The Black Star (Book 3) (64 page)

"Murder won't do after all," Somburr muttered. "What has the world come to?"

The front door faced the flat. They had no way to get outside without being seen. They might try to conceal themselves within a shadowsphere, but its pure blackness would be obvious against the backdrop of the tower and the trees. As Dante ran down their options, another pair of soldiers joined the observers.

Somburr turned to him. "We've reached the point where a bad idea now is better than a good idea later."

"So what's your bad idea? Kill everyone and make a break for it?"

"The alternative is to hide here until they go away."

"The Minister will know the flash means someone was tampering with his stone. He'll tear this place apart for signs of the culprit."

"So we murder, then?"

He took another look out the window. "I don't see what else..."

He whirled. A couple of years ago, on a week-long tour to better understand the city he'd soon be taking charge of, he'd visited dozens of local industries. Among these was a glassworks, a hellish yet beautiful place of heat and flame. Dante had never known how glass was made and was amazed to learn it was nothing more than melted sand.

He ran to the window at the back of the Spire. Outside, the flat continued for ten feet before stopping abruptly, its edge bordered by a waist-high railing. Dante plunged his mind into the nether in the glass. It failed to move. He redoubled his focus, willing it to go fluid, to remember that it was nothing more than earth, no different than the rock or the mud. Outside, voices approached the tower. He felt Somburr gathering the nether beside him.

With a soft glurp, the window parted like warm taffy. Dante tapped Somburr's shoulder and heaved himself onto the sill. He lowered his feet to the flat, giving Somburr a hand down, then willed the glass back together. The window was clearer and cleaner than the others, but it was intact, and they'd gotten outside with hardly a whisper.

Dante crouched and scuttled to the edge of the flat. There were no scaffolds beneath it, but a tangle of lesser branches projected from lower flats. The closest was about five feet below them and as thick as his calf. Not much room for error.

A chain clanked from the other side of the tower. He was out of time. He flipped around and lowered himself from the edge. As he stretched his legs into the abyss, toeing for purchase on the branch, a light struck the first floor windows.

His feet made contact. He bent his knees, lowering his weight to the branch. It sagged a fraction of an inch and Dante tore one hand away from the flat's edge, waving about for balance. He made the worst transition—that heart-stopping moment when he had to release the flat with his left hand in order to be able to reach the branch he was standing on—then sat and straddled it.

Beside him, Somburr finished the same maneuver. They were sitting on the upper extension of a long branch protruding from the side of a flat below the one they'd just left. They were a good forty feet above and away from the lower flat's surface. Above them, people spoke back and forth. A face stuck from the edge of the flat, eyes white. The man glanced to either side, then withdrew.

Dante scooted down the branch. Leaves shook at its ends, but their rustle blended with the breeze. The flat they were approaching sported a number of buildings half hidden by the foliage. Populated, but he saw no current movement. He continued down, lifting his legs over the forks of smaller branches. Twigs scraped his face. By the time the branch connected to the side of the flat, it was as thick as his waist. The surface of the flat was three feet above him. He got his feet under him and stood for a peek. Seeing no one, he hauled himself up and rolled over the ledge. Somburr followed him up. Still disguised as soldiers, they ought to be in the clear.

Somburr turned in a circle, orienting himself to the trunk. Dante held up a hand. "Just a minute."

He transferred his vision to the squirrel he'd left inside the Spire of the Earths. It was on the ground floor. Light flickered from the top of the tower. He moved the squirrel up the steps to the floor below it. Above, three figures stood in the circular light of a lantern: the Minister, and his two nethermancers, the man and the woman who'd watched when he went to speak to Lew in the cell.

"...block the stairs," the Minister was saying. "Nobody leaves or enters the Top Loft until we've questioned everyone here."

"Everyone?" the woman said. "You mean everyone who could have provoked the stone into flashing?"

He stepped up to her face. "What did I say?"

She glanced to the other man for support. He offered none. She lowered her eyes. "Everyone."

"Then unless everyone has agreed to a new definition of 'everyone' that I'm not privy to, I want you to question
everyone
. If you feel they are lying, or being in any way less than forthright, you are authorized to enhance your questions with whatever means necessary to deliver satisfactory answers. Understood?"

The two nodded in unison. The Minister smiled.

Dante ordered the squirrel to lie flat on the step, then dropped all connection to it. "Time to go."

They hustled toward the trunk and got on the staircase, passing a couple of soldiers bound for the uppermost flats. The system of three bridges hadn't yet been shut down. As they waited for the last set of steps to be lowered into place, Dante heard footsteps above them. The stairs clicked down. Dante forced himself not to run across. He glanced over his shoulder. Above, the two nethermancers reached the sentries at the top of the checkpoint. Dante hurried down the stairs, dropping from sight behind the curve of the giant trunk.

All the way down, with the stone inside his cloak bouncing against his chest, he expected to be shouted at. Stopped. Assaulted. But they reached the roots without exchanging a single word with another person. Once on the ground, they headed west until trees screened them from the palatial loren, then hooked south through the forest toward their own.

From the lowest flat, Cee and Ast watched them approach, confirmed their identities, and scrabbled down the roots.

Dante patted his cloak. "We got it. Ready to move?"

"Almost," Cee said. "Left the food up top. Bears, you know."

Dante climbed up to the round to help bring down the food. They had rifled Lew's gear for anything that might reveal him as being from Narashtovik, but were leaving most of it behind. It was unlikely to be found soon, let alone connected to Lew, but on the off chance it was, it would reinforce his story about coming back to Spiren alone.

Despite that, and the fact they already had as much as they could carry, it felt wrong to leave his things there in this hostile country. Halfway down the roots, Dante turned back to the round and pawed through Lew's possessions until he found a talisman he'd seen Lew wearing earlier on their venture into Weslee, a tiny steel cat dangling from a broken chain. It would have been easy enough to fix, but Lew must have been too involved in his work to get to it. Dante didn't know why the monk had carried it or what it signified, but he intended to bring it home. Narashtovik. The city Lew's death had saved.

He climbed back down and headed west. The woods were dark and quiet. After a half mile, Cee piped up. "Run into any trouble up there?"

"What do you think?" Dante said.

"Then I'm glad to hear you outfoxed it."

"I don't think the Minister noticed I'd altered the stone. But he knows we're from Gask. He's canny enough to suspect why we're here. We can't stop until our legs quit on us."

Ast hadn't quite deciphered the maps, but he had a good guess as to what part of the Woduns they covered. Anyway, their exact course didn't matter yet. What mattered was getting to the mountains. And those were impossible to miss.

They walked overland, avoiding the roads. Just in case the stone in the Spire of the Earths was being actively monitored by the Minister's nethermancers, Dante left his piece of it untouched. To be on the safe side, he didn't call on the nether at all, and didn't intend to again until they were a safe distance from Corl.

Restraining himself was a challenge and a half: he was in the habit of pulling the nether from its crevices dozens of times a day, simply to do it, flexing his mental muscles the same way a strongman might clench and unclench his stomach while walking about on his errands. That night, Dante had to stop himself from summoning the shadows on four different occasions. When they finally bedded down, he reminded himself not to draw on it the instant he woke up, which was also his habit.

That meant no undead sentries, either, forcing them to rotate through a standard watch. Everyone was exhausted, and rousting the next person to take their turn almost led to two fistfights, but they made it through the night without outside attacks or any sign of the Minister.

They pressed on. The hills ramped toward the sky. Dante got hold of Nak, let him in on the latest developments, and asked him to find him anything he could about a black mineral, flecked with silver, that glowed green in the presence of nether.

"Deepstone," Nak said on the spot. "It's mentioned in some of the Council of Narashtovik's earliest histories. Which you really ought to read sometime, O Great Leader."

"Really? What's it do?"

"Not exist, as far as I knew. Thought it was mythical. But it's credited as the inspiration for the colors we wear."

"Do any of these 'myths that are probably actually history' tell you what it does when it's in the presence of nether?"

"Oh, it explodes violently," Nak said. "Just kidding. I don't remember—but I know where to look."

They dropped the connection so Nak could research the deepstone. Dante walked on. While he waited to hear back, rain began to hiss on the canopy, dropping to the ground in fat dollops. Dante pulled up his hood. It would wash away their tracks, at least. But he didn't think they were being followed. If they were, it was likely through methods immune to a bit of weather.

Nak got back to him a couple hours later. "So. These accounts are horribly obscure in all senses of the word. As you said, deepstone glows in the presence of nether actively being used. There was one story of using it to detect the presence of enemy sorcerers, but that turned out to be a parable of the folly of hubris—the user didn't know that a stone will only glow a few times before it's saturated and has to 'rest.'"

"Is that all? It doesn't explode, or get bonded to its owner, anything like that?"

"Not that I'm aware."

That was enough for Dante. Sooner or later, they would need the stone to find the exact location of Cellen. That afternoon, when they paused for a rest, he walked a short distance from the others, glanced around to make sure the nearby lorens were unpopulated, and sat down on one of their sprawling roots. Rain dripped from above. He set down the cubic stone and brought forth the nether.

At first, he just brought it nearby, the way you'd approach a stray and uncertain dog. The stone glowed, though it had none of the intensity of the flash in the Spire. After a minute, with no other activity, he slitted his eyes and reached his mind inside the stone. Green washed over the tree, catching a thousand raindrops in its glare.

He held on. The glow became too faint to see in the overcast light. The deepstone felt more or less like all high-density stone did. Maybe the adepts of Pocket Cove could feel the difference between granite and basalt, but that was too subtle for him. He moved through the nether of the stone, exploring its boundaries. These were as hard as the edges of the stone itself, but he knew this was a trick. Because this piece of rock had once been part of a much larger one.

And then he felt it. Not just one signal, no singular bloom of pressure in his brain, but dozens, so intense and in so many directions he had to withdraw. He returned, cautiously, but the results were the same. Very soon, he reached an awful conclusion: this piece wasn't the only fragment of the original rock. There were scores of them. And this bit was connected to them all.

He explained to the others. Cee cocked her head. "What does this mean?"

Somburr smiled wryly. "That we don't know where it is after all."

"Maybe I can block out the other signals," Dante said. "Concentrate on just one."

"How will you know
which
one?"

Cee held up her hand. "You want us involved in coming up with ideas? Then you've got to start explaining exactly how things like this work."

"It's like how I followed Blays," Dante said, exhaling. "A bit of his blood pointed me toward his whole."

"And the feeling got stronger the closer you got?" She waited for him to nod. "Then we use the maps to get close. Once we get nearby, maybe its signal will be strong enough to separate it from the others and follow it to its precise location."

"Sounds iffy. If it works, though, it's brilliant. Either way, we have no choice but to keep moving."

He was less than thrilled that it depended on so tenuous a plan. He had to remind himself that if it weren't for him, no one from Narashtovik would have made it this far. The city would be oblivious to the threat of the Minister; unchallenged, their enemy would have found Cellen, used it to split the Woduns in half, and flooded Narashtovik with his army. At most, Dante and Olivander would have had only a few days to prepare. The city would be torn to the ground.

The following day, Cee stopped in her tracks and pointed into the lorens ahead of them. The branches writhed with motion: scores of humans cutting lorbells from their thick stems and lowering them to the ground in bushels.

"Do you see?" Somburr said.

Dante wiped his nose. "The human hive dismantling the trees?"

"The lorens are so heavy with fruit the Spirish never need to walk more than a mile to find food. These are meant for people who intend to be gone from Spiren for some time."

They watched in silence as the Minister's citizens plucked fruit to feed their soldiers in the field. Were the lorens particular to the soil and climate of the Eastern Woduns, or would these trees someday loom over Narashtovik, casting the city's ruins into such deep shadow nothing else could grow?