The Black Star (Book 3) (68 page)

Perhaps, in the end, neither one had known the other as well as they'd thought. Dante had always hidden certain dreams, like his ambition to follow in Cally's footsteps and extend his life beyond its natural span. Likewise his ascension to High Priest of the Council (which had come much sooner than he'd expected). Still, his dishonesty hadn't come in the form of a blatant campaign of lies. He merely hadn't bothered to mention certain things. If Blays had ever asked, Dante thought he would have told him the truth.

But it ran deeper than that. Deeper even than the death of Lira, the event that had prompted Blays to run away while Dante lay unconscious in recovery. The problem was simple. Blays thought the world was better than it was. That you could free the norren, or lead a city like Narashtovik, without violence or strife. The war itself had proven that false. You could be a devout pacifist, but when outside forces came to take what was yours—your land, your freedom, your life—you had one choice: bow down, or stand and draw your sword.

Dante squeezed his eyes shut. The past and present were too sprawling and confused for him to look at all at once, let alone to make sense of. The only thing that did make sense was sleep. And food. They passed around flatbread and the last of the lorbells. With few words, they slept.

The storm quit a couple hours before sunrise. Its silence woke Dante and he moved to the little porthole, but it was too dark to see much. He managed to sleep a little longer, eventually woken by shuffling noises near the small hole in the wall. It was Blays, and he appeared to be attempting to pee through it. Dante rolled his eyes and swept open the wall.

Outside, there was no sign of human tracks. Just two lines of deep, round impressions, with a thin, shallow line running parallel between them.

Ast glanced through the valley. "Kapper."

"A whatter?" Blays said.

"Giant monster," Dante said.

"Is that what those things are called?"

"Are you coming with us?"

Blays folded his arms. "Narashtovik's not my home anymore. And I'm not sure how much good I'd be in a war." He kicked around some snow. "But I guess I bear some responsibility to help undo this."

"
Some?
You delivered Cellen straight into the Minister's hands!"

"You weren't expecting him to show up, either. He would have stolen it from you instead."

"There's no way to know that." Dante went to the ladder to get the rest of their gear from the cave. "All I know is he took it from
you
."

While they readied, Ast studied the maps; he'd picked out a path back to Soll the night before, but an extra foot of snow had fallen overnight and the clouds looked like they were ready for more. Grounds that would have been traversable yesterday might no longer be feasible.

"I want to try this ridge," he said to Dante, tapping the map. "It's going to be hard. We might wind up wasting time and have to turn around. But if we get over it, the glacial valley on the other side will get us out of here before things can get much worse."

Dante considered the squiggles representing the colossal peaks. "What are the risks?"

"Same as with any bad climb. But if we take our original route, I'm afraid we'll be snowed in."

"Minn can move the earth, too. We'll try the ridge."

Ast took the lead, Dante behind him, the others strung out in a line. They headed up a long incline toward a tumble of short cliffs topped by two great peaks. The ridge Ast meant to summit was strung between them. To both sides of their path, the ground fell away in deep ravines.

The way forward snaked between any number of apparently impassable peaks. But if they could get across to the glacier, Ast believed that would provide them with a relatively easy walk across ten miles of flattish ice. After, they'd still have a long way to go, but they'd wind up bypassing the worst of what the mountains had left to offer.

The ridge was only some three horizontal miles away. But Dante had spent enough time at elevation to know that didn't matter. What mattered was the
vertical
distance—and the willingness of the rocks to let you climb them.

They reached the cliffs and, after hiking up to two dead ends and backtracking, worked their way up to the plateau above. By that time, it was after ten in the morning. They paused for lunch and to eyeball the path ahead. The clouds were darkening, but so far the snow was falling in such small flakes they could only be seen when they gleamed in the sun.

The next leg was up a stretch of blue-white ice too slick and steep for more than a rough layer of snow to stick to it. Not wanting to deplete their nethermancers, they hacked their way up with axes; at the roughest spots, they flipped the axes around and hammered their few spikes into the ice. It was rough going, especially with their packs and cloaks, and it took a couple hours to scale three hundred feet.

Rock walls hung above them. These proved much easier to tackle than the ice: Dante shepherded the others to one side, then drew a staircase straight to the top. At the next cliff, Minn did the same. The two peaks soared to either side, hemming them in. They walked and sometimes crawled across a field of ice, then reached a seemingly impassable fifty-foot rock wall that Dante surmounted in a matter of seconds with another staircase.

"It would be unfair to claim any mountaineering records for this," Blays said.

Dante stood back to examine his work. "You can take the wall if you prefer."

Up top, they found themselves faced with a rough span of cracked ice cemented between projections of bare rock. They threaded through the cracks but were stopped two thirds of the way across by a crevasse that spanned the entire ridge. After walking parallel to it, they found a spot where the gap was less than three feet wide.

"What do you think?" Blays tucked his gloved hands into his armpits. "Got a spare bridge in your pocket?"

Dante glanced at one of the rocky upthrusts. "Could melt a door through that instead."

Cee grimaced, huffing in the thin air. "Forget how to jump?"

Before he could answer, she tensed her legs and sprung. She landed lightly on the other side, swooping to one knee to arrest any possible slide. Somburr followed. Blays raised a brow at Minn. She snorted and took a long, hopping stride across. Blays followed. Dante readied himself and leapt.

His lead foot slipped. He fell forward, the chasm yawning beneath him. Blays whirled, snagged his cloak, and fell backward, dragging Dante with him as he toppled to the ice.

Blays pushed him off. "Damn instincts."

They reached the edge of the icy saddle between the two peaks and looked down on a frozen river flowing all the way into the haze of fog and snow miles to the west. Climbing down to this was neither hard nor easy. Up close, the glacier wasn't nearly as smooth as it looked, split with rifts and ribbed with razor-sharp lines of ice. Except for the occasional hole, however, none of this proved to be a real impediment to walking, and they made four good miles before the sun got low enough to force them to stop and find a cliff. There, Dante hollowed out a cave for the night.

"This
is
like cheating," Ast said, voice bouncing from the close walls. "I never could have made it up those cliffs. Not without two hundred pounds of rope and another three hundred pounds of spikes."

Blays chuckled. "That's traveling with Arawn's chosen for you. It's like boxing against a man who doesn't know he's boxing. Because he's asleep."

"Well, remind me never to leave home without a sorcerer again."

"A question," Minn said to Dante. "Where did you learn to move the earth?"

"I figured out your people had built Pocket Cove," Dante said. "From there, it was just a matter of experimenting with the nether until I learned its relationship to the dirt."

"Do many at Narashtovik know how to do it?"

"I'm the only one. Would my knowledge of their skill upset the People of the Pocket?"

"It upsets them when people know they
exist
," Minn laughed.

As the sun disappeared, the snow returned, piling down from the sky. The constant wind scoured it from the glaciers, however, and when they resumed the trek in the morning, the thin crust provided little resistance. A long day's travel got them all the way to the end of the glacier. It spilled down a cliff in a frozen waterfall, but Dante and Minn were able to shape stairs down one of its less treacherous declines. A bone-chilling wind blew off the glacier, but that only highlighted the fact it was several degrees warmer in the snowfield they'd descended to.

Two more days got them out of the worst of the mountains. It was still cold beyond belief, but once they were into the pine forests, the going got much easier. Their load had lightened, too: they'd eaten most of their food.

All the while, Dante had been putting off informing Nak about recent events in the Woduns. This delay wasn't something he could explain. He knew he had to warn them, to give them as much time as possible to prepare. Yet he couldn't bring himself to open the loon. Perhaps doing so would cement the reality of the events. Or maybe he just didn't want to confront his own failure.

Giving mental voice to
that
thought made his spine go straight at last. He owed Narashtovik better. It didn't matter that
he
thought it would make no difference whether he told Olivander now or waited until he was there in person. Olivander would want to know as soon as possible.

That evening, as they encamped in the woods, the smell of pines and snow thick in the air, Dante moved away from the group and climbed up on a boulder where he had a good eye on the forest. He opened a line to Nak.

"We lost it," Dante said. "I had it in my hands, then the Minister took it away."

Nak gasped, choked on his own saliva, and coughed, heaving. In time, he composed himself. "How did
that
happen?"

"Does it matter?"

"No, I suppose not." Silence. "What should we do?"

Dante shook his head at nothing. "Let Olivander know. We'll be back in a week. Make sure the entire Council is present."

"We recalled them weeks ago, just in case. Funny thing, though. All this time, I assumed it would never come to anything. That you'd take of it. Like you always do." Nak drew in his breath sharply. "I'm sorry. I know you did all you could."

"And failed nonetheless," Dante laughed. "Which raises the question: what good is it to be noble and dutiful without the competence to back it up?"

He shut down the connection. Someone or something was crunching toward him through the snow. He called forth the nether.

Blays walked up beneath him. "Who was that?"

"Nak. He's in charge of the loons now. I got him promoted to the Council."

"I bet that's further than he ever thought he'd make it," Blays laughed. "Good choice."

Dante breathed into his hands. "He was a more obvious pick than you'd think. Narashtovik has lost a lot of talent since we showed up."

"Citizens, too. Think it's been worth it? What if we'd just stayed in Mallon?"

"Samarand would have invaded it, killing thousands. The norren would still be the tributes and slaves of the Gaskan Empire. And while Samarand focused on Mallon—where we, being homeless trash, would likely be conscripted and killed—the Minister would find Cellen and drive a knife into Narashtovik's turned back."

"Yeah, maybe so." Blays squinted, smiling without humor. "Even so, you have to wonder if we'd have been better off being farmers."

He wandered away. It was a fair question. Everything Dante had done had felt right, or at least the best choice in a multitude of bad options, but at that moment, with Cellen in the hands of the Minister, it felt as if all of it had added up to nothing. He realized he'd forgotten to tell Nak about Lew. How old had Lew been? Twenty? No more than 25. Not that much younger than Dante, in any event, and yet he was gone, returned to the netherworld that awaited them all. Perhaps Dante's rule was over before it began, and the Minister would bring Narashtovik to the ruin that centuries of regional warfare had never quite managed to complete. The only thing Dante was sure of was that the killing wasn't done.

And that he could kill the Minister before it was done.

The fastest path to Narashtovik carried them many miles north of Soll. Dante knew the people had to be warned, but there was no time for that. They found a village in the foothills and, after a brief argument that Dante concluded with a display of nether as proof of his authority in the Citadel, requisitioned six horses.

Two days later, they were in Narashtovik. Snow rested on the peaked roofs, churned grimy in the streets, but after the mountains, it was no more imposing than a spell of frost.

As soon as they entered the square in front of the Cathedral of Ivars, the Citadel gates cranked open; somehow, word had raced through the city faster than their mounts. Gant, as always, was waiting in the courtyard. For once, he looked surprised.

"Master Buckler," he said. "Should I prepare your former room? It has been left untouched."

"That's a little odd," Blays said. "Whatever's easiest. I won't be here long."

A phalanx of soldiers moved in to take their horses—Dante let them know the animals were to be returned to the village he'd appropriated them from as soon as possible—and to attend to the needs of the travelers, who were hungry and extremely dirty. Inside the Citadel, servants strode up and down the halls, delivering news of their arrival. Dante and Somburr were separated from the others. As Dante was fed and cleaned up, he was made aware the Council would like to meet at his soonest convenience.

He didn't delay. He let his servant know to summon the others to the chamber. He dressed in the black and silver of his station, fixing his cloak with the sapphire brooch of Barden. Finally alone, he sat down for a full minute, letting his mind grow still. Once he was ready, he walked into the hall.

The double doors of the Council chambers stood open. The other ten chatted around the round table. In previous years, they had almost exclusively been old men. Some such as Tarkon and Joseff remained, but the last decade had seen so much death and upheaval that their human male seniority had become the exception. Olivander, Somburr, Ulev, and Nak were all middle-aged. Hart was plenty old, but he was a norren, his white hair and beard swirled about his head like clouds. Between that and his thick stature, he looked like a statue of Taim come to life.