The Black Star (Book 3) (73 page)

Had it been a mistake to leave? Fumbling Cellen straight into the Minister's hands certainly felt like a cock-up of epic proportions. The kind of blunder so bad that all you could do was laugh. Laugh, and start a mad dash across hundreds of miles to try to make amends.

The thing was, going to Wending had not been a mistake. They'd saved Minn's cousin. Mended family rifts. Foiled Tallivand's attempt to snatch the
Almanack
and bolster Moddegan's effort to capture the Black Star. All that could be seen as nothing less than a Good Move (capital G, capital M). In hindsight, it hadn't been necessary to continue to Setteven and chase down Kinnevan, maybe, but who knew; if the king's sorcerer had hung onto the norren idol, perhaps he could have beaten everyone to Cellen. Stopping him had been another good move, then. If a lower case one.

The mistake, if there had been one, lay in going after Dante. There it was, his error glaring like the nimbuses in the quicksilver world of shadowalking. He'd figured Dante would be up to something selfish and egotistical, and thus had to be beaten at all costs. But Blays should have anticipated that everyone
else
pursuing Cellen meant to use it for something far worse than personal gain.

"What's so funny?" Minn said.

"Let's just say we'd better get this done."

The raft floated along the coast. Sub-currents pushed and pulled it this way and that, but it never came closer than a hundred yards to shore, nor further than double that. Blays tried to adjust course with his paddle, but it was as useless as before.

He set it on the deck. "We're going to have to swim in, aren't we?"

"Just figured that out?"

"Will have to ditch our cloaks. Maybe our boots, too. If they refuse to see us, things are going to be crummy for a while."

Minn's mouth twitched. "If they refuse us, what does it matter what happens next?"

"Well, there's the fact that, unless Ro's
really
upset with us, we'll still be alive. And thus in need of not stepping on sharp things and freezing to death."

"Good thing I had you train barefoot in the Fingers."

The memory made him shiver. "Hang on. When we were in the Woduns, we were able to shadowalk over the top of the snow. What happens if you shadowalk on water?"

"You sink."

"You sink on water, but not
frozen
water? What kind of sense does that make?"

"Let me ask Arawn about that," Minn said. "How should I know? You can walk on top of snow in the real world, too. It just crushes down some. If you were able to shadowalk on top of the water, that would be no different from flying, would it? Which we can't do. So I suppose the netherworld retains some of the properties of the physical world it mirrors."

"Do you swim through nether-water just like the normal stuff?"

"Not exactly. You'll see."

They had come a couple miles down from the upper curve. To the south, the sea and beach were now deserted. A wave washed over the raft, soaking Blays' folded legs some more. It was on the miserable side, there was no denying that. Not exactly breaking any speed records, either.

When they were about a mile from the entrance to the tunnels, a steady diagonal current pushed them closer to land. Blays paddled madly, trying to get them close enough that the breakers would push them in the rest of the way, but as the swells began to bulge, a riptide drew them away. He pulled off his boots, knotted them, and looped them around his neck. Minn saw what he was doing and did the same. There was no saving his cloak, however. He transferred the contents of its pockets to his doublet and dropped it on the deck, where the heavy fabric immediately sopped up seawater.

The raft quit angling away and resumed moving parallel to the beach. Blays glanced at Minn. She nodded. The surface was too unstable for a running start, so he walked off the edge. Before he hit the water, he delved into the shadows.

The ocean turned as dark as night, spangled with silver ripples. The water beneath his right foot felt like thick gelatin. He was sinking, but he was able to step forward, his left foot plunging mid-shin into the gummy ocean. The next step took him past his knee. Then he was wading, slogging forward, continuing to sink to his waist. Minn flowed past him. She was doing a crawl stroke, but she seemed to be moving faster than she ought to be able, as if she had a rope around her waist and someone was hauling her in from shore. Blays' momentum flagged. He leaned forward and pawed at the water. He hardly moved.

The water wasn't helping, but the shadows within it could. He dipped into them and surged forward. It was cold, but not in the heat-leeching way of a wintry sea. He didn't feel all that wet yet, either. Very odd. He thought about going back for his cloak, but he could no longer see the raft.

He continued toward shore. Rubbery mounds of black water rolled to all sides, alive with silvery foam. It felt like swimming and yet not. With a frown, he wondered what would happen if he inhaled any of the thick liquid.

Ahead, Minn stood, slogging in to shore, waves tumbling up the sand and shining around her knees. Blays dangled his legs and touched bottom. He followed her in. Once he was above the tideline, he stepped out of the shadows.

He blinked against the overcast glare. He was damp rather than soaked, but he was tired of trying to make sense of this. He plopped in the sand and pulled on his boots. The beach was still empty. They stood and walked south toward the cave mouth. A stone's throw from the entrance, Minn stopped. There
was
no entrance. Just blank, slabby basalt.

Blays cocked his head. "This is it, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then where's...it?"

"They've closed it," she said. "They saw us coming."

Blays walked up to the wall and knocked where he thought the entry had been. "Well, that's rude."

"It's their form of mercy. It's what they do when a stranger sails into the cove, but they don't want to kill him."

"I'm going to choose to interpret that as a positive sign." He glanced over his shoulder. "What are you waiting for? Open it up."

"I can't."

"Forget how magic works, did you? Give it a try. For me. So you can tell me 'I told you so.'"

She set her mouth in a skeptical line, but reached toward the rock. A vertical seam appeared. Rock flowed inward, concaving the wall in a spreading, egg-shaped depression. A moment later, rock poured back in from the sides, obliterating her work.

"I told you so." She gave him a look and stepped back. "They're watching from within."

"So what if we come at it from over there?" Blays pointed where his old room must have been located inside the cliff.

"They'll feel it and stop us."

"Well, there has to be
something
we can do." He glared at the rock. Stupid rock, as solid as itself. The seal their antagonists had set up probably wasn't all that thick, but even if he had a tree trunk and a dozen burly men to hoist it, the People of the Pocket would close up the wall faster than he could bash it down. "We know you're in there!"

"It's no use," Minn said. "They have enough supplies to last for a year without stepping outside. It's standing policy. And as long as they're stuck in there, they've got nothing better to do than keep us out."

Blays gazed at the basalt wall. Matter in the netherworld only showed
some
of the properties of its earthly counterparts. Water was sort of watery. Sort of wet. Snow was kind of cold and a little bit soft. What if rock was only
sort of
hard?

The certainty that he could walk through it flooded his marrow.

He stepped into the shadows, then stepped into the wall. And rebounded from it, accompanied by a coconutty whack of his skull. He stumbled back into the real world, rubbing his forehead. "Shit!"

Minn laughed. "Did you just do what I think you did?"

He ignored her. His problem was he'd tried to walk through the wall. He should have been trying to follow the nether into it. He vanished back into the twilight realm. The nether rested in the rock as it did in everything else. He felt himself in the nether in the air. In the layer of sand beneath his feet. In the salty vapor that hung in the air. In everything.

He felt himself in the nether in the rock. He stepped forward.

He popped out into a round chamber of rock, the pale, nethereal light inside it illuminating the faces of six extremely surprised-looking women.

"Fancy seeing you here," he said. "How many walls does a guy have to walk through to talk to Ro?"

The women stumbled back. Without turning his back on them, Blays knocked three times on the outer wall. A moment later, daylight poured inside, followed by a dazed-looking Minn.

"How did you do that?" she said, chorused by two other people.

A woman with her red hair in a bun gathered her wits. "You cannot be in here!"

"Yet here I am," Blays said. "Want to get me out? Take me to see Ro."

"Not necessary." Ro strode from the hallway leading deeper into the tunnels, jaw clenched. She turned an incinerating gaze on the others. "Who let them in?"

"No one did." The redhead squirmed. "He walked through the wall. Right through solid stone."

Ro tightened her hand into a fist and turned on Minn. "You know better than to come here. I am in my rights to strike you dead."

"Go ahead," she shrugged. "If we leave without you, we're dead anyway."

"Would be a shame to lose Minn," Blays said. "Apparently she's a hell of a teacher."

Ro sighed louder than the surf banging up the shore. "Why did you leave us? Weren't you happy?"

"It wasn't about that." Minn's voice dropped. "A member of my family was being held captive. Without us, he might have died."

"You know the vows."

"Like my own name. Please, Ro. Listen to what I have to say before forging your judgment."

Ro's jaw worked. "Speak, then. Knowing that my judgment is final, and I will not hesitate to enforce it."

Minn closed her eyes. "That's all I can ask."

"Outside."

Without waiting for acknowledgement, Ro strode out the oval door Minn had opened in the wall. Halfway to the surf, she sat in the sand, the wind teasing her gray-streaked hair about her face. Blays and Minn sat across from her. A handful of the others drifted after them like a lost flock, looking to Ro for permission. She nodded and they sat in a loose ring around the three.

"Everything?" Minn asked Blays.

"Everything." He winked at Ro. "I trust her to keep a secret."

Minn leaned forward, tracing her fingers through the sand. "It's a long story. Bear with me."

She began. Not with their decision to leave Pocket Cove, but with the story of what brought her to it. How she'd been cut away from her family by a father who looked at her not as a daughter or a person, but as a blasphemous witch with no interest in her role as a vessel of motherhood. By the time she concluded the tale of her homelessness, Ro was the only one who looked unmoved. She'd heard this before, Blays decided. Either that or she really was that steely.

Minn shifted to the recent past. Admitting that she'd kept in contact with her brother made her visibly uncomfortable, but she continued, explaining how she and Blays had chosen to go to Wending to help her cousin. That they'd meant to be gone no longer than a week or two. Until they'd discovered that Cellen was on the verge of its return, and that Moddegan meant to take it.

"So what?" Ro interrupted. "What does it matter to us, the useless strife of kings? Pocket Cove is separate from all of that. That's the very reason why we're here."

"Cellen's the one thing that could tear down our walls," Minn said. "Besides, I'm not finished."

Ro looked irritated, but made no further objections. Minn moved through what they'd done at Setteven and the Norren Territories, explaining what had brought them to Dante (as well as his significance in this tangled game), and how, right when Blays had made off with Cellen, it had been snatched up by the Minister.

Ro was staring at Blays. "And if you'd hung on to it, what would you have done with it?"

"Me?" he said. "I honestly have no idea."

"I have no time for coyness. No one quests for Cellen without scheming what they'll do once it's theirs."

"I really didn't give it that much thought. I just wanted to keep it away from the others." He picked up a pearly little shell and rolled it around his palm. "But you're right. I thought about it. If I'd kept it, I would have brought it to Setteven, and played a giant sky-spanning illusion of King Moddegan being batted around by an enormous kitten."

"An enormous..?" Ro's face creased with angry confusion. "Why?"

"For laughs. Mostly, to be rid of it."

"I don't believe that." She cleared her voice, enforcing its sternness. "Not for a second."

"The Minister comes from from Weslee," Minn finished. "He still blames Narashtovik for what we did to his land."

Ro swung her head Minn's way. "Did you tell Narashtovik this?"

"Don't they have a right to their own history? To know why they're about to be put to death?"

"You don't understand how little that means to me. We haven't concerned ourselves with the outside world in centuries. All I care about is the safety of the People."

Blays snorted. "You're not hiding here for your safety. If that were true, it wouldn't matter if your people came and went. Instead, you're hiding the shame of what you did to Weslee. I've seen plenty of self-loathing in my travels. It looks a lot like punishing your young by forcing them to swim naked in winter and spend days alone in the Fingers."

"Those aren't punishments. They're training methods! And they certainly worked for
you
."

"We don't want much from you. A tunnel through the mountains. We're not going to massacre Weslee again, just take Cellen and maintain the status quo." He held her gaze. "Your people will never be in harm's way. And you can walk away knowing you saved lives in the present—and redeemed others in the past."

Ro rolled her lips together. "You really think the People of the Pocket should shoulder the blame for something that happened a thousand years ago?"