The Black Star (Book 3) (81 page)

"They're here!" a woman shouted. "The outlanders, they're right here! Gods save us! Gods—"

Something darted through the leaves and she went silent. But others were calling out in her stead, beseeching the Minister for help. Dante swore and broke into a sprint, diverting around the busted lumber of a pub. Martial commands barked through the night. Dante skidded in the mud, facing the box canyon of a shattered flat. He turned around, ran out the way they'd come in, and hooked around the debris. A couple of clicks went off, followed by thuds: the Spirish soldiers' mechanical bows.

"They're here!" a man said. "They're heading south!"

His bow clicked. The bolt flew through the shreds of Dante's cloak. Cee dropped to one knee and fired back. Her arrow hissed through the night. The man groaned.

The path ahead was hemmed in by the remains of a flat. The ground was strewn with broken wood, crushed branches, shards of ceramics, and splintered furniture. Blays wove through it, following Dante's path. After a hundred yards, the flat to their right ceased. Dante cut south through a field mounded by thick clusters of leafy branches. A loren loomed a couple hundred yards away, lofts alight with lanterns, but there was too much wreckage and rain to see if Narashtovik's army was waiting at its base.

More of the crossbows clacked ahead and to the right. Green-clad soldiers spilled over the remnants of a flat, shouting to each other as they fired on the three escaping foreigners. Dante veered to the left, putting more branches between themselves and the enemy.

The loss of vital seconds proved a crucial mistake. Ahead, a phalanx of green-clad troops poured from a gap in the flat, cutting them off. Rain glistened on swords and spears. Dante attempted to cut toward three o'clock, but that was only taking them further from the next loren, where their reinforcements were currently waiting to help them escape from Corl.

The Minister's men kept pace, paralleling them through the rain. With less debris ahead of them, they were able to close ground. Dante put his back to them, returning toward the main ruins of the tree. Blays and Cee followed. Dante spoke into his loon in quick, choppy barks, then went silent.

"We're doomed, aren't we?" Blays said.

"It's okay," Dante said over his shoulder. "Narashtovik is safe."

Blays splashed behind him. "You got Cellen! Well, I hope you used it to make us impervious to arrows. Or is that what brought down the tree?"

"In a sense." Dante pointed to a chunk of flat just ahead. It was fifty feet square and sunk partially into the mud, its surface just a couple feet above the ground. Smashed buildings sat atop it. "Time to make a stand."

He jumped up to its top. Blays followed, Cee right beside him. Across the field, the troops were a couple hundred feet away and closing fast. Bolts sailed through the rain.

Dante moved behind a free-standing wall. "Cee, pick off as many of them as you can. Blays, deal with anyone who gets up. I'll make sure few of them do."

With a rumbling slurp, the mud around the flat began to sink, forming a moat. Blays got behind a wall and drew his swords. He wasn't sure about the exact nature of the plan. It wasn't like they could hold off the entire force indefinitely. A better plan might be to flee into the woods, lose the Minister's pursuit, and circle around to rendezvous with their soldiers somewhere to the west. Then again, with potential lookouts in every loren from here to the Woduns, that would be more than a little difficult.

Regardless of their options, this was where they were, fortified in an elevated position with plenty of cover. More importantly, Dante had chosen it. And Dante was not in the business of being outsmarted.

Cee's bow twanged, firing through a crack in the wood wall. Enemy bolts answered, drumming into their cover. Through another crack, Blays watched the soldiers dash forward. One fell, struck by an arrow, but they were urged on by their captains. Once they came within a hundred feet, some took cover behind branches to snipe at the platform. Most continued straight forward.

Cee stopped firing, sighting down the shaft of an arrow. Dante was holding back, too. Blays joined them by default, but reached for the nether, trying to figure out how many figurative arrows he had left in his quiver. To his surprise, the shadows responded as if he hadn't touched them all day.

When the first of the enemy got within twenty feet, Cee fired, reloaded, and fired again. Two men were down before the others neared the flat and were stopped by the moat, crying out in dismay. Cee felled a third soldier. A couple tried to leap across, but fell to the bottom with a thick splash of mud and rain. From so close, Cee could hardly miss. One man after another was knocked into the mud, but there were far more troops in the field than arrows in her quiver.

The men turned and ran for cover. Blays knew better than to celebrate. The crossbows rattled Cee's wall with a volley. Blays felt the incoming nether an instant before it burst in behind the bolts, exploding the wooden wall. Cee cried out, shielding herself from the hail of splinters. She threw herself flat and scurried behind the wall protecting Dante, bolts shredding the air above her. Dante fired back, nether streaking from his fingers. Men screamed in the field.

Blays risked a look out. Forty feet away, a crew of soldiers heaved up the planks dropped by the men Dante had just killed. They ran toward the moat. Dante hurled more dark lances at them, but the energy burst into tatters, disrupted by someone hidden in the ruins.

The Minister's troops hurled boards across the gap. Dante splayed his hand. Nothing happened. He swore and drew his sword. Cee dropped one of the enemy troops, then ran through the open space to join Dante. Soldiers ran across the planks and charged their position. Cee cast aside her bow and drew a short sword and a knife.

Blays stepped into the nether. Invisible, he ran sidelong into the opposition, taking one through the neck and another through the ribs. The blades didn't sink in as easily as they should have—it was like hacking into thick gelatin, or semi-frozen meat—but the men shrieked in shock and pain. Blays struck again and again, felling them. The others raised their swords, turning in fearful circles. Blays wheeled his sword down on the head of a third, aiming for maximum demoralization. The man slumped to his knees and fell on his face. Six of the men broke, running back across the boards.

"Engage them!" the Minister shouted from the darkness.

Blays dismantled a fourth with stabs through the ribs. That sparked the others to vacate this place of mysterious death. They burst forward, swarming around the wall hiding Dante and Cee. Crossbow bolts tore past Blays, killing two of those who had chosen to retreat. A stray bolt hit him in the leg. He faltered, falling out of the nether.

He threw himself back into cover. Swords flashed behind the wall. Men made unpleasant dying sounds.

"Arawn on a platter, that thing is sharp," Cee said. "It went straight through their swords!"

"It had better," Dante answered. "It's made from a god's bones."

Blays inspected his leg. The bolt had hardly penetrated his calf. He removed it and hastily bandaged the wound. The storm of bolts tapered off, leaving them in a lull of rain and mist. Shouts erupted to the south. Blays peeked through a gap. Most of the men in the field had turned to face the other way. Impossibly tall figures ran from one patch of cover to the next, closing on the Spirish forces. And then the clash of swords drowned out the rain.

Dante emerged from the cover of the wall. "Well, we managed to hang on long enough. Good work. Ready to run?"

Blays leaned against the boards in front of him. "Engage as we go? Or is this one of them all-out retreats?"

"Our duty now is to get everyone home safe." Dante strode forward. "That means we—"

He threw up his hands. Splinters burst from the wall. Shadows erupted around him, knocking him down. He forced himself back to his feet, but his face was as white as the moon. "Run. Run as fast as you can."

Before Blays could reply, Dante took off along the flat, running headlong between the ruins of the buildings. Nether streaked toward him and he flung out his hand, disrupting it into nothing. He reached the end of the fragment of flat and leapt across, arms windmilling. He landed on the chunk beyond, leaning forward so far it seemed impossible he didn't fall.

Down in the field, a lone man ran toward him, hunched over, long limbs swinging. Cee fired. Her first shot was behind him. Her second shot was ahead. Her third shot was true, but the Minister held up his palm and the arrow snapped as if it had hit a wall. He threw a hive of shadows at Dante. Dante continued to run sidelong, batting them away with furious gestures.

"Go, you idiots!" he bellowed.

Cee stood, but only to draw a better bead on the Minister. A bolt hissed past her. She turned, sighted in on the crossbowman, and returned fire. Blays glanced at the field. Torchlight gleamed on swords. Arrows and bolts streamed back and forth. A half-crumbled wall shielding a squad of Spirish troops exploded under a hammer of nether. A team of norren warriors charged the exposed men, heedless of the broken wood hailing down around them. Much too early to predict an outcome, and reinforcements could arrive to bolster the Minister's numbers at any moment, but it appeared Dante's plan had worked.

Blays dove into the shadows. On the neighboring platform, Dante and the Minister were obscured by whirling streams of stars. They lashed at each other like two gods, nether sizzling and bursting like water poured on a raging stove. From the vantage of the netherworld, the flat was awash in blinding silver light, flash after flash strobing across the night. As Blays ran toward them, Dante fell back, his straining face skeletal and ghastly in the glare.

"Where is my star?" the Minister said.

Dante sent a spike of nether at his eye, but the man flicked it aside. Dante grinned, teeth flashing. "It's gone. Just like your insane dream of vengeance."

Light burst so brightly Blays threw a hand over his face. Unable to see, he tripped on a pile of rubble but landed with little pain, still in that place where an object's physical nature reflected only dimly through the nether. Fifty feet away, Dante lay on his side, kicking away. The Minister stood over him with shadows in hand.

"I wouldn't say it's gone. It's just going to take longer. I'll start with you." The darkness swelled in the Minister's hands. Blays got up and ran. The Minister pointed a finger at Dante's forehead. "And everyone you brought with you. Then I'll find out how you got here and use that path to march my armies on Narashtovik. You think you've saved your people from my justice? Fuck you. You've saved nothing."

Nether gushed from his finger. Dante cried out. Nether swooped wildly, like bees afire, and then there was another flash, the largest yet. Dante lay unmoving on the flat. The Minister reached for a knife.

Blays was in mid-air, leaping off a downed wall. The instant before he landed, he exited the nether into the physical world, where flesh was flesh and steel was steel, and buried both swords to the hilt in the Minister's back.

41

Bouncing. That's what he was doing: bouncing, repeatedly, on something curved but also kind of sharp. His head was full of pain and a lot of fog. Wet stuff was falling on him. The stuff was rain. Legs moved beneath him, splashing the mud, but they didn't seem to be his. He knew the boots, though. They belonged to Blays.

Swords rang in the night, along with the screams and shouts that typically accompanied such things. The commotion was a ways to his right, however, so it seemed safe to continue bouncing while someone else did all the hard work. In the corner of his vision, he saw another set of feet splashing beside Blays. Cee ran with them, bow in hand. She looked all right. That was good. She had been very helpful in the last few months. Hard to find people like that.

"Say 'The Minister is dead,'" Blays said to her. "In whatever gobbledegook they speak here."

"The Minister's dead!" Cee cried in Weslean. "But all is not lost! Withdraw to the trunk and take shelter in the rounds!"

Blays chuckled. "That sounded like improvisation. Keep it up."

As they ran, she repeated herself twice more. Dante swung up his head. It was too dark and cluttered with debris to get a good picture, but the section of his brain versed in martial matters observed that two teams of norren were advancing through enemy opposition while staying largely shielded from the Spirish crossbowmen, most of whom were pinned by a mixed squad of Narashtovik and norren archers. Black missiles zipped back and forth across a no man's land of empty space between makeshift fortifications of broken flats. For some reason, Blays appeared to be headed in that direction.

Dante cleared the gunk from his throat. "Why are you running toward the worst of the murder?"

Blays stiffened, altering the tempo of the bouncing. "Because I'm not a fan of you bleeding to death on my shoulder. How do you feel?"

"Bounced."

"Not deathy?"

"I blocked most of his strike. Wouldn't have been able to block another. Is he really dead?"

"Pretty sure."

"How sure?" Dante said. "Last time he walked away from having a six-hundred-foot tree chopped out from under him."

"Fortunately, when I was in the palace, I got some practice stabbing him in the heart. This time, I was much better at it. And did it ten times instead of once. Then cut off his head."

"I always thought the secret of your success was your thoroughness."

Blays' head jerked around. He veered toward a cluster of branches. There, Mourn and a dozen norren had gathered to prepare for their next push.

Blays set Dante on his feet and walked up to Mourn, breathing hard. "Time to do some fleeing."

Mourn looked between the humans. "Have we done all that we came to do?"

"And then some."

The norren drew a horn dangling from his neck and lifted it to the rain. The note was long and shrill. It was repeated by the horn of Narrinor, Dante's captain in the field. Dante leaned against an upturned floor as he waited for the troops to withdraw. The retreat was swift, and given the conditions of the field, extremely orderly: either the Minister's men had already begun to pull back, or the loss of their commander had set them adrift.