The Black Star (Book 3) (80 page)

On the other side, structures lay in a dense rubble of wood—and stone. The palace was unrecognizable, a mound of devastation that looked as if an angry Gashen had descended from his throne of war to pound it to pieces with his sledge. The pressure in Dante's skull became painful. As he approached a jumbled wall, including a twenty-foot chunk of flat, he knew he'd found it. He closed the connection.

"He's here." His voice quavered. "There's a good chance Cellen is, too."

"Check the bodies," Somburr said. "Especially the Minister's, if you see him. They had a few minutes to find it before we brought down the tree."

The others moved out, but Dante stared at the rubble. He pulled on a loose board. It bent, then slid from his fingers and whapped back into place. He got out his sword. With four cuts, he knocked a door through the wood, the rectangle dangling from an upper corner. He pulled it toward him and trimmed the wet scrap of wood holding it up. It dropped to the mud.

The back of a head showed beneath a muddy cloak. Dante dropped to his knees. The body was more intact than it had a right to be, but even if Blays hadn't been dead when the loren fell—and Dante was sure he had been—he would be now.

Somburr freed the body's right hand from the muck and opened it. It was empty. The left arm was smashed and it was clear at a glance its hand held nothing. Dante felt himself collapsing, tumbling in on himself from all sides. He could no longer hold it in. He wailed, one long and pointless note that seemed to hold all his sorrow in its tune, but when that trailed off, the hurt was still there. He told himself that he had killed the Minister, but found that mattered for nothing.

Blays was dead. Blays was dead, and though that death had come in service of saving Narashtovik, Dante had been the instrument of his passage. As he'd been for so many others. Blays had been his only friend at a time when that friendship was the one thing standing between Dante and being stabbed in the streets of Bressel. Blays hadn't had to do that. He could have gone his own way. Instead, he'd gone with Dante, saving him. In the process, he'd doomed himself.

Somburr crouched beside Dante and hesitantly touched his shoulder. "It isn't here."

Dante shook his head, spilling tears. Rain drummed the ruins. Wood clacked, stirred by someone outside the makeshift tomb encasing Blays.

"This isn't helping us," Somburr said. "We have to find it before the Spirish soldiers find us here. Or this was all for nothing."

Dante knew this was true. But he couldn't bring himself to speak, let alone stand. He knelt there, rain soaking his knees and shins. After a moment, he heard Somburr leave.

His loon pulsed. Mechanically, he answered. Nak said, "Your troops inform me they're nearly on scene. And highly confused about the nature of that scene. Where would you have them meet you?"

"Doesn't matter," Dante said.

"Er, I assume it matters to them. Since they don't know where you are."

"It's over. Tell them to stay where they are."

"You found it?" Nak's voice rose. "Dante, what's going—?"

Dante shut down the loon. He moved into the nether, but as before, there was nothing to use it for. The flesh was inert. The nether in it was now tasked with consuming, not mending. He might force it back together, but that would be nothing more than ghoulish cosmetics.

But perhaps that was not true. Perhaps that was just what he had been taught. It didn't make any difference that people like Cally had never been able to bring back the dead. He wasn't Cally or any of the others. He sat back, calmed his mind, and touched the shadows.

"People of Corl!" A voice boomed through the night. Dante looked up in shock. The Minister's voice was ragged, husky, but as strong as ever. "After a thousand years, the agents of Narashtovik have come back to try to finish their genocide. They are among us! Find them! Find them and shout out so they may be purged."

Dante surged to his feet and reactivated his loon. "Nak, tell the troops to circle to the northeast of the downed tree. And to be
extremely
careful. The Minister's right on top of us. Got it?"

"Got it."

Dante cast about. He had to find Cellen before the Minister could clear the area. He didn't know how the man had survived—he must have evacuated across a connecting flat to another tree—but the world had once again turned on its head. All that mattered was Cellen.

He stumbled out of the tomb, hunched down, and scanned the broken, churned-up ground. A part of him was close to hysteria: to hope he'd stumble over a fist-sized black object in the middle of all this destruction? He felt through the nether, hunting for any sign of its heft there, but it hadn't stood out to him during the brief moment he'd held it in the Woduns and it didn't stand out to him now.

Every few seconds, someone shouted from the darkness. Most were asking for help, but some claimed to see foreigners. Enemies. A hint of black shined from the mud. Dante bent and pawed at it, slicing his finger on a broken mug. Idiotic; Cellen didn't gleam.

He moved on.
Pointless
, his mind screamed. He ought to sneak up on the Minister and murder him. Split the man in half. But that would only martyr him. Someone else would march his troops on Narashtovik instead.

A silhouette jogged at him through the rain. He swept out his sword. Cee splashed up in front of him. "Somburr told me you'd be here."

"And I'm searching for Cellen. The Minister is back."

"I heard." She held out her closed hand. "So I thought you might want this.

It dropped in his palm with the weight of a mountain. Black, lightless. His knees quivered. "How did you find it?"

"Later." Her lips pulled back in a grimace. She tossed her head, looking away. "Now take it and use it before I do."

He crushed her to her chest, then stepped back and held Cellen in his open hand. It felt different this time. Ready. He fell into it like a hole in the ground.

The rain hovered in the air. Cee was motionless, her hair unstirred by the wind, which had stopped as well. The flicker of a fire down the broken flat became an unwinking glare. All the world was frozen. Ended. Complete.

A million new worlds began in that world's place. Every dream, every wish, waited like a doorway. All he had to do was step through. The power to level Corl. To expand his reach into the nether tenfold, and walk the earth like a god. To live and go on living for century after century, young and unchanged while everything else withered, decayed, and became replaced by its offspring. Doors spread to all sides, promising health, prosperity, strength and wisdom beyond all measure. He felt as tall as a loren, as invincible as the Woduns. As unstoppable as a river and as mighty as Arawn. If he chose the right door, he could feel that way forever.

The doors converged, coming together like cards fanned on a table being swept back into a deck. In a blur of possibilities and promises, they folded into a single portal.

He stepped through.

40

Nothingness. No sensations, no feelings, no thoughts, no place.

Then somethingness, although there was still no sense of time, nor self. Like the memory of sleep. There was an openness, and emptiness, like falling, or like the apex of a leap into space, but there was no sense of danger to this feeling. It just was. With it came the feeling of a thing about to begin, like the eastern horizon on the moment before dawn.

And then stars everywhere, as far as the eye could see—not that there were any eyes to see with—a field of black and silver that scrolled on and on like the view from a rolling carriage. It was infinity, startling and eternal and so achingly beautiful you felt blessed to be allowed to see it.

He was himself again. He was six years old and he was proud of this because it had just happened. For his birthday, his mother had given him a sling. Then she'd told him to go catch something with it so they wouldn't be hungry. He'd said okay and ran into the forest behind the houses and that's where he was now, only he'd kind of forgotten about the rabbits and the squirrels and was hucking rocks at trunks and leaves instead, or just whirling the sling around his head to hear it whoosh. The forest was big and he'd seen a lot of it because he wasn't afraid but there was always more to see.

He ran past the tree with the bees, hopping on one leg so they wouldn't sting him, and then past the birches, where he didn't stop to peel the papery bark because he wanted to get some more stones and see if he could use the sling to skip them all the way across the stream, and he went to do that for a while, and it was fun. When it got less fun, he went down to where the stream got wide and ran across the beaver dam to the other side. Running felt good, so he kept going, all the way across the meadow with the stumps and into the piney canyons on the other side. They smelled good, like when you cut them with a knife, but he'd never gone all the way through them because there wasn't anything to see in them.

That's when he saw the rabbit in the mulch beneath the tree. He didn't really want to kill it and that was probably why he missed it with his first stone. The stone spat dirt everywhere and the rabbit bolted up the canyon, back legs flying like the fastest thing in the world. He didn't stop to find his stone, just chased the bunny. He ran after it to the next canyon and then stopped to look at him. Rabbits weren't too smart and he guessed that was why it was okay to shoot them. He whirled his sling, but missed again.

It ran more and he chased more. It went into some brush and he looked for it and then stomped around to try to scare it out. It was smarter that time, though, because it didn't get scared. Maybe when he'd gone around to the other side of the brush it had snuck out the way it came in. Whatever it had done, it had tricked him. It was no good dealing with a tricky rabbit. He walked away from the shrubs so it could fool someone else instead.

He was further into the canyons than he'd been before and he wanted to see what was beyond. He ran on some more, twirling his sling around. He got to the top of a ridge. After a little ways beyond it, the trees thinned. There was a meadow with a house and some fields behind it. A girl ran toward the house, blond hair flying behind her, and he thought she was having fun like he was, but she was screaming:
Daddy! Help me, Daddy!

He thought she was just a girl being scared of nothing, but a yellow dog bounded out of the tall grass, not friendly like dogs did, but in the way of a bigger animal that meant to eat a smaller one. The girl ran and ran but the dog got closer. He started running, too, whipping his arm around to build up speed in the sling. A dog was much bigger than a rabbit and he knew he could hit it, but he was too far away, the dog would get to her before he could get to it. She was going to get hurt.

Daddy!
she said, and her voice pierced everywhere.
It's chasing me!

The dog bounded at her heels. He slung the stone forward, thinking he might scare it, but it fell short in the grass. The dog nipped at her heels. She shrieked.

A man ran from the house. He had a stick in his hands and a mad look on his face. The dog swerved away but then remembered it was hungry and went back to nip at the girl. The man got to her and scooped her up in one hand like she was nothing. The dog stopped and backed up, watching him.
You get away!
the man said.
Get out now!
He swung the stick through the air.
I'll beat the mean out of you!

The dog turned and trotted toward the woods, looking back over its shoulder. The girl pressed her face into the man's neck, crying. He stroked her hair.
It's all right
, he said.
I'm here. You're safe. I'll always be here
.

And the man was so strong Blays knew it must be true.

He was lying on his back. He was no longer nothing, or everything among the stars, or a child coming to terms with the fact he had no father who would always be there to protect him; he was lying on his back, and he felt fine, though he had the recent memory that this hadn't recently been the case at all.

A face hung above him. It looked scared. Maybe that was because it was dark and the roof above their heads was broken and splintered and leaking like a sieve. The face was Dante's. Blays sat up, wincing as if he expected pain, but there wasn't any.

Dante lunged forward and hugged him as hard as he could.

"Get off me," Blays laughed. "You're all muddy."

Dante withdrew and wiped tears from his eyes, but all that did was smear more mud around. "You're back."

His voice was so small Blays had to laugh again. "What..?" He looked around the cramped room with the shoddy roof. "Actually, let's start with that: What?"

Dante's face went through several emotions at once. He shook his head. "The Minister's hunting us. I'll tell you on the way. Just don't—get hurt again."

Blays stood. One of his swords was on his belt. The other was sandwiched between what appeared to be a pile of lumber and a ton of mud. He yanked it free. "Wait, '
again
'? What happened last time? I feel fine."

Dante pulled him out of the tent-shaped room into a rainstorm. Oddly, instead of leaves and branches and whatnot, the cloudy sky was visible. To his right, a long, dark wall stretched in both directions. The usual bits of tree were everywhere, but the ground beneath him wasn't the hard, smooth surface of a flat. It was very definitely mud. Dirt. The stuff that sticks to the surface of the earth.

Cee was goggling at him, eyes like two full moons. "You..."

"Me," Blays said.

People were crying and moaning in multiple directions. Dante muttered into his loon. Blays had the feeling he ought to be more concerned by the rainy, shrieking, smashed-up chaos around him, but the truth was he felt great.

"The Minister's forces are on the other side of the trunk," Dante said. "Roughly ten o'clock. Ours are waiting outside the nearest loren at five o'clock. Somburr, Mourn, and Ast are already on their way to meet them."

He took off jogging away from the dark wall. He hopped over something. A body. Something clicked in Blays' mind. Somehow, the loren had toppled. He must have been in it. Gotten hurt in the fall. Dante had healed him. But how could the tree—?