The Black Star (Book 3) (6 page)

It impacted with an anti-flash of pure black. The kapper charged on without breaking stride.

Dante dove to the side. A spiral horn snagged his thigh, shredding his pants. Pain lanced up his leg. He cried out and thumped to the grass. The beast trampled past and swung about through a wide turn. Dante drew on the nether. His first effort had been weak, but now that it had blood to feed it, it surged like a storm-swollen creek, wreathing his hands in darkness. As the kapper charged anew, he struck it again.

And again, the shadows dissipated on impact. An audible hiss fried the frigid air. Cold pins prickled Dante's scalp and spine. With the rasp of steel on leather, he drew his sword. As it closed on him, he flung himself out of range.

It flew by. The wind of its passage smelled of pine sap and bog-rot. The creature might not be able to climb cliffs, but it looked perfectly capable of bashing down trees—it was armored like an eight hundred-pound pillbug, as solid as a rhino but with the predatory grace of a tiger. And it was apparently impervious to nether.

The only tree branches in reach were dried-out and spindly. Likely to snap if Dante put his weight on them. His only chance was to run into the trees and try to outmaneuver the kapper as he returned to the cave in the cliff.

He sprinted from the crest of the bald hill into the woods. It closed on him, feet pounding soil. He juked behind a pine. Branches snapped behind him, spitting splinters. Overhead, the strange lights played on, painting the woods in blazing pinks and greens, causing the shadows of the trees to waver on the frosty ground. Dante weaved around an ancient fir and jumped down a short ravine, skidding to a stop in front of a wall of brambles. He turned his shoulder and burst through a thin spot in the growth. Thorns scraped his hands and cheeks.

With the lights in the sky to guide him, he knew he was headed in the direction of the cave, but he was still a few hundred yards from sanctuary. Even as he had that thought, the kapper leapt down the ravine behind him, landing so hard Dante felt the impact in his soles. A storm of thrashing erupted behind him. Robbed of its momentum, the kapper had become mired in brambles. Perhaps its armor was too thick to feel the thorns and that's why it didn't cry out. Whatever the case, its silence was more unnerving than any howls or roars.

With a few seconds of freedom, Dante quit dodging around trees and ran pell-mell toward the cave. As he sprinted away, he tried to grasp the nether inside the kapper, meaning to shred its lungs and heart, but reaching for its insides was like reaching toward a pool of water and banging into solid ice.

But there was more than one way to skin a kapper.

By the time it tore free from the brambles with a crash of twigs, he'd opened a lead of a hundred feet. The monster galloped behind him, gaining swiftly. The dark wall of the cliff bobbed behind the pines. He wouldn't make it before the monster was upon him.

"Dante?" Lew's voice carried through the trees.

"Stay there!" he shouted.

Still running, he called the nether from the darkness. Fifty feet from the cliffs, with the kapper crashing through branches and saplings, Dante whirled. The kapper bounded forward. It would be on him in a moment. He thought about striking for its small bright eyes, but dropped to one knee and punched the hard, frozen earth.

A crevasse zigzagged from his hand. Brown pine needles cascaded into the gap. The ground cracked apart with a groan of rock. The beast snorted and tumbled into the pit.

Dante stood, breathing hard. His heart felt like it would knock through his ribs. A cloud of dust drifted from the crack. Loose stones clacked to the bottom. His gashed leg throbbed. Keeping the nether close, he edged up to the pit and illuminated its bottom.

Dust motes twinkled in the pale light. Twenty feet down, the kapper lay on its side beneath a patina of pebbles and sand. A shard of basalt spun down and plinked off the creature's plates.

"Dante?" Lew called.

"I'm fine," Dante replied over his shoulder. "The kapper—"

A flood of stone rattled from the pit. The kapper surged to its feet, shook off the dust, and leapt up the steep wall, claws scrabbling at the loose rock. Impossibly, it pulled itself closer to the top.

"Oh, come on!" Dante said.

He might have struck at it again, or opened the rift even further, dropping it from a height that would crack even its iron-hard shell. But he was wounded, weakened, and panicked. He ran toward the cave, meaning to hole up, catch his breath, and assess the situation from a location where he wasn't in imminent peril of being impaled on spiral horns.

Grass flew from his heels. Before he'd made it twenty feet, the kapper heaved itself out of the pit and lumbered after him. Its footsteps thumped closer and closer. It snorted from its blunt, triangular snout. Dante dashed through the pines, scratchy branches lashing his face. The kapper tromped down hard, planting its weight, then made no sound at all.

Dante threw himself flat. The beast flew over him, limbs extended, fat fleshy tail sailing behind it. With a great crack, it smashed into the bole of a towering pine, its horns spraying bark. Dante spat dirt from his mouth. The kapper's left horn had punched straight through the pine. Dante vaulted up and ran past it. Only then did it roar, a bone-shaking honk that nearly froze him mid-stride.

A lantern flared from the cave. Dante launched himself at the cliff face and raced up the ladder he'd drawn into its side. Above, Lew craned from the entrance, eyes wild. Dante reached the opening and threw himself in.

"What's
happening
?" Lew screeched.

"I met a kapper," Dante said. "And discovered their manners are extremely poor."

Ast appeared beside them. "You went outside? In the night?"

"To see the lights I was sent here to investigate? Yes, how foolish of me."

Ast gave him a long look. "We don't live in high holes because we think the ground smells funny."

"Obviously, it makes more sense to me now!"

In the woods, the kapper thrashed and yanked. With a great crack, its horn came free. The pine stuttered, popped, groaned, and fell, boughs hitting the dirt with the sound of incoming surf. The kapper shook its head, backed up, and gazed straight up at Dante.

"Are they smart?" Dante said.

"I've never engaged one in conversation," Ast said. "As predators, however, they are impeccable."

"I noticed. They're impervious to nether! No wonder the priests of Ancient Narashtovik exterminated them. It would be like living barefoot in the land of loose nails."

"Where did it go?" Lew said.

Dante turned back to the woods. Starlight glittered on frost. The trees stood alone. The only sound was the whisk of the breeze in the branches.

"You see what a hunter it is?" Ast said. "It's trying to trick us. Not wise to descend before dawn."

"No problems on that front," Dante muttered. "It has successfully scared the shit out of me."

He watched the woods for a minute, then withdrew from the entry to tend to the deep red gash in his leg. The nether sewed it up with no trace of the wound but puffy pink flesh. Less could be done for the leg of his pants, but Lew had been an acolyte in the monastery for years, and was well trained with the mending of the monks' robes and underclothes. By the time he finished, the pants were wearable, if susceptible to the winds.

Somehow, Dante was able to get back to sleep. When he got up, it was an hour past dawn. The grounds around the cliff had been clawed up, but Ast had already climbed down to scout, and assured Dante the kapper was gone. As Dante ate breakfast and shook the fog from his head, he stared at the fallen pine. Its trunk was broken in jagged shards. He tried not to imagine what the kapper's horns would have done to the trunk of his body.

Once they'd eaten, they resumed their course into the mountains. They spoke little, crossing first the forest, then another field of sprawling talus. This descended to a high valley of waving grass broken here and there by buttes. To the east—the direction of last night's lights—the ground sank in a series of terrifying cliffs. Miles away, the skyline was interrupted by dominant peaks. The sun dropped. Ast began to search for a good place to set up a cave, looking for a cliff with an eastern exposure.

He found a short butte, forty feet high and carpeted with yellowing grass. For the third day in a row, Dante carved a hole in the wall and an inset ladder leading up to it. They ate their standard fare, which was dwindling. If they turned back toward Soll tomorrow, they wouldn't face any problems on the food front, but if they tarried beyond that, they'd have to forage or go hungry. The latter wasn't a pleasant scenario when they were marching up and down mountains all day long. Dante would probably be able to knock down a few birds and squirrels, but cleaning and cooking the game would slow them down.

And he didn't like the idea of building a fire. All that smoke would be a dead giveaway of their presence. Nevermind that they appeared to be completely alone in a pristine landscape. That just made him feel more exposed.

They climbed up to the cave. Dante had modified this one to have a higher entrance with a shallow deck-like landing that would permit all three of them to watch the night skies. Low clouds streaked past, reddened by the sunset. Within minutes, the day had fled, chased away by the stars and a quarter moon already halfway across the heavens.

"It was the kapper, wasn't it?" Lew said, hushed. "That's what's been killing the sheep."

"The bull-sized pile of teeth, horns, and impenetrable plate?" Dante said. "What makes you think it's capable of killing a ball of wool?"

Ast surveyed the land below them, a brief plain interrupted by another sheer ravine. They had reached the last of what could be called the foothills. Any further east and they'd be climbing into the staggering upslopes of the spine of the Woduns.

"It's unusual for them to descend into shepherd territory," Ast said. "I've only seen two others in all my life here."

Dante glanced his way. "Yet despite their rarity, Soll is built around protecting yourselves against them."

"They're rare because our ancestors learned to allow them no reason to come to our homes."

Dante chuckled. "Trust me, after facing one—or more accurately, backing one, as I fled from it at full speed—I would be living in cliffs, too."

Lew leaned forward. "Or getting the hell out of the mountains altogether!"

Ast shook his head. "People live in lands with hurricanes, wildfires, warfare that leaves the fields buried in three inches of ash. This is no different." He was quiet a moment. "Although the sight of a village ravaged by a kapper is as grotesque as any war."

Dante opened his mouth to ask for details. Pink light seared across the east. At first it came in beams straight from the sky, shading Lew's face rosy. Then the beams curled and dispersed into multicolored sheets of purple and green. For minutes, the colors shifted and swirled, floating lower and lower until they seemed to graze the jagged peaks.

Dante's interested waned. It was pretty enough, but so was everything in nature when you sat and looked at it. And with the exception of the initial beams, this looked like just another expression of the Ghost Lights.

The kappers were genuinely troubling, however. If the animals were venturing below their normal grounds, the Council of Narashtovik might be able to repay and curry favor with the eastern peoples by dispatching a force to root out the monsters. And Dante believed they'd have more to gain from such a venture than mere favor. If he could study a kapper, and determine what enabled it to resist the nether, it could be a tremendous boon to the strength of Narashtovik's priests. It would lend them an advantage over every other nethermancer in the land.

Without warning, the lights coalesced from ethereal sheets into a tangle of curved lines. One, thicker than the others, stood straight in the sky, pointing to the heavens. Each of the thinner lines curved toward it, connecting to it. The light paled until it was as silver as the stars.

"That's Barden," Dante said flatly.

Ast leaned forward. "The White Tree?"

"It looks exactly like that."

"That looks like an oak."

"Really? How many oaks have you seen with branches like scimitars? Because remind me to stay away from
that
forest."

"They kinda look like swords," Lew squinted.

Dante frowned. "Haven't they taken you to see it?"

"We're not supposed to visit. Except on the holiest occasions."

"Well, that's ridiculous. Barden sits at the center of our beliefs. Remind me to change that policy as soon as we return."

Lew watched him sidelong, attempting to gauge if he was serious, but Dante only had eyes for the tree in the sky. It shimmered, swaying not as if it were in a wind, but as if it were moving on its own power. The lights sharpened—Dante could make out the teeth budding from the bone branches—then collapsed to a single blinding flare. The ball of light wavered to the eastern peaks. It disappeared in a flash of white.

He blinked against the sudden darkness, the image burned into his vision. "Well, we have to go see
that
."

"Did you mark the spot?" Ast said.

"How could I? It's miles away in the middle of the night."

"My point exactly."

"We've already come this far. I think we can spend another day to find the resting place of the awe-inspiring bundle of light."

The tall man shrugged. "You are the captain. But it could have come down anywhere in that range. It will take many days and better equipment than we've got to fully search it."

Dante shook his head but didn't bother to argue further. He
was
the captain, and they would do as he said. This was something Olivander continued to drill into him. Dante was used to operating on his own, accountable to a handful of superiors. Now, he was the superior. People like Ast were accountable to
him
. It was his role to ask them for more than they believed they were capable of—and to recognize when they were correct. He didn't expect to search the whole range, but Ast could at least provide him with a look.