cohesive. Proper things like our world, if a little stranger. It's like the only parts of the Mists that are stable are the parts inhabited by people."