The Black Star (Book 3) (39 page)

For another, even if they wanted to risk dawdling around in a land they'd been banished from, the woods weren't exactly teeming with horses. Or four-legged beasts of burden and/or meat of any kind. Dante and crew ran into the occasional flock of sheep or herd of goats, but for the most part, the people found it more fruitful to harvest their trees than to plow fields or maintain herds. The few horses stabled in the lorens were property of the wealthy, or those whose livelihoods relied on fast travel.

So, with the option of revisiting the issue once they crossed into less hostile lands, they made their way forward on foot. The road was well-drained and they made fine time. The forest continued around them, the rolling hills falling lower with each mile.

"Was this what you had in mind when you came to Narashtovik?" Dante said to Cee as the afternoon grew late.

"When I signed up to be your hunter?" she said. "No, I figured I'd spend all day down in a basement signing papers."

"You can't be
that
blasé. Two months ago, we hardly knew this place existed."

She gazed up at the trees. "I didn't even know Weslee's name."

"How did you get into a job like this in the first place?"

"Growing up, I spent a lot of time hiding. Once I got older, I found I'd developed a keen insight for where other miserable creatures might try to hide."

He watched her sidelong. "Orphan?"

She laughed through her nose. "Sooner or later, aren't we all?"

"Do you think I'm prying? We've been working together for a season and I hardly know a thing about you."

"I was born in Setteven," she said. "Mother died in childbirth. Father died of plague when I was seven. A family friend took me in, but he was killed in a duel less than a year later. Despite winning, the aggrieved party did not feel the death of my foster father was satisfaction enough. He came for the rest of us. With the estate crumbling, and my foster brothers being hunted, I wound up in the streets."

"I was on the streets of Bressel for a while," Dante said. "But not until I was sixteen."

Cee was quiet for a moment. "Well, I was eight. And a girl. And my adopted name was a death warrant, signed by one of the palace's bluest bloods—and its most bloodthirsty."

"Sounds like Cassinder," he said. She nodded. "Wait, it
was
? I killed him. In the war."

"I know," Cee said. "Why do you think I wanted to help you find your friend?"

"The pocket-splitting reward?"

"I should feel ashamed of not wanting to starve to death?"

"How did you get through it the first time? Alone, hunted by a powerful man when you were so young?"

"At first I followed dogs," she laughed. "I figured they'd know their way around. Then I fell in with kids like myself. We stole food, picked pockets. When we got low, our leader rented us out as servants for days or weeks at a time. She got the money and we got slices of bread. I was better off with the dogs."

"Did you have to kill her?" Lew said, hushed.

Cee laughed harder than before. "Is murder your solution to everything? I ran away. She probably thought I'd died. No one cared either way. There are always more like me, kids with so little they're grateful for anything. You work yourself to the bone for your daily bread, you wake up tomorrow and do it again. Better than sleeping on the street. Than never knowing where your next meal will come from. Of course, when you work like that, you're running in place. And if you ever fall down, you won't have the strength to pick yourself back up.

"That's what I figured, anyway. For a while after I ran away, I lived mean. Thieving. For a while I lurked under the docks and ate the fruit and grain that fell from the boats. Then I started to live smart. I found a notch in the ridges overlooking the palace and grew a secret garden. One day I left my garden and walked down the Street of Kings. A servant's horse had stumbled. Broken a leg. The servant needed to see to it, but he needed to deliver a letter immediately. For some reason—I still don't know why—he thought he could trust me. Maybe he saw a young girl, reasonably clean, and thought I'd do whatever I was told.

"He was wrong about that, but right that he could trust me. Because I saw an opportunity. After years in the streets, I knew the city like I'd built it. I delivered his message faster than he'd have brought it on horseback. He was so grateful he kept bringing me more and more jobs. I was quicker than the devil and never got robbed.

"Servants talk; word spread. Soon, I had more work than I could handle. Eventually hired a couple other girls to keep up with it. After a few years, I got bored. Traveled. Quit being a courier and started being a hunter. And I always worked for myself. That's the only way."

Dante looked up. "Then why are you so eager to work for me?"

She pulled down her hood; they'd entered a clearing and the sun was out. "When Cassinder killed my foster dad and got away without so much as a slap on the wrist, it taught me that we might all live in the same city, but men like him walk in a higher world. Untouchable. If a person up there reaches down to kill a person like me, no one's going to stop them."

"Unless you attach yourself to someone else from that world."

Cee nodded. "It grinds my teeth, but that's how it is. Figured I may as well attach myself to the person who got to Cassinder before I could."

"That's a hell of a story," Dante said. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I didn't want your decision to be colored by sympathy. I wanted you to hire me because I'm the best."

She left it at that. When dusk fell, they holed up beneath a juvenile loren whose roots were barely spacious enough to accommodate the ponies. Ast swung up into the branches to cut down lorbells. Lew scurried around beneath him, trying to catch the fruits before they dashed into the dirt.

Three days after their departure from Corl, the forest came to an end. The hills overlooked a long plain. The horizon was crumpled with another range of hills. Patches of the basin were dark green with trees, but these were common firs, nothing like the land they'd just left. Instead, the pastoral scene was much like any in Gask or Mallon: flocks of sheep, small villages, a keep standing watch on a lonely hill.

They stopped at a village to sleep in real beds and allow Ast the opportunity to get directions to the city of Ellan. The locals spoke the same language as the people of Spiren, but with an accent that sharpened their vowels into lethal points. When Ast asked the way to Ellan, they looked at him like he'd asked which direction was up.

Dante seized the opportunity to work on his Weslean and to learn more about the city the monk in Corl had sent them to for answers. Ellan was the capital of the plains region known as Camren, and its history had echoes of Narashtovik: repeatedly sacked, wrecked, and burned, sometimes to the point where its citizens had considered abandoning it altogether.

One woman who had lived there for many years before retiring to the countryside to farm proved a bountiful source of information. It sounded like the foundation of Ellan's current prosperity had been laid roughly two centuries ago, when a fiendish series of marriages, trade agreements, and border realignments had converted two enemies into allies, pacified three others, and reduced one foe to ashes. Ellan had experienced ups and downs since then—it sat in the middle of the prairie and had few natural defenses—but kept itself intact through aggressive trade and politicking.

She had no insight into the address they'd been given, and nothing she said stood out as an obvious reason why Ellan would hold the keys to understanding Cellen. But with a city that big and that busy, Dante could believe it possessed the wisdom they needed to finally take another step toward their goal.

Overnight, a snowstorm blew in, layering the plains with three inches of white. To save wear on themselves and their ponies, they stopped for the night in a middling burg. In the plaza, a vendor of beef pasties looked askance at their Spirish currency. An eavesdropping merchant offered to swap it (for a minimal fee) for Camrish money, which looked much closer to what Dante was used to: round metal coins, though these had holes punched through the middle. In the smallest denominations, the coins were thin rings; as they increased in value, the holes shrank until they were so small you could hardly pass a string through them. Dante recognized bronze and silver, but was confused by the most valuable, which resembled tin. Ast informed him it was aluminum.

They crossed the hills and looked down on a sweep of grassland dotted with lakes and carved up by sluggish streams. Herds of sheep and cows roamed the prairie, cropping the grass that tufted the snow. Many of the beasts were tended to, but others appeared to be wild.

After inquiring at another village, Ast hooked south at a crossroads. This connected to a larger, rutted road running eastward, parallel to a wide, languid river. People came and went in both directions. Many of the wagons were laden with lumber harvested along the river or in Spiren. All of it was bound toward Ellan. For the last two days of their walk, they fell in with one such caravan; Dante thought they'd be less conspicuous arriving in the company of legitimate businessmen.

With the plains so flat, Ellan was visible from thirty miles away. At first it was just a dark lump beneath a pall of smoke, but it soon congealed into a typical if gigantic city. Makeshift slums around its outer walls. Rowhouses were visible behind the walls, interrupted by cathedrals, universities, palaces, and a towering coliseum. Most of the larger structures were made from clay bricks or sandstone, but the housing was a mishmash of that and wood. Whatever the materials used, the architecture remained uniform. The homes were squared off with flat roofs. The more elaborate structures employed square or hexagonal towers, frequently with domed caps.

While they were still a mile outside it, horns piped from within the walls, blasting from several points across the city. Dante started. The lumber merchants took no notice.

"Ah," Dante recovered. "Sounds like they're heralding our arrival."

Lew wrinkled his brow. "How would they know?"

Cee laughed. "Question is, are they horns of celebration? Or warning?"

The front gates were a grille of shining brass bars. The city walls were fired brick. Their group was met by guards wearing white and carrying long spears. After a cursory investigation, the guards allowed them into what turned out to be a brief maze. The caravan navigated it easily, emerging through another gate into the city proper.

A brick tower faced them across a plaza of pale yellow flagstones. People streamed in and out of the gate and the buildings ringing the square. Ast had already asked the caravan's members for directions to the note's address, and after exchanging goodbyes, the two groups parted ways. Ast led their party down a side street that linked up with a wide but less frantic avenue. People babbled to all sides. Much of it was in Third, but a good bit was in tongues Dante didn't understand, including at least three others that sounded like they might be branches of the greater Weslean speech-tree.

After several blocks, the street spilled into a sprawling fruit and vegetable market. Much of the trade was in grain, rice, spices, and other dry goods, but there were also fresh lorbells and mounds of citrus in greens, yellows, oranges, and pinks. Most had brown spots on their skins, but they looked edible enough. Ast bought a handful of limes and spoke with the vendor, who explained how to navigate their new environment.

Ellan was enormous, and as hodgepodge as all great cities were, yet its main streets were laid out in a vast grid, individually named. Every building was marked by a chest-high stone pillar marked with a numeral and a cardinal direction to tell you which side of the street it was on.

They were looking for Iden Street, #327 East. According to Ast, they were already on the proper street, and now it was a simple matter of following it to the correct address. The brick shop to Dante's right said #151 East. The next one up was #152 East. They continued north.

Very quickly, he became myopic to anything but the increase of the numbers. These ticked along in orderly fashion, but now and then one got skipped. He could only guess the address had been absorbed by a neighboring building. Or possibly got destroyed long ago in one of Ellan's many raids and wars.

Over the next half mile, several addresses were skipped, missing. And yet when they reached #326, and the neighboring building advanced to #328, Dante was dumbstruck.

#326 was a private residence. #328 was a shop filled with bolts of cotton, silk, and hemp. Ast inquired with the avuncular shopkeep, who got a puzzled look and informed them there was no #327 East on Iden Street.

Dante had Ast check in at two other businesses across the street, then with three separate street vendors. All agreed there was no such address. They returned to the textile shop and paid off the owner for a thorough inspection upstairs and down. The roof allowed them a good look at the neighboring residence. There was no sign of a hidden address anywhere.

Baffled to the core, Dante wandered to the shadow of a sandstone temple. "Why would the monk send us to a place that doesn't exist?"

Ast shook his head. "Cities change. Perhaps he hasn't been here in a long time."

"Maybe," Cee said. "Or maybe he meant to send us on a two-tailed fox chase."

"Then why all the subterfuge?" Dante said. "Why go to the bother of setting up a midnight meeting that could have landed him in deep shit with the Minister? He could have told us any old lie and we'd have bought it."

Lew folded his arms. "Could he have written it down wrong? What if it's actually at #372 East? Or something?"

This sounded plausible, barely, but Dante was worn out, thirsty, angry, and tired of wrangling the ponies around the crowded streets. Running down the various ways the monk might have transposed the numbers would take hours. He decided to find a stable and an inn and clear his head. Ast got directions to a place two blocks away. Unlike the monk's address, this inn actually existed.