The Black Star (Book 3) (23 page)

"Maybe they just don't want to see you," Cee said.

"That's a little paranoid."

"Only if you weren't watching. When you flashed your badge at the stables, a boy scampered out the door. His tracks run all the way up here. Now the monks are gone."

"I've never done anything to harm them," Dante said. "All I want is answers."

"These fellows are pretty smart, right? Isn't that why we're here? Maybe they're smart enough to know what you were going to ask—and that you'd force the answers from them."

Dante scowled at the heights. "This is their home ground. We could hunt them all winter and they'd be two steps ahead of us the whole time."

Cee strolled forward, nudging the mud with her toes. "The good news is you couldn't ask for better conditions to follow their tracks."

Lew crossed his arms tight. "The bad news is it's freezing cold and we'll ruin our boots."

"You can always head back to town," Dante said. "Or would Olivander execute you for letting me out of your sight?"

Atop his mule, Lew swore with hair-raising blasphemy. "Of all the world's horrors, there's nothing worse than muddy boots."

"You think?" Cee said. "Guess you've never had shitty boots."

Lew could only close his eyes.

They found the tracks within minutes. Or what Dante took to be the tracks. The monks appeared to have departed single-file, pulling a sledge behind them to erase their footprints. This had left an obvious rut through the mud, but if Dante hadn't already been suspicious that they'd run from him, it might have been enough to throw him off.

It was strange, there was no way around that. But the fact they'd tried to hide their tracks spoke more loudly than words.

The tracks continued across the grassy field to the left of the cliffs, leaving the monks' passage as clear as dawn. The blades were trampled down, ground into the mud. The wind picked up, colder than ever. The plain angled up, leading to a steep rise that was barely walkable. Soon, the tracks led to a path too tight and rubble-strewn for the mules. Dante got down and Cee helped secure the animals behind a thatch of shedwind sheltering the approach to the escarpment.

The path up the mountain was often bare rock. Where it wasn't, it was snot-slick with lichen and moss. The occasional footprint in this or the patches of mud gathered in the flat spots continued to point the way. The trail grew steeper yet, then swung into a series of switchbacks. Some points were so narrow Lew pressed his back to the wall and edged forward inches at a time. Dante would have berated him, but he was secretly grateful to be forced to slow down. A thick haze clung to the heights. After an hour of slow progress, the mists grew too thick to see the plains below. The upper reaches were just as hidden.

The angle of the rise gentled and the switchbacks ceased. They stopped for a snack and some water; as with any time they left a city, they'd brought enough consumables to get them through a day or two.

Cee plunked down on a rock and leaned forward, stretching out her legs. "Either these guys have gone on a very abrupt and inconvenient pilgrimage, or they do
not
want to see you."

"They can't have much of a head start," Dante said. "We need to be silent from here on out."

Up to that point, the path had been navigable, if completely unpaved, but within minutes, it reduced in size to a game trail, and not necessarily one traveled by larger mammals. Shedwind grew thickly overhead, providing a leafy pergola. Condensed mist pattered their cloaks. The ground inclined again and the vegetation shrank to moss and hardy clumps of grass.

The patter of mist intensified. But the shielding shedwind was gone—it was raining again. Within two minutes, the sprinkle became a downpour. Hard sheets of rain pounded the trail, driven by a gusting wind.

"We're completely exposed," Cee said. "And not in the way that means I'm having fun."

"It's just a bit of rain," Dante said.

"And floods." Lew pointed. Uphill, runoff streamed into the trail, coursing down in a muddy froth.

Dante turned in a quick circle. Since leaving the temple, they'd seen no man-made structures of any kind. They had encountered a few crevasses and overhangs in the rock, but the last one was at least a quarter mile back a trail that was growing more treacherous by the second. With no other options, Dante ran off the path and jogged up a house-sized mound. He got out his knife, pulled up his sleeve, and cut the back of his left arm. The rain rinsed the blood away, but the nether couldn't be confounded that easily.

The dirt swelled at his feet. He let the mud slide away, then drew the underlying rock into a broad shelf, extending it outward, slightly rounded, with its entry pointed downhill. Finished, he ran beneath it. The others joined him.

Rain sluiced over the doorway in a solid curtain. Their clothes steamed from the heat of their bodies. They panted, wiping water from their eyes and toweling it from their hair with rags kept safe in inner pockets.

"There goes our tracks," Cee said.

Lew wrung water from the cuffs of his cloak. "And our whole hunt!"

"Try not to sound
too
happy about it," Dante said.

Beyond the makeshift cave, capillaries of floodwater joined to become veins. Dante watched it all literally wash away. Downhill, a crow fell to the ground with a strangled squawk. It whapped its wings against the mud but couldn't stand up. It slipped in a torrent and was swept against a crush of brambles. When the water relented a few minutes later, the crow was no longer moving.

The storm was a coastal squall, blowing itself out shortly. Once it abated, Dante stuck out his palm. Mist settled to his clammy skin. He walked outside, boots squelching. The trail was obliterated. So were entire stretches of mountainside.

Cee moved beside him. "You know, there's a good chance they don't even have what we came here for."

Dante blew into his hands. "Then why would they run?"

"Hell if I know. You believers do all kinds of things that don't make any sense."

"For someone whose expertise is finding things, you give up awfully fast. Watch and learn."

Without another word, he walked away from the sludgy remnants of the trail and headed to the brambles. He called to the nether and it leapt into the broken body of the crow, hungry for the fresh death. The bird jerked, twitched its wings. Cally had always said you couldn't get a dead bird to fly, but Cally had never been much for working with animals. Dante had tried, on occasion, and while he'd never succeeded, he'd seen room for potential. He picked up the crow, lobbed it into the air, and ordered it to fly. It flapped clumsily and slammed into the wet grass. He tried again, but it was simply too heavy.

Well, for one thing, it was soaked. As the others watched, he took it back into the cave and transmuted the nether into raw heat. Steam wafted from the black feathers. Once the crow dried, he took it back outside and threw it into the air again. This time, it was able to glide for fifty feet before it arced back to the ground. Still too heavy.

"What are you doing?" Lew said.

Dante got out his knife. "I thought you'd like a pet."

Cee didn't know whether to look amused or disgusted. Well, if she was going to stick around, she'd have to get used to it. Dante dug the blade into the crow's gut and hollowed it out, letting the entrails fall to the grass. They were no good to anyone now. All he needed was its wings and its eyes.

This time, when he lobbed it into the sky, it wobbled, glided, and rose.

"Look at that," Dante said. "I might never have to leave my room again."

He suspected the next phase of operations was going to involve a high degree of dizziness. He went back to his little cave to sit down. Firmly planted, and sheltered from any more sudden rains, he sent his sight to the crow's.

The ground rolled along a hundred feet beneath him. Dante's heart leapt. Involuntarily, he sent the bird flapping higher, then got a hold of himself and let it do its thing. The hillsides were a mess of mud and torn-up sward. Sediment flowed around boulders. In places, the floods had swept rocks onto washed-out paths, piling them up at the bottom of slopes. He made the crow bank and glimpsed the top of Cee and Lew's heads far below. He circled around, getting a sense for how people looked from that high up in the sky, then turned it loose to scan the hills and valleys.

Now and then, he registered Cee and Lew murmuring something to each other, but they knew enough to leave him to his hunt. When he felt himself get chilly, he got up to pace around, but still kept his sight tied to the crow's. At first he had no real plan to the search, letting the crow follow the winds, which were still quite stiff, but he soon found himself wandering over ground he'd already covered. He directed the crow to soar through an ever-expanding spiral.

It continued to see a whole lot of nothing. Now and then an odd spot of brown or white drew his eye, but whenever he sent the bird closer, it turned out to be a piece of rock or a patch of clay exposed by the storm. Sometimes he homed in on motion, but it was always revealed to be the rush of wind through the plants, or very rarely, a vole or sparrow emerging from cover to see if it was safe.

He was growing weary, losing his focus. He let the crow land on a boulder, then withdrew his sight, stood up, and rubbed his eyes.

"That's not the posture of a man who's found what he's looking for," Cee said.

"No," Dante said. "It's the posture of a man who's spent the last twenty minutes staring through the eyes of a dead bird."

"Light's getting late."

He glanced at the clouds. This whole time, his vision had been pointed groundward. He was surprised to see that much more than twenty minutes had passed: at least an hour, maybe two. Yet between battling the winds and swooping up and down to get a better glimpse of suspicious colors or shapes, he'd barely investigated a fraction of the terrain.

"Get some firewood," Dante said. "We're going to have to spend the night."

"That idea is so bad I want to take it behind the barn and club it."

"We don't have a choice. Even if we headed downhill right now, we wouldn't be back to the temple before dark. There's no way we can navigate this mud after nightfall."

"But you could create a light for us," Cee said. "I've seen you."

He clenched his teeth. "I'll search until sunset. We'll camp here tonight and head back tomorrow morning. The slopes will be drier then."

"You're the boss."

She turned and walked out from the cave. Lew wandered off to lend her a hand. Dante reseated himself and returned to the crow. After a couple false starts, the undead creature was able to take off on its own power, launching from a branch. It soared on the winds, passing over a tight valley of swaying grass.

Dante frowned. Only parts of the grass were swaying. And it wasn't grass—it was shedwind.

The crow ceased flapping and banked, bleeding altitude. Through a gap in the shedwind, a man in a soaked robe tugged at the green stalks, lashing them together into a crude shelter.

Dante's eyes flew open. He let the crow circle a few more times, then had it climb higher and higher to take in vast stretches of mountain.

"I've found them," he said. "They're close."

But Lew and Cee weren't; they were downhill, lugging up damp branches, sour looks on their faces. Dante jogged to them and repeated himself.

"They're settling in," he said. "If we hurry, we can catch them before dark."

"And then what?" Cee said.

"We sit down and converse. Like normal, everyday people who aren't chasing each other across the mountains during a potentially lethal storm."

She looked skeptical. He didn't care. They hiked through the hills, following a crow-scouted path over solid rock that had suffered little during the downpour. A half hour later, with the light weakening, they crept over a ridge and looked down on the shedwind-choked valley.

"Let me handle them," Dante murmured. "If they threaten us, don't hurt them unless you're in imminent fear for your safety."

"I don't want to hurt anybody," Lew said.

Cee smiled. "Then stay behind me."

Dante crept down the ridge, crawling through the mangled brush until he got down to where his silhouette wouldn't show on the horizon. His clothes were soaked. His boots were so laden with mud they were three times as heavy. Mud had crept up his shins, too. The smears just below his knees had gone lighter as they'd dried.

Voices drifted from the valley bottom. The rustle of leaves. Dante's crow alighted in a fir and eyeballed the camp. A dozen monks sat in a loose circle, holding their hands above a large rock as if to warm them, but there was no visible flame.

Dante paused within bowshot, hidden behind a screen of leaves. The Hanassans were renowned for their wisdom, their knowledge and lore, but some were sorcerers, too. If they perceived him as an enemy and lashed out at him—particularly the ethermancers—he might regret being so sneaky. He already had a few nicks on his knuckles, but he cut his forearm and kept the nether close.

"Please tell me there's been a misunderstanding." He stepped from behind a tree. "If you really ran all this way to avoid me, I'm afraid of what I've come to ask."

As he spoke, three monks drew nether to their hands, where it swirled darkly like blood dropped in sluggish water. Motes of ether danced on the fingers of a fourth man. The Hanassans stared as one.

Dante moved further from cover. "I'm not here to hurt you."

Since sorcerers needed no weapons to do harm, and actually had a habit of splaying palms and swooping their arms about when they meant to do business, the typical displays of peaceful intentions—hands open, raised, or held before you—tended to evoke hostility from fellow practitioners. Instead, the Gaskan custom among sorcerers was to press your palms together in front of your navel where they could be clearly seen, and any motions of the elbows or wrists would be obvious. Dante wasn't certain whether the display was the same in the Houkkallis (which, like so many other places, was a part of Gask, but hadn't always been), yet he attempted it anyway.