The Black Star (Book 3) (20 page)

She saluted mockingly and exited through the front gate. Dante ran upstairs to his room and opened
The Cycle of Arawn
across his desk. He had whole passages of it memorized and found the mention of Cellen without the need to check the monks' indexes. But that mention was no more than a blink: "And Cellen slipped through the skies, a dark pearl in a black sea, while bright stars flashed on all sides, as common as the sand."

That was it. There was little to be gleaned from the context, either, a story of sorcerous warfare in an eastern kingdom that had probably never actually existed. Dante read the passage three times, but found no hidden meaning.

Not that he'd expected it to be that easy.

Carrying the
Cycle
, he went into the hallway, walked past the tapestries depicting the White Tree, and knocked on Tarkon's door. The old man met him with a smile and led the way to the balcony, where he'd been drinking tea and watching the city go about its business.

"What do you know about Cellen?" Dante said.

"Cellen?" His brows banged together. "About as much as I know about the magical alchemical process that transmutes food into dung."

The man had to be ninety or better, but his wits seemed ageless. Dante smiled. "Yet you recognize it."

"Samarand talked about it from time to time. I never paid it much mind. You know how she was about her prophecies."

Dante nodded vaguely. He'd only known the former leader of the Council for a few months, and at the time, he'd been less concerned with getting to know her than he'd been with exterminating her. She had died by Cally's hand during a highly questionable attempt to summon Arawn himself to lead her followers to victory in Mallon. Her willingness to believe his avatar would appear to her cast shade on
anything
she might have believed, yet the woman had been a brilliant nethermancer and a powerful leader. Anyway, considering Dante was currently chasing a norren myth, it was hard to be too harsh in his judgment.

"I never got to know her that well. What did she have to say about Cellen?"

Tarkon sipped his tea and scratched the back of his ear. "Gibberish, mostly. I got the sense she thought it was a tangible object, something you could take hold of. What stuck with me most is she was most keen on making sure nobody
else
got it."

"Why was that?" Dante said.

"Search me. These days, my memory's a sieve. She never trusted me enough to fill me in on her schemes."

Dante stood. "If you think of anything else, please let me know."

"There might be more about it in her rooms," Tarkon said.

"Cally's chambers? There's nothing left of hers in there."

"No, her
rooms
. Downstairs."

The existence of these was news to Dante. As soon as Gant led him downstairs, past the main basement and the dungeons and into a cramped staircase Dante hadn't even known existed, it was clear that Samarand's trove had been well known to Cally. The old man's notes were all over her collection of scrolls, folios, and notebooks, which filled multiple shelves and several desks.

There were artifacts, too. Bottles of colorful oils. A bucket of stones and gems. Two complete possum skeletons held together with wires and glue. Driftwood planks carved with foreign runes. Silver goblets and flatware. All of it was cobwebbed, dusty, yellow-gray with age; some of the items were so time-weathered Dante wasn't certain exactly what they were.

One item stood out like a lantern on a midnight hill. An object Dante had thought long lost: a four-foot rib bone shaken from Barden itself during the battle that had taken Samarand's life. Its edge held a terrible, undulling sharpness. Cally had done some work on it, early on, then declared it required much more study. Supposedly, he'd tasked a team of monks with it, but somehow the bone had wound up down here. Dante couldn't guess why. It would have been just a little useful during the war. Perhaps the old man's mind hadn't been as coherent as Dante thought. Perhaps it had been brought here
during
the war, hidden out of the way where Moddegan's people would be unlikely to find it. Or maybe Cally had simply stored it here with the intention of returning to it later, but the constant business of Narashtovik had left it forgotten.

Much of Samarand's collection was quite interesting, but it wasn't what Dante was after. He ordered the servants to help him carry Samarand's prodigious volumes up to Cally's room, then dove into the work.

For days, he pored over her writing, skimming where he could, but reading closely enough to catch any glancing mention of Cellen. Meanwhile, Lew stacked up one old book after another, bookmarking relevant pages with knotted strings. Cee came and went at odd hours. When Dante's eyes grew strained, he sat back and closed them while she related stories and legends she'd culled from the streets of Narashtovik.

The problem, however, was that none of these tales were about the Black Star itself. Instead, they used it as a storytelling device, a metaphor for things that were cryptic or obscure. "And so young Hollander became as lost as Cellen," for instance, or "Gena's dreams remained as out of reach as the Black Star."

The same pattern emerged in Lew's books. There had been a flash of mentions of Cellen four hundred years ago during the High Dwardic Period, but only as that same metaphorical device. Dante could only conclude an influential thinker had dredged up the term from the mists of the past, and other authors had quickly aped it as a way to display their erudition. Not terribly useful.

And then he found Samarand's notes on Cellen. His hopes soared. Hours later, they crashed like Vosk and his leather wings. While she had been aware of the phenomenon, teasing it out of a skein of classical references, her knowledge hadn't run any deeper than his own.

In one sense, this was impressive, because she had been working with nothing but rumors and scattered mentions of a thing that, as far as Dante could tell, no one else had even known existed. In terms of useful information, however, there was just a single segment he might be able to use: "Ten years? Total power. Wrest Mallon back to us. But
to find it
, to brush back the curtain so it will shine like a flame."

And that was it. The rest was largely the same passages copied from the books Lew was bringing him. Cee's efforts fared no better. During the second week, the stories grew more and more outlandish: "Arawn pulled the serpent Gormor's heart from its chest, and it was so dark that all who saw it went blind. He had no choice but to stick it behind the night sky where no one would see it." Dante began to suspect people were making them up on the spot to earn another payment.

He burned through the materials in the Citadel and enlisted a slew of monks to help comb the public and private libraries distributed across Narashtovik. Even with so many extra eyes in the search, they turned up nothing of note. Strange, considering how strongly Samarand had felt about it, and how obviously the lights were flaring across the mountains. But maybe Cellen hadn't appeared in a long, long time. Or maybe it was nothing more than pretty lights and didn't deserve a detailed historical account at all.

But he thought there was more to it.

After three weeks of hunting, he strolled through Olivander's open door. "Permission to sail away to foreign lands, sir."

Olivander looked up from the paperwork he never seemed able to leave behind (the one trapping of the office Dante most dreaded absorbing). "To any land in specific? Or has all that reading finally driven you insane?"

"Considering I've exhausted what Narashtovik knows, it would make sense to try anywhere else. But I have a more specific idea. The one place that knows everything: the Houkkalli Islands."

10

Blays jogged up the staircase through the cliff. Up top, the wind tousled the woman's hair. She stood in place, gazing at him as he wiped sweat from his temples and glanced across the plain far below for sight of Dante.

"Well?" he said. "Aren't we going to head down to the caves? Meet the other ladies?"

"I brought you up here because I was tired of shouting," she said. "Now talk."

"About what? The weather? This fog feels strange, but I assume you're used to it."

"This is why we don't let outsiders in the Pocket." She turned to go.

"Hang on a second." He grabbed for her sleeve.

As soon as he made contact, an icy jolt shot up his arm, paralyzing his fingers into claws. He yelped and jerked back, slipping on the damp rocks. He tipped toward the edge of the cliff. Before he could fall, he sat down hard and remained there, massaging his right hand.

"That was rude," he said.

She regarded him impassively. From most angles, she looked as young as he did, but in other moments she looked no less than fifty. "More so than grabbing the clothes of a stranger? If you have more to say, quit wasting my time and spill it."

"I want—I
need
—to learn how to disappear. I know you've got more protecting you than these cliffs. What happens when someone approaches by sea? Or one of you decides to take a vacation from the sanctum?"

"We don't leave the Pocket. When they come by sea, we seal the caves."

Blays sighed and closed his eyes. "Look, the fact you have to lie about it only proves you
do
have contact with outsiders. Last time I was here, all I saw was women. Unless you've got a very lucky man tucked away in a cave, new recruits have to come from
somewhere
."

A streamer of mist shrouded the sun. In the dimmed light, she looked much older. "The man down there. Is he here to kill you?"

"I don't know what he intends. To blather at me, probably. But he's crazy enough to try to haul me away with him." He rubbed his hands down his face. "Does it matter? I'm sick of being hunted. I want to learn what you do. To be free."

"How do I know you're not a spy?"

"For who, the guy I'm trying to warn you about? Let him up here and see for yourself."

She smiled slightly. "Come with me to the shore. We'll see what the others have to say."

She turned and squelched through the muck. Ahead, gnarled black pillars rose from the plateau like the arms of plague victims. Cold fog billowed through the rocks, sliming them with condensation. It smelled like salt and the flatulent scent of peat. Insects squirmed in the lichen.

The mist enveloped them, reducing visibility to fifty yards. The woman picked a careful trail through the columns and stagnant pools. Adrift in the fog, the walk felt eternal, yet it couldn't have lasted more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Eventually, the plateau fell away, exposing a narrow strand of beach and an endless gray sea. She walked to a staircase built into the cliff and descended to the sand.

"You will wait here," she said.

"Righto."

She moved to the cliff face, brushed aside a leather curtain, and entered a dark cave. Blays stood there a few minutes, rubbing his hands together to warm them back up after the chill of the plateau. The afternoon was growing late and a bitter wind swept off the sea, bringing the smell of kelp and hollowed crabs. A group of women emerged from the cave. He stood up and smiled, but they ignored him and headed up the staircase to the bluff. It only took him a second: they were off to deal with Dante.

He sat back down, got cold, stood up and wandered the strand, careful not to stray too far from the cave. Mist swirled overhead, but the beach itself was clear; the steam appeared to be materializing as currents of air moved from the sea to the land. Miles to the north and south, the cliffs curved inward, encircling Pocket Cove in a solid wall of stone. It was the world's finest fortress. And if Dante could be believed, the People of the Pocket had built it themselves to keep them safe from the conquering Gaskan hordes.

Blays could almost believe it.

The sun glowed from the waves so fiercely he thought it might melt the sand into glass and him into jam. It hung above the water, a perfect red ball he could stare right at without blinking. It touched the horizon and slid away with the slow, steady momentum of a beast with no fear of predators. As soon as its red rim winked behind the blue ledge, the woman appeared from the cave.

"You can stay," she said. "For now."

Blays grinned. "I was afraid men weren't allowed."

"Rarely. They have a habit of trying to take this place for themselves."

"Well, I promise you'll find me as pliable as that pile of goo next to the seaweed over there."

"I'll take that in the spirit it's intended."

"So," he said. "Got a name?"

"Minn." She walked toward him. Twilight softened her features, made her look younger again. "And it's the last name you get to learn until we know
you
."

"Fair enough. Now can we go inside? I'm freezing."

Minn swiveled her head toward the leather curtain shielding the cave mouth. "That's where the People of the Pocket live. Are you a Person of the Pocket?"

"Is this a trick question?"

"You'll live here." She gestured to the beach. "As we did when we first came here."

Blays frowned. "If that's how it's going to be, it would have been nice to have some warning. I could have built a hut while you were in there talking."

"We weren't expecting visitors, were we?"

"Your house, your rules. But if you come out here tomorrow and I'm a solid block of ice, at least have the courtesy to drop me in something alcoholic."

Minn laughed twice, a quick
ha-ha
that sounded rusty from disuse. "I'll get you started."

She turned back toward the blank cliffs. On reaching their base, she drew a razor from her belt and touched it to the back of the first knuckle of the third finger of her left hand. Shadows bloomed in her hands. As Blays watched, a wall of rock six feet long and three feet high emerged from the sand.

"You can handle the rest," she said.

"How about dinner?" he said. "Or am I catching my own fish, too?"

"Can you?"

"With this?" He smacked the sword on his hip. "On a calm lake on a clear day. In churned-up waves approaching dark, I think I'll wind up eating sand cakes."