The Black Star (Book 3) (25 page)

Over the years, he had adapted the technique into more than a method to coordinate his musculature. It was also a way to clear his head, to get out of himself. Using it, he could learn a new skill in minutes. Invent new fighting techniques from whole cloth. By envisioning the combination of movements that would lead to an effective maneuver, he could break it down muscle by muscle, then combine those movements into a single gesture. A few days of practice, and the new technique no longer took conscious thought.

As he sat on the rock, he put himself through his paces, starting with his head and working his way down. He tensed his ears, scalp, and brow. His neck, then his shoulders. His pectorals and lats, abdominals and hips, and so on. From the corner of his vision, Minn was giving him a funny look, but he was already feeling better, more at one with the various components that comprised the Blays he was. He let his breath flow in and out. He reached for the fish.

"Oh shit," he said. "It feels like being stabbed with cold iron!"

Minn jolted forward. "Are you okay? Did you sit on something?"

"I felt it. The nether! It's cold and it hurts, right?"

"Generally." She pushed out her lower lip. "But you can't have felt it already. You just started."

"Unless you gored me with a pigsticker while I wasn't looking, I think I've done it."

"How?" she said.

"I swooped in on it."

"You swooped in on it?"

"Like a bird of prey." He cut his hand through the air. "Like a blade closing on the bearer's enemy."

"Impossible," Minn said. "Then do it again."

"Whatever you say." He breathed, tensed, relaxed. Reached out. Felt the icy sting. Though he'd touched it with his mind, not his fingers, he couldn't stop from shaking out his hand.

She blinked. "How'd you do that?"

"Magic."

"Well, you've magically destroyed weeks of my plans."

"Does that upset you?"

She looked up from the fish. "I put a lot of thought into those lessons."

"Plans are like newborns." He straightened, retracting his focus from the nether. "Best not to get attached to them until they grow sturdy enough to be put to work."

She laughed, then stopped herself. "Perhaps you'd like to spend the rest of the day honing your new skill. I have to find a way to build new plans on the ruins of the old."

He thought he pretty much had it down, but it wouldn't hurt to be sure. As Minn retired to the caves, he worked his way around the pools, touching the nether within the snails, minnows, kelp, and a cruising octopus. He didn't see what the big deal was. The nether was there. He knew it was there. So why shouldn't he be able to touch it?

Hungry, and too lazy to go build a fire, he cut loose some mussels and ate them raw. He wouldn't go so far as to say he was getting a taste for raw mussels—he wasn't sure you
could
get a taste for nature's phlegm—but he no longer minded them. Funny how fast you got used to things.

In the morning, he and Minn reconvened at the tide pools. He stretched his elbow over his head and pulled it to the side, extending his shoulder. "Figured out what you're going to do with me next?"

"Tell you about the next Season."

"Just like that?"

She brushed a ragged bang from her eyes. "What were you expecting, a feast in your honor? Shall I fetch the stew?"

In truth, he had been expecting
something
to mark his accomplishment. The Progression of the Seasons was supposed to take about as long as the real ones, wasn't it? And he'd burned through Winter in ten minutes. Darned impressive, he thought.

He supposed that, in the scheme of things, it was nothing more than a baby step. He hadn't even begun to
use
the nether yet. This was just his ego standing up and taking its pants off. Ego could be a fine thing, of course. A strong one could help you accomplish goals even when those goals were plainly boneheaded. And aside from the practical advantages of ego, it was simply a fun thing to have.

But at the moment, ego wasn't helping. If anything, it was slowing him down. When it came time to learn, the role model was the sponge, and he had yet to meet a sponge that was full of itself. What with all the holes, they could never get enough.

"Yesterday's stew can wait." He blew into his hands. "I hope the real winter passes as quickly as the fake one."

"A change that sudden would drown us in storms," Minn said. She took a moment, letting her amusement fade and replacing it with a look of authority. "Spring. The season of melting and unlocking. First you
saw
the nether. Then you learned to reach it. Next, you learn to
melt
it."

"Makes sense. It felt as cold as snowman's piss."

"It's critical to keep in mind this isn't literal. Though similar in some ways, the nether isn't ice. It isn't water, either. Don't confuse a metaphor for what's actually in front of you."

"Don't worry, I'm used to dealing with people who are constitutionally incapable of talking in plain terms."

"Then get to work."

He ran through his breathing warmups. On top of a damp, slimy rock, a fiddler crab was jerking its big claw back and forth, announcing to all the other crabs that it was the most fiddlin' fiddler that ever fiddled. He saw the nether in it, touched it. It was as cold and sharp as before. He intensified his focus, imagining it as the heat of a climbing bonfire. The nether stayed cold. Immobile.

He was unworried. He hadn't expected Spring to zip by as briskly as Winter. The subtleties of Fall were still fresh in his mind. After a while, Minn returned to whatever other duties occupied her in the caves, but he stayed beside the captive saltwater, willing the nether to come forth.

A week later, he was still there. He had tried any number of mental tricks. Thinking of his attention as heat that would melt the dark ice. That it was a knife that would slice loose the fastened shadows. That it was a big old fist capable of yanking trees out by their roots. He had tried it on crabs, fish, birds, grass, slime, coral, a juvenile shark, a lost seal. And, as far as he could tell, he'd gotten exactly nowhere.

"Got any more roots?" he asked Minn at the end of Spring's first week. "Preferably something that will cause my brains to pour out my ears so I can pick them up and give them a shake?"

"Nat-root won't do you any good here," she said. She caught the look on his face. "But we can try it anyway."

"I mean, worst case, we have a good time, right?"

So they ate bowls of mashed-up root and Minn sat by the water while he tried to warm, force, and tickle the nether from its obstinate shell. He fell over more than once, but despite one incredibly vivid hallucination that he'd convinced the shadows to swim out from their hidey-holes and leap like a pod of dolphins, he had no luck.

Another week went by, never to return. The first snow hit, a squall of whirling flakes that barely had time to crust the sand before a warm wind blew in from the south. Blays watched it melt with calm fury. Stupid nature, always showing people up. When he calmed down a bit, he tried to take a lesson from that, to imagine where he might conjure up a southern wind of his own, but after a couple of flailing attempts, he threw the idea out like an empty mussel shell.

Thinking it would be the strongest and thus easiest to get a handle on, he cut himself to work with his own blood. But that got him nowhere. Except bandaged. Finally, so frustrated he could kill something, he climbed up the staircase to the misty plateau, where he could overlook the beach and have a laugh about flinging himself down upon it.

The climb felt good. The solid sheet of mist-borne ice on the rocks, however, felt like it might induce death. But there was something bracing about that, something that kicked him free of his snarled irritation and back into immediate survival, so he turned his back on the ocean and picked his way inland.

Below, the exuberant tide thundered to the shore. Ahead, he heard nothing. Not even the dripping of water. But then he heard voices: one male, and one female.

They appeared to be conversing, not shouting, so he left his sword sheathed (he'd only brought it because the plateau was known to harbor centipedes as long as your arm). He crept forward, keeping knobby pillars of rock between himself and the two people. Anyway, he didn't need to see the woman to recognize the voice as Minn's.

He came within proper earshot as their conversation reached the goodbye phase. Their parting words were lengthy, and as it became clear he was eavesdropping on close friends, Blays grew sheepish. He turned back to the staircase. By the time he reached the bottom, however, he felt less bad—Minn wasn't supposed to be up there in the first place. He sat in the sand to watch the stairs.

Minn walked out a couple minutes later. Her eyes alighted on Blays, widening.

"Went up for a walk?" he said.

"Just to clear my head," she said.

"Me too. Who were you talking to?"

She shrugged. "A friend. Who else?"

"This friend sounded decidedly male."

"Afraid I'm replacing you?"

"Are we allowed visitors, then? Or is that one of the countless things I still don't understand about Pocket Cove?"

Minn eyed him, head angling to the side. "Maybe it's time to fix that. I haven't been much help this Season. Then again, the first time is as much a lesson for the teacher as the student."

"I'm your first student?" Blays said. "I don't know whether to feel honored or horrified."

"Both, I'd think. Perhaps it's time to take you to
my
teacher."

"Now I'm definitely horrified."

Minn smiled. "At least your instincts are good."

She took him to the cave, then had him wait in his room while she went deeper. She returned and nodded. As they walked to the main tunnel and ventured toward what lay beyond, Blays found himself so thrilled to be seeing something new that he laughed out loud. Minn glanced at him but held her tongue.

Torchstones embedded in the walls threw just enough light to reveal the way. They passed a doorway every ten or twenty feet, each papery door supported on a frame of the bamboo-like reeds that grew on the beaches to the north. The hallways grew warmer, rich with the scent of incense and spices. Although Blays knew better than to say so, it was probably to cover up the smell of fish oil that hung in the air, too.

Once, they passed a young woman in a loose robe, a red scarf fluttering from her wrist. The woman gazed at Blays with mild curiosity and moved on. After a couple more turns, Minn opened one of the parchment doors. A brief foyer opened to a wide room. The walls and floors were so thick with blankets and rugs it took Blays a moment to spot the woman sitting in their midst.

"Oh," he said. "You again."

Minn's head cranked around. "You know each other?"

"We met a few years ago," Blays said. "Sort of. I think Dante was too busy blathering for me to get in a single word."

"I remember you," the woman said. Her long dark hair was streaked with gray. "But we don't get many visitors."

"Really? All it would take is a three-hundred-foot ladder."

"My name is Ro," she said. "Minn tells me you're stuck on Spring."

Blays looked up from a rug woven with a repeating geometric pattern he'd never seen before. "Is that unusual? I thought these things could take months to get right."

"Often, yes. Others find it goes much faster. But after unusually swift advancement, you seem to be..."

"Unable to find my ass with both hands." He winced. "Ma'am. If that's what you prefer to be called."

"Ro is fine."

"Maybe I passed my first two Seasons too easily, without gathering the tools to go further. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Or maybe I'm not cut out for this. Either way, I would appreciate any lessons you can manage to pound through my dense skull."

She nodded. "First, why don't you tell me what you've been doing."

"Well, whenever I try to get the nether to move, I—"

"When you try to do what?"

"You know," he said. "Make it melt. Make it let go of whatever it's stuck on so it will come over and say hello."

She turned on Minn, face heavy with reproach. "You couldn't have asked him this yourself?"

Minn held up her hands. "I never told him anything about trying to
move
it."

"Apparently you didn't do so well explaining the concept of
melt
, either."

"He's my first student."

"Don't Pocket yourself," Ro said, softening her voice. "I'm not berating. I'm explaining."

"It could be," Minn said, "that my explanation was lacking."

"Or maybe he really is that dense."

"Ro!"

"Oh, she's right," Blays said. "You shouldn't assume I've understood a single word you've ever said."

"You're trying to skip Spring and go straight to Summer," Minn said.

"Well, why didn't you say so?"

"You might think there is no difference between unlocking nether and getting it to move." Ro leaned forward, blankets rumpling. "But if you're thirsty and all you have is snow, you won't be able to drink until you've turned it into water."

Blays nodded slowly. "And drinking is a special skill of its own, too."

Ro smiled wryly. "Tell me about it."

"Oh, do you have a bottle of something?"

"Get back to work."

This was said friendly enough, but Minn took it as an omen to depart immediately. She thanked Ro and took Blays back through the maze of tunnels to the gusty beach. Sand blew over the dunes in streams.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Yeah, you really trampled the rabbit on that one."

"I should have paid better attention. I've been wasting your time."

He wiped his nose against the cold. "Then I guess we'd better get to it."

"You're dedicated, aren't you?"

"When I have to be."

He resumed his studies at the pools. Minn took a more active role, watching him closely. He'd never enjoyed instruction that was too hands-on, preferring to be given the occasional pointer or whack on the head and be otherwise left to himself. But this wasn't like learning to bake bread or sew a wound, straightforward and a mere matter of practice. This was
magic
.