One of the guards started down the right branch, apparently taking Alaeron's musing as an order. A clattering noise came from the ceiling, and the man fell, shrieking, as something the size of a large housecat dropped onto his head. Blood spurted, probably from the man's neck, but it was only seconds before his entire head and shoulders were reduced to a ruin. The thing attacking him looked like a blur of needles spinning around a metallic sphere covered in blinking lights.

"Automaton! Kill it!" Alaeron shouted, and the startled guards lifted their weapons and began muttering spells. But it was Lodger who struck first, aiming the Earth-Mover and pressing the button that activated it.

The device was a blunt instrument. It operated something like a wizard's spell of telekinesis, but its effects were limited only to rock and metal, and it had absolutely no finesse. If you needed to punch a man-sized hole in the side of a mountain, the Earth-Mover would do it, crushing even bedrock to sand and compressing the shattered particles so intensely they sometimes literally caught fire. The force wave—which looked a bit like a heat shimmer radiating from the crystal at the end of the Earth-Mover—struck the automaton like a giant's fist, without moving the guard's ravaged corpse an inch. The automaton smashed against the curving wall of the corridor and slid down the wall, sparking tiny lightnings and emitting a high-pitched whine that trailed off to silence...

The Pathfinder Tales Library

Novels

Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross
Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham
Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones
The Worldwound Gambit by Robin D. Laws
Master of Devils by Dave Gross
Death's Heretic by James L. Sutter
Song of the Serpent by Hugh Mattews
City of the Fallen Sky by Tim Pratt
Nightglass by Liane Merciel
Blood of the City by Robin D. Laws
Queen of Thorns by Dave Gross
Called to Darkness by Richard Lee Byers
Liar's Blade by Tim Pratt
King of Chaos by Dave Gross
Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones
The Dagger of Trust by Chris Willrich
Skinwalkers by Wendy N. Wagner
The Redemption Engine by James L. Sutter
The Crusader Road by Michael A. Stackpole
Reign of Stars by Tim Pratt
Nightblade by Liane Merciel
Pirate's Promise by Chris A. Jackson

Journals

The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline edited by James L. Sutter
Hell's Pawns by Dave Gross
Dark Tapestry by Elaine Cunnningham
Prodigal Sons edited by James L. Sutter
Plague of Light by Robin D. Laws
Guilty Blood by F. Wesley Schneider
Husks by Dave Gross
The Treasure of Far Thallai by Robin D. Laws
Light of a Distant Star by Bill Ward

Short Stories

"The Lost Pathfinder" by Dave Gross
"Certainty" by Liane Merciel
"The Swamp Warden" by Amber E. Scott
"Noble Sacrifice" by Richard Ford
"Blood Crimes" by J. C. Hay
"The Secret of the Rose and Glove by Kevin Andrew Murphy
"Lord of Penance" by Richard Lee Byers
"Guns of Alkenstar" by Ed Greenwod
"The Ghosts of Broken Blades" by Monte Cook
"The Walkers from the Crypt" by Howard Andrew Jones
"A Lesson in Taxonomy" by Dave Gross
"The Illusionist" by Elaine Cunningham
"Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver by Erik Mona
"The Ironroot Deception" by Robin D. Laws
"Plow and Sword" by Robert E. Vardeman
"A Passage to Absalom" by Dave Gross
"The Seventh Execution" by Amber E. Scott
"The Box" by Bill Ward
"Blood and Money by Steven Savile
"Faithful Servants" by James L. Sutter
"Fingers of Death—No, Doom!" by Lucien Soulban
"The Perfumer's Apprentice" by Kevin Andrew Murphy
"Krunzle the Quick" by Hugh Matthews
"Mother Bears" by Wendy N. Wagner
"Hell or High Water" by Ari Marmell
"A Tomb of Winter's Plunder" by Tim Pratt
"Misery's Mirror" by Liane Merciel
"The Twelve-Hour Statue" by Michael Kortes
"In the Event of My Untimely Demise" by Robin D. Laws
"Shattered Steel" by F. Wesley Schneider
"Proper Villains" by Erik Scott de Bie
"Killing Time" by Dave Gross
"Thieves Vinegar" by Kevin Andrew Murphy
"In Red Rune Canyon" by Richard Lee Byers
"The Fate of Falling Stars" by Andrew Penn Romine
"Bastard, Sword" by Tim Pratt
"The Irregulars" by Neal F. Litherland

Reign of Stars © 2014 Paizo Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

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Cover art by Roberto Pitturu.
Cover design by Emily Crowell.
Map by Crystal Frasier.

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ISBN 978-1-60125-660-7 (mass market paperback)
ISBN 978-1-60125-661-4 (ebook)

Publisher's Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Pratt, Tim, 1976-
Reign of stars / Tim Pratt.

p. ; cm. — (Pathfinder tales)

Set in the world of the role-playing game, Pathfinder and Pathfinder Online.
Issued also as an ebook.
ISBN: 978-1-60125-660-7 (mass market paperback)

1. Alchemists--Fiction. 2. Thieves--Fiction. 3. Imaginary places--Fiction. 4. Good and evil--Fiction. 5. Pathfinder (Game)--Fiction. 6. Fantasy fiction. 7. Adventure stories. I. Title. II. Series: Pathfinder tales library.

PS3616.R385 R45 2014
813/.6

First printing August 2014.

Printed in the United States of America.

For my nephew Aleister,
a fellow devotee of killer robots.

Chapter One

Intangible Assassin

The perimeter alarms howled, and Alaeron—master of the alchemical arts, student of the arcane, and hater of unexpected visitors—carefully capped the lead flask hissing and bubbling on his worktable and wondered which trap would kill the intruder.

The simple spike-and-pit traps in the back yard were haphazardly covered with dead leaves and unconvincing bits of sod, and were meant to be noticed—burglars who attempted to avoid those would almost inevitably step on an ingeniously hidden catapult that would fling them back over the wall. In theory, anyway. When Alaeron had tested the trap with pigs and goats, about ten percent of the subjects had been thrown at an awkward angle and splattered into the wall instead. But anyone who chose to ignore the spikes and quite realistic-looking skulls and climbed over the wall anyway deserved whatever fate befell him.

If unwelcome visitors managed to avoid the catapult, their approach to the back entrance would take them through a field of reactive caltrops of Alaeron's own invention. His friend and patron, Skiver, said they were basically just bear traps with unnecessary barbs, but bear traps merely snapped shut; these would bite down, and then start chewing, sinking in the barbs and pulling them out again. They were a fine area denial weapon and he had high hopes of selling them to the Andoren military if the generals ever got over their aversion to what they termed "gruesome violations of the honor of the battlefield." There were less scrupulous governments who would be delighted with the weapons, but Alaeron was enough of a patriot to refuse to sell anything that might be used against his own people. Andoran was the greatest nation in the world, forward-thinking and idealistic, even if its generals did make poor ordnance-purchasing decisions.

Any intruders who made it past that threat—presumably by levitating—would trigger a cloud of acid when they got within ten feet of the laboratory proper, a spray deployed from nozzles hidden in the rather garish topless female statues Skiver had installed on either side of the door in a misguided attempt at a housewarming present. The acid was a new formula Alaeron was working on, a short-acting compound that should serve to dissolve clothing and flesh and muscle and organs, but leave the bones intact. Alaeron could always sell skeletons. He wasn't particularly interested in anatomy or necromancy, but he corresponded with other researchers who were. Intruders in heavy armor would probably just have their armor and skin stripped away, leaving the organs exposed, which would be terribly messy, but it was hard to imagine someone in full plate climbing over the wall and making it through the other traps unscathed anyway.

Anyone making it past that—some kind of acid-resistant golem, perhaps—would have to stand on the steps, or touch the door, and needless to say, no visitor who wasn't expected could possibly survive that. True, if someone made it that far Alaeron would have to install a new exploding door, but he had heaps of those in storage, as they'd proven strangely unpopular among the wealthy and security-conscious Andorens he'd expected to buy them. Those would-be customers had insisted that not all unexpected visitors deserved to be killed automatically, which made no sense to Alaeron at all—how could you get any work done if you just let anyone show up on your doorstep at any time with no consequences? Alaeron supposed his measures were overkill if you were simply worried about door-to-door salesmen, religious zealots, and those seeking alms for the poor, but surely he wasn't the only person in the city of Almas who was regularly menaced by unannounced and heavily armed would-be assassins?

Alaeron watched the softly glowing crystal globes on the wall, which indicated the smooth operation of his various defense mechanisms. They would turn red if they were triggered...but they remained steadfastly green. Perhaps he should have installed some sort of mystic eye or magic mirror to give him a view of what was going on out there—but watching thieves, spies, and Technic League assassins die didn't particularly interest him.

When he heard the knocking sound, he initially assumed it was one of his more lively experiments trying to escape from a box. It was only when a voice called, "I bring a message from the north," that Alaeron realized it was the sound of someone knocking at the inner door of his laboratory, which should have been utterly unreachable. The knock itself was peculiar, though: more of a rattling rat-a-tat than the usual thump of a fist.

Alaeron considered the various bottles within arm's reach. There were extracts that, when consumed, would give him superhuman, feral strength, and if he wanted a more direct approach, there were bombs, and even acids—the latter mere reagents for other concoctions, but they'd prove quite effective if flung at any exposed skin or mucous membranes.

But if the visitor had made it through his outer defenses unscathed, none of those were likely to do any good. Clearly something more formidable was in order. Alaeron called, "Just a moment!" He lifted the weapon concealed beneath the worktable, took aim, and twisted the knob.

This particular weapon—he called it the Wave-Maker, because it transformed solid matter into an equivalent volume of water, which always tended to make a splash—was looted from the last Technic League assassin who'd tried to kill Alaeron. The would-be murderer had reduced a portion of Alaeron's outer wall to liquefied mud with the weapon before blundering right into a trap that released a tiny spurt of a compound made from the glands of a blue dragon that instantly turned all the liquid in his body into sand. The manner of his death, given the weapon he came armed with, was almost ironic.

A shimmering beam shot from the rounded end of the Wave-Maker, and the whole delicately curved and articulated weapon hummed with the usual minor seventh chord. The inner door and a portion of the wall turned to water, showering down into a messy puddle, and revealing the lean, tall, long-haired form of a Kellid beyond. The northern barbarian's cold and watchful eyes looked at Alaeron levelly, and despite walking directly through the path of the beam, the man was not even remotely liquefied.

Alaeron winced and put the weapon away. "Incorporeal?"

The Kellid nodded.

"I remember Gannix of the Technic League was experimenting with an artifact from Silver Mount that rendered things incorporeal," Alaeron said. "But his test subjects kept falling straight down into the bowels of the earth. I suppose someone else took up his researches after his death and managed to solve the practical problems. Hmm. Clearly the effect is aura-based, since your clothing is also incorporeal. Combined with a levitation effect to keep you on a level plane, I assume? That's how I would have approached it."

"I have not come to discuss my—"

"Hmm. Did you make yourself solid again to knock on the door? Seems like a dangerous gamble, since if you gave up incorporeality I could have killed you in any number of ways through the door. But there was something funny about that knock..." Alaeron snapped his fingers. "Wait, I know that sound—you threw pebbles at the door, didn't you, like a suitor flinging stones at a lover's window? So you can pick up stones, and they become incorporeal, and when they leave your aura, they become solid again. How interesting. Not very sophisticated, but elegant in its simplicity, I suppose."

"You like to talk," the assassin—for what else could he be?—said. "You would do better to listen."

"And so I will, the moment I hear something interesting. I assume you've come to kill the thief, the apostate, the runaway apprentice? Er, those are all me, I mean. All three." Alaeron was sitting on a stool, and the stool was on top of a trapdoor. With the right shift in pressure, he could trigger a lever, drop through the trapdoor, and slide down a greased chute into a heavily fortified safe room, which would be worthless against a person who could walk through walls. Alaeron wondered how the Kellid would strike, given his incorporeality. Throwing knives, perhaps, becoming solid when they left his aura? Perhaps a sling or a slingshot? Even a crossbow. The possibilities were, if not endless, at least numerous.

Alaeron had killed four League assassins in the past year and a half—none as formidable as Kormak, the first of them, who'd pursued Alaeron to far continents in his zeal. It would be a shame to die now, at the hands of yet another servant of the League, even though, statistically, Alaeron had always known his luck would run out and his planning prove insufficient someday.

But, apparently, not today. "I am not here to kill you," the Kellid said. "I am here to deliver a message, and a gift."

Alaeron grunted. He had, briefly, served as an apprentice to the Technic League, a group of vile arcanists who plundered the riches and relics of Numeria, where long ago a ship—or a city, or something stranger—had fallen from the sky and crashed into the earth, scattering its bizarre and powerful mysteries across the breadth of the land. Alaeron, always fascinated by forbidden knowledge, had been unable to resist the appeal of such a place, though the members of the League revolted him, as they were slavers and tyrants who were only interested in power, not the deep secrets of the universe. After certain misadventures in Numeria he'd escaped with a sack full of relics...and ever since, the League had been trying to get its stolen property back, and take revenge on him, too. In the process, the League had allowed Alaeron to steal even more property from its failed assassins, which only made its leaders want to kill him more. It was a vicious circle, though it also served to enrich Alaeron, so it could have been worse.

"Is this message mostly in the form of curses and inventive profanity?" Alaeron said. "And is the gift poisonous, or explosive, or both?"

"The nature of the message has not been disclosed to me," the Kellid said. He reached into his pack and then tossed a wooden box slightly larger than a human head toward the lab table. When the box left his field of incorporeality, it became solid and landed with a thunk. Alaeron sucked air through his teeth in dismay—there were substances on the table that did not react well to being jostled—but nothing blew up or bubbled over, so no harm done—this time.

"I am staying at the Succulent Eel, near the docks," the Kellid said.

Alaeron blinked. The Eel was rather exclusive, in a very particular way. "Really?"

The Kellid continued in a bored tone. "I will be there for the next two days, if you wish to send back a message." With that, he departed, passing through a wall and out of sight.

Alaeron carefully examined the box from all angles. It was made from an unfamiliar pale wood, with unsettling patterns in the grain that made him think it had come from a tree twisted by magical forces. The nails holding it together were shiny and uniform, the sort of precision work he'd grown accustomed to seeing during his time with the Technic League. He didn't see any indication that the box was trapped, but he wished briefly that he'd hired an assistant at some point anyway—someone disposable to pry open the box while Alaeron himself stood some discreet distance away, perhaps behind a wall of stones and steel.

He swabbed the edges of the box with certain substances that reacted to the presence of alchemical explosives, and they turned up no sign of such dangers. After a moment's thought he went to another worktable in the long, high-ceilinged laboratory and returned with an augur. He drilled a coin-sized hole in one side of the box, then activated an alchemical light-stick and peered inside by its illumination. How embarrassing it would be to open the box and be attacked by some venomous mutated Numerian serpent.

But as far as he could see through the hole, the box contained nothing but a folded sheet of parchment resting atop a small object wrapped in cloth.

There was such a thing as being too cautious, and in truth, Alaeron's elaborate precautions were just an attempt to offset his natural tendency to leap in without looking. You couldn't make bombs and mix acids and dismantle ancient relics for a living if you were overly worried about preserving your own life, limbs, and sanity. He'd crawled into many a barrow, burglarized many a library, and mixed many an unknown substance just to see what would happen, and if he hadn't grown a bit paranoid about the League's attempts to kill him, he'd likely still be leading such a reckless life, trusting in his own quick thinking and reflexes to keep him from coming to serious harm.

He'd rather hated traveling the world and adventuring when he was in the midst of it, but now, sitting here in his laboratory examining the treasures he'd won on those expeditions, he sometimes missed the excitement.

Alaeron took a chisel and hammer and prised off the top of the box. He lifted out the parchment, which was sealed with a blob of wax marked with the impression of a cogwheel, the Technic League's symbol. The wrapped parcel made him more curious—mysterious objects were, in a very real sense, his reason to live—but it was probably better to see what the letter had to say first.

He read it, stared at the wrapped parcel, read the letter again, then folded it carefully and put the lid back on the box. After that he descended through the laboratory's cellar, opened a panel in a false wall, deactivated the traps ahead by pressing the proper stones in the wall in the proper sequence, continued along a subterranean tunnel, reset the traps by pulling a concealed lever, and emerged through a similar hidden door into the basement of an empty house he owned some blocks away from his laboratory. From there he went out into the street, found one of the loitering street children who could be trusted to perform simple tasks for small coins, and sent the boy with a message to Alaeron's friend Skiver.

The message was simple: "Come quickly. I've just received a letter from a dead woman."

Chapter Two

Dead Letter

Read this." Alaeron thrust the parchment toward Skiver, who sat lounging in one of the overstuffed chairs in the laboratory's living area.

Skiver looked at the parchment in Alaeron's hand, wrinkled his nose, and said, "You know I only like reading debt sheets and crooked contracts. Never saw the need for anything else. Why don't you tell me what it's all about? You talk faster than I read anyway."

Alaeron paced up and down, the parchment still clutched in his hand, worry and doubt and excitement and curiosity all at war within him. "Did I ever tell you about a woman named Zernebeth?"

Skiver nodded, his sharp, narrow face thoughtful. "Sure. A witch from the northern barbarian lands, your old boss in the Technic League. You said she was less evil than the usual run of bastards up there. She took you into that—what do you call it?—the Steel Hill—"

"Silver Mount," Alaeron said. "The largest fragment of...whatever it was that came down in the Rain of Stars. A structure taller than any tower you've ever seen, honeycombed with deadly mysteries and world-shaking secrets."

"Right, that one. She got herself killed while you two were exploring the Mount, and you ran off with the treasures she found, and that's what set the League to chasing you all this time."

"More or less." Alaeron would have phrased it a bit differently, stressing his reluctance to leave Zernebeth behind in the Mount, and his intention to honor her memory by studying the artifacts she'd found instead of letting her hated, treacherous rivals in the League loot her belongings for their personal gain. He was still haunted by dreams where he saw Zernebeth pierced by the eldritch lightnings that flickered throughout the strange chamber they'd breached together in the Mount, her body contorted in horrible agonies, his only thought to escape with the treasures before he joined her in death.

Except, apparently...

"Zernebeth sent me a letter," he said, stopping in his pacing to stare down at his feet.

"What, something she wrote before she died?" Skiver said. "And you got it just now? She should've invested in a better messenger."

"No. It...if this is true, if it's not a trick, Zernebeth is alive." He held up the parchment and cleared his throat. "It says:

Dearest Alaeron,

You will be surprised to hear from me, as you believe me to be dead. (I will not say I entirely forgive you for leaving me behind in that ghastly, wondrous place. You had every reason to believe my cause was hopeless, I know, but I like to think that, if our positions had been reversed, I would have tried to save you, or at least sought help, instead of merely fleeing for my own life. But that is neither here nor there; what is done is done, and it may all be for the best, strangely enough.)

I did not die. I was...preserved, I suppose. Put into a kind of stasis. The preservation field might have been a safety mechanism built into the Mount to protect its original occupants in the case of catastrophic disaster, some precaution that we inadvertently triggered. After the lightning surged through me, I became frozen in time—I did not breathe, my heart did not beat, my hair did not grow, I did not age, and I was not conscious in the usual sense.

I did, however, have dreams, of a sort. Meaningless, but diverting—perhaps I'll tell you about them when I see you in person.

I was discovered by other members of the League some time after your successful escape. (And well done, killing Gannix on your way out. He was a terrible arcanist, better at politics than the mystical and mysterious arts, and the only good ideas he ever had were the ones he stole. We have much more salutary leadership in the League now.) An expedition into the Mount uncovered the chamber where I hung, suspended in the air, caught up in a web of blue light. At great personal risk to life and limb—because some value the love of knowledge over self-preservation, Alaeron—those explorers deactivated the machinery in the walls (mostly by cutting the walls open and looting the skymetal wire inside), and I was freed. They carried my still-unconscious form out of the Mount, and back to the League's laboratories in Starfall, where I was nursed back to health by several well-trained medical slaves.

While portions of Silver Mount are surprisingly hospitable to our kind, that particular section of the Mount was apparently not designed with humanoids in mind, and the stasis process interacted in negative ways with my physiology. I was not entirely undamaged, as I'm sure you saw before you ran away—I lost a fair bit of blood before I was frozen in time, and after I was rescued, the chirurgeons were unable to save my left arm. (I do not feel the loss too keenly; I have made certain improvements.)

My fortunes have risen since I returned. Those who are lost in the Mount for years do not generally return, so I was an object of much curiosity at court. I had a private meeting with the Black Sovereign (long may he reign), and I told him of my experiences, and the insights I believe it gave me into the true nature of the Mount—he was mostly impressed I'd come out alive, but I'm content to have impressed him at all. The Sovereign's approval is hardly necessary—we in the League have our sphere, and the Sovereign has his own, and they overlap only incidentally—but things do go more smoothly in the capital when the League and the royal court make common cause. My newfound notoriety at court and the rather forthright tactics I used to recover the property that was stolen by the other captains after my "death" put me in a position to seize leadership of the League. Of course, all captains of the Technic League are equal—but you might say I am the most equal.

I find myself ill-suited to administration, I admit, but being the de facto head of the League allows me to pursue those projects I find most worthwhile without having to worry about coddling anyone else's cherished ideas or delicate egos; indeed, a certain brutality and dismissiveness is expected in one who holds my position. I have never been cruel by nature, but I find that my natural indifference to, and related dearth of respect for, my underlings serves me well.

Let me come to my point. My fellow captains are all formidable, I admit, but they are avaricious schemers, every one, and they are useless to me now. I need clear-eyed thinkers who burn with a passion to understand, and to uncover mysteries for the sake of knowledge itself, not for the power that knowledge might buy. In other words, Alaeron, I need you. I have an expeditionary project that you would be perfect to spearhead. I can trust no one else.

In return for this service—as if the opportunity alone wouldn't be payment enough—I can make sure that no minion of the League will ever attempt to stick a spearhead through you again. Without condoning your theft, desertion, and betrayal, I am willing to forgive them, and extend to you full amnesty for your past crimes against the League and Numeria. You will no longer be hunted by assassins. You can even keep the trifles you stole. There are better ones buried in this land. That is not faith, or supposition, or educated guess; I know. (We can make you wealthy, too, of course, if you survive the expedition. But you never cared much for money, and if you've started caring about it since last we spoke, I suggest you tear up this letter and forget I ever sent it, and continue to dodge assassins as best you can. I won't send more from the League, but I won't stop anyone else from doing so unless I get something in return—Gannix had friends, and if I'm going to annoy them to make your life easier, I want recompense.)

If you intend to join me, inform the messenger who brought this letter, and I will make the proper preparations for your arrival. You will have to make your own way rather than traveling with the messenger, however—he moves quickly, using methods that might not be comfortable for you. I'm not sure how many more trips he can survive, honestly, but he is a good experimental subject regarding the effectiveness of certain peculiar relics we've discovered recently. I look forward to your reply; I trust you'll send the correct one.

Your mentor, whom you left for dead,
Z

Postscript: I've included a little trifle to remind you of the wonders you could find here in Numeria. I discovered a cache of a dozen, only a few of which appear operable—the others are either broken or somehow disabled. Perhaps if you pick apart this one, you can figure out how to fix the others. They are precious, but I can spare one for my favorite runaway apprentice, and it could even help with your journey. (The applications for travel will be obvious to you, though whether that's why they were made, I couldn't say—perhaps they were meant for punishment, or storage, or as party favors for children. Who knows?) Remember: miraculous items like this are commonplace here, and I intend to send you in search of something miraculous even by local standards.

"That's all." Alaeron folded the parchment and tucked it away.

"It wasn't bad," Skiver said thoughtfully. "Until that bit about ‘your mentor, whom you left for dead'—that was rather direct, but then, she probably knows you're easily distracted and don't always pick up more subtle..."

Skiver's voice went on, but Alaeron wasn't paying attention anymore. He was thinking about the object Zernebeth had sent in the box to tempt him. He'd looked at it, but he hadn't actually touched it yet. The device was a cube, about three inches to each side—just a little too big to fit comfortably in the palm of his hand—with a raised red button in the center of one side. The cube was heavier than an equivalent volume of solid lead, but only slightly. He would have to push the button sometime, obviously, but he was still a little worried it would explode and destroy, oh, perhaps the whole city. The Technic League had never gone in for subtlety before, and the idea of them sending a fake letter from his dead mentor seemed rather baroque as an assassination plot, but anything was possible.

"—her handwriting?" Skiver said.

"Hmm?"

"Do you recognize Zernebeth's handwriting?" he said patiently.

Alaeron blinked. "Oh." He opened the parchment and looked again. He'd seen Zernebeth scribble things many times—messy notes, peremptory orders, formulae, schematics, and so on—but it had been years...still, she had a distinctive way of writing, the letters strangely twisting and sinuous, doubtless a consequences of her being educated among the white witches of Irrisen instead of in the more civilized lands farther south. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I'm almost certain this is her writing."

"All right, then," Skiver said. "When do we leave for Numeria?"

Chapter Three

Many Rooms

Alaeron cocked his head. "Skiver, you can't come with me—you have a business here." Skiver owned a couple of taverns and a gambling hall and had inherited his late patron Ralen Vadim's smuggling business when the old man passed away from a mysterious wasting disease, probably contracted from one of the countless strange artifacts he'd kept in his vault—though it was possible Skiver had simply poisoned him. Alaeron had made a lot of poison for his friend back then.

"I have business interests," Skiver said, "and people who can look after them in my absence. They'll steal a bit from me while I'm away, of course, but I'm willing to take that as the cost of doing business. If you propose to stay in Numeria indefinitely, well, I don't know that I'm willing to move away forever, but as your friend it's the least I can do to see you get settled."

"You hate traveling."

"Not a bit. Broadens the mind. And fills up the coffers, in my experience. Come on, Alaeron. You know I love you like a brother—except my own brothers are pieces of shit to a one—and there's no one better when it comes to blowing things up or turning into a monster or finding useful things in ancient garbage heaps. But we both know you're, ah, occasionally not so good with human nature. I'm not saying you're gullible, exactly, just that...you're not so interested in people, and so you don't always notice when they're tightening a noose around your neck or using you for a human shield or a stepping stone to higher ground."

Alaeron scowled. "I think I have a keen understanding of human—"

"Jaya," Skiver said softly, and Alaeron winced.

"Yes, all right, Jaya." On the last journey Alaeron had undertaken with Skiver, they'd had a third member in their party, a beautiful archer named Jaya. Alaeron had entertained certain romantic and sentimental ideas about her, which Jaya had appeared to intermittently reciprocate...until they returned to Almas and Alaeron learned Jaya was a thief and confidence trickster who'd only been using him as a means to rescue her lover and partner from a difficult situation. "Point taken."

"This Zernebeth of yours doesn't seem all that—what's the word?—sophisticated when it comes to leading you around by the nose. She's more hammer than filleting knife. But still, I think you could use someone to look out for you."

Light dawned. "You just want to loot the treasures of Numeria!"

"I don't just want that. I want to look out for my friend Alaeron and loot the treasures of Numeria."

"Mmm. And suppose at some point you have to choose one over the other?"

He sighed. "It won't come to that, but if it did, yes, I'd save your life over grabbing a sack of treasure. I can always find other sacks of treasure—with your help, if you're alive to do the helping."

Alaeron scratched the small scar on his chin he'd gotten from an ill-timed chemical reaction. "It would be useful to have someone in Starfall I knew I could trust. The place is...well. To say it's a ‘nest of vipers' is needlessly rude to vipers."

"Imagine that!" Skiver said. "Me, the only man another man can trust. My old mother would never believe it."

"I suppose we should make travel plans." Alaeron chewed his lip, thinking. "The last time I went to Numeria I traveled with some pilgrims and crusaders bound for the Worldwound, up the River Road along the Sellen. They weren't the most pleasant companions—either irritatingly devout or crudely lusting for blood—but they made for a safe journey—"

"You let me take care of everything," Skiver said. "I helped make the plans for our last trip, and that worked out beautifully, didn't it?"

"Well..."

Skiver frowned. "We survived, anyway. You can't say we didn't survive."

"We did make it back alive. That is indisputable."

"And in full possession of all our limbs, no less. We'll make it there and back again just fine this time, too. You go visit your Kellid-who-walks-through-walls and tell him you'll be on your way, and I'll make the arrangements. We can depart in, oh, two or three days, depending."

"If you're sure..."

"I'm sure. And this time, we're going to travel in style."

∗ ∗ ∗

Alaeron didn't leave for the Succulent Eel immediately. Instead he took the strange cube Zernebeth had sent him out onto the grounds, safely surrounded by his walls. Most of his nonlethal outdoor space was given over to growing the various herbs and weeds and legumes and fungi he required for his alchemical efforts—making his own reagents was so much better than shopping at markets, both in terms of price and quality control—but he had a large cleared area of hard-packed dirt where he sometimes experimented with particularly volatile compounds. He set the cube in the center of the dirt circle and considered it for a moment.

Well, he had to do it sometime. He reached out and touched the button.

Or was it a button? He applied pressure, but the circle didn't move. The red metal was surprisingly cold, and his fingertip tingled sharply, as if being scraped by sharp and delicate filaments. He pulled his hand away, alarmed, and then noted with great interest that the surface of the button had changed. Where before it had been smooth, it was now marked with tiny, intricate black lines, swooping curves and whorls...Alaeron looked at the pattern of his fingerprint, and realized that it had been reproduced perfectly on the button.

Intriguing, but it was hard to see the point—

The box began to make a low humming sound, so he pressed the red circle again. This time, the button sank under his fingertip, down to the level of the cube's surface, and gave a satisfying click.

The result was immediate. The sides of the box began to swell, then slide, then unfold, and Alaeron moved back to what he hoped was a safe distance. The cube grew in height and width, the sides opening up and out, like a large and much-folded map spread out against a wall. The operation was eerily silent, except for that low hum, and in the space of just a couple of minutes, the unfolding stopped.

Alaeron walked around the device, which now resembled nothing so much as a coffin standing on end. The red button had somehow migrated from the top of the box to the front panel, where it now occupied a position like that of a doorknob. There were no visible seams or cracks in the rectangular prism, but Alaeron's working hypothesis was that if he pressed the button again, the front panel would swing or slide open, allowing Alaeron to step inside. He picked up a stick and banged it against the side of the device, and it didn't even clang, just seemed to absorb the sound, as if he'd smacked a pillow. Alaeron pressed his hands against the side of the box and gave it a push, thinking something so top-heavy would easily topple, but it may as well have been rooted to the ground—he couldn't knock it down any more than he could demolish the Golden Aerie with his bare hands.

Perhaps the cube was some sort of field shelter, meant to provide a safe place to rest in hostile landscapes. Not luxurious, but probably quite strong, and proof against various dangers—excepting, obviously, claustrophobia. Good to have on hand if you were in the jungle about to be leapt upon by a ravening beast, or squeezed to death by a snake of unusual size. If nothing else, it could keep one out of the rain.

Alaeron started to reach for the button, then paused, considering. The button had made a copy of the pattern on his fingertip, which suggested the device had attached or bonded itself to him specifically. It was reasonable to guess the magic box wouldn't work for anyone else, though he'd have to test the theory later. The question was whether the device was tied to his particular aura—like many of his alchemical extracts, which had miraculous effects on his own body and mind while being as nonreactive as water for anyone else who drank them—or if it was actually, specifically activated by the touch of his right index finger. He picked up the stick again and poked the button. The device didn't react, and he nodded to himself. Then he tried pressing the button with his sleeve-covered elbow. No reaction. He pushed the button next with the heel of his left hand—

The machine began to hum again, and the door swung inward, revealing a rectangle of abiding blackness.

Alaeron grunted. He hadn't expected that. Perhaps it was keyed to his flesh, then, and not his particular fingertip? That was interesting. But it still had a major drawback as far as security went: anyone who lopped off one of Alaeron's limbs could potentially use it to open the device. Unless, of course, it only worked for living flesh. Unfortunately, there was no good way to test that without cutting off one of his toes and trying to use the severed digit to open the box. While he wasn't averse to experimenting on himself, and was reasonably certain he could grow back a toe if the need arose, such an action seemed unnecessarily rash. And of course there was the question of identical twins, magical duplicates, shapeshifters capable of taking on the form of another—would any of them be able to open Alaeron's magic box? Or was it even truly keyed to Alaeron at all? That was his hypothesis, but maybe the fingerprint impression was just a decorative touch, or had some function he couldn't fathom. Until he had Skiver try to open the box it would be impossible to—

Oh dear, Alaeron thought. He was stalling. Standing in front of a box full of mysterious blackness, and on some level afraid to investigate deeper. Zernebeth's note had made the "field shelter" hypothesis seem most likely, but there was something rather thick and syrupy about the nature of the darkness inside that box. Was it actually a shelter at all? Or was it something else? A gate to a place of darkness? Portal to the plane of shadow? The mouth of a strange beast?

Alaeron was going back to Numeria soon. His days of working in (relative) safety were rapidly approaching an end. He'd spent too long in comfort, without taking audacious risks, without showing the courage of his conviction that anything that could be known should be known. That wouldn't do at all. Arcanists could not be coddled—alchemists couldn't be safe, not if they wanted to remain alchemists. He had to recapture the old spirit of investigation. To accept that the possibility of messy death as a small price to pay for the joys of curiosity.

Still, he wasn't an idiot. He poked the stick into the darkness first, then drew it back to make sure it hadn't been gnawed by monsters, burned by acid, coated in slime, turned to glass, transmuted into ivory, or reduced to ashes. The stick seemed unharmed by its expedition into the dark, so Alaeron threw it aside, and stepped into the box himself.

The darkness receded as soon as he stepped in, replaced by a softly glowing light. Two long strides should have taken him into the box and then slammed his nose against the back wall, but instead he found himself in a high-ceilinged room the size of a master bedroom in a fine house. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made of the same greasy-looking black metal as the exterior, and three orbs of softly glowing light floated near the roof. There were no furnishings of any kind, but there was plenty of room—it was big enough to hold half a dozen people comfortably, and twice that if they didn't mind getting cozy. What a lovely bit of dimensional folding! The place just cried out for experimentation.

Alaeron examined the still-open front door. A pale green button and a pale blue button were placed at roughly eye height on either side of the opening. Alaeron pressed the blue one, and the door swung shut, closing seamlessly. He pressed the green—briefly wondering what he'd do if the door didn't open, and coming up with several possibilities involving the acids and explosives in his shoulder bag—and was gratified when the door slid open again. He went back out, and the door closed after him automatically.

With some experimentation, he discovered that holding the red button down firmly for six seconds caused the magic box to collapse into a cube again. His next experiment involved dragging an old crate inside the shelter, then closing the door, collapsing the shelter down to a cube, and expanding it again. When he looked inside, the crate was unharmed, which meant the contents of the shelter weren't crushed when it compressed itself; the cube merely gave access to some bit of pinched-off space that existed independently. That was good.

That meant Alaeron and Skiver really could travel in style.

Chapter Four

The Eel

The Succulent Eel would have been just another den of iniquity where sailors from a thousand foreign ports could gather to drink the local rotgut and roll the local loaded dice and threaten one another with various weapons of personal cultural significance, except for one quirk: the owner was an excellent chef in general, and was widely considered the best in the world when it came to his particular specialty dish.

The chef was a rough-looking sort, a sailor from regions unknown who'd settled down after winning the tavern in a drinking contest, and those who saw his scarred face (his nose was almost entirely gone from an incident variously attributed to a battle with pirates, wrestling a shark, or the poor aim of a novice harpoonist) often mistook him for a common thug, and not an artist of local (and limited international) renown. Known as "Onionskin" to most because of his exceedingly pale features, which revealed the tracery of every vein running beneath his papery flesh, and as "that noseless bastard" to the more refined restaurateurs of Almas who coveted his closely guarded recipe for eel pie, Onionskin opened the tavern whenever whim suited him, made an arbitrary and variable number of eel pies in the kitchen, and doled them out strictly first-come, first-serve, until they were all gone. While such a purely egalitarian approach was in keeping with the fundamental principles of Andoren society, in practice it greatly annoyed the various politicians and social mavens and high-ranking Eagle Knights who had to stand in line with the lowliest of their fellow citizens in the often-vain hope of tasting his Succulent Eel Special Number Two. (Onionskin had never served the "Special Number One," or indeed any other number, which only further fueled the speculation about his talents and origins, and enhanced his mystery. Skiver said Onionskin was a genius as a businessman, and claimed to have stolen several useful innovations in the fine art of luring in customers from the man.)

The tavern had a single room for rent upstairs, and Alaeron had heard there was a waiting list several years long to spend even a single night there, despite the slanting attic roof, the narrow bed, the cracked basin of cold water, and the window that didn't quite close. The reason was simple: Onionskin made himself breakfast each morning, and he was apparently willing to let guests eat whatever he didn't finish. The fact that Zernebeth's incorporeal messenger was quartered there gave Alaeron some sense of the resources she was willing to spend on even relatively trivial matters, and he assumed it was meant to be a demonstration of her reach and influence. Onionskin was, apparently, indifferent to money, since he could essentially coin it just by gutting and skinning eels and working his own culinary magic, which meant Zernebeth must have used some other means of persuasion to get her messenger housed there without planning years in advance.

When Alaeron arrived in the vicinity of the Eel, he judged from the dejected figures slumping away from the tavern that the day's allotment of pies had already sold out, which meant the place would be nearly deserted. He ducked inside the salt-stained, dark-timbered building, shutting the ill-hung door behind him. The space inside was absolutely crammed with tables and chairs, all empty, and Alaeron had to pick his way carefully through, moving seats aside to clear a path to reach the bar.

Onionskin leaned there, a glass of some colorless liquid—it could have been any number of pure and powerful spirits, suitable bases for potions and extracts—before him, eyes faraway. He gave every impression of being either an idiot staring vacantly or a philosopher lost in thought.

"Pies are all gone," he said when Alaeron took a seat on a bar stool.

"I am heartbroken," Alaeron said. He'd shared a pie, once, with Skiver, and found it just as good as everyone said, but nonetheless perhaps not worth standing in line for three hours. Really, food was just fuel. "But I've actually come to speak to a man staying here, a Kellid—"

Onionskin grunted. "You're the alchemist, then?"

Always pleased to hear his fame had preceded him, Alaeron nodded.

"He'll know you're here," Onionskin said. "He'll come down when he's ready. A drink while you wait?"

"I'll have whatever you're having."

Onionskin raised one pale eyebrow, shrugged, and reached under the bar for a pitcher, pouring a healthy measure into a cup and passing it over.

Alaeron sipped, bracing himself for the burn of grain alcohol or corn liquor...but it was just cold water. Quite clean-tasting, admittedly, but still not what he'd expected. "Wonderful."

"On the house." Onionskin's voice held no apparent irony.

Alaeron understood intellectually that there were social mores and questions of courtesy and rudeness that many people expended vast amounts of energy in learning to navigate, but he'd always assumed such restrictions applied to other people, and not to himself, because he had better things to do. If he wanted to know something, he always just tried asking first. "What did the Kellid pay you, to get two nights in the most sought-after room in Almas, I presume on rather short notice?"

Onionskin's cheek twitched, though whether it was a tic of annoyance or the barest gesture toward a smile, Alaeron wasn't sure. He then spoke, at greater length and with more erudition than Alaeron would have suspected him capable.

"There is a plant that only grows reliably in one particular place in Numeria. A bush, found nowhere else in the vicinity of the Inner Sea—perhaps nowhere else, period. Some speculate it's a seed that fell from the sky, and that only some strange impurity in the Numerian soil allows it to grow in our world at all. That plant produces yellowish berries, which have a fine flavor on their own, but also have the astonishing property of intensifying, smoothing, and blending the flavors of any other food eaten in the same bite. An ordinary dash of salt can bring out the flavor in nearly any dish, everyone knows that, and this is similar—but oh, so much more powerful. These berries can turn a common bowl of beef stew into a dish men would kill for the chance to taste."

Alaeron leaned forward. "Is that your secret ingredient, then? In your pies?"

The chef snorted. "I don't need magic berries to make my pies, and though I'd heard of the berries for years, I'd never seen or tasted them. Until your friend arrived, bringing a sack full of dried berries—not as good as fresh, but still better than almost anything else—and asking to have my room for a few days. So I told the Taldan ambassador he'd have find someplace else to sleep, though I agreed to let him join me for breakfast to avoid one of those, what are they called—international incidents? No loss. As far as I can tell your Kellid friend doesn't eat."

Alaeron wasn't done talking about the berries, because new reagents were one of the many most interesting things in the world. "Did you use the berries to make today's pies?"

Onionskin waved his hand dismissively. "It would be wasted on the palates of most of my customers. And those few who could truly appreciate the experience would be disappointed in the quality of any pies I made in the future without the berries. I knew a man who consorted with a goddess, once; he said every man and woman he slept with after that was a crushing disappointment. Why do that to my customers? No, the berries are for me. I used half of one for my breakfast today. I'm trying to make them last."

Alaeron didn't say any of the things that leapt to mind—that if the berries truly grew in soil tainted by the strange discharges of the wreckage that fell so long ago from the sky in Numeria, Onionskin might very well become addicted to the berries, or altered in some gross or subtle way. Many of Numeria's elite were addicted to the bizarre drugs that could be found or refined from the leakage of the wreckage, even though the effects could be extremely deleterious. But Onionskin's potential addiction was none of Alaeron's concern. He'd love to get his hands on the berries, though—they might have all sorts of interesting alchemical applications. Perhaps Skiver could arrange for a burglary...

A ghost fell through the ceiling and landed beside Alaeron. The alchemist jumped, startled, but Onionskin merely nodded a greeting at the newcomer.

"Alchemist," the incorporeal barbarian said. "You have a message for my mistress?"

"Yes. Tell her I gladly accept her offer."

The messenger reached into a pouch at his waist and drew forth a small object, which he dropped onto the bar; it landed with a click, becoming solid after leaving his grasp. "Since you have accepted, you may tell her yourself."

Alaeron leaned forward and peered at the thing on the bar, some sort of blue gemstone fixed to a metal needle. "An earring?"

"Put it on," the Kellid said.

Alaeron's hand drifted up to his right earlobe. "Ah, I'm afraid I don't have my ears pierced—"

Onionskin smiled. "Oh, we can fix that." He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bit of potato, a needle, and a cup containing a few chips knocked off a block of ice. Alaeron tried to protest, but Onionskin snapped, "Be still." He rubbed a bit of ice on Alaeron's earlobe, pressed the chunk of potato against the back of the lobe, and then lifted the needle. "Don't worry, alchemist, I dipped the needle in grain alcohol first. It's clean as clean."

Alaeron winced as the needle pushed through his lobe and into the potato, which was probably filthy even if the needle wasn't. The ice wasn't much help, since it just numbed the outside of the lobe, which left plenty of inside to hurt. Onionskin picked up the jewelry in his deft fingers and unscrewed the clutch from the post, then slid the earring into Alaeron's tender new hole and screwed the back on securely again. "There. You'll be the prettiest one at the ball."

"I'm sure it looks very fetching. But why am I supposed to wear this?"

"Say your mistress's name," the Kellid replied.

"She isn't my mistress—I haven't been her apprentice for years—but I suppose you mean Zernebeth—"

"Alaeron, finally." Zernebeth's clipped, impatient voice sounded in his ear, so close she might have been right beside him. "You've accepted my offer, then?"
"Ah, I hear you, but can you hear—"

"Yes, yes," she interrupted. "Your voice sends vibrations through your skull and the earring can interpret those and convey them to me as speech. I'm wearing the twin to your earring here. They are linked by a spell of clairaudience, and will allow us to stay in touch."

"Can you two hear her talking?" he asked.

Onionskin raised that eyebrow again. "I hear you talking to yourself."

"Her voice is audible, but directed into your ear," the Kellid said. "Someone could hear her, if they put their ear close to yours, but it would likely register as a whisper."

"Mmm, interesting," Alaeron said. "Zernebeth, I activated this device by saying your name. How do I deactivate it?"

"You don't. Just assume I'm always listening. I won't be, of course—I have better things to do—but you'll never know when I'm listening or not. Anytime you say my name it will be transmitted to me, however, and open the channel on my end, so you can guarantee my attention that way. That is, if I'm not sleeping, or busy, or not wearing my own earring for some reason, such as indifference. Don't you dare ever remove yours, though."

"A partnership based on mutual trust and respect cannot possibly fail," Alaeron said, with as much irony as he could muster.

"Says the runaway apprentice who left his mistress for dead. How did you like the gift I sent?"

Alaeron felt suddenly uncomfortable talking to her while Onionskin and the messenger looked on, so he lifted a hand to them in a "just a moment" gesture and walked toward a corner of the tavern, sidling around jammed-in chairs and tables. "Ah, it's very interesting. It should make the journey easier."

"I should think so."

"Does the messenger have one of the boxes as well?"

"No. He does not travel by conventional means. In fact, he'll be back in Starfall by tonight."

"Wizardry?" Alaeron said. "A portal of some kind?" Such magics were expensive, though upon reflection there was no reason to think Zernebeth would balk at the price. Captains of the Technic League didn't need to worry about money. Having a whole population to oppress and a whole nation to loot was profitable work.

"Not exactly. We found a device in one of the wrecks that enables the instantaneous transportation of certain materials across a vast distance."

"Ah," Alaeron said. "Given how much the average wizard charges to teleport valuable items in the course of trading, the cost-saving opportunities for an import/export business with a device like that—"

"Are a bit limited, since it doesn't work for distances of fewer than hundreds of miles," Zernebeth interrupted. "It could have applications for long-distance trade, though I don't imagine the caravan masters and sailors who already work in that business would take to such innovations kindly. Knowing that, I've invited several such traders to pay us handsomely to stay out of their business. There are, of course, obvious uses for the device—exile, banishment, disposing of unexpected toxic experimental byproducts, and so on. It's a formidable tool. Alas, there are...side effects...when it's used on living people."

"Such as?" Alaeron was beginning to remember what a pleasure it was to talk over the arcane and the mysterious with Zernebeth. She had a searching and quicksilver sort of mind.

"You haven't noticed? My messenger is partly incorporeal. He didn't start out life that way. The controls on the device aren't perfect, or else we don't understand them completely. We can choose a destination roughly, but precise positioning is difficult. Once, we accidentally sent my messenger into a space occupied by a stone wall. It should have killed him, and possibly destroyed the wall, forcing two forms of physical matter to share the same space, fusing them together or blasting them apart. Instead, the device activated some sort of protective or defensive mechanism, and made my messenger into the ghastly, ghostly creature you see before you. He passed through the wall harmlessly at his destination, but we've been unable to make him solid again. If there's a reverse switch, I haven't found it."

"Mmm. The composition of the transporter device—it involves inubrix, I suppose?" Inubrix was one of the seven known forms of skymetal—far less well known than the "Numerian steel" more properly called adamantine, which was the most common—and had peculiar properties, occasionally passing through solid objects or becoming incorporeal.

"We have not torn the device open to examine its inner workings—destroying something that works perfectly well just to understand it better isn't always necessarily in my best interest. Though if I found another device like it, I might sacrifice that one for knowledge."

Alaeron suppressed a sigh. Zernebeth had a greater sense of inquiry and thirst for knowledge than the average member of the Technic League, but she still cared more about the merely practical than he did. Speaking of the practical..."Why doesn't your apprentice fall straight through the ground? If his body is incorporeal..."

"That is also a subject we're studying. He can control his vertical pitch, rising and falling at will, though he is not very good at expressing himself when we demand to know how. The tools we have to extract information from his brain directly are useless since he doesn't have a physical form we can interact with. If you look closely at his feet, you'll see they hover slightly above the floor, though. He's obviously surrounded by some kind of energy field, but I haven't been able to determine its precise nature or limitations. Some distorting effect that moves him just slightly out of phase with our physical reality, I assume. He can still do useful work, of course. He can pass through the world entirely like a ghost, but, if he wills it, anything he touches—or that enters his energy field, perhaps—becomes intangible to the rest of the world, but tangible to him. So he can still eat and drink, and his piss and shit and other emissions turn solid once they leave his body."

"And he can reach into a man's heart and pull it out through his chest, presumably," Alaeron said.

Zernebeth laughed, rather musically, all things considered. "If a merciful death is called for. Removing the kidneys is an option if we prefer his victims to suffer and die slowly."

"So this fellow is your personal guard and enforcer, then?"

"Mmm. Sort of. He's my new you, Alaeron. My apprentice. His name is Char, and he's even brighter than you were. But his...medical condition...limits his ability to lead the expedition I have in mind for you. My employees and slaves find him too unsettling, and he's more useful to me if he's a figure of mystery and terror anyway. ‘Zernebeth's ghost,' they call him."

"But he can go anywhere, can't he? You could have him walk through the walls in Silver Mount. He could penetrate to the very center, no mystery would be hidden to us—"

"Do you truly think that didn't occur to me?" she said. "It was the first thing I tried when I discovered his condition. Alas, the presence of skymetal interferes with his power. Trying to pass through any known variety gives him blinding agonies. Perhaps it's a security precaution, or merely a coincidental chemical reaction. Fortunately, most of my allies in the League haven't realized Char's limitations, or I'm sure they'd be building walls laced with skymetal to keep him out even now."

"Hmm. Perhaps there's a solution to reversing the process, there. If skymetal is immune to his phasing, then the secret to that immunity might be—"

"It is a problem for another time," Zernebeth interrupted. "As far as that goes, I wouldn't want to reverse the changes in him; though it would be nice if he could turn the incorporeality on and off at will. He misses sex, I suspect. He could engage in such congress, perhaps, bringing at least part of his partner into phase with himself, but it would be very uncomfortable and strange for the young lady or gentlemen so altered, and no one is lining up to be an experimental subject."

"Ah. I see I haven't entirely thought through the—"

"Fantasize on your own time, Alaeron—which you don't have anymore, by the way. Your time is mine now. When do you expect to reach Numeria? I am eager to begin the expedition. While my sources of information about the wreck I want you to pillage are...nontraditional...it's always possible one of the other captains will discover the wreck's whereabouts and launch an expedition of their own."

"I will make all due haste," Alaeron said. "My associate Skiver is going to accompany me—"

"Associate?" she said sharply. "Another alchemist?"

"Ah. No. More of a...businessman."

"Oh, a criminal," Zernebeth said. "Hmm. Just as long as you know I'm not responsible for his health, wealth, or welfare. For that matter, I'm not even responsible for yours. I suppose bringing a bodyguard isn't a bad idea—the River Road hasn't gotten any less dangerous since last time you came, and nowadays you have a lot more to lose if you die on the journey."

"He's not exactly a—"

"Keep me posted on your progress. I'll make preparations for the expedition."

She fell silent, and Alaeron tentatively said, "Ah...goodbye?" but there was no answer. Which didn't mean she wasn't listening, necessarily. He turned back around and gave Onionskin and Char a smile. "Thank you, gentlemen, for your assistance. Char, perhaps I'll see you again in the future—"

"Apostate," Char said. There was no malice in his voice, but there was no warmth, either.

Alaeron blinked. "Ah. The first Kellid who came after me, hoping to drag me back to Numeria, used to call me ‘runaway.' You, too, disapprove of my sudden departure from the League's employ, I take it?"

"I trust Zernebeth," Char said. "I am sure she has some use for you. But you left her for dead. When she returned from the Mount, and was revived, she was taken by a terrible madness. The rest of the League locked her up, unwilling to let her die because of the mysteries her mind might contain. I was sent to care for her, because she was deemed too important to be given over wholly to the care of slaves. I nursed her back to health. I helped build the replacements she designed for her lost limb, and to repair her damaged body, following her instructions. She saw some aptitude in me then, and took me on as her apprentice, and she..." He trailed off. Onionskin gazed at him in open wonder, and Alaeron supposed this was by far the most words Char had spoken in a row to anyone. "I would die for her," he said. "I would kill—I have killed—for her. If she had seen fit to take me with her into Silver Mount, I would not have fled like a terrified youngling and left her alone there in the dark."

"Ah," Alaeron said. "That...is easy to say. You weren't there."

"No," Char said. "You were there, and Zernebeth nearly died because of it. But if she thinks there is some use to be squeezed out of you, I will trust in her wisdom." He stepped toward Alaeron with startling speed—did being incorporeal allow one to move more quickly? There would be less air resistance, presumably, but that wasn't likely to matter when it came to sprinting the mere length of a room—

Char reached out, and his fingers sank into Alaeron's chest. There was an immediate, uncomfortable tingling and stinging sensation, like being swarmed by fire ants. The alchemist swallowed hard, wondering what it would feel like for this man's none-too-clean fingernails to close on his heart. But after a long moment of staring into Alaeron's eyes, the Kellid withdrew his incorporeal hand, gripped now in a fist. "If you ever endanger Zernebeth's life again, I will take out your heart, and show it to you, and you will die watching my teeth bite into the still-beating flesh."

"A very vivid image. You should have been a poet instead of an arcanist." Alaeron reached into his pocket, where among the assorted vials, bits of dried plant matter, and scattered coins, he had a twist of adamantine wire no longer than his pinky finger. He withdrew it and—with, he thought, perfectly creditable speed of his own—jammed the wire into Char's face.

Chapter Five

The Road, Again

The metal wire disappeared in the vicinity of Char's left eye, passing through his incorporeal skin. The Kellid howled and dropped to his knees, clutching his head, and Alaeron dropped with him, keeping the wire in the Kellid's out-of-phase brain. Char tried to pull away, but it was as if the wire were somehow hooked into him, and he wriggled like an eel in a net, unable to escape or phase through the floor to freedom.

Alaeron felt not even the slightest hint of pull or pressure on the metal as Char writhed, his ghostly form snagged on the hook of skymetal. "Interesting," he said. "I suppose you didn't overhear Zernebeth telling me your weakness—that trying to pass through skymetal causes you terrible pain. You could choose to make this metal tangible to you, isn't that right? A bit of solid metal in the brain might end your suffering, but I doubt that's the route you'd prefer to follow. Now, why would Zernebeth tell me your weakness? She isn't the sort to make mistakes, so I'm sure she armed me with that information for a reason. Probably because she knew you were the sort to let his emotions run away with him and make threats against business associates. I think there was probably a test here, and you failed it. Ah, well. We all fall into error sometimes. No reason to dwell on it, though. We do have to work together, after all."

Alaeron withdrew the metal and Char immediately dropped through the floor, out of sight. Sighing, Alaeron put the twist of wire away. It would be very expensive to construct a mail shirt out of skymetal, but he supposed it might be a good investment. Even if he only made every third link skymetal, that would be enough to prevent Char from reaching into his chest again. Perhaps once he got to Numeria, if there were time...

The alchemist hated crass shows of force, which was why he'd felt compelled to respond to Char's threat in kind. To do less than push back as hard as he could would only embolden the incorporeal apprentice to further threats and bluster. The whole conflict was so foolish, just a needless distraction. Why couldn't they move forward in mutual pursuit of forbidden knowledge, without all the petty and annoying emotional games?

Char probably wanted to sleep with Zernebeth, Alaeron mused. It was an impulse he could appreciate, and it was also a classic case of a nurse falling in love with his patient. Now the poor bastard was incorporeal—which at least complicated the possibility of a sexual relationship, if it didn't preclude it entirely—and his object of worship didn't even want to cure him. And, of course, any apprentice would be jealous to see a former student return, and fear usurpation.

Just because Alaeron understood Char's feelings didn't mean he had to be nice about it. Hence the hook in the brain. Skiver would be so proud of him.

∗ ∗ ∗

"I'm so proud of you!" Skiver slapped Alaeron on the back. "Antagonizing a man who could kill you with a flick of his wrist. That's boldness, or maybe foolhardiness, but either way, well done."

"We'll have to keep an eye on Char when we're in Numeria." Alaeron stood gazing at a shelf in his lab, debating whether to take the vial of ooze ichor or the vial of gelatinous slime, and decided to take both; they were small, and he had plenty of room, after all.

"Lucky for us he's not invisible, then. So what's this wonder you were planning to show me?"

"Mmm? Oh, yes. Come and see." Alaeron led his partner to the corner of his lab where the magic box rested—now that he'd determined the box wouldn't explode or turn into a portal for demons, he was willing to activate it inside the house. "Observe." He crouched, pressed the red button, and stood back as the device expanded, watching silently with Skiver.

"Hmm." Skiver walked around the coffin-sized crate once it had finished whirring and clunking into place. "If it were a bit smaller we could slip it into someone's food and then, after they ate it, turn it on—if we had a way to turn it on besides pressing the button, though a punch in the stomach might suffice—and then they would explode as it expanded in their gut. Not as elegant as a knife between the ribs, though I'm sure this box was a lot more difficult to make than a knife."

"It's not a weapon, and I didn't make it. Zernebeth sent it to me. It's a...Here, go inside." Alaeron opened the door and gestured toward the inky blackness within.

"Must I? I knew a fella who was claustrophobic once, a forger who wanted to quit forging, even though many other fine upstanding criminals depended on his work for their livelihood. One of his friends found out he was terrified by small spaces, but it's not like his friends were all that reliable, so word got around. Knowing what he was afraid of made it easy to get him do whatever you wanted—just shove him in a box a bit smaller than this one for a few minutes, with Fat Harald sitting on the lid to keep it closed, and he'd do nearly anything if you'd just let him out. We only wanted him for forgery, but he'd have done murders, arson, all sorts of things outside what you might call his area of expertise. The old box trick worked every time, until he had a heart attack once, and was dead inside when we lifted the lid. Kind of curious how he never got used to the experience, but people are funny that way. After seeing him all curled up in that box, I must admit, I felt a touch of claustrophobia from time to time, afterward."

"I take your point, though you could have given it to me a lot more briefly. Fine, follow me inside—there's room for both of us." Alaeron stepped inside the magic box, and a moment later Skiver did the same.

The thief let out a low whistle as he looked around. "And all this was inside the box when it was small, too?"

Alaeron nodded, taking in the scene with pleasure. He'd decorated the interior of the box with a four-poster bed, a dresser, two armchairs, a few bookshelves, and even a rack of alchemical supplies, including a few compounds too volatile to take on a journey that would entail bouncing on horseback or in carts or on choppy river waters. Alaeron had included the explosive elements only after shrinking the box with furniture inside, shaking the cube vigorously, and expanding it again to find none of the contents had shifted so much as a hairsbreadth. (He'd made chalk marks on the floor, and he measured with calipers, just to be safe, and the configuration of the interior was identical and stable every time. Which didn't mean it always would be, but it was a working theory.) As far as he could tell, nothing moved inside the box unless he moved it. "We can stay in here," he said. "We won't have to pay for inns or sleep in hedges or on the decks of ships—just find a dark bit of forest, or a nice hole in the ground, put in the box, and rest in comfort no matter what the weather or other conditions are like outside. It's like carrying a bit of home with us everywhere. As far as I can tell, the exterior of the box is impregnable, so it should be safe enough."

"Unless we step out and find ourselves ringed 'round with pikemen." Skiver flopped into one of the armchairs. "But at least then we'd have an invincible box to hide inside. I do like it, Alaeron. It's just a shame the box is black. Don't misunderstand, I like a good greasy assassin black, I just think it would look jauntier in a brighter color." He kicked one foot back and forth and gazed up at the distant ceiling and the floating lights. "Of course, you haven't mentioned the possibilities that most interest me about this toy of yours."

"Mmmm?"

"Smuggling leaps to mind. Fill this box with—oh, whatever people in one place want to buy, but aren't allowed to, or can only get from the local price-gouging monopolist. Collapse the box down, hide it at the bottom of a trunk, take it over the border, then open it up, and there you are—you've transported unspeakable quantities of your contraband of choice and opened up lucrative new markets."

Alaeron grimaced. "That hadn't occurred to me. It's dangerous—what if the border guards seize the magic box? It's not exactly replaceable."

Skiver shrugged "That's a possibility anytime you're smuggling, or even if you're not. Any border guard might steal anything at any time, and your box is at risk whether it's filled with crates of relics or not. Sure, I'd lose my property too, but every business has an element of risk."

"I suppose," Alaeron said. "We could use it for looting, too. We're being sent in search of great treasures in Numeria, and being able to fill this, this—"

"Black box?" Skiver offered.

Alaeron nodded. "Yes, this black box, with such wonders, and then easily carry them away, will make everything much easier."

"I knew a fella who had one of those magic bags, the kind that looks like an ordinary sack but can hold heaps of things, big as a room inside somehow, you know, and he used it to do burglaries from time to time, until one day he burgled the wrong people and got shoved inside his own bag. They turned the bag over and shook it out after half an hour and he tumbled out, skin blue, eyes full of burst blood vessels, like he'd been smothered or choked to death. The inside of this box is a lot more hospitable."

"Do you know any fellas who are still alive?" Alaeron asked.

"I'd say it's split about evenly between alive and dead just now, but dead tends to win out over the long run."

"As long as we survive. I'd hate to become one of your stories."

"I'd much rather tell a story than be one. Might as well begin this chapter, though, eh? I was thinking we'd get on our way first thing tomorrow."

"The sooner the better. Adventure awaits."

"Oh, good, another adventure," Skiver said. "Nobody's ever lost their fortune, life, limb, or sanity on one of those."

∗ ∗ ∗

They prepared to depart the next morning, Skiver having acquired a rather nice coach, all lacquered and black, with suspicious scratched patches on the doors where Alaeron suspected a coat-of-arms or family crest had been pried off. Someone had hit a run of bad luck at one of Skiver's gambling tables and settled their account with this conveyance. The carriage didn't come with staff or horses, Alaeron guessed, as the driver was a disreputable-looking woman in a long leather coat the color of drying dog turds, and the four horses were so mismatched and varied in color and size they seemed almost to belong to different species. While Skiver talked horses with the driver (his interest was mostly limited to racing the animals, but the two had enough common and uncommon ground to fuel a spirited discussion), Alaeron fussed around on the roof making sure the luggage was properly stowed. It was a less pressing task than usual, since his explosive compounds were safely packed away in the immovable confines of the black box, itself resting at the bottom of an elaborately trapped and secured backpack he intended to keep on or near his person at all possible times. The bags and trunks on top were mostly for show, so it didn't look like they were setting off on a long journey with no luggage at all; the trunks and bags would also ideally serve to satisfy the larcenous appetites of any bandits, pirates, or highwaymen they encountered along the way, and were accordingly full of shiny but worthless trinkets and clothes of indifferent quality.

All parties finally declared themselves ready to depart, and Skiver and Alaeron clambered into the carriage, which smelled strongly of cloves and old smoke. After an initial bounce as they pulled away from the cobbles in front of Alaeron's house, the ride settled into a smooth one, the springs compensating admirably for the unevenness of the street. Alaeron could think of a few modifications that would make the coach better suited to the journey—for one thing, it would help if it could double as a raft for some of the river crossings...

Skiver snapped his fingers in front of Alaeron's face. "I know that look. Plotting to put a pair of flapping wings on the carriage, to bear us to Numeria like eagles?"

"I don't think that would work. Not flapping wings anyway. But I suppose with a sufficient wingspan we might create something that could glide. I'd want to change the shape of the craft, of course, something more like a rowboat and less like a cart—"

"Joking, joking," Skiver said. "I've had enough of flying machines for one lifetime. Here's the itinerary I've got in mind: we'll take this fine carriage toward the border with Taldor, to the mouth of the Sellen River, where I've got passage on the nicest ship available. I know you think traveling in style is hiking all day and then sleeping in a magic box in the woods, and we could trudge up the River Road with the rest of the crusaders bound for death and glory, but I'd prefer to get to Numeria in more pleasant circumstances."

Alaeron shrugged. He didn't care, really, how they got where they were going. He took his mind with him whether they were on a ship or on a horse or walking on his own two feet, so in the fundamental sense, he was always at home.

Admittedly, long stretches on horseback made his rear end hurt, which did detract from his ability to concentrate.

"I know it's been a few years since you went up that way, and I've never been so far north myself," Skiver went on, "but I hear it's not as treacherous a journey as it used to be, since there are so many high-and-mighty crusaders heading up to the Worldwound to fight the demons and keep the world safe for innocence and purity and all that. Of course, even if the trip isn't quite so perilous anymore, once you get to the north you're likely to die at any moment, but we'll deal with that when we get there." Skiver leaned back and pulled his hat low on his head. "So just relax, exercise your mind, and we'll be in Numeria before you know it."

"Oh, certainly," Alaeron said. "With our shared history of peaceful and pleasant journeys, why would we expect anything but the smoothest of sailing?"

Chapter Six

River Pirates

The vessel that Skiver rented, or chartered, or held part ownership in, or intimidated the captain into loaning him—Alaeron never got a clear understanding of the situation—was a single-masted cog called the North Wind, a name Skiver chose to interpret as a good omen, even after Alaeron pointed out that a wind blowing from the north would naturally push them to the south, which was not the direction they hoped to go. If Alaeron had his way, all ships would have useful names like Quite Fast Medium-Sized River Conveyance Number One Hundred and Sixty-Five.

The ship was mostly weighed down with barrels and crates to be delivered upriver, but the captain had rather lavish quarters and the first mate slightly less lavish ones, and Skiver and Alaeron were given use of those cabins with only the slightest show of displeasure on the parts of their intended occupants. Alaeron would have been happy enough in a cupboard, since he spent his evenings sleeping in the four-poster bed heaped with furs he'd installed in the black box, but the mate's quarters had a door that locked (and quite securely, once Alaeron was done modifying said lock), which helped him relax.

During the long slow days on the wide river, Skiver chatted with the crew and wandered off for a while at every stop to load or unload freight—improbable as it seemed, he appeared to know people at various ports of call. Alaeron asked how he'd come to have so many far-flung friends when he essentially lived within a few square miles in Almas, and Skiver shrugged and winked and said, "A lot of my business involves certain items crossing certain borders, and for that to happen, you have to know people on the other side of the borders. Usually those people come to Almas for our meetings, but I thought I'd pop in and surprise a few on the journey. Gives them a little jolt of the unpredictable, you know, seeing me saunter into their taverns or warehouses or springhouses or cellars. Knowing I can just, poof, appear out of nowhere like that, it keeps them honest—or at least within acceptable parameters of dishonesty. I don't expect perfection. Demanding the thieves who work for me never steal at all would make me—what's the word? You know, like a politician who says he hates liars, or a card sharp who says she hates cheats?"

"A hypocrite," Alaeron said.

Skiver nodded. "Nothing worse than a hypocrite."

Alaeron, who had been pursued by assassins, stalked by strange denizens of ancient tombs, nearly dissolved by ambulatory slimes, and had once narrowly escaped the lair of a sleeping linnorm, thought many things were worse than hypocrites, but he'd grown used to Skiver's rhetorical style of random assertions and didn't bother with a refutation.

The alchemist stayed in his cabin most of the time, sketching designs for devices he might build with the increased access to skymetal he would have in Numeria, and jotting down chemical formulae that he thought would interest Zernebeth, or that would hybridize well with some of the rare solvents and solutions that oozed from Silver Mount and other wreckage from the Rain of Stars. He emerged to eat with Skiver, and often watched the moon shine on the waters—leading to many thoughts about the movement of light in the water, the propagation of waves through air and fluid, and the distance to the heavenly bodies, which interested him more and more in recently years—but he'd done this journey once before, and remembered it well enough to have little interest in the sliding by of the same landscape years later. He lived in his mind, and found the accommodations marvelous.

∗ ∗ ∗

Skiver wasn't having quite so pleasant a trip. Granted, being bored was better than being hungry or terrified, but it was a lot less pleasant than having fun.

On the day of the attack, he sat in his cabin chatting in a desultory way with the captain—a boorish man who told the same stories over and over—and tried not to think about how long they had to go until they reached Numeria.

Skiver was arguing the superiority of Andoren beer over the varieties available in Absalom—not because he necessarily believed it, but just to pass the time—when one of the boys who loaded and unloaded crates burst in, shouting. "Captain, there's a ship moving to intercept us!"

The captain leapt to his feet, swearing, and told the boy to alert the rest of the crew. "Skiver, are you any good in a fight?"

"I mostly have people to do my knifing for me these days, but I might have a blade or two about my person." He patted his body absentmindedly. "Pirates, then, eh? Is it going to come to fighting, you think?"

The captain winced. "It depends. Usually with something like this, it's just a thug who wants a bribe to let you pass—that's all part of the cost of doing business in the River Kingdoms. There's a whole pirate city that operates along one of the river's tributaries, the Dagger, but there are miscellaneous independent operators, too. Piracy is what they have here instead of an economy. There's a law around these parts: ‘You have what you hold.' If you can't hold on to it, why should you get to have it?"

"That's always been my personal philosophy," Skiver mused, "but it seems a peculiar system of government."

The captain grunted. "Ships flying the flag of one of the River Kingdoms get attacked less often—they have the backing of powerful local interests, after all, and wars are bad for business—but foreign traders nearly always have to pay. Or fight, which is often more expensive. The pirates usually want less than it costs to keep a contingent of fighting men on board to repel their attacks, so mostly we just shrug and pay the toll."

"Why not just fly a false flag?" Skiver listened for the ring of steel on steel but didn't hear much of anything except shouting sailors on the upper deck.

The captain frowned. "Because we're not pirates? And because if we were caught running under River Kingdom banners that we didn't have a right to use, we'd risk angering the powers behind those flags, and as much as I love coin, I love my life better."

"Hmm. So when you figured out how much to charge me for riding with you, you took bribes into account, then, and passed the costs along to me?"

The captain, a Taldan with long drooping mustaches and expressive eyebrows, made all the hair on his face waggle in outrage. "Charged you? You're riding for free! And I had to change my route to accommodate you!"

Skiver wrinkled his nose. "I'm giving you a very generous break on the interest you owe, though, and letting you chip away at the principal directly, which is money out of my pocket, isn't it? You said usually it's just a sensible pirate asking for a reasonable bribe—so what else could it be?"

The captain made a face like he'd smelled Chelish cheese. "Most of the pirates are reasonable men—they don't want to destroy the river trade, they just want to feed off it, skim a little without taking too much. But there are some bandits who are more...enthusiastic, or less cultured. They have funny ideas about how to do things. Comes from hearing too many stories, I think, about daring outlaws and bold acts, so they get their hands on a ship and some like-minded idiots and come up to the wild River Kingdoms, where they can be free men, preying on the masses who live like sheep—you know the type."

Skiver nodded. You found that sort trying to join the gangs from time to time, all ambition without sense or skill, convinced they knew best because they were the smartest one in their little gutter back home. Once they got to the big city, they either smartened up or got cut down.

The captain continued. "The daring sorts don't last long—they get hunted down by those sensible pirates I mentioned—but they can do a lot of damage before they're stopped. Ships have been sunk because the captains didn't willingly hand over all the valuables on board, unnecessary murders happen, things like that. Some of those pirates like to make a point about how serious they are by killing someone right away, and when that happens, sometimes it all gets out of hand, you know." He shrugged. "I'll go up on deck and see what's what. With luck, there won't be any need to fight, but...best to be ready."

"I'll lend a hand. Nothing gets my blood pumping like the prospect of spilling someone else's." They went out on deck, and Skiver took in the landscape. Not much help there—forest pressing in on the river from both sides, without any signs of habitation. Skiver figured he could probably roll over the railing and swim to either shore, provided no pirates noticed him. He'd call that his contingency plan.

The ship ahead of them was a smaller, more nimble craft. The pirates had angled to cut across their path, making it impossible to pass, and there were a few figures standing on their deck, at least a couple of them holding bows.

A booming voice emerged from the air, amplified by magic (which also served the purpose of letting their victims know there was some kind of magic-user among the pirates): "Welcome travelers! We are the protectors of this river. Unfortunately, protecting a river is expensive work, so you'll need to help out with our expenses. Drop anchor and we'll send an emissary to negotiate a fair toll." The woman's voice, even distorted by magic, was strangely familiar to Skiver, an accent that was almost Chelish, but not quite.

"Bastards," the captain muttered.

"Now, now," Skiver said. "Some of us bastards are perfectly nice people, and I've known legitimately born daughters who were vicious as river rats."

The captain called for one of his crew to drop anchor. "If we can get through this ‘negotiation' quickly, we can still make our schedule."

Skiver winced. The schedule. The bloody schedule. When Skiver had commandeered—or, rather, negotiated to hire—this ship, he'd imagined it as a private pleasure craft, but the captain had driven a hard bargain, and they had a hold full of cargo, which required slow going, lots of stops to load and unload things, and seemingly endless half-days sitting in port. Alaeron didn't care about the delays—he had his researches, and was happy to sit in his cabin absorbed in thought for twenty hours a day. Skiver was growing hungry for novelty, though. It turned out that lazing around while others did work was less diverting than he'd expected; he needed something to do.

Skiver had entertained himself earlier in the journey by going ashore to terrorize his local contacts, but he didn't have anyone to bother this deep in the River Kingdoms, and he was growing weary of the schedule. He was ready to be in Numeria, to see the wonders and terrors, and to find new and interesting ways to get rich. Watching the nimble pirate craft draw closer as some crewman fumbled with the anchor chain, he envied the bandits their mastery of the river, their ability to go anywhere and do anything, free from the tyranny of a schedule.

As the ships drew closer together, he saw a dark-skinned woman standing on the deck, hands on her hips, wearing crossed swords on her back and a deep red sash around her waist.

A memory clicked into place. That not-quite-Chelish accent—he recognized it. He'd known a woman named Genthia, once, who came from the rebellious jungle colony of Sargava, way off to the southwest, who'd signed on to a pirate crew in the Shackles and then eventually made her way to the Inner Sea. She was more dangerous than a devilfish in the water, and fairly formidable on land, too. They'd met while they were both having an affair with the same man, a lean and easy-smiling fella with wide-ranging appetites and a taste for slumming, and when the beautiful scum dropped them both to marry some minor noblewoman, the two jilted lovers had commiserated over drinks and become fast friends, until Genthia went off to seek her fortune by plundering the fortunes of others.

And she always wore a deep red sash, which she claimed used to be white, until she dipped it in the blood of every man and monster she'd ever killed. Nonsense, of course—blood was a terrible dye, and smelled bad besides—but a good story.

The ships were nearly in hailing distance, now, so Skiver cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "You there! Genthia!"

And the reply came, booming, like the voice of an incredulous god: "Skiver?"

He grinned. Maybe he could escape the tyranny of the grim god Schedule after all.

∗ ∗ ∗

Genthia came aboard with her first mate, who took the North Wind's captain aside to haggle over percentages and proper tribute while Skiver and Genthia exchanged greetings in tones of pleased disbelief. After they embraced (with the customary clatter of dangling swords and knives), they sat on a pair of crates, knees to knees, leaning in and grinning at each other. Finding an old friend in the wilderness was rarer and more precious than finding a lump of gold in the middle of a dusty road.

Skiver caught her up on the recent history of mutual acquaintances—who was dead, who'd tried to move into legitimate business, and, of course, who was sleeping with whom—and then glanced around to make sure the captain was well out of earshot. "So, Genthia...how fast could you get to Numeria?"

"Faster than anyone would ever want to get to Numeria," she said, frowning. "The food is terrible, the weather is dreadful, and it's full of monsters and thieves."

"Oh, well—what's wrong with thieves?"

"The criminals in Numeria are worse, because they're actually the government," she said. "If the Black Sovereign's thugs don't get you, the Technic League's thugs do, and if you managed to avoid them, you'll still run afoul of the unaffiliated locals. Any of them will rob you, and if you put up a fight with the wrong bunch, they'll send you to work in a mine until you die." She shuddered. "Why, is that where you're heading? Whatever for?"

"Got a bit of business to attend to, you know."

She shook her head. "You were always a little too ambitious, Skiver. Why don't you stay here with me, take up a life on the river? It's good work, not too taxing, and even though we're a bit far away from civilization, every imaginable kind of freight comes this way for the river trade, so there's no shortage of luxuries. I've got Osirian spices and Chelish wine back at our camp."

"It's tempting," Skiver admitted, "but I'm not looking for a whole new life. I've got a pretty good situation in Almas. No, this is just a business trip, shouldn't take more than a few weeks of my time, or, at worst, months—but the thing of it is, this slow boat is a dismal sort of travel. Nobody in the crew will play dice with me anymore, even though I made a point of losing two times out of five, and I'm sick of looking at trees slide by. If you'd consent to give my friend and me passage to Numeria, I'd consider it a powerful gesture of friendship."

"Skiver, I'm a pirate captain. My crew doesn't get paid in friendship."

"What if I could make it worth your while?"

She snorted. "You'd still be asking me to take honest pay for honest work, and that's also not how pirates prefer to operate. If we wanted to ferry passengers to and fro, we wouldn't carry so many swords." Just then her mate came over to confer with her, and they spoke in low voices for a few moments, and then the mate returned to give the captain the bad news. "No, it was a pleasure to see you, old friend, but you'd best keep riding this slow pig of a ship—"

"What if you gave me a ride in exchange for a chance at some truly first-rate plunder?" Skiver said.

She looked around. "What, on this tub? My mate's looked over the manifests, and there's nothing in the cargo hold I need here—dried meat and barrels of beer? I've got better of both in camp already. Oh, I'll take some, it's the principle of the thing, but—"

Skiver shook his head. "I've been chatting with the captain, and I know that once he gets to Chesed, he's going to buy up a load of relics from Numeria to smuggle down south for some of the collectors there."

She frowned. "Thanks for the information, Skiver, and maybe we'll keep an eye out to hit the ship on its way back, but the relics that get sold out of Numeria are mostly fakes or junk. I don't think tipping me off to some dubious loot is worth a free ride to a place I'd never willingly go—"

He sighed. "Would I waste your time, Genthia? The captain isn't buying those relics, fake or not, with dried meat and bad beer, you know. He's got gemstones, a nice big bag of them. How'd you like to get your hands on those?"

Genthia stroked her chin. "Usually we just take the toll—we don't want to stop the captain from plying his trade on our river in the future, you know. It's never good to bleed a mark dry. You take a little, let them replenish, and then take a little more. But...your captain didn't mention any gemstones when he disclosed the contents of his ship. If he had, we'd have taken a tiny percentage, but since he didn't, and tried to keep it a secret..."

"He deserves to be punished," Skiver agreed. "Sometimes, you have to make an example, to teach future victims not to misbehave."

Genthia rose, removed her red sash, and waved it at her ship. Almost immediately, a small craft hit the water, filled with an especially vicious-looking bunch of river pirates. She tied the sash back around her waist, turned, and called out to the captain: "You've been holding out on us."

The captain walked over, trying to strut and stand tall, but he cut his eyes nervously toward the approaching boarding party. His crew sort of faded away, ducking behind heaps of crates or vanishing down to the hold. "What do you mean? We've negotiated an acceptable price—"

"The jewels," Genthia said. "You shouldn't have tried to hide them. Now I'll have to take them all."

The captain glanced at Skiver. "I—there are no jewels, I don't know what—"

"Sorry, captain. I may have let the news slip. Inadvertently, like," Skiver said.

The captain's mustaches trembled. "You—you scum! I gave you passage, I took you on board—"

Skiver shrugged. "Couldn't be helped. Genthia here's an old friend of mine. Honor among thieves, and all that. Or not honor, but, well, you know."

"I'll have you cut into fish bait!" the captain roared.

"Ah. I won't be continuing on the journey with you after what you might call the aforementioned betrayal, obviously. That would be rude, even for me. I'll tell you what, though—consider your debt to my organization totally discharged. Call it even, eh?"

The captain clenched his hands into fists. "I didn't owe you that much—"

"If it consoles you," Skiver said, "I was going to crack open your lockbox and steal the gems myself before I disembarked, so really, you haven't actually lost anything."

The river pirates boarded the North Wind and spread out across the deck, slouching with lazy menace.

The captain hung his head. "Fine," he spat. "The strongbox is under the bed in my quarters."

"True," Skiver said, nodding to Genthia. "He's got it bolted to a steel plate sunk into the deck, so no one can cut a hole from below and run off with the box. Nobody can just pick it up and run away and crack it open at their leisure, either. There's a nice little bag of stones in there."

The captain took a key from his pocket and flung it at Genthia, who deftly snatched it from the air. "Take it, and begone."

"We'll also want the strongbox hidden in the first mate's cabin." Skiver grinned when the captain went pale. "You know, the one in that hollow space in the rafter, with the nice big bag of stones?"

"How—how did you—"

Skiver touched the side of his long nose. "I've got a way of sniffing these things out. The mate didn't even know it was there, did he? That's the bag of jewels you want, Genthia—the ones in the captain's cabin are mostly just paste."

"You really should have become a pirate, Skiver." Genthia clapped him on the shoulder.

"Eh, boats," he said, and let that suffice for an answer. "Let's go down to the mate's cabin. My partner Alaeron is in there, so it shouldn't be any trouble getting in."

"You mentioned him. When you say...partner?" She flickered her tongue at him and wiggled her eyebrows.

Skiver snorted. "Ha. Not even. He doesn't like men, not that I'd necessarily cozy up to him even if he did—he'd get distracted halfway through, and anyway I'd get ink stains all over me. No, Alaeron prefers women, when he stops a minute to think about them, but mostly he loves his bottles and books and concoctions. He's an alchemist, one of those scholarly types. He'll be coming along with me on your lovely fast ship there."

"A thief and a thinker, off to Numeria? My, my. Won't you two get yourselves into trouble."

"Nah, our troubles are over. Smooth sailing from here on out, isn't that what you seafaring types always say?"

Chapter Seven

The Sea Snake

The door's locked." Genthia pounded again on the entrance to Alaeron's cabin. "Is he dead in there?"

Skiver regarded the solid slab of door to the mate's cabin thoughtfully. "Ah. Probably not dead."

"Deaf, then?"

"He's got tolerably good hearing, as far as I know."

"Is he an incredibly deep sleeper?"

"He's an incredibly deep thinker, mainly. And he's been known to get so caught up in his work that you could scream in his ear and the most he'd do is maybe sort of blink, look at you for a moment, and then go back to it. I've had whole conversations with him looking right at me, and he didn't hear a single word." Skiver didn't mention that Alaeron sometimes also imbibed certain substances that helped his concentration—and enabled him to go days without sleeping. They made him even more focused than usual, and if he was riding high on the effects of such a potion, the ship could probably sink without him noticing until his parchment got wet. "I'd try to pick the lock, but it's probably barred, or otherwise protected. Alaeron gets a little...nervous...about some of his special apparatuses and such, and he usually makes security a priority, so it could take me a while—"

"Don't worry," Genthia said. "I've got a key that will open any door."

"Magic?" Skiver said.

"In a way," she said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Because of his antisocial tendencies, and also because of all the drugs he was using, Alaeron didn't realize anything was amiss until the head of an axe came smashing through the upper half of his cabin door. He'd been vaguely aware of shouting and thumping and the odd splash for a while, but such sounds weren't unheard of on the ship—the captain had a tendency to hurl crew members who disappointed him over the side, though he almost always let them back on board again after a few minutes.

This intrusion into his personal space was annoying, however, and Alaeron turned around on the wooden bench to look at the door, frowning. He hadn't slept in three days, and that tended to put him in an ill temper, though it also allowed his mind to make impressive intuitive leaps, so it was a fair trade-off. He felt he was very close to figuring out the mechanism by which the black box expanded and collapsed, and if he could master that technology, he could make all sorts of things, from canoes that folded up and fit in a backpack to shields that collapsed small enough to fit in a pocket—

The axe tore free of the wood, then came slamming down again, taking out another chunk of the door.

There were axes on the ship, of course, but they were mundane things, hatchets and the like designed for hewing wood or chopping through heavy ropes—tools, rather than weapons. The head of this axe was curved, covered in elaborate scrollwork, and rather pitted and tarnished. A nice weapon wielded by someone who didn't take proper care of it.

Bandits, then. But since they were on a river, the particular flavor of bandits was probably pirates. So this ship—what was it called, the Ill Wind?—was under attack, and the attackers weren't content with plundering the rest of the ship, oh no, they had to bother Alaeron. Ah, well. Pirates were not renowned for their good sense.

The alchemist had a few options available to him. He could let the pirates in and see what they wanted; that one didn't appeal much, since they probably wanted pillage, and would either kill him and take his possessions, or just knock him down and take his possessions, both of which resulted in him losing his possessions. No good. He could activate the magic box and hide inside it, but he'd have to poke his head out eventually, and when he did, there was a good chance he'd be in a pirate lair, or at the bottom of the river, or surrounded by curious men with large weapons.

Or he could kill all the pirates, save the ship, and continue his journey, ideally with a minimum of fuss and delay.

"Bother," Alaeron muttered. He swept together the papers he'd been working on and placed them in a neat pile, then opened his bag to consider his bombs, acids, and extracts as the axe fell against the door again and again. He lifted out a small vial with a wax stopper, marked with the imprint of a jagged tooth. Hmm. Using that one would ruin the door—

The axe came down again, this time tearing open a hole big enough for Alaeron to see the face of a pirate with a scar across his long face, smiling and showing off teeth of silver and gold.

Ah, well, the door was pretty well destroyed anyway. Alaeron uncapped the extract and tossed it back.

∗ ∗ ∗

"He's awake in there," Genthia's first mate, who went by the name Bugbear for some reason, held an axe that Genthia assured Skiver was magical—"Never loses its edge, and cuts through stone nearly as easily as wood, not that it did the man we stole it from much good."

Bugbear peered into the cabin where Alaeron was locked away. "He's drinking something. Hope he brought enough to share."

"Oh no," Skiver said. "Don't—"

But Bugbear didn't hear, or else didn't listen, and he swung the axe again, knocking the hole in the door even wider. Then he grunted, and the axe was jerked roughly out of his hands, disappearing through the crack in the door, leaving Bugbear gaping. "He's—he's—"

The hardened river rat screamed and turned and ran down the corridor.

"Oh dear." Skiver shook his head. "I should have warned you. Genthia, love, you'd better go on up—"

"What happened? Did your friend just take the axe away? Why did Bugbear scream like—"

A strong smell, like the musk of a large animal, drifted out of the cabin. A low, growling noise came along with it. Skiver took a few steps back. Best not to be too close to the door. "Questions later, Genthia, but for now—"

The cabin door burst off its hinges, sending jagged splinters of wood flying. The figure in Alaeron's cabin was so hulking it could barely fit through the doorway, and when it shouldered through, the doorjamb splintered and cracked. The monster resembled Alaeron, more or less, but it was hairier, bulkier, red-eyed, with fangs crowding its mouth, fingernails grown out to ragged claws, and muscles on top of muscles. The monster held the axe in one hand, and the weapon seemed the size of a toy in his grip.

"Gods, he's a werewolf!" Genthia fumbled for a sword on her back, but had trouble drawing it over her shoulder in the low-ceilinged corridor. "A werebear!"

Skiver shook his head. "Just an alchemist. He drank something, what's it called, a mutagen? Makes him a bit...beastly." Alaeron must have refined this potion since the last time Skiver saw him take it—he was far bigger and nastier this time around. Skiver wondered if he was stupider than last time, too, since Alaeron had told him the increase in strength and savagery came at the cost of his higher functions.

The thief stepped forward, tentatively, and raised up both his hands. "Alaeron, old son, it's only just me, your friend Skiver, right?"

Alaeron growled, hunched, and pounded his hairy fists against the floor. He caught sight of Genthia and snarled. Was it the red of her sash, infuriating the beast within Alaeron?

"Don't run," Skiver called over his shoulder. "He might chase you, just by instinct."

"As if I'd run." Genthia had managed to get both her swords unlimbered, and held them at the ready.

"Now, now, no need to let things spin out of control!" Skiver took another step toward Alaeron, though it made him as nervous as walking up to a bear in a fighting pit. "Come on, now, it's me, your partner. Sorry about the axe and all—we knocked, but you were deep in your studies, you see. This nice lady—" Genthia said "Ha!" and Skiver glared at her. "She's an old friend of mine, she's going to help us get to Numeria. You remember, Numeria, yeah?"

Alaeron lifted one of his enormous hands—more like a paw—and Skiver braced himself for a slap or a swipe, but instead the monster absentmindedly scratched his nose, a gesture that was familiar from the alchemist's human form. "Skiver?" Alaeron's voice was like a growl through a mouthful of broken glass, but was just comprehensible. "Do I need to kill anyone?"

"Not just now, my friend."

"Oh." The beast-man shrugged. "I can go back to work?"

"Maybe better let the mutagen wear off before you work on anything that requires heavy thinking, yeah?"

Slowly, the beast nodded. "Oh. Yes. Right. I'm very tired."

"Yes, well, I've told you about taking that stuff that keeps you up all night, it catches up with you. You have to sleep sometimes."

"Mmm." Alaeron curled up in the corridor like a great hound, head resting on his forelimbs, and closed his eyes.

Skiver exhaled. "All right, then. Shall we get the gems before he wakes up? And I'll pack his things."

"You want me to let that creature on my ship?" Genthia said.

"Of course. He's not usually so monsterish. Normally he's very mild."

"If he breaks anything of mine, you're paying for it," the pirate captain said, and followed Skiver into the cabin.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Wait, so we're traveling with the pirates now?" Alaeron had awakened from his nap naked in the corridor, with Skiver in the cabin packing up his things. The alchemist felt somewhat refreshed, but mostly just disoriented.

"Probably for the best, since you broke part of this ship. Genthia's an old friend of mine, she'll see us to Numeria faster than this old wreck."

"Oh." Alaeron nodded slowly. "I didn't kill any of her pirates, did I?"

"If you had, you'd know it, because you'd be cut up into a lot of pieces, you see, all bobbing around in the river."

"Oh. Good, good. Sorry about all that. I was just...the axe startled me."

"Axes have a way of doing that. I think the pirates have a healthy respect for you now, at least."

"Will I have my own room on their ship?" the alchemist asked.

"We'll make that a point of negotiation," Skiver said.

"This fine vessel is the Sea Snake." Genthia stood on a raised section of the deck with Alaeron and Skiver, gesturing proudly at the long, sleek craft, riding low in the water. The North Wind had been left far behind, the curses and dire threats from the captain gradually fading to inaudibility, and the pirate ship was skimming along the water at speed.

"Sea Snake, eh?" Skiver looked around, nodding appreciatively. "Lovely, has a nice ring."

Alaeron wondered why it was called the "sea" anything when they were on a freshwater river, but ships were named all sorts of strange things. He'd been on a ship once called A Song of Stone even though it was actually made sensibly of wood and rope and metal and canvas. A stone ship would sink, probably, though the issue of course wasn't really weight, but density and surface area, so if you made it properly—

"I named her the Sea Snake because she's slippery as an eel, and has a worse bite." Genthia winked.

As so often happened, Alaeron's mouth began spilling out words before he'd even willed it to open. "But eels aren't snakes."

Genthia swiveled her head, turning a beam of high-intensity scorn on Alaeron. "Of course they're snakes. They don't have any arms or legs, do they?"

"If a lack of arms and legs was all it took to make a snake, any man could be turned into a snake with a few strokes of a sword," Alaeron said. "When in fact it takes, at minimum, a rather skilled wizard to enact such a transformation, and the effect is seldom permanent. I suppose given time and the proper materials I could make a potion to—"

"What's an eel, then, if it's not a snake?" Bugbear was clearly determined to overcome his abject terror of Alaeron by being loud and aggressive instead of cowed and absent. "Some kind of lizard?"

"It...it's a fish," Alaeron said. "It breathes water, through gills or through its skin. Snakes, even water snakes, only breathe air, and lack gills. Admittedly, some eels are amphibious, capable of brief forays onto land, but they all breathe water. There are some other fascinating internal distances between snakes and eels, if you dissect them, regarding the number of chambers in their hearts..." Alaeron felt perhaps he was entering overly specialized territory, and trailed off.

"So if we cut off your arms and legs and threw you in the water," Genthia said, in the tone of someone pondering a great mystery, "and kept you from breathing air...would that make you an eel, then? Or would we have to subtract a few chambers from your heart first?"

"Alaeron can't help himself." Skiver's tone was soothing. "The other day I was showing him my new knife and I told him it was a stiletto, and he said calling it a stiletto was practically as vague as calling it a dagger, and that to be specific it was a cruciform rondel, having four cutting edges designed to inflict terrible damage with every thrust, and I just nodded at him like I'd learned something. A minute later he wandered off to draw sketches of spring-loaded knives and everything was fine. That's usually how it happens."

"I still can't help feeling like he's insulting my ship," Genthia said. "Calling it a fish and all."

"I didn't say that—and even if I did say that, fish are good swimmers, so why is it an insult to—" Alaeron went silent at a glare from Skiver.

"Alaeron," his friend—increasingly it looked like his only friend on this craft—said. "Remember what I told you about how to behave after you've given offense?"

Alaeron brightened. Of course—the formula. It seemed silly and pointless, but Skiver said it worked more often than not. He half-bowed to Genthia. "I sincerely apologize. I was in the wrong, and will do my best to avoid making that mistake in the future."

"Hmph." Genthia crossed her arms, unmoved.

"Better go with Variation Three," Skiver said sagely.

There were variations Alaeron had learned for times when a simple verbal apology failed. Variation One involved offering a bribe in the form of coin; Variation Two involved kicking out the aggressor's knee and running away; and Variation Three...

Alaeron rummaged in his bag and removed a large bottle etched with skulls and little pictograms of dead people with X-ed out eyes. "Would you like a drink? Of this? Which I offer by way of demonstrating the sincerity of my apology?"

"Variation Three is offering me poison?" Genthia said.

"Ah. No. It's just in a bottle marked poison so that no one will try to drink it. It's actually a liquor I distilled myself, with Skiver's input—"

"Goes down like a silky dream, but it'll knock you flat in three glasses," Skiver said. "Small glasses, at that. You should see how clean the still he uses to make this stuff is. You could use bits of it for your wedding china."

"You drink it first." Genthia glared at them both. "You too, Skiver."

"You wound me, Genthia. As if I'd kill you. I don't even know how to sail! But fine, it's no hardship to sip this nectar."

"You'd better provide the cups," Alaeron said. "I have some, but if we did plan treachery, it would be easy just to poison the cups we gave you rather than the whole bottle—"

"Stop helping, Alaeron." Skiver accepted the small wooden cups from the first mate, eyeing them thoughtfully. "This stuff probably won't dissolve the wood, but drink fast just to be sure, eh?"

Alaeron poured out shots, and tossed his back at the same moment Skiver did. As always, Alaeron failed to see the point; alcohol made one slightly stupider while making one feel far smarter, and it slowed the reflexes, and in quantities too large it acted very much like the poison it was—to a certain extent, the markings on the bottle weren't even a lie. Anyone who drank a significant portion of the bottle in a sitting probably wouldn't be waking up the next day. Alaeron could brew substances that created far more interesting effects—ones that produced visions, or provided superhuman speed and agility—but so many people were content with a drink made from the fermented sugars of various forms of vegetable matter. Skiver swore by this bespoke liquor's value and potency, though, and when the pirates decided there was no treachery and accepted pours of their own, they were suitably impressed, too, and demanded refills all around. Soon they were sitting companionably on the ship as one surly, sober pirate manned the tiller.

Genthia gestured with her cup. "If you keep this in a bottle marked up to look like poison, what do you keep your poison in?"

"Plain bottles that look like almost all my other bottles, but with tiny markings on the sides or on the corks that I can feel with my fingertips in the dark," Alaeron said truthfully. Genthia looked troubled, so he added, "But I'm not a poisoner! No, no, no. I can't remember the last time I poisoned anyone. I just sell the stuff."

"He makes a nice venom." Skiver, two cups in, was clearly feeling beneficent and expansive. Alaeron didn't point out that in order to be venom a substance technically had to be injected, either by a needle or a fang or a claw or a blade, while substances that killed when ingested were more properly termed simply ‘poisons.' Fortunately he'd learned his lesson about excessive specificity—at least temporarily—from the eel-versus-snake conversation, and chose not to go down that road again, but simply to nod his head modestly, taking the compliment.

Skiver went on. "I've got blades doctored up by his art that can paralyze a man, or make him fall asleep with the barest brush of the edge. He knows how to make nastier things, but usually doesn't."

"Morals, eh?" Genthia said. "In the River Kingdoms those are as useful as wings on a frog."

Alaeron declined to comment on the self-evident uses that frogs could certainly find for wings, given the opportunity. It wasn't really morals, either. What people did with the poisons he made was hardly his concern. The more straightforward killing toxins were just less interesting to concoct.

"As charming as the River Kingdoms are," Skiver said, "we're not going to be here long, if your ship's as fast as you say it is."

"Oh, yes." Genthia took another sip from her cup. "That's right. You're bound for Numeria. A place positively famed for its morals."

Chapter Eight

Night's Numerian Shore

They spent the evening at the pirate camp, a cheerful place tucked away on a wooded island in the center of a broad branch of the Sellen. Skiver donated most of the luggage they'd brought for show to the pirates, as a thank you, he said, though really it was because they needed to start traveling more lightly from here on out.

Alaeron was introduced to assorted pirates and forgot all their names, except for a balding, stick-thin priest called Cantor, who seemed to be either in a constant state of divine bliss or riding the wave of some pleasant intoxication. While they sat around the fire eating bowls of barely cooked fish and warm rice, Alaeron eased himself a little closer to the priest. "Were you the one who worked the spell to amplify the captain's voice during the raid?"

Cantor tilted his head as if listening to distant music and said, "Oh, yes, lending Genthia the voice of a god. I do many things for my people. I bring swift winds, and smooth waters, and keep the insects away. Oh, and healing, when someone gets a sword in the face or..." He waved his hands vaguely. "What have you."

Alaeron found priests and oracles less interesting than wizards—wizards had spellbooks, and given time, Alaeron could study those books and learn to create extracts that could more or less replicate many of their spells, while priests just...thought really hard, or sat still and didn't think at all, or gazed heavenward and babbled, and somehow made magical things happen. They could work impressive feats, no doubt, but Alaeron didn't think he'd enjoy being a priest. For one thing, they were utterly beholden to their gods—all the power any cleric had was borrowed, and in a sense, they were just employees of some divine taskmaster. When the great god Aroden had died, even his mightiest priests had been stripped of their powers and forced to either convert to new faiths or turn back into ordinary folk, with no special abilities beyond accepting tribute and offering moral instruction. It would be like waking up one day and discovering all your potions and extracts had turned to plain water, and losing all knowledge of how to create more. How horrible!

Still, Alaeron was to some extent interested in everything, so he said, "If you don't mind me asking, which god do you serve?"

"Oh, he's done it now," Genthia said from the next log over. She elbowed Skiver. "He's going to get Cantor started. Hope you're ready to be converted, alchemist."

"I do not proselytize," Cantor said with great dignity. "The truth of my god is self-evident, and any who choose to open their eyes and see will inevitably join its cause. Those who do not..." He shrugged. "They select their fate."

"Cantor worships the Divine Ass," Genthia said. She cackled.

"Don't we all," Skiver muttered.

"I revere the Holy Fundament," the priest said with exaggerated dignity. He lifted his hands and sketched a broad, round shape in the air. "This world on which we scurry and scuttle is the hind parts of the one true god, who squats over the great latrine of the heavens, preparing to empty his bowels endlessly into the night sky, at last quenching the fires of the stars. The first tremblings of his great movement have already begun."

"He's talking about the Worldwound," Genthia said. "He says it's the puckered asshole of the Holy Fundament, and all the demons pouring out of it are the first dribbles of cosmic shit, the trickles that herald the flood."

"Hrm," Alaeron said. "I've seen drawings of the Worldwound, based on observations taken from the air, and it does bear a certain resemblance to, ah..."

"The biggest rectum in the world, yeah, I know." Genthia shook her head. "Which only goes to reinforce my holy friend's unique worldview. The bizarre thing is, his spells work, even though he's worshiping a deity he invented after drinking a bottle of solvent and eating too many funny mushrooms. I figure there must be some god of trickery and chaos who amuses herself by granting the Ass-Father's prayers."

"Fascinating!" Alaeron drummed his fingers on his knee, thinking back over the various strange texts he'd read over the years. "I wonder which god it could be...the Lantern King seems obvious, but I think his influence on the mortal realm is limited—"

"Your words are merely the shadow of the Holy Fundament's passing wind," the priest said, sadly. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to perform my nightly sacrament." He rose and disappeared into the dark.

"He means," Genthia said, "that he's going to take a shit."

"That's a holy man who has his priorities straight," Skiver said.

∗ ∗ ∗

They set out the next morning with a small crew, just Genthia, Bugbear, Cantor, and a couple of armed pirates who were feeling stir-crazy and wanted an outing. "You're bound for the capital city, Starfall," Genthia said, "which isn't a place you can reach by water, even if I wanted to go there, which I don't. So I think I'll drop you off, oh...not far from Iadenveigh. It's a booming metropolis by local standards, so you can find someone to sell you horses, or at least some provisions for your walk to the capital."

"We'll manage," Skiver said.

"Iadenveigh." Alaeron shook his head. "It's not the most...welcoming place, for someone like me. Worshipers of Erastil, you know, huntsmen and trappers and foresters, suspicious of outsiders. They can take or leave magic, but when it comes to strange relics they can be positively zealous in their disapproval. Not overly fond of alchemists, either. And they truly despise the Technic League. I can't say I blame them—the League is objectively terrible—but..."

"Right," Skiver said. "Best not mention our true purpose, then."

"This Technic League, they're the Black Sovereign's advisers, yeah?" Genthia said. "I've never ventured too far off the river in Numeria—been up to Chesed once or twice for trading, but the interior is pretty well a mystery to me. Still, you hear stories..."

"Not exactly," Alaeron said. "It's better to think of the League as the Sovereign's allies than as his counselors. They're powerful in their own right, not directly subject to the Sovereign's authority or will, and they pursue their own interests and researches without interference. At the same time, they do make an effort to keep the Sovereign happy, because if he wanted to, he could rally his warriors and root them out—or at least give them a war that would be devastating for both sides. So the League helps the Sovereign when he needs it, and supply him with treasure and...other things." Those other things were bizarre drugs, mainly. Alaeron was himself a great believer in better living through chemistry, but the Sovereign had by all accounts been under the constant influence of some bizarre chemical or another for literally years now. Nevertheless, he remained a formidable man, still in possession of his legendary will and strength, even if his once-great ambitions to unify the north had been reduced in scope to merely dominating the narrow world of the debauched court at Starfall.

"So why do the common people hate the League?" Genthia asked.

"The Technic League doesn't tend to put the needs of the Numerian people first," Alaeron said at last. "The Sovereign's people handle the running of the country, so when the League comes along, it's never to do anything good. They're not well liked within Numeria as a whole, but Iadenveigh is in more or less open rebellion against the League. We have certain relics in our possession that would cause us a great deal of trouble if they're noticed in Iadenveigh."

"Terrible place, bad memories, understood," Skiver said.

Alaeron shook his head. "Oh, quite the contrary. When I left Numeria I'd, ah, had some trouble with the League—"

"He killed one of their captains, or something," Skiver half-whispered to Genthia.

"—and the League was pursuing me. I fled to Iadenveigh when I made my escape, knowing the League wouldn't immediately follow me there, at least not without making preparations first. The locals had heard about the Technic League casualties I inflicted, and mistook me for a sympathizer with their cause. They gave me aid and comfort, and helped smuggle me down the river to freedom. I even have friends there, of a sort. But not friends who would be delighted to know I was coming back to work with the League again, so we'd best be subtle."

"I do love making new friends." Skiver spun a coin across the backs of his fingers. "We'll come up with a plausible cover story."

∗ ∗ ∗

"We're here to infiltrate the League in order to destroy it." Skiver took a deep draught of some horrible beer-like substance made from wood mushrooms and whatever mutant wild yeast rode the breezes of Numeria.

Alaeron's old friend—or, at least, onetime co-conspirator—Redfang threw his head back and laughed, showing off the crimson-colored teeth that gave him his name. He always looked like he'd just ripped out someone's throat, and there were various stories about the origin of his strange smile, but Alaeron suspected he'd just drunk from a stream contaminated by some of Numeria's myriad wreckage and been forever stained as a result. He had a great mane of reddish hair, too, and enough beard to carpet a fair-sized parlor, and was dressed in the same muted greens and brown bits of leather that most of the other denizens of the town wore.

The three of them sat companionably in a corner of Iadenveigh's central lodge, a sort of combination tavern, community center, and fortification. It was a smoky, dark space, made of heavy timbers, but managed to feel spacious for all that, with high ceilings and open windows (though there were thick wooden shutters that could be dropped in case the place needed to be made more secure). The walls were decorated with the mounted heads of stuffed trophy animals, most impressively large but otherwise unremarkable, except for a few mutated versions of ordinary animals: a hugely antlered deer with a nest of tentacles where its mouth should have been, a wolf with dangling eyestalks, and a river crocodile with bright feathers sprouting in profusion from its head. There was also a four-foot-long river fish of some sort, with baby-sized forelimbs ending in perfectly formed humanoid hands where its front fins should have been.

"Last I heard, you were on the run from the League." Redfang drank from a clay mug and smacked his lips. "Now you're off to wage war against them?"

"War might be putting it a bit too strongly," Skiver said. "Y'see, Alaeron's promised to buy his way back in to the League's good graces. He's got this story about how he did some researches and discovered the location of a secret cache of relics, and he's got all sorts of maps and charts and diaries from dead explorers and such to make it look plausible. But when he gets in to see the League leaders, he's going to spring a trap—"

"Strictly magical," Alaeron interrupted. He wished Skiver had run this particular avenue of deception past him first. He was treading on dangerous territory. Redfang was fond of Alaeron, and respected enough in the town for that fondness to extend an aura of general protection to the outsiders, but even a whiff of the technomantic arts could lead to a sudden shift in tone, and the two newcomers could easily find themselves the subjects of a show trial that would end with the two of them fed to a bear, or given some other appropriately rustic form of execution. "It's just a combination of two potions that should never be combined, the same way you should never mix bleach and ammonia, because it creates toxic gas. But in this case, it's far more destructive than gas."

"Alaeron made a sort of bomb, right, only it looks pretty much like a jar with two chambers inside, and when he throws the jar at the feet of the League captains, it'll break and the two potions will mix together, and then...What you want to do is picture a sinkhole." Skiver waved his mug in a vague circle. "Only it's a sinkhole that opens up in the air, and then all the Technic League assholes fall inside it, and then the hole closes, and there's nothing left behind but their stink. Neatly done, eh?"

Alaeron had no idea how he'd go about making a bomb that would actually do that, though it wasn't a terrible description of what would happen if a wizard dropped one extradimensional space (say, a magically capacious bag that was bigger on the inside) into another (say, a portal to a pocket dimension). Alaeron briefly pondered the possibility of weaponizing such a combination, before deciding that some experiments were too dangerous even for him.

"Bold, very bold." Redfang nodded appreciatively. "Will this bomb destroy their devilish machines as well?"

"All in the vicinity," Skiver said. "For the rest, well, we'll see what can be done with fire and acid and such."

"You'll likely be killed by the League's guards, or their assassins, or those terrible metal men they dug up out of their double-damned silver mountain. But you'll be dying for a worthy cause, and what more can a man ask for?"

"Winning a worthy cause would be pretty nice," Skiver said. "That's what I'm hoping happens."

"We'll help send you on your way well provisioned," Redfang said. "You want to make a start tomorrow?"

"That would be—" Alaeron began, when a voice spoke sharply in his ear.

"Where are you now?" It was Zernebeth's voice—impatient, icy, and perpetually disappointed. (And why did Alaeron find that tone strangely arousing?)

Redfang and Skiver were looking at him curiously. Skiver elbowed the hunter and said, "He's gone off into one of his little mental diversions."

"Oh, sure, he had that way about him when last we met, mind always a thousand miles away." Redfang nodded, but he was looking at Alaeron with those sharp, hawklike eyes.

"Report!" Zernebeth barked. Alaeron could have excused himself and mumbled to Zernebeth in some more private corner of the town, but would a sudden departure draw more attention to his strange behavior?

"Iadenveigh seems to have prospered since I was here last," he said.

"Oh, you can't speak freely," Zernebeth said. "Hmm. Iadenveigh! What would possess you to go there?"

Alaeron lifted his mug, sloshing a bit of the untasted liquid across his knuckles in the process. "It's a pleasure to reunite with old friends."

"True friends are rare as honest traders," Redfang said, and Alaeron wondered if there was some subtle threat, warning, or indication of doubt there.

"Ha." Zernebeth snorted. "I wondered how you evaded the League operatives sent to retrieve you after my unfortunate demise. I see you made friends among the malcontents. I've often thought we should send a few of our fire-spitting technic spiders to cleanse the whole place, but it's useful to have the backward-looking superstitious fish-gutters and tree-fellers all more or less in one place. Fine. When do you depart for Starfall?"

"I think, yes, leaving in the morning, don't you, Skiver?"

Skiver held out his hand, which wobbled ever so slightly. "Once I'm clear of the hangover, certainly. How long is the journey?"

Redfang shrugged. "A hundred miles. I could walk it in four days, if I ever had cause to go near that godsforsaken city. You two...no offense, but you are city folk...I'd give it twelve days. Maybe two weeks."

"I don't suppose there are any horses to be had?" Alaeron said. "We can pay."

The hunter winced. "You'd have a hard time finding anyone willing to part with live horseflesh just at this particular moment. Old Skelton the hostler was digging a new well on his property, and he breached some kind of shell or pot or something, probably from the Rain of Stars. This horrible black smoke came pouring out—it flowed almost like water, and shimmered with all kinds of ugly rainbows. Whatever it was, it poisoned Skelton and every animal on his property. After that, the smoke flowed back into the hole, like an animal that had eaten its fill and returned to its den. So we filled the well with rocks and mud and one of the priests put a ward around it to keep whatever came out from ever slithering to the surface again." He sighed. "But we're awfully short on horses. Every once in a while a trader comes through on a circuit that includes Starfall, picks up pelts and sells salt and so forth, and you might be able to buy a space on a wagon, but I wouldn't expect anyone for another fortnight, and it'd be nearly as slow as walking anyway."

Skiver sighed. "So it goes. Shank's mare it is. Won't be the first walk we've ever taken together, eh, Alaeron?"

"I suppose not," he said.

"Walk for about twelve miles," Zernebeth said. "Due north, as straight as you can manage. You'll see a fortification, an old abandoned earthworks, the only thing that rises any distance up from the plain for miles. Whatever you do, don't try to explore the interior, don't even peek inside—just wait there, and I'll send someone to fetch you the rest of the way to Starfall."

"I'm sure we can make our way," Alaeron said. "I—"

A new figure entered the lodge. Tall and gray-beaded, he wore a leather cloak, well worn and trimmed with fur, with a cloak pin shaped like a bow crossed by an arrow. The crowd murmured hellos, and he nodded to everyone, pausing to lay hands on shoulders, bending in to talk.

"Who's the big man?" Skiver said.

"One of our priests, called Shadowstalker." Redfang lowered his voice. "He's an important man in the Banner of the Stag."

"I've been to a few stag parties," Skiver said. "But I'm guessing his organization's got a different focus?"

"It's a sort of...free-ranging independent militia," Alaeron said, sitting very still, painfully aware of the black box wrapped in cloth and hidden in his bag. "Worshipers of Erastil. They organize to protect remote villages and outposts from harm."

"The local group ranges around the River Kingdoms and occasionally into Brevoy," Redfang said. "I've run with them a time or two. They helped us drive back an attack by wildcats, all twisted by poison water into hulking monsters. Bandits don't trouble us much, either, not with the Banner of the Stag likely to ride along at any moment."

The priest approached the table. "Redfang. Who are your friends?"

"Alaeron and Skiver." Redfang rose and nodded to the man with respect. "Southrons, as you can tell from their dress, but Alaeron's an old enemy of the Technic League—you remember when the one called Gannix was killed some years back?"

"I was in Brevoy then." Shadowstalker smiled, showing a mouth full of brown stumps. Erastil apparently didn't care much about preserving the teeth of his worshipers. "But I heard tell, yes. He was foremost among the captains, and sent the League into quite a little war to see who'd take his place. I always prefer to have the Technic League captains killing each other—keeps them from paying attention to us. You were the one who eliminated Gannix, then?"

Alaeron nodded. "Don't let Redfang make it sound like a heroic act. I was lucky to escape with my life, and luckier still to deprive him of his."

"Alaeron and his friend are off to tweak the League's nose again," Redfang said.

"Are they now." The priest reached across the table and seized Alaeron's arm. "I'm a bit confused. Why were you with the Technic League in the first place? Because I heard the man who killed Gannix was a rogue apprentice. Is that true? Were you part of the League, southerner?"

Chapter Nine

Erastil's Blessing

That took a nasty turn, Skiver thought. He wondered how Alaeron would handle this. His friend often tried to talk his way out of even the most impossible situations, not because he was particularly silver-tongued, but because he confused making a logical and well-supported argument with winning a fight. In some cases, though—like on the North Wind, most recently—something more practical in the alchemist, or some part of him that grew weary of suffering a world full of fools, would snap into action instead. Skiver figured the odds were nine in ten that Alaeron would attempt to defend himself with words, but there was always that tenth chance that he might hurl a bomb into the priest's face instead.

Alaeron opened his mouth to answer—as the odds had suggested—but the priest didn't give him a chance to speak. "If you were—ha!—in league with the League, I wonder, are you still a devotee of their poisonous philosophy, a dealer in twisted relics? Are you planning to buy your way back into their good graces with trinkets and trophies? Because one of the other fellows in the lodge overheard you make that very boast, and quietly sent for me."

"No, someone misunderstood," Redfang said. "He's going to trick the League—"

"You're a good man, Redfang, but I fear this silver-tongued southerner is trying to deceive you." Shadowstalker shook his head sadly. "You know the League tells lies the way birds fly. It's just their nature."

Alaeron tried to pull his arm away, but Shadowstalker growled and held on tighter.

Skiver glanced around the room. They were clearly the center of attention, now, every eye in the lodge on them. While Skiver was handy with a knife, he couldn't take on a score of heavily armed woodsmen all at once. (Now, if they were sleeping in camp some night, with just one or two sitting up watch, and Skiver could creep among their bedrolls at his leisure, that would change the percentages appreciably.)

It would have to be diplomacy, then.

"What would it take to convince you we're enemies of the League?" Skiver said.

Shadowstalker didn't take his eyes off the alchemist, but he answered. "A simple search of your possessions should be sufficient to prove Alaeron's innocence—or confirm his guilt. I have reliable information that he's carrying a Technic League artifact, doubtless something he stole, and he's returning it to buy his way back into the vile conclave's graces."

Oh ho, Skiver thought. Treachery already. That was quick. But, fortunately, not entirely unexpected. Alaeron began to speak, but Skiver shook his head imperceptibly.

"And what's this supposed to be?" he asked, in his broadest Andoren accent. "If my friend here had a mighty Technic League weapon, and was about to be caught, wouldn't he start laying waste to this whole lodge?"

"Erastil watches over us. He wouldn't allow any harm to come to us here."

Which translated, Skiver supposed, to, My informant told me the relic Alaeron's carrying isn't a weapon, so I'm not worried.

"I could choose to be offended," Skiver said. "But, in fact, I understand your suspicions. Alaeron's told me the horrors of the Technic League—that's why I'm here, to eliminate them—and with vipers like that nested just a short hundred miles away, I suppose I'd get a trifle nervous, too. There's nothing for it, Alaeron—you'll have to let this holy man go through your pack. I know you value your privacy, but it's the easiest way."

Alaeron silently widened his eyes, but Skiver gave him a smile that was—he hoped—reassuring.

"Redfang, if you'd be so kind?" Shadowstalker said.

The hunter rose, frowning, and muttered, "Sorry," to Alaeron. He picked up the heavy canvas pack as if it weighed nothing at all.

For once, there was no telltale clink of glass vials wrapped in cloth when Alaeron's pack moved. Apart from the bottles he had hidden away in his coat, the alchemist had put all his precious and fragile possessions into the room inside the black box, safe from the dangerous jostlings of the road. "Better let Alaeron disarm it first," Skiver said mildly, and Shadowstalker leaned back and frowned at the bag.

Alaeron managed not to sigh heavily, but he'd obviously been counting on the sleeping gas trap in the bag to solve this problem for him. Instead, at Skiver's nod, he tugged what appeared to be a loose thread dangling from the bottom of the pack. "It's safe now."

"You open it, then," Shadowstalker said. Obviously his informant hadn't mentioned booby traps. But of course not. He didn't know anything about Alaeron's tendency to secure his possessions against tampering—he only knew about the black box that must be inside the pack.

Alaeron unbuckled the straps on the bag and threw open the flap. Shadowstalker began pulling items out, grunting as he set them aside. A tin cup, plate, spoon, and fork. A few extra clothes, rolled up tightly, at least until the priest unfurled them to look for contraband. Wadded-up parchments and scrolls in tubes. A stoppered canteen. The sort of hideous food that traveled well and tasted bad. Essentially the same things Skiver had in his pack, scrolls aside—basic materials for a long journey.

Finally Shadowstalker's eyes lit up, and he drew out the thing at the bottom of the bag: a roughly spherical shape of bundled rags, a camp blanket wrapped around and around some small object. "The cube!" the priest said, standing and gesturing to the room. "Just as I suspected. A foul device of the Technic League! Something poisonous, best left buried deep in the earth, where it could do no harm. Who knows how many innocents this relic has killed? It's an affront to the natural world itself." As he spoke, he unwrapped the blanket, his hands moving deftly to pluck apart twists and snarls of fabric.

Skiver actually managed to suppress his smile when Shadowstalker at last threw open the blanket and revealed the object inside.

It was a cube, more or less. But it was no strange relic from the Rain of Stars. It was a block of dark brown, soft wood, hacked into a rough shape.

To his credit, Alaeron didn't even gape. He just looked sad, disappointed, and—this was a masterly touch—a trifle embarrassed for Shadowstalker. The priest stared down. "It's...just a piece of wood?" The crowd murmured.

"Alaeron likes to do a bit of carving when we're on the road," Skiver said. "Keeps his hands busy and his mind occupied. That's going to be—what was it, Alaeron?"

"A bear," Alaeron said. "I can see the shape, hidden in the wood. All I have to do is cut away everything that's not the bear, and—"

Shadowstalker took a hatchet from his belt and savagely hacked down at the wooden block, sending splinters flying, and making a split right down the middle of the cube. If he'd hoped to chip away an outer layer and reveal something nefarious inside, he was disappointed as the block fell apart into neat halves.

"Ah," Alaeron said. "Perhaps...two much smaller bears, then."

Shadowstalker reached down for Skiver's pack and tore it open, finding nothing much different from Alaeron's possessions, apart from a great many knives. "This...I was told..."

"You got some bad information," Redfang said. "It can happen to anyone. But I knew Alaeron, years ago. He killed a Technic League captain. How many men in this room can say that?"

No one answered. Shadowstalker ran a hand through his long, ragged gray mane. "I, ah...you have my deepest apologies." He looked at Skiver's eyes, though, and there was no apology in that gaze.

Go on, Skiver thought. Push it. Say we must have hidden the relic somewhere. Then I can ask where you got your information, and when you don't want to answer, I'll make a suggestion, and they'll see in your face that it's true. Or at least, you'll worry that they will.

"I'm sorry for harming your...wood." The priest half-bowed to Alaeron, the motion as stiff as new leather. "I wish you good luck on your journey. May Erastil's blessings be upon you."

"Ah, and upon you?" Alaeron said.

The priest shuffled off, muttering, and the rest of the lodge relaxed, and returned to the business of drinking the night away.

"Sorry for all that," Redfang said. "He means well, but when you've fought as long as he has, you see enemies everywhere."

"Oh, that's all right." Skiver stretched his arms out, pleased with himself. "We'll all be great friends in the end, I'm sure."

∗ ∗ ∗

Later that night, side by side on bedrolls in the back of Redfang's modest hut while their host snored away on a raised pallet stuffed with straw near the front, Alaeron said, "You stole the black box."

"I moved the black box, and replaced it with something of pretty much equal size, though of less miraculous properties. Though, yes, I had to employ the tools of theft to do the moving. You used that same trap with the sleeping gas once when we were traveling in the south. You should know better than to repeat yourself like that. Anyway, the black box is safe, buried outside the town. We'll pass it on our way out, and dig it up, and it'll be back in your bag where it belongs."

"A sensible precaution. But I can't imagine how Shadowstalker knew we had a relic. He even knew it was a cube—"

Alaeron was brilliant about some things, and he understood the workings of everything from clocks to clockwork deathtraps, but if there was one sort of mechanism he consistently failed to understand, it was the human mind. "It was your Kellid friend, Zernebeth's other apprentice, the one who's all ghostlike and passes through walls and such. Char. You humiliated him, and threatened him, and he had a considerable head start on us, so it's no surprise he decided to cause a bit of trouble with the locals. Char's the only one who knows about the black box and bears you ill will, so he must have been the source."

Alaeron frowned. "You think Shadowstalker worked with a Technic League operative? His most hated enemies? The priest struck me as...rather more upright than that."

Skiver shrugged. "I doubt Shadowstalker was thrilled about the arrangement, and I'm sure he'd rather kill Char than collude with him, but he can't—the Kellid's a ghost, and no amount of swinging a hatchet at him would draw blood. I'm sure talking to Char made Shadowstalker's skin crawl, but he saw the chance to do some damage to the League, in the form of doing damage to you, and he took it. Once he had the knowledge that you were carrying a League device, he couldn't ignore it, even though he got his information from a poisonous source. After Shadowstalker confronted you and didn't find any evil relics in your pack, though, he couldn't push things too far—someone might ask him where he got his information, and he could hardly say he'd been tipped off by a member of the Technic League, without making himself seem guilty by association." Skiver yawned. "Of course, I could have concocted a thousand lies to cover up my source of information if I'd been in Shadowstalker's position, but priests of Erastil don't practice deception as much as some clerics do, so I figured he'd back down."

"Astounding! You knew all along Char was going to betray us?"

"Of course not," Skiver said. "But I knew if anyone in this town found a Technic League relic in our possession they'd give us a show trial and execute us in some grisly country fashion, so I figured, better safe and buried."

"I'm glad you're here," Alaeron said. "What are we going to do about Char?"

"You could tattle on him to your mutual mistress, I suppose," Skiver said. "You said he near enough worships her, so maybe she can be a voice of reason, whispering in his ear, telling him to leave you be."

"And if that fails..."

Skiver grunted. "You and I have dealt with trouble before. And you already know Char's main weakness. Stick a bit of wire in his brain and he's yours to torment. Now try to sleep. We've got a fair bit of walking ahead of us tomorrow."

∗ ∗ ∗

They breakfasted with Redfang before dawn, mostly a paste of mashed nuts eaten with their fingers, and then the hunter bade them a rather formal farewell and set off into the woods to pursue his own livelihood. Skiver and Alaeron headed into another part of the forest, following the trail Redfang had told them would go most directly north, and then waited around in the bushes a while until they were sure their host was gone. They looped back around to the west and south to find the particular leaning-over tree where Skiver had hidden the black box. He swept away the covering of leaves to reveal disturbed earth, and dug down a foot or so until he reached the bag and the relic within. "Here you go."

He handed it to Alaeron, who tore open the bag, peered inside, and nodded. "Everything seems to be in—"

"Stop, in the name of the Erastil and the Banner of the Stag!" Shadowstalker materialized as if from nowhere—probably some stealthy priestly power that let him move unseen through the forest, Skiver supposed. Luckily, he was alone. Also luckily—if you could call sensible foresight luck—Skiver had foreseen the possibility that he might secretly follow them, and he'd advised Alaeron to keep a couple of his best crowd-control weapons handy.

Shadowstalker was about twenty feet away, and closing. Alaeron had boasted—in that way of his that sounded less like boasting and more like telling you something obvious, like "water is wet"—that he never missed anything he aimed at, at least not if it was within twenty feet or so. As soon as Shadowstalker spoke, Alaeron reached into his pocket and took out a roundish, fist-sized clay vessel. The clay bulb was full of something, and there was a thin glass bottle floating inside that something, containing another substance. The two fluids, separated, were inert, but Alaeron gave the clay ball a hard, sharp shake, enough to break the glass vial inside and mingle the ingredients. He nonchalantly tossed the bomb underhand toward Shadowstalker, who had wits enough to try and move out of the way, but with his usual casual throwing expertise, Alaeron seemed to have anticipated the priest's action. The bomb struck the ground right at Shadowstalker's feet, and though Skiver didn't see exactly what happened—having learned from experience to turn away, duck his head, and cover his ears when Alaeron started tossing bombs—there was a sort of dull thump, like a giant stomping on the ground beside them.

When Skiver turned back, Alaeron was already kneeling by the fallen priest, who groaned loudly.

"What, he's not dead?" Skiver reached for a knife.

"No, I used a force bomb—enough to knock him off his feet and render him slightly senseless. If he turns up dead, we're the obvious suspects—people will just assume Shadowstalker was right about us."

"Oh no, you mean we might be unable to return to scenic Iadenveigh ever again?" Skiver snorted. "What a loss!"

"It's more that I'd rather not have the Banner of the Stag after us."

"Ah. That's a fair point. If you don't plan to kill him, what is your plan?"

"Come here and make sure he doesn't get up, and I'll show you." Alaeron put the black box down, pressed his thumb against it, and stood back as the thing unfolded in its eerie, silent way into something the size of a closet.

"Ah, make him disappear, brilliant," Skiver said. "Stuff him into the black box here and then dump him in a river far away where no one will ever find him, I like it. I still don't see why we can't kill him now, though, save time later—"

"I don't think I'm as bloodthirsty as you are."

"I wouldn't say bloodthirsty, as such, but willing to spill a bit, sure."

"I don't mind killing people if I have to, but if he disappears, that's still suspicious. I have a better way, I think." Alaeron opened the door to the black box's mysterious interior. "Please don't murder him while I'm gone."

Skiver shrugged, and kept watch on the supine priest, who appeared to have a bad concussion, at the very least. A few moments later Alaeron returned with a bottle containing a pale blue potion. He tipped it into the priest's mouth, holding the back of Shadowstalker's head to keep him from turning away, and watching as he swallowed.

"Good," Alaeron said. "Shadowstalker. Listen to me. You don't remember anything your informant told you about us—in fact, you don't remember your informant at all." The priest's only reply was another moan.

Alaeron rose, collapsed the black box down to portable size, wrapped it up, and stowed it in his pack. "Come on. We'd better hurry, before he wakes up and notices us again."

"What was that potion?" Skiver said, following as Alaeron sprinted toward the trees.

"Oh, just something I've been working on—I call it ‘forget-me-lots.' I saw a bard work a bit of magic once. He brought up a volunteer from the audience, insulted him in rather colorful fashion, and then made the man forget the insults—and then he did the same trick all over again, twice more." Alaeron made a face. "A ridiculous and trivial use of such a power, I thought, so I started working on a potion that would have similar effects, to selectively remove memories. My first few attempts just gave people terrible headaches, but I finally—"

Alaeron had been listening patiently, but he had his limits. "Wait." He held up his hand. "You mean we could steal someone's jewels, and then give them a drink, and make them forget we'd robbed them?"

The alchemist blinked. "Well, they'd still notice their jewels were missing. Better, I think, to make them forget they had the jewels in the first place."

"You should really mention these things to me," Skiver said. "I sometimes think you don't always consider the practical implications of the things you create."

"It's a bit of an ordeal to brew the potion, honestly. The rosemary is easy to find, but the nepenthes has to be imported from the jungles in the south at ruinous expense. That was the only vial of forget-me-lots I had. I do hope it works as intended. If the Banner of the Stag tracks us down and kills us, we'll know the potion needs further refinement."

"That would be a terrible disappointment, under the circumstances," Skiver said dryly.

Chapter Ten

Automaton

Alaeron was happy to be on the road again. Redfang was nice enough, but being surrounded by the provincial folk of Iadenveigh made him uncomfortable, even without priests of Erastil trying to kill him. The people of Iadenveigh wanted the world to be a forest, and for everyone to do things the way everyone had always done things, despite the fact that many of those old ways were obviously inefficient. The world could be so much better, and more interesting, than it was—but you had to be willing to make the world change.

Still, walking was weary work. They trudged for most of the day, first in the forest, and then, when the trees dwindled, along a dirt track the locals probably used to drive goats or sheep from scraggly meadow to scraggly valley. The vegetation was mostly sparse, and where it was lush, it was often subtly or overtly wrong—bushes with bright orange leaves, lonely trees choked by vines that slithered visibly like snakes, man-sized mushrooms that glowed faintly green.

"This place gives me the creeps and the crawlies," Skiver said, pausing to gaze at a tree whose branches wriggled like a dying man's clutching fingers. "I don't like country life even back home, and the country here is a lot less pleasant."

"The land is poisoned, in places," Alaeron said. "The soil and water tainted by leakages from things that fell from the sky. There are verdant fields where things grow more or less normally, but there are bad patches, here and there, too. The things that grow in those places are—"

"Abominations?"

"Fascinating, I was going to say." Alaeron hmmed. "But, yes, also abominations."

They continued on their way, until Alaeron pointed. "Do you see something rising up ahead, like an earthen mound?"

"Could be. Your eyes are better than mine."

"Are you there yet?" Zernebeth snapped suddenly in Alaeron's ear. He couldn't hear anything except her voice, but she was breathing hard, which suggested she was experiencing some stress or exertion.

"I think we're in sight of the mound, we'll be there—"

She said something in a language he didn't recognize—probably something they spoke in the land of white witches, where she came from—but from her tone it was clearly something angry, and possibly profane.

"Are you all right?" he said.

"Fine. Just...dealing with a bit of politics. Most of the League captains are firmly in my camp—I've given them reason enough to support me—but there's another faction that likes to make trouble for me, and one or two captains who fancy themselves independent. A certain amount of treachery is to be expected, but sometimes things go too far, and have to be dealt with."

"You sound like you've been running."

"Politics in Starfall isn't typically done from the comfort of one's desk. It's a bit more direct. Ruling the Technic League is like herding ice weasels—if they get bored for a moment they start plotting treachery, and the only acceptable response to that treachery is swift brutality. Captain Bothvald brought me irrefutable evidence that Captain Lofan was plotting against me." She sighed. "It's a shame, too—Lofan was making good progress with his electrified slime project. Ah, well. At least the slimes he left behind will feed well on his corpse."

"I'm...glad you have things well in hand. Speaking of politics played for deadly stakes, I should mention—your apprentice tried to have me killed."

"Did he really." She didn't sound particularly bothered, or surprised. "He failed, it seems. Unless you're stuck in an oubliette somewhere starving to death?"

"No, as I said, we're nearly to the mound—"

"Ah, then are you slowly succumbing to some vile poison? If so, you must not be as much of an alchemist as you claim."

"I am fine," Alaeron said as levelly as possible. "Char's machinations were unsuccessful. But the fact remains, he made an attempt on my life."

Zernebeth chuckled. "And he failed. So I'd say you're ahead on points at the moment. A little friendly competition between you and Char will make both of you work harder, I think. I support that."

"So you wouldn't object if I tried to kill him?"

"I might be a bit disappointed in your lack of imagination—can't you do any better than copying his approach?—but otherwise, no. Any apprentice of mine who can't defend himself is hardly qualified for the position. You spent months among the League, Alaeron. You know we believe in testing to destruction—and that which survives is recognized and appreciated for its value."

"I see. Yes, I'm definitely back in Numeria again."

"You southlanders are too coddled by law. Here the strong make the law. Just count yourself lucky that the leading captain of the Technic League is your mentor, hmm? I do hope you survive, Alaeron. I need another man I can count on here. Lofan was ostensibly part of my cohort, and to find he'd been plotting against me...I can't say I was surprised, because I expect betrayal as a matter of course, but I was certainly disappointed. You won't disappoint me, will you?"

"Since you are very nearly my only friend in this country, and certainly the only one in a position of power and authority, I think you have little to fear on that score," Alaeron said.

"True enough. And luckily for me, you're terrible at making new friends, and have no more interest in politics than I have in Osirian fashion. We will do great things together, Alaeron. Now get to the mound—I've sent a transport to fetch you the rest of the way here."

"Zernebeth, before you go, when you said you didn't want me to explore the earthworks...surely you know there's nothing you could have said to make me want to explore it more?"

"Perhaps it was a test to see how well you can follow my instructions. Or perhaps I secretly want you to go inside. Whatever shall you do?"

"Hmm," Alaeron said. "I'm always interested in hidden secrets, but there's no point if the place has been pillaged already—"

"Oh, no—there's an inner door that has never been breached. There's no telling what might be inside. I keep meaning to send a team to clear the place out, but it's not the most pressing bit of business I have."

"Ah. So—"

"I have to go." Her voice abruptly vanished from his ear.

"I think I'm being tested," Alaeron said to Skiver.

"Oh? Why's that?"

"Because Zernebeth just told me I was being tested."

"That is a fairly clear indication," Skiver said.

After another half an hour of trudging down a barely there dirt track, they reached the earthworks, the only feature on the desolate plain of ugly scrub, with no sign of other human habitation in the vicinity, not even a line of smoke on the horizon. The earthen mound itself hardly seemed like a place humans might have lived—it was a roughly head-high ring of earth, about thirty feet across, which had at one point offered some thin semblance of protection for people huddling inside the walls. Alaeron scrambled up one steep side of the mound—there were plants growing at haphazard angles, providing handholds—and peered down inside.

A few scattered stones and bits of broken pottery lay scattered in the empty circle of space within, but otherwise no sign of the people who might have lived or made some last stand here. Skiver climbed up beside him and grunted. "I can't see why we shouldn't go in. Of course, I can't see any reason why we should, either—I suppose if there was a hard wind blowing it might be worth sheltering within, but otherwise I can't see what the inside has to offer over the outside—"

"Look." Alaeron pointed across the mound, to the inner wall, which was currently cast in shadow. "There's a hole, a place where the ground has fallen in and collapsed. I suspect that's the ‘in there' we've been encouraged not to explore. Or perhaps been goaded into exploring."

"How about that. A hole in the ground in a place famous for the ancient horrors buried in the ground."

"Often literally buried," Alaeron said. "The tribespeople in this place mostly consider the remnants of the Rain of Stars to be taboo, and they've spent generations heaping stones and dirt on top of the wrecks, trying to hide them. It's most inconvenient—the League has to rely on stumbling across bits of metal revealed by erosion, or discover hidden caches by divination, but many of the wrecks seem to resist that sort of detection."

"I can't help but think the tribes have the right idea."

"Where's your sense of curiosity, Skiver?"

He snorted. "I know where yours is. Right there at the surface, like always. I suppose you want to stick your head in that hole?"

Alaeron scanned the horizon. "I see no sign of our transportation, and Zernebeth didn't bother to tell me when to expect them. We have to pass the time somehow."

"I do have dice. I even have a harrow deck. We could play a word game—Picturesque Death, maybe, or Spot the Wobble. There are many options besides crawling into a hole, especially one you were particularly warned against crawling into."

"I think that's the test. Zernebeth wants to see if I'll show initiative. She has plenty of slaves and lackeys to blindly obey here—she said she needed someone different, when she summoned me. Zernebeth mentioned there's an inner door here that's never been breached. We're going to be sent on an expedition to excavate something far bigger than this. Perhaps she wants to make sure I'm up for the job."

"Are you?"

"I've crawled into many strange places, and I've always crawled back out again."

Skiver sighed. "I've been down a tunnel or two and back myself. All right, we can—"

Alaeron shook his head. "You should stay and keep an eye out for the transport. I'd hate for them to arrive and then leave again when they can't find us."

"Hmm. Can't say I like the idea much. What if you never come out?"

"Ah. Well. If I don't return in, say, two hours, it's probably best to assume I'm dead. And you probably shouldn't come after me, in that case, since I'm fairly good at not dying, so if I do, I must have encountered something formidably unpleasant."

"You'd better not die. I've got a fair bit of property locked up in that black box of yours, and nobody else can open the thing."

"Your concern for my well-being is appreciated." Alaeron slid down the gently sloping inner wall and approached the hole tentatively, removing an alchemical rod from his pack and shaking it to make the chemicals within mix. The rod emitted warm light the color of fresh butter.

"Watch my pack," he said, letting the bag drop to the ground. Holding his light aloft, he ducked into the tunnel, noting the smoothness of the walls. No mere sinkhole, then; something had created this deliberately, cutting a perfect cylindrical cross-section into the earth. The tunnel was about five feet high, just small enough to make him stoop over and feel cramped, and it led downward at a steep but not precipitous slant. Alaeron decided he could skip tethering himself to the surface with a rope, and worked his way down surrounded by a pool of light, wishing he'd thought to mix a potion that would allow him to see in the dark.

The tunnel leveled out, more or less, after fifty feet or so, and Alaeron soon saw what he'd expected: the dirt tunnel intersected a wreck made of dark metal. The outer wall of the wreck sported a ragged hole, full of jagged edges, where something had broken in (or out). He scented the air, smelling electricity, acrid chemicals, and an undercurrent of rot. "Hello?" Alaeron said. Sometimes the sort of things you found in the ground in Numeria could speak, though the things they said didn't always make a great deal of sense.

There was a chamber beyond the jagged hole, and true to his nature, Alaeron stepped inside, raising his light high.

The room was small and low-ceilinged, and there were ten or twelve bodies—it was hard to be sure, since some were in pieces—scattered on the canted floor. The oldest were just rags and bones, but a couple were fresh, probably only weeks dead, bearing deep and bloody cuts, some severe enough that the limbs were cleanly separated from the bodies. Intact swords, axes, and spears lay among the bodies, none so much as stained with blood, which suggested the weapons hadn't done their wielders much good.

Or, alternatively, that they'd been used to attack something that didn't bleed.

After a moment's thought, Alaeron sorted among the vials in his pockets until he found the right combination, and swiftly mixed them in a round-bottomed clay vessel the size of his fist. Feeling reassured, he stepped among the bodies, examining the curved room. There were holes in the walls, some revealing what looked like nests of metallic worms—skymetal wire, probably, and thus quite valuable. No wonder people had come to loot and pillage, though apparently none successfully.

There was a door, or rather a rounded hatch, in the wall in front of him, presumably the inner door that Zernebeth said had never been opened. Was there a trap of some kind that triggered hidden blades when someone attempted to open the door? These people had been cut apart, not gassed or burned, so if he could avoid slicing knives or wires...

Alaeron glanced around and picked up a boot. Still with a foot inside it—rather disgusting—but it did give the boot an impressive heft. He backed out of the chamber into the mouth of the tunnel, judged his distance, and threw the boot as hard as he could at the inner door.

He was prepared for hidden panels to slide aside and razor-sharp death to fill the chamber. But instead, there was a distant sound, a bit like a child crying. Some sort of alarm or call to arms?

The hatch slid open, and a thing emerged. The shadows made it difficult to see, but it was easy to hear. It buzzed like a wasp in a bottle, whirred like a flock of blackbirds taking off, clicked like a tapping cobbler's hammer. Alaeron was suddenly terribly aware of the bright light in his hand, a beacon for whatever creature this might be—assuming it had eyes, or something like eyes—and he wished the alchemical rod could be doused as simply as a candle or lantern. Then again, being down here in the dark would hardly be preferable.

The thing inside the chamber squealed, a metal-on-metal sound, and at first Alaeron assumed it was some sort of battle cry. But when it moved forward in a jerky, uneven gait, he realized its limbs were made of metal, and they ground together in a way surely not intended by whoever had designed it.

An automaton, then. They were one of the unique threats of Numeria. The metal men known as Gearsmen were the most famous examples, seen regularly in the capital, going about their inscrutable or vile business on the Technic League's behalf. But there were other mysterious creatures of metal and glass, animated by a power incomprehensible to scientists and arcanists both. Alaeron had glimpsed the things called myrmidons, which flew high in the air, watching for signs only they understood, lashing their strange wire tentacles, and he'd heard recent tales of the annihilators of the Felldales, things like immense metal scorpions that brought fiery death—and, more disturbingly, gathered wounded humanoids and took them away for their own alien reasons.

This automaton wasn't quite like either of those. It was the size of a wolfhound, with a body that seemed composed of bits of metal left over from more ambitious projects, a cobbled-together junk-heap thing, apart from its profusion of multi-jointed limbs. Alaeron had a heap of scrap in his workshop at home, and he imagined that, if it suddenly took on life and began to wander around the room, it would look like this. Was it an automaton that had tried to repair itself over the years, using bits of the crashed ship to replace broken elements? Or was its bizarre appearance simply the product of some aesthetic so inhuman Alaeron couldn't understand it?

The thing reached out with one of its—legs?—and there was a humming sound. The dirt at Alaeron's feet began to smoke, a finger-width black line appearing in the tunnel floor, and he leapt back, dropping his light in panic. The line of invisible fire passed over the lamp, shattering it, and spattering glowing alchemical fluid everywhere.

Alaeron could easily imagine his blood mingling with that fluid in moments if he didn't get away.

He tossed the clay orb he'd prepared, a mixture of lightning-fused sand, glands extracted from electric eels, and assorted stabilizing and amplifying agents. During his previous time in Numeria he'd been told that his best chance to survive an attack from an automaton was to have a wand of lightning, or a wizard handy with spells of electricity, but Alaeron preferred to be self-sufficient, so he'd devised these shock bombs instead. His aim was as unerring as ever, and the bomb struck the scuttling thing and broke open, sending surges of crackling whitish-blue miniature lightning coursing across its misshapen form.

The approaching line of fire stopped, and the automaton slumped, limbs unmoving, the new smell of burning rubber and fresh thunderstorms overpowering the stink of death and alien fluids. Alaeron took a small, fist-sized globe of alchemical light from an inner pocket and advanced carefully on the machine. It was impossible to tell if it were dead—if "dead" was even the right term—but it seemed, for the moment, to be inert. He examined its limbs, noting the one it had used to generate the line of fire was tipped by a triangular prism made of glass. The glass had cracked when the automaton collapsed on itself, and no amount of fiddling with the limb caused it to react, so Alaeron gave up on his brief dream of owning a wand of invisible fire.

He retrieved one of the axes from the killing floor and used it to smash up the automaton, curious about the nature of its interior, and found it impressively full of gear wheels and pistons and hair-thin wires, all wrought in such miniature that he could scarcely apprehend the details. Given a few months, and magnifying lenses, he might be able to make sense of it...

"Alaeron?" Skiver shouted from some distance down the tunnel. "I heard a noise, all sizzles and pops. You'd better not be dead!"

"I'm fine!" Alaeron called. "I found something fascinating. And then I killed it."

"Hurry up and loot its corpse, because I see something approaching, and it doesn't exactly look like a carriage. Either it's our ride, or its something I'll need your help running and hiding from."

"Erm. I'll, ah—be right there." He looked longingly at the inner door, still standing wide. He'd wanted to explore the whole place! Who knew what treasures there might be inside? Just a brief look...

The space beyond the inner door was roughly the size of the cheapest room at a middling inn. The floor was covered in bits of scrap metal and broken glass, presumably spare or discarded parts for the automaton. There were no other doors, windows, hatches, or holes—just a simple, broken space. A sleeping chamber or storage room for the machine, perhaps. Certainly not the entry to a vault of wonders.

Alaeron sighed. That inner door had presented a tantalizing mystery that had lured many to their deaths, and in the end, there was nothing of great value behind it. For something that actually existed, it seemed disturbingly like a metaphor.

Alaeron pulled a bit of skymetal wire from the remnants of the automaton, coiling it up and sticking it in his pocket—might as well make a bit of money from this little diversion—and then headed back up the tunnel to join Skiver on the wall, gazing northward.

"What do you make of that?" Skiver asked. Something was approaching rapidly, sunlight glinting on its polished surfaces, legs moving up and down as swiftly as needles in a gifted seamstress's hand. It was impossible to tell how big it was at this distance, but Alaeron thought it was probably the size of a cottage.

"Ah. I was...just thinking about those." He swallowed. "I always kept my ears open for news from Numeria, and I began hearing rumors of these things not long ago. They're sort of...wild automatons. The locals call them ‘annihilators.'"

"Annihilators." Skiver said the name like it belonged to a foreign and unsavory god. "Annihilate. Doesn't that mean...destroy without a trace?"

"More or less."

"How strong is that black box of yours, do you think?" Skiver said.

Chapter Eleven

Annihilator

Skiver and Alaeron retreated into the inner ring of the earthworks, hoping the annihilator hadn't seen them. The alchemist activated the black box, and as always, Skiver felt deeply unsettled watching the little cube expand. He'd never let on that it bothered him, but seeing something so small become so large, unfolding in ways the eye couldn't follow, just seemed wrong.

Alaeron tugged open the door and they went inside, the panel closing securely behind them. The alchemist lit a few of his smokeless lanterns and took a seat in a chair, drumming his fingers on the arm and gazing at the door. Skiver paced around the interior, which wouldn't have seemed all that cramped, except for all the crates he'd filled the place with. The opportunity to run a thriving import/export business while Alaeron mucked around in the wreckage of ancient history had proven too tempting to resist, especially since he didn't have to pay a penny in shipping. He was sitting on a fortune here—a significant, though not quite ruinous, portion of his net wealth—and now he wondered morosely if he'd ever get to sell it. To have all these fine products (and imitations of fine products, available at much more reasonable prices) spend life in the belly of some monstrous thing like a crab mated with a scorpion adorned with pointy and bladed chirurgeon's tools would be a terrible waste. Did the annihilator even have a belly?

What happened if the black box fell over with the door side down? They'd be trapped. True, Alaeron and Skiver hadn't been able to budge the expanded box when they experimented, no more than they'd been able to crack the door open with sledgehammers or crowbars, but they weren't a clockwork monster the size of a house, were they?

"It's not clockwork," Alaeron said.

"Was I talking out loud?" Skiver said, genuinely alarmed at the notion.

"Muttering, really. I just caught the one word. The annihilators aren't clockwork. Clockwork makes sense—when you take it apart you can see how the cogs and gears and flywheels mesh, how tension is transferred into motion. But the things that come out of the wrecks in Numeria...we call them automatons. They're not exactly constructs, golems, like a wizard would create, either—at least, techniques that destroy magic don't have any effect on them. Some of the automatons are intelligent. Maybe even most of them. We just...don't have the worldview to understand what they are, or what they want, if they want anything." He gestured at the heaped crates. "I never asked. What's in these?"

Skiver frowned. That was a sudden shift in topic. Was Alaeron trying to distract him from their troubles? Or just struck by a sudden curiosity? Skiver didn't really have the worldview necessary to understand Alaeron's mind, sometimes. "You told me the nobles of Starfall, if you can call them nobles, like to play as if they're courtiers in some fancy palace, yeah?"

"They imitate, as best they can, what they imagine the great courts of kings and queens might be like," Alaeron said. "It's a bit like a child playing dress-up, sometimes, but yes."

"Well, then I'll help dress them, for a price. I brought them luxuries. Fine porcelain. The best dyes from Andoran. Assorted relics—and convincing fakes—that will look fine adorning a shelf. Jewelry, both paste and real, and as always, the paste looks better. A bit of fine Andoren lumber, though I bet I could have sold heaps of the stuff if I'd had time to put together a proper stockpile instead of grabbing what was handy. Spices from Qadira, picked up in Absalom at ruinous prices, but I can sell it for more this far north. Chelish wines, and swill made in a basement and poured into Chelish wine bottles. Silks. Oils and incense from Osirion. Really whatever I could lay my hands on without much notice. Your friend Zernebeth is a woman of power and influence, so I figure she can point me toward potential buyers."

"I suppose," Alaeron said. Commerce never seemed to interest the alchemist much, but Skiver had discovered within himself a passion for trading—or, more specifically, for getting the better end of a bargain—that eclipsed his old and well-established love of stabbing people in the kidneys in the dark. Skiver had not, in any objective sense, moved into truly legitimate business, but smuggling and fraud were positively genteel compared to his old occupations.

"How long do you think we should wait in here?" Skiver said, glancing at the door.

"I haven't made a great study of annihilators—no one has, they only appeared recently, and it's impossible to get close enough—but I understand they emerged from the Felldales, the ruined lands to the west. They wander out, lay waste to whatever they find with fire and brute force, and then return with whatever they've stolen away. I am curious about what they do with the living people they abduct...though not quite curious enough to allow myself to become one of them, even if I am a great believer in the power of firsthand experience. I think if we stay here for a few hours we can probably—"

Someone knocked on the door. Skiver and Alaeron glanced at one another, then stared at the door. The knock came again, harder, and there was shouting, too. The knocks sounded perfectly ordinary, but the quality of the shouting was strange: not at all like someone calling from the other side of a closed door, even a very thick one, but more like someone shouting up from the considerable depths of a cave, a voice distorted and full of peculiar echoes.

"Would the annihilator knock?" Skiver said.

"I'm not sure it could. Its legs are the size of trees."

Skiver approached the door. "This thing could do with a spyhole." He raised his voice. "Who's there?"

More shouting. Was that the word "League," or were Skiver's ears just feeling optimistic?

"I suppose we should open it. We're not going to learn anything by sitting here." Alaeron rose and reached into his pockets, presumably for something lethal, though how lethal anything they had could be against an annihilator was an open question.

Skiver's hand found the hilt of a knife at his belt and drew it free. Hopeless, probably, but he might as well die with steel in his hand. "All right, then. Let's see who's come calling."

∗ ∗ ∗

"You tamed an annihilator?" Alaeron shaded his eyes from the afternoon sun and looked up at the hulk of the scorpion-like automaton. He could have stepped beneath its belly and been shaded entirely; the thing could double as a pavilion, standing still on its six immense, multi-jointed metal legs.

The Technic League member—not a captain, but one of the small cadre of trusted lieutenants or apprentices who served one captain or another—who'd come to collect them shrugged, the movement barely noticeable within the general mass of his tics and twitches. Alaeron didn't recognize him from his previous time in Numeria, but turnover in the League was notoriously high. Lieutenants only rose in status by making greater, more deadly or intoxicating discoveries than their fellows, and so they competed with one another to go into the most dangerous places in the country. As a consequence, many of them died or were irreparably damaged physically, mentally, or spiritually. The annihilator-rider's name was Lodger, and though he'd once been a handsome man, he'd clearly suffered some kind of nerve damage, or else he was in intense withdrawal from a nasty drug.

"We didn't tame it, exactly." Lodger's hands fluttered like wounded birds. "This annihilator was found staggering around near a sheep farm on the edge of the Felldales, stumbling like a drunkard or someone in a delirium, blasting holes in the ground or firing its weapons into the sky, falling over and then getting back up again." Lodger's cadence was jerky, his voice starting and stopping halfway through words and blundering haphazardly through the ends of sentences.

"You're saying it was sick?" Alaeron said.

Lodger shook his head, a greater movement within his constellation of lesser ones. "No idea. Sick, damaged, demented, tired of life? There's so much we don't know about these creatures."

"So you found a damaged annihilator and brought it down—"

"You make it sound so simple! The Sovereign contributed a host of warriors, and several League captains were on hand personally, along with their handpicked lieutenants—myself included—to subdue this thing. Even blundering around, it was lethal. Most of the men and women arrayed against it didn't survive. I caught the barest whiff of a noxious gas the thing emitted—we still don't know if it was a weapon or just some kind of leak—and ever since then I've had these...twitches. Those exposed directly to the gas convulsed and died. But in the end, it stumbled, and one of the captains got in a lucky strike with an energy weapon—though to hear him tell it, he intuited the weak spot and took careful aim. Anyway, those few of us who lived that long brought the monster down, and dragged it back to Starfall. Zernebeth thought it would be interesting to take it apart and see if we could seize control of its processes, and we did, more or less. She got the idea from a kind of parasitic wasp that turns cockroaches into slaves—"

Alaeron nodded. "I've heard of those. The wasp slips its stinger into the roach's brain and somehow takes over its physical system, leading it around by tugging on the roach's antennae. You've done that here?"

"Cracked open the annihilator's head, hooked in some wires, attached it to a board with a few levers and keys, like you might find on a piano or organ, and figured out how to make it walk around." He patted the leg of the behemoth affectionately. "Sorry to startle you. When we go this far from the capital, we like to make a big show. Keeps the peasants from getting ideas, and we're not too far from Iadenveigh here, so we can't risk any show of weakness. If I had time I'd head over in their direction and rip up a few great old trees by the roots, maybe smash a few huts, just to remind them the League could crush them anytime it chooses, but Zernebeth says I'm to fetch you back as soon as I can. Her ways are mysterious to me, but I do as I'm told."

"Then we should get going." Alaeron glanced around for Skiver, who'd finished gathering their only apparently meager possessions. "I think Zernebeth will want to send some people back to clean out the earthworks here."

Lodger frowned. "Isn't this the place with a hole in the ground people go into, and then there's screaming, and nobody ever comes out again?"

Skiver wandered over and laughed. "Oh, Alaeron went in and came out already, but he didn't have time to strip the place to the bare walls. He killed something horrible down there, of course, but he does that most days before breakfast."

Lodger looked at the alchemist with new respect, and it was only then that Alaeron realized the Leaguer had been a bit condescending before—Alaeron wasn't much good at reading body language, and Lodger's was written in a foreign dialect anyway. "I'm sure Zernebeth will be interested to hear it," Lodger said. "Would you like to climb aboard?" He gestured to a rope ladder dangling down one side of the automaton.

Skiver scrambled up in seconds, and Alaeron followed a bit more sedately, the black box a heavy weight in his pack. Lodger had been very interested in the device—he'd seen them once or twice in Zernebeth's workshop, and clearly wanted to be invited inside, but Alaeron had ignored the insinuations, and Lodger hadn't been quite bold enough to ask outright.

Old habits were coming back to Alaeron. You never gave another member of the League any information or advantage unless you were sure you'd gain something worth more to yourself in the process. He'd briefly hoped the League might have reformed under Zernebeth's guidance, altered to become less...evil seemed a dramatic if accurate word. But her cavalier attitude toward Char's attempt on Alaeron's life had dispelled that notion. Competition unto death was still the rule of the day, and anyone who lost didn't deserve to play the game anyway. It was disappointing—Alaeron suspected the League could achieve more if its members pooled their knowledge instead of jealously guarding it and plotting against one another—but the sort of arcanists who were attracted to the League tended toward fierce independence, and Numeria was a harsh land full of harsh people.

The annihilator was tall enough that it was noticeably windier on its back than it had been on the ground. When the monster had been retrofitted into a transport, a wooden platform had been constructed on its broad back, with padded benches bolted down, and a chair installed near the front, where Lodger could control the metal beast's motion. Alaeron spent a bit of time examining the joints where the legs met the body, patting the barrels of the terrible weapons protruding here and there from the chassis, and gazing up at the huge, curving scorpion's tale that rose over the back.

"Do the weapons still work?" Alaeron asked. He'd heard the tail had a sort of wand of fire embedded in its tip that could set whole forests ablaze, and there were weapons similar to the guns of Alkenstar mounted elsewhere on the beast, capable of firing tiny projectiles at a much higher rate, and to more devastating effect, than anything created in the workshops of the Mana Wastes.

Lodger was strapping himself into his seat when Alaeron spoke, and he grunted. "League secret."

That was a "no," then, probably. In Alaeron's experience, the League liked to boast about its power, and only became discreet when it had something it wanted to hide. So the League had managed to make the monster walk at its whim, but not to unleash the thing's terrible destructive forces.

Perhaps he could take a look...but no. The annihilator's weapons were only weapons, after all, no different from a wand of lightning or a crossbow, except in degree. He was here to explore more interesting mysteries.

Lodger whistled to himself as he ran through some sort of mental checklist, toggling switches and twisting knobs. In his seat on the back of the annihilator's head, Lodger looked at ease, his constellation of twitches reduced to the level of mere fidgetiness. "Almost ready!" he called. "Best get settled back there."

"Never thought I'd ride a giant scorpion," Skiver said from his place on the bench, sounding just a bit anxious beneath a veneer of cheerfulness. No one else would have noticed the former, but Alaeron knew his friend well. Being up this high, or perhaps perched underneath that lethal question mark of a scorpion tail, clearly made Skiver nervous.

"We should strap in." Alaeron pointed to a broad leather belt nailed to the bench beside Skiver, then pulled the twin on his side across his own lap.

"Eh?" Skiver said. "Oh, right, right. Bumpy ride, you think?" He pulled the strap down tight across himself, hooking it into a buckle fixed to the seat on the other side.

"I wouldn't—" Alaeron said, and then the beast began to move.

First, there was a roar, like a rushing wind, as whatever strange engines powered the annihilator spun into life. Then the automaton rose up even higher than before, its pointed legs unfolding, and began to sprint across the landscape. Alaeron had never been in an earthquake, but he was sure it must be a similar sensation, and even with the belt strapping him to the bench, he bounced around wildly, banging into Skiver's bony shoulder.

"This is worse than horseback!" Skiver shouted over the noise of the automaton and the rush of wind. "Why the hell didn't your friend send us a carriage?"

"The League isn't famed for its subtlety!" he shouted back. "They can barely pass the salt without blowing something up in the process, just to show they can!"

"The League is good at making prostheses, yeah? New hands and legs and so on?"

"They were, and unless the chirurgeons have all murdered one another since I left, I'm sure they still are. Why?"

"Because I'm going to need a mechanical ass by the time this ride is over!" Skiver yelled.

Riding on the back of a legendary monster toward the decadent capital of a nation of madness and avarice, wind blowing through his hair and his bones slamming against a not-nearly-padded-enough bench, Alaeron laughed and laughed and laughed.

∗ ∗ ∗

There were some practical reasons to take the annihilator over a carriage, as it turned out. The road to Starfall hadn't been smooth and beautiful the last time Alaeron came here, and portions of it were worse now, with great gouges ripped in the earth, downed trees, sinkholes, and craters all marring long stretches, clearly the aftermath of some battle or another. The annihilator had no trouble running over even the most broken ground, stepping over small trees without pause. Lodger's twitchiness seemed to translate into exceedingly fast reflexes, and Alaeron gradually began to relax as his faith in the driver's skills grew.

Lodger was a good driver, but, alas, a terrible person, as was fairly typical of the League. Crews of sullen slaves were repairing some of the damaged areas on the road, and they scattered in terror when the annihilator came racing toward them. Lodger laughed uproariously at their fear, the hitch in his voice making the cackling sound even more maniacal and deranged than it would have anyway.

"He's a charmer!" Skiver said.

"He's representative of his kind," Alaeron replied. What was the point of terrorizing slaves? There was nothing to learn from such an exercise. Sadism baffled Alaeron. It was such a waste of energy.

Night fell, and Lodger switched on great lights in the front of the annihilator, throwing cones of brightness across the ground before them. The landscape, mostly barren and boring in daylight, became strange at night—lights in various colors shone in the distance in all directions, either pure and bright or eerie and pulsing. Glowing smoke rose up in the east, swirling into the sky like a show by an illusionist, but Alaeron was willing to bet the smoke was profoundly poisonous. Bizarre lightning—which seemed to lance from the ground, up into the sky, without any accompanying crack of thunder—sparked in the west, in the direction of the Felldales. Alaeron wondered if the lightning had anything to do with the annihilators or the other strange creatures that made their homes in that shattered place.

At one point they blundered through a field full of sheep, and Lodger worked the levers on the automaton to manipulate pincers, reaching down and snatching up two live sheep, holding them aloft, one on each side of the vehicle. The animals hung at roughly the same level as Alaeron and Skiver, and the beasts shat themselves in terror, eyes rolling wildly. One of them had a vestigial leg poking out of its side, like a smaller sheep inside it had tried to kick its way out. "Mutton for dinner tonight!" Lodger shouted over his shoulder.

"Simpler than going to the butcher, I suppose," Skiver said, but even he—a thief through and through—shook his head in distaste.

The sheep wriggled horribly for a while before they died, either from terror or from injuries inflicted by the pincers. At least they stopped shitting and bleating, then.

After another hour, the annihilator slowed down. Skiver's joke about a prosthetic ass had stopped seeming funny and started seeming like simple good sense hours ago, and the only parts of Alaeron that didn't hurt were those that had gone numb. Skiver, amazingly, was asleep, head leaned on the backrest, snoring away; at least that noise was muffled by the annihilator's motion. Alaeron nudged his friend in the ribs, and Skiver was awake in an instant, with no interval of fuzziness or confusion. "Are we there, then?"

Alaeron pointed wordlessly, and Skiver looked.

The thief was rarely at a loss for words. Alaeron had strolled with him through Absalom, the City at the Center of the World; traveled with him through a field of ancient obelisks in Osirion; and walked with him through the wreckage of a city that had once flown through the air. The thief had taken all that in stride. But now, Skiver gaped. "What...what is that?"

A silly question, in a way. There was only one thing it could be. But hearing about it and seeing it were very different things, and even though Alaeron had actually been inside it once, looking upon it again after all these years took his breath away, too.

"It's Silver Mount," he said.

Chapter Twelve

Welcome to Starfall

Skiver had spent most of his life within a few miles of his birthplace in Almas—and why not? Almas was one of the great cities of Andoran, which was objectively the greatest and most enlightened of all the nations of the Inner Sea. Nevertheless, he considered himself a man of the world. He'd seen Absalom several times, and he'd traveled across the sea to Osirion where the pyramids towered, and of course he had proper reverence in his heart for the spires of the Golden Cathedral in Almas, hometown wonders not to be scorned merely for their familiarity.

But Silver Mount was a grander thing than any monument Skiver had ever seen. He'd seen far larger mountains, true. But mountains were mountains, not things made by mortal hands.

Then again, Silver Mount hadn't been made by mortal hands, either, or at least, not the hands of any mortals from this world. Alaeron had told him all about it: Silver Mount was the largest of the objects that had, according to legend, fallen from the heavens on the night known as the Rain of Stars. The Mount's precise contours were impossible to make out in the dark, lit only by the moon and stars and the torches and lanterns of the city in its shadow, but it rose from a wide base to craggy and jagged peaks and spires, broader and taller than any building Skiver had ever seen. Apparently this wasn't even the whole of the Mount. Some unknown vastness of the city—or ship, or coffin, or whatever it was—had been driven deep into the ground when the mountain fell from the sky, and Alaeron said there could be as much again hidden beneath the earth as there was standing revealed above it.

"The songs say it appeared in the sky, in a time before memory," Alaeron said. "As it tumbled, it broke, or exploded, or fragmented, and smaller pieces fell all around, balls of fire driven into the ground. The thing I killed in the earthworks came from one tiny piece of this, or its attendants."

"And you've been inside that thing?" Skiver said.

"Just once. I barely made it out alive. Zernebeth very nearly died. And we weren't even very deep. The interior is huge and still mostly unmapped, because would-be cartographers are so often killed. There are doors that no explosive or magic can scratch, and chambers full of poison or monsters. There's one room with a great window made of something stronger than glass, and beyond, there's a circular pool of black water or oil, and every once in a while, something like a tongue studded with bulging black domes that might be eyes—or taste buds, or organs for some sense we can't imagine—breaks the surface, and slaps against the glass, as if trying to break it. No one has ever been able to so much as scratch that glass, though to be honest, I'm not sure how hard anyone has tried."

"But what is it?" Skiver said. "The thing beyond the glass?"

Alaeron laughed without humor as the annihilator slowed its run to a walk, approaching the walls of Starfall. Lodger flashed the lights in some pattern, presumably to let any watchers know this wasn't a real annihilator come to lay waste and take prisoners. "What makes you think anyone knows?"

"I've seen the Ruins of Kho, and they're ancient, too, yeah? But we know it used to be a city of the Shory Empire, a flying city that crashed. Is this the same sort of thing? I mean, surely there are stories, even if the truth isn't known for sure—"

Alaeron shook his head. "The Shory Empire first sent a city into the sky during the Age of Destiny, which scholars agree—insofar as they agree on anything—began around eight thousand years ago. An unfathomable distance of time, truly, and we only have records and relics from that time because of powerful magics that preserved old histories, and because of the accounts of a few incredibly long-lived beings, though trusting their memories seems like a foolish thing to do. Before the Age of Destiny came the Age of Anguish, and before that the Age of Darkness, when the Starstone fell and created the Inner Sea—that was almost ten thousand years ago. Ten thousand! Can you imagine it? Say a human is lucky, and lives a hundred years—that is a hundred such lives, laid end-to-end. As for the Rain of Stars, well, no one is sure when it happened, precisely. Some time after the Starstone fell, but likely before the Shory cities took to the sky. Perhaps nine thousand years? No one is sure. The Shory at least had writing, they made records of their empire, they were human, but whoever or whatever created the Mount left us precious few clues as to their nature or intentions. There are just broken fragments of songs from the native Kellids, passed down from generation to generation, and all they agree on is that thing falling out of the sky." He nodded toward the Mount. "Any question of why, or even what, is no closer to being answered now than it was the night of the Rain itself."

"All right, so no one knows where the Mount came from or what it is. Do you have a guess?" Skiver patted Alaeron on the shoulder. "I'm not in a debating society, and I don't need you to show me any citations. I'm just curious what you think."

Alaeron squirmed uncomfortably. Truth was truth, and speculation was speculation, and though the latter was often a necessary step to reach the former, it still made him uncomfortable to share such ill-formed and unsubstantiated musings. "Some say the Mount was a ship. That seems obvious, in a way. There are things inside it that are, if not alive, then at least not dead, and who might have been passengers. There are rooms, hallways, tools, apparently engines. It seems like a place that people might have lived—at least, portions of it do. Some think it's a palace, because it's so full of precious things..." Alaeron trailed off.

"You disagree?"

"I think it probably was a ship," Alaeron said quietly, surely too quietly for Lodger to hear, almost too low for Skiver. "I wonder if it was also a prison. Or a...a place to seal up deadly things, forever, the way sometimes wizards have to construct vaults deep underground to hide things too dangerous to leave lying around. I wonder if somewhere, far away and unfathomably long ago, some wizards or kings or shamans put their deadliest creatures, things, and ideas into a vessel made of skymetal, and launched it into the sea of space—or even into the spaces between other planes of existence—with the hope that they'd never see any of that locked-up badness again. Perhaps that prison ship, or sealed box of monsters, then tumbled in the dark until, through bad luck or sorcerous design, it crashed into our world...and broke open against the skin of what is now Numeria. If the Mount was a prison, I wonder about the Gearsmen, the strange metal creatures who serve the Technic League not quite reliably—were they the guards for this prison? Or were they among the prisoners?" Alaeron looked at the Mount, and shivered. "But it's just a thought. Almost certainly impossible to prove or disprove."

Skiver grunted. He'd seen the inside of a gaol once or twice, and never much enjoyed the experience, but to be locked up in a metal mountain and thrown into the sky...He'd heard of people being exiled to faraway lands, because the rulers of their own cities didn't want to put them to death for one reason or another, but wanted to make sure they never came back. Alaeron's theory struck him as plausible enough. Even other nations had strange laws and customs, where something that might have been merely rude in one place was a killing offense in another, so who knew what kind of laws entirely other worlds might have, or what kind of sentences?

"We're here," Lodger said cheerfully, tossing down the rope ladder. "I've got to secure my little spider here, but one of the League's servants will let you in through the side gate, there in the wall. The League compound is in the—"

Alaeron interrupted him. "I know where it is, unless it's moved since I was here last. Where are Zernebeth's rooms?"

"The best workshop in the compound, of course," Lodger said. "Zernebeth has a lot of sway in the League these days. I believe in your day her rooms belonged to a fellow named Gannix." His voice was perfectly mild, tremors aside, but Alaeron tensed up anyway, for an attack of either the verbal or physical variety. He'd killed Gannix, or at least caused his death, and there was no telling who among the League had counted that one-eyed monster as friend or mentor and might bear a personal grudge—or who might think Alaeron deserved to die just on the general principle that anyone who killed a League captain should not be permitted to live. He had Zernebeth's protection, supposedly, but who knew how far that protection extended? Or even if her offer was entirely genuine?

"I'm sure I'll see you here and there from time to time," Lodger said, and Skiver shook his hand and said friendly things as Alaeron nodded in a distracted way. Mere paranoia, then. Unfortunately, paranoia was a completely rational psychological position in Numeria.

The two Andorens climbed down the ladder and stood in the shadow of the wall. There were watchtowers up above spaced at random but frequent intervals, and Alaeron was keenly aware of the presence of guards with bows and more dangerous weaponry, salvaged and repurposed from Silver Mount and used to repel assaults from enemies and monsters. Bits of metal, from hand-sized to wide as a wagon wheel, were embedded haphazardly in the wall, either to strengthen the stone or (more likely) because the builders thought it looked impressive. To Alaeron's eyes, it just looked messy, glittering jewels draped on a filthy pig.

Starfall was like that in general, except mostly it was just pig, and dispensed with the jewels entirely.

"Welcome to Starfall," he muttered. Then he snapped his fingers. "Hold on, before we go in, I have to open the black box for a moment."

"What for?" Skiver said.

"I need to go inside and change my coat."

"Ha! You want to look your best for Zernebeth, eh?"

"Something like that," Alaeron said.

∗ ∗ ∗

They knocked at the door Lodger had pointed out, and a panel slid open, revealing a rectangular slice of a dirty face with a suspicious expression. "What do you want?"

"I'm Alaeron, here on League business. I'm expected." His new coat was velvet, red with golden trim, and looked either regal or like someone trying far too hard. It was also damnably heavy and hot

The voice grunted. "Who's that with you, then?"

"My manservant." Alaeron smiled to himself as Skiver choked back laughter.

"How do I know you're really you?" the guard said.

That was a philosophical question that could have occupied Alaeron's mind for some time, but Skiver provided a rhetorical shortcut by shouting, "We just arrived on a bloody giant metal scorpion, you git! Open the door and let us in!"

The door keeper muttered to himself for a moment, then unbarred something and swung the door open. "Much obliged." Skiver stepped through ahead of Alaeron.

The door closed behind them, and the guard shooed them away, then leaned against the wall and began chewing on a dirty thumbnail and staring pensively at his shoes. His job was apparently not a stimulating one. He wore a mail half-shirt of adamantine—an expensive substance even here, so he wasn't a common soldier, but a favored servant of the League.

Adamantine was incredibly expensive, but common enough that even ordinary people in Andoran had heard of it, by name or as "Numerian steel." There were other skymetals, though, far more exotic, and mostly unknown outside Numeria to anyone other than scholars and specialists. Djezet was a rusty-red analogue to quicksilver, existing only in liquid form, and crafters of magical weapons sometimes quenched their swords and knives in so-called "quickiron," believing it imparted some magical power—Alaeron wanted to see more research before he believed it. Inubrix, the metal that had probably poisoned Char (if Alaeron's theory was right), was notoriously hard to work with because of its phasing properties—half the time you couldn't even pick it up, as it just passed through your fingers. Siccatite had strange temperature properties, and was always either burning hot or so cold it sent tendrils of vapor curling into the air. Abysium, also known as feverstone, was a pretty, luminous blue-green and probably had mystical properties, but those who worked with it too long sickened and died, sprouting open sores and losing their hair and raving about things reaching out from the dark. Noqual was a pale-green crystal that could be forged and worked like iron, and besides its beauty it had many practical applications, especially seeming to deaden the effects of magic—but it was quite rare. Rarest of all was horacalcum, a common-looking coppery metal that had bizarre effects on the flow of time, causing it to slow down or speed up in the metal's vicinity—armor and weapons made with that skymetal turned the wielder into a terrifying creature of blurred speed or infinite patience. Alaeron had often wondered what it would be like to get enough horacalcum to construct a vehicle, but since it was almost never found in quantities of more than a pound at a time (and that pound was valuable enough to buy a well-appointed inn on a piece of prime real estate), he supposed he'd never find out. Unless he became a leading captain of the Technic League...

"Alaeron, we really should be going," Skiver said.

The alchemist shook himself and blinked. The door guard was frowning at him now, and Alaeron laughed, a bit wildly. "Sorry, sorry. Just...thinking. Haven't been here in a while. Lots of memories, associations, speculations...My mind is running away from me."

"It does that," Skiver said. "So this is Starfall, then. Give me the grand tour."

Alaeron started walking, toward the center of the city. "Ah. Yes. It's a city of some thirty thousand souls, though it's hard to be precise, especially since the number of slaves fluctuates so wildly, as they die or new ones are...acquired." The streets in this district were narrow, the buildings crowding together and made of dull stone, some decorated haphazardly with panels of metal, mosaics of broken colored glass, and shiny black tiles salvaged from wrecks. "I understand this place began as the headquarters for the Technic League, which was then a loose alliance of arcanists dedicated to studying Silver Mount. It grew into a city—the way any mining town might, though the mines here are rather more dangerous than most. In time it was taken over by Kevoth-Kul—the Black Sovereign—after he united the warring tribes and conquered the country. He meant to make this place the capital of an ever-widening empire, but..."

Alaeron trailed off, glancing around, suddenly worried that he might be overheard saying something unflattering about the Sovereign. As they'd moved away from the gate and the guardhouse there, the streets had become more populated, with the citizens of Starfall scurrying from building to building or lurking in alleyways, even the poorest ones in their dull rags wearing bright bits of improvised metal jewelry. Slaves in heavy metal collars shuffled or sprinted as their current tasks dictated. Most of the people (free or slave) were Kellids, dark-haired and deeply tanned, though Alaeron also saw several dwarves, which was no surprise—their prowess at extracting metals from the earth made them valuable as advisors and engineers. He knew there was a small community of halflings here, too, prized for their ability to wriggle into small places other races couldn't easily reach, and usually a smattering of half-orcs, mostly as hired muscle. He didn't see anyone who looked like a guard or a spy, but he lowered his voice anyway: "The Sovereign formed an alliance with the Technic League—it was that, or try to kill them, and they're harder to kill than most. The League plied the Sovereign with drugs from Silver Mount, and his plans to conquer and unite the north...receded in importance as he embraced the pleasures of the flesh and the strange visions the drugs provided him. Kevoth-Kul is still a formidable man, and his will is absolute law here—except when it comes to the League, which has its own, shall we say, parallel power structure—but the Sovereign's once-great dreams are smaller in scope, now. The whole city exists, in a way, to cater to his whims."

"Nice work if you can get it," Skiver said. "His citizens don't seem like the dancing-in-the-streets types."

That was true. Those people who deigned to notice Alaeron and Skiver at all glared suspiciously. "They're not really citizens, not in the way the people of Andoran are. The Sovereign and the League make the rules, and their favored family and friends and allies have some power and influence, too. As for the rest of the people living here, well, even the ones who aren't actually slaves might as well be, at least by the standards of Andoran—subject to the whims of an absolute monarch and the even more terrifying whims of the League. No, not citizens. Inhabitants, maybe. Denizens."

"Victims," Skiver muttered.

They turned a corner and found themselves in a broad square, filled with tents and makeshift booths in a bustling night market, traders shouting over one another to ply their wares.

"Genuine relics from Silver Mount!" shouted a man selling obvious fakes, carved wood thinly coated in base metal.

"Flour! Hardly any weevils!" shouted another.

"Dried meat! Guaranteed pureblooded!" called a man in a booth festooned with dangling strips of grayish dried flesh.

"Pureblooded?" Skiver said.

"He means it didn't come from an animal with extra legs, or eyes, or tentacles, or fins," Alaeron said. "Which is almost certainly a lie, and irrelevant anyway, since even outwardly ordinary creatures can be terribly twisted inside. Tainted creatures are common here."

"Finest potions! Dangerous drugs!" called a familiar-looking woman with her hair in a multitude of braids, woven with little baubles of shiny metal and glass. Alaeron brightened, walking toward her booth.

"Malica! Are you still selling sugar water and phosphoric acid as a miracle cure?"

The woman's eyes went wide, then narrowed. "Alaeron! Give me one reason why I shouldn't hand you over to the guard for a sack full of gold and silverdisks."

Chapter Thirteen

Palace of Fallen Stars

For a moment, Alaeron felt a flash of fear, then saw the twinkle in her eyes. "Don't be nasty. You know I'm more valuable than silver and gold. Besides, as far as I know there's no bounty on my head. I've been invited back by the League to do a little business."

"I heard a rumor of a rumor about your return, last time I was in the League compound. You got called back by that icy witch Zernebeth, eh? Didn't you leave her for dead?"

Alaeron shrugged. "I suppose. But it was an accident. She's forgiven me, I think."

His fellow alchemist glanced at Skiver, raising one eyebrow. "Who's your friend?"

"Ah, this is Skiver, he's my..."

"I keep him out of trouble," Skiver said. "The wrong sort of trouble, anyway. You're an alchemist too?"

Malica nodded. "The finest in all of Starfall. Though Alaeron here isn't bad, when he gets his head out of the clouds long enough to mix something useful. We used to trade the occasional tip in the old days, though he left town without saying goodbye. In his defense, I suppose people were trying to murder him."

"Still damnably rude," Skiver said.

"How are things with you? And in the city in general?" Alaeron asked.

The alchemist took a sip from a flask, grimaced, then grinned. "Oh, much like always. Not so bad if you've got money, fairly hellish otherwise, I would imagine. There was a bit of upheaval in the League a while back, a few murders in the streets, suspicious fires, charred bodies, people with their heads exploded by mysterious means, a woman who vomited a torrent of tiny metal aphids, that sort of thing. But Zernebeth seems to have things well in hand now, and everyone's behaving themselves, more or less. I still do a lot of consulting for the League, and the Sovereign is always happy to pay a premium for new drugs, so I keep myself occupied and the coffers filled. Come by my house sometime, over in the Street of Lights, I'll show you a good time—I have some mind-enhancing potions I'm working on, they're great."

"I'll do that, if I get half a chance. But we should probably meet up with Zernebeth."

"The League compound is just where you left it, clinging to the palace like a parasite," she said, inclining her head to the right.

Alaeron leaned in and kissed her cheek, feeling irrationally happy at finding a friendly face. His relationship with Zernebeth had been rather fraught—he respected her, feared her, sometimes lusted after her—but Malica was like an older sister. Skiver bid her a friendly farewell, and they continued on through the streets.

"She have many connections in court?" Skiver asked.

"Mmm? Oh, I suppose—she mixes potions and makes matches and alchemical lanterns for all the wealthiest people. Or at least, she did."

"Aha," Skiver said. "Good to know. I may wander back by and see if she can help me unload a few things, reduce the clutter in your black box."

A few more turnings, and they entered the city's central square, blazing with light from alchemical lanterns rising high on needle-thin spires. The buildings facing the square were among the most impressive in the city, with gleaming facades of shining black and silver metal, homes for the wealthiest members of the Sovereign's court.

The square itself was filled with wonders: the legendary quicksilver fountain (surrounded, as always, by dead birds who'd made the mistake of touching the splashing, poisonous liquid); a great adamantine statue of Kevoth-Kul, rippling with only slightly exaggerated muscles, holding aloft his greatsword in one hand and the head of a generic vanquished enemy in the other; and, of course, the citadel of the Black Sovereign, the great Palace of Fallen Stars.

"It's like someone put all the palaces of the cities of the Inner Sea in a dice cup and shook them up and then dumped them down here." Skiver didn't quite gape, but it was a near thing.

"It is a bit much for the eye to take in all at once," Alaeron agreed. Great reflective black marble steps led up to a row of columns carved with the faces of monsters and heroes, all wrapped with shining wire. The columns held up a broad roof topped by a central dome, which in turn was topped by the oversized representation of a greatsword, the dome and sword both gleaming silver in the moonlight. Those features alone, while a bit ostentatious, were reasonable enough for a palace, but whoever had designed this place and made improvements over the years had lacked any sense of restraint, proportion, or decorum. The roof sprouted additional spires, turrets, and towers, with whole sections from salvaged wrecks incorporated into the structure, from bulbous black glass domes to corkscrews of ruby metal. The interior, Alaeron knew, was a maze of corridors, stairs, ladders, and hidden passages, haphazardly connecting all the diverse parts of the palace. "The Black Sovereign holds court in a combination throne room and feasting hall beneath the dome. It's...quite an experience."

"So do we go up and through the front door, then?" Skiver sounded nervous at the prospect, which made sense; on those occasions when he'd entered grand houses, he usually did so through a second-story window in the dead of the night, ideally when no one was home.

"No, we'll go around back, where the Technic League keeps their workshops and laboratories. They're close enough to consult with the Black Sovereign and enjoy the pleasures at court...but far enough away that the odd explosion doesn't hurt the palace itself." He started to walk across the square, then froze as a trio of figures marched down the palace steps toward them.

They were like men, but made of smooth metal, with each helm-like head featuring a single round, red eye in its center. All three of those heads turned and stared at Alaeron and Skiver as they walked past, but they never altered their pace.

Once they'd passed by, Alaeron let out a breath he'd scarcely realized he was holding.

"Those would be Gearsmen, then," Skiver said. "They're a bit eerie, aren't they?"

"That's putting it kindly. They obey the orders of the League perhaps ninety-nine times out of a hundred...but it's the slim possibility of disobedience that makes them so troubling. You can't be entirely sure what they'll do."

"I suppose they're tricky to punish, too."

"They can't be bribed, or compelled. I have no idea why they choose to follow the League's orders even as much as they do. They feel no pain, no fear, nothing at all. Having them as guards is like having a lion as a guard dog. Just because it hasn't bothered to eat you yet doesn't mean it never will."

"Steer clear of those, then. Understood."

Alaeron led Skiver through the square, around the right side of the palace, down a path lined with metal sculptures of flowers (the soil this close to the League compound being far too poisonous for living things to actually grow). The path terminated in a twelve-foot-high wall of shining metal, with a door flanked by two Gearsmen holding spears tipped with complex, glittering points that probably spat lightning or plasma or worse things.

"I am here on League business." When the Gearsmen didn't react, Alaeron cleared his throat. "Zernebeth is expecting me." Still nothing. "I'm Alaeron—"

The Gearsmen looked at one another, then one tapped the door with the end of its spear. The door didn't swing open, but instead slid sideways into the wall, like a pocket door, but by all appearances moving under its own power. "Ah. This is Skiver. He's with me. He gets to come in, too." There was no further movement from the Gearsmen, so Alaeron walked between them, shoulders hunched and tense, with Skiver close at his heels. The door slid shut behind them with a crack of finality.

The League compound was centered on a huge stone building, almost a palace in its own right, surrounded by miscellaneous outbuildings, greenhouses, smoking forges, slave barracks, silos, and disorderly piles of metal and broken machinery. It was practically a miniature village, and was filled with the bustle of Technic League servants.

"Zernebeth's workshop is in the main building, upstairs, in the largest workshop," Alaeron said, and began winding his way along an ornamental path, set with etched metallic disks instead of paving stones. None of the League paid much attention to the newcomers, the general theory being that anyone who made it past the Gearsmen had a right to be here. Alaeron didn't see many familiar faces, which was good—he didn't have great memories of his time here, and if he was remembered by anyone, it was unlikely to be fondly. He exchanged nods with a hulking Kellid wearing insectlike optics over his eyes, peering at an arrangement of brass gears spread across a worktable. A gnome with milk-white skin and shocking blue hair banged on a lumpy piece of metal as she cackled. A half-orc stood patiently while a willowy woman who might have been a Keleshite stood on a stool and fitted him with a helmet bristling with spikes and wires. A short, stocky fellow with a nest of white hair and a bright steel eyepatch seemingly welded to his face fiddled with a long-barreled object, pointing it at a heap of bricks and whooping with delight when the bricks exploded, scattering fragments everywhere and making Skiver and Alaeron flinch; no one else reacted to the noise or destruction in the slightest.

The entry to the main building wasn't guarded, and inside were the old familiar broad corridors, lined with doors leading to workshops and labs, the biggest and best for captains, according to their prominence and influence. Those positions shifted wildly with each new discovery or practical application, and when someone died, the other Leaguers swarmed like beetles on a dog's corpse to pick their labs clean of anything that might be useful. The air stank of mingled chemicals, sharp and cloying and astringent all mixed together, and the sounds of screeching grindstones, clashing metal, and sobs and screams (the latter arriving from a great distance, at least) formed a background hum with occasional spikes of loudness.

"Are people being tortured here?" Skiver cocked his head at a particularly sharp scream.

Alaeron nodded. "Oh, most certainly. Anyone committed to death for whatever the Black Sovereign considers a crime is given over the League for experimentation. After all, it's very tempting to graft a weapon that shoots lightning to one's forearm, but first you have to test it on someone else, to make sure it won't liquefy your bones or stop your heart. And there are all sorts of interesting things dripping down the walls of the Mount, some of which have miraculous properties, and others of which are poisonous—and so they're often fed to those condemned to die, to see which is which."

"Does anyone ever survive those experiments?"

"Oh, some. Not most, mind you, but some. A few even thrive, or gain superhuman strength, or have skin that turns hard as armor, or develop glands that let them spit acid...those that might prove useful are quietly taken into League service. The others are just experimented on again, tested to destruction."

"Alaeron," Skiver said, "these people are evil. Don't get me wrong, I'm bad, but evil is a whole other thing entirely."

"You'll get no argument from me."

"Are you sure you want to work for them, is what I'm saying."

Alaeron shook his head. "Not at all. But Zernebeth isn't so bad. She's...cold, certainly, but not cruel, unless she feels the need to prove a point. Not sadistic for sadism's sake."

"That's reassuring. Look at me. I'm reassured."

"This is the place where the wonders of the world are buried, my friend. I understand if you don't want to be here, and I can get you passage back to Almas anytime you like—I never expected you to stay once you'd seen me settled anyway—but for me, the chance to find the mysteries Zernebeth hinted about overcomes my disgust at the circumstances."

"I'm not going anywhere just yet. I've got a lot of high-quality goods to sell, after all."

They reached a staircase, and Alaeron paused. "Skiver, I think you should stay here. I'd better meet Zernebeth alone." He took off his pack and handed it over. "Just in case. If I don't come back soon...well, try to stroll out as nonchalantly as possible. Maybe no one will notice you."

"You're expecting treachery?"

"Not necessarily. But we're in Starfall. Treachery is this city's greatest natural resource."

∗ ∗ ∗

He was halfway up the stairs when Zernebeth snapped in his ear, "Where are you? Lodger reported that you were delivered an hour ago."

"Just seeing a bit of the city," Alaeron said. "You know how charming it is on a cool summer night. I'm coming up the stairs to your workshop now."

"Yes, yes, just hurry."

The top of the stairs ended in a set of heavy metal double doors, and Alaeron knocked, though his knuckles barely made a sound against the density of the metal. They swung apart a moment after he touched them, opening onto a single huge room with high, vaulted ceilings. Alchemical lanterns in various colors hung everywhere, and long worktables lined the walls, broken up only by towering bookshelves stuffed with volumes and scrolls and tablets. Zernebeth's living quarters were mixed in with her work space, including a four-poster bed large enough to hold six people—eight if they were sufficiently friendly—and two armchairs next to a stone fireplace big enough to count as another bedroom in most places.

And there was Zernebeth herself, standing in the center of the room, looking at Alaeron with the last expression he'd expected: a fond, sweet smile. Standing over six feet tall, her skin the color of ice (complete with undertones of blue), her hair the color of white gold, her cloud-pale eyes...he'd never seen anyone who looked quite like her. She wore a black cloak threaded with silver wire, and underneath he glimpsed a sea-blue dress that clung to her figure provocatively. Given that in the past she'd always preferred plain, workmanlike clothing, Alaeron assumed the dress was yet another way for her to assert control of the situation, trying to take him off balance. He could be aware of the manipulation and simultaneously enjoy the view; he didn't even have to feel guilty, as he knew she wanted him to look—to be unable not to look.

Alaeron thought, not for the first time, that Zernebeth was like a statue of a goddess carved from ice, her proportions somehow just slightly larger than life-sized, and even though he knew her skin was so cold it burned, even the hint of her curves beneath the cloak gave him exceedingly warm thoughts.

The last time he'd seen her, blood had been pouring from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, and her hair had stood on end and crackled with lightning. She appeared none the worse for wear.

Until she approached him, opening her arms to embrace him. Her right arm was bare and unblemished, but her left...

Her left arm was gone, and in its place she'd affixed a vaguely armlike device of gleaming silver, convex bubbles of black glass, and transparent panels revealing tiny, silently whirring gears. The arm ended in a hand of sorts, with six fingers and two thumbs, all with at least one more joint than their natural analogues.

"Zernebeth," he said. "Your arm...I knew you'd lost it, but..."

She paused, looking at the prosthesis as if noticing it for the first time. "Oh, do you like it?" Her voice was faintly accented from her youth among the white witches of Irrisen. "I did not emerge from the Mount entirely undamaged, as I may have mentioned. Merging my mind and body with whatever information poured out of the Mount took a toll on me—I was not the intended vessel for that knowledge, you know. I think it was like pouring acid into a wooden cup: not so good for the cup. But knowledge isn't free, and an arm isn't such a high price to pay."

"It's my fault," Alaeron said. "I left you behind."

She shrugged. "True. You might have spared me the injuries, if you'd pulled me away. But you might have died yourself—I understand I was sparking with lightning? If you'd broken my connection with the ship, I wouldn't have seen the things I saw—oh, such things, Alaeron! They're the reason I brought you back here."

"I was expecting a bit more viciousness in your welcome, I confess. Perhaps more piling on of guilt. Well earned, of course, but—"

"I used those as tools to make you come. That objective has been achieved, so we can dispense with them now."

"Ah. So it's to be honesty and forthrightness between us?"

"Oh, I don't know about that. But certainly different sorts of manipulation. I'd hate for you to get bored." She put her arms around him and pressed him against her body. Her metal arm felt strange against his back, but not necessarily unpleasant. The chill that radiated out of from her body made him shiver—though it was possible the chill wasn't the only reason. She pulled back and favored him with another smile. This was more than she'd smiled at him during the entire time he'd been her assistant.

He coughed. "Speaking of manipulation, that's a lovely dress."

"Isn't it? I thought it would be kind to give you something nice to look at, before..."

Alaeron tried not to visibly tense. He scanned the corners of the room and didn't see anything dangerous lurking...but there was no telling what sorts of devices Zernebeth had primed in the room. "Before what?"

She tapped one metal finger against her lips, then said, "What would you do if I told you this was all a trick to lure you back here for your execution, runaway?"

Chapter Fourteen

New Business

Ah. I would probably ask you what you think of my coat."

Zernebeth frowned. "It's nice, I suppose. Fashion doesn't interest me much, and I didn't imagine you'd care about it, either. I would then ask you why you were talking about your coat when you're about to be handed over to the boys in the basement who test dangerous technology on prisoners?"

Alaeron opened his coat, showing the dozen vials sewn into little pockets inside, carefully padded so they didn't clank when he moved. Then he held up his right hand, careful not to wriggle the fingers. "You might not be able to see them, but there are threads tied to my fingers, and each thread goes back to a stoppered vial. If I move my fingers just so, the tension will release the tops of the vials, and unleash a particularly virulent poison gas of my own invention. I, of course, ingested an antidote at the same time I put on this coat, so I would stroll away while you and any other living League members in the vicinity of the cloud died in agony. The Gearsmen might get me, I suppose, but at least I'd make my capture cost you."

Zernebeth smiled again and clapped her hands. "Oh, Alaeron, I'm so proud of you. I was terrified you'd gone soft in recent years, down in the weak lands of the south. Even more so when you whined about Char trying to kill you. But you're still thinking like a man of the Technic League, so this might work out after all."

Alaeron was no keen student of human behavior, but he chose to believe that Zernebeth had merely been testing him, and removed the loops of thread from his fingers, gently, before taking off the coat and draping it over his arm. "It's a pleasure to be back," he said. "Would you like to meet my friend Skiver?"

"Not especially," she said. "I'm told he's lurking downstairs—I'll have someone show you to your rooms, and you'll join me tomorrow morning for a meeting with the League council. The Sovereign is having a feast tomorrow night—some cousin of his is getting married the next day, so it will be even more debauched than usual—and you should attend that, too, so the right people can see you, and recognize that you are my chosen ally. It will help cement your authority when you're out in the field. Then we'll see about organizing the reason you're here. All right?"

"As long as I get to see things no human has ever looked upon before, I am content," he said. "I can tolerate a bit of the social sphere if that's the price to pay for access to arcane wonders."

She patted his cheek with her metal hand—amazingly, it was less cold than her flesh. "Good boy. Tell me, how tired are you?"

"Middling," he said. "I should be exhausted, but I find myself excited as well. Eager to begin the work."

"Mmm." She shooed at him. "Go on down, a slave will take care of you. I'll see you soon."

∗ ∗ ∗

Skiver and Alaeron were given separate rooms, but with a door connecting the two, albeit one that could be barred from either side for enforced privacy. Soon after Alaeron got into his room and shut the door, Skiver wandered in through the connecting door, looking around and nodding, holding a glass of something amber-colored in his hand. "Oh, good, it's not just my room that looks like it was decorated by someone who had a lot of old scrap to get rid of."

Alaeron laughed. The Technic League's guest rooms were full of things deemed useless for debauch or destruction but interesting enough to impress visitors. A gear the size of a wagon wheel hung above Alaeron's bed, and his headboard was decorated with a mosaic made from broken fragments of silverdisks, the small etched metal objects often used as currency in Numeria alongside more ordinary coins. "This blue lampshade is made of glass from one of the wrecks. Quite pretty, isn't it?"

"I've got a piece of melted slag, looks a bit like a windblown tree, almost as tall as I am, just standing in a corner. I've got no idea what it's for, so I hung my coat on it." Skiver sat down on the mattress and bounced up and down once or twice. "Your bed is like this too. Bloody bizarre. Why's it jiggle like this?"

"The mattresses are made with springs."

"Springs? What, you mean coiled-up metal? Numerians are all mad. There's something wrong with feathers or straw?"

"Someone invented the spring-loaded bed, and the Black Sovereign liked it—something about the way the, ah, bosoms of his nightly visitors bounced as they romped on them—and so there was a brief craze for the things. The ones left over when the fad passed got stuck in the guest rooms for want of any better fate, I suppose."

"Spring-beds fell out of fashion, then?"

Alaeron nodded. "I understand one of the coils uncoiled at an inopportune moment and poked up through the mattress, jabbing the Sovereign in a moderately delicate place. He had the bed destroyed and the inventor...well. I don't think he ever slept in a bed again, let's say."

Skiver sucked air through his teeth. "This Sovereign of yours is a dangerous man to try and curry favor with."

"Indeed. Fortunately, he mostly leaves the League to its own devices. Though if you please him, the Sovereign will raise you up high, or at least, what he considers high—which mostly involves eating larks' tongues and quail eggs, ingesting mind-altering chemicals, and rutting with the slave, servant, or even courtier of your choice. They don't exactly have ‘nobles,' here, unless you count the Sovereign's family and original tribe, partly because there's precious little in the way of nobility. Which reminds me—we're invited to a feast at court tomorrow night."

"Oh, good. I was hoping to do a little business."

"Ha. Best of luck. Be prepared to see sights that will shock even you."

"I would have said that was impossible, but after a few hours in Starfall, hearing entirely secondhand horrors, I'm beginning to realize the limitations of my imagination. I'd best rest up, then."

"Ring the bell and one of the servants will bring you a bathtub. I know I've got days of road grime to wash off me."

"Good idea," Skiver said. "We want to smell sweet for the barbarian courtiers tomorrow, eh?"

∗ ∗ ∗

A noise woke Alaeron, and he rolled off the mattress, landing on the side away from the door, reaching underneath the bed for a clay bulb. The bomb contained a substance that would immobilize anyone it splashed without killing them, and he'd laced the fluid with inert flakes of skymetal, so that it would even work to paralyze the immaterial Char.

"Master Alaeron?" muttered an elderly slave wearing a skymetal collar that marked him as a valued possession, not to be casually murdered. He raised up a lantern. "Sir, are you here?"

Alaeron cleared his throat and stood up, aware that he was wearing only his underclothes. "Ah. Yes. I...the bed is a bit too soft for me, so I was sleeping on...Yes, I'm here."

"Mistress Zernebeth desires your company in her workshop."

Alaeron frowned. There was a waterclock in the room, elaborate and ugly, but it hadn't been maintained and didn't work at all, so he had no idea what time it was. The very black belly of the middle of the night, was his guess. "Ah, very well, I'll dress—"

The slave cleared his throat. "I was given very specific instructions that you are not to dress, sir. The hallways have been cleared. You will not be witnessed."

"I don't— Oh. Oh." Could he refuse? Of course he could, the slave wouldn't be authorized to physically drag him upstairs. But what would the consequences of refusal be? That question aside, did he even want to refuse?

He'd never taken advantage of the ladies of negotiable virtue Skiver knew from his business, because the need for physical release he felt every day or two was more quickly and efficiently dealt with on his own, over in the space of minutes, with no necessity for negotiation or conversation. But Zernebeth...she was more than his equal intellectually, an altogether fascinating figure, and moreover, she was unlike any woman he'd known. It would certainly be a new experience, and what else did he live for, after all?

"Of course," he said, and followed the slave through the empty hallways to the staircase that led to Zernebeth's workshop. The slave stayed at the base of the stairs while Alaeron ascended, and the metal doors of her room stood open. Only a single light glowed inside, illuminating the bed—and Zernebeth herself, who wore nothing at all. She lay on her stomach, leaning on her elbows, chin propped in her hands, one metal and one flesh.

"Mmm," she said. "I told the slave not to let you dress. I didn't expect you'd sleep in your underthings—I was expecting you naked. How barbaric. Take those off."

Alaeron complied.

"Good. Now come to me."

The alchemist walked to the bed, stirring in all the predictable ways, and Zernebeth sat up and swung her legs over the side, reaching for a vial on the bedside table. She tossed it to him, and he managed to catch it while simultaneously staring at her bare body. "Drink," she said.

"Ah. Not that I doubt your intentions, but...what am I drinking? If it's something meant to enhance performance, I don't think that will be a problem." He gestured vaguely downward.

She chuckled. "It had better not. No, it's a potion to protect you from frost. I'm sure you've noticed I give off a bit of a chill—blame it on a brush with ice magics in my youth, compounded by a few experiments with siccatite when I was new to the League. The potion won't make me feel much warmer, but it will keep the cold from...interfering, or harming your flesh. I'd hate for you to feel any pain. At least inadvertently."

Alaeron tossed back the contents of the vial. It tasted like summer wine. He suspected Malica had mixed the potion—she'd always had a gift for making her nostrums palatable. Then he wondered if Malica knew what the potion was for, in the general sense or the specific.

"You said you don't doubt my intentions," Zernebeth said. "What do you think those intentions are now?"

"To strengthen my loyalty."

"True," Zernebeth said. "But I also want to enjoy myself."

"No reason one mechanism can't fulfill two functions," Alaeron said. "I am a great admirer of efficiency."

∗ ∗ ∗

Alaeron woke up in his own bed to the sound of pounding on the connecting door, but he hadn't been sleeping for long. He was groggy and faintly hungover, without the benefit of having ingested alcohol—an effect attributable to lack of sleep, or dehydration, or some side effect of the potion. Still, given the choice to do the night over again, he wouldn't have chosen to get more rest instead.

"I'm awake!" he called, pulling a sheet around himself. He felt sticky and disheveled, but it couldn't be helped. Zernebeth kept a tub in her workshop, complete with its own water tank so she could fill it at will, but being basically immune to cold, she never bothered to heat it, and he'd declined her offer of a dip in icy water when they were done.

Skiver pushed open the door and strolled in. He had somehow acquired clothes that fit in better at court, with too-tight green breeches and a loosely flowing pale yellow shirt. Whenever Skiver wore anything other than black clothes suitable for an assassin it looked like he was wearing a disguise, but at least he was making an effort to blend in.

"You missed breakfast," Skiver said. "Decent food, though a bit bland. Better than what we could've bought at the market last night. I wandered down to the kitchen and made a deal with the cook to sell some of my more exotic spices. She made me an appointment with the Sovereign's personal chef, too. Care to open up the black box for me? I need samples. I'm going to go see Malica shortly, too, see if she can help me move a little merchandise."

Alaeron complied, then washed his face in the basin and dressed. Skiver emerged from his personal warehouse carrying cloth sacks slung over his shoulders and dangling from his hands; he looked like a man imitating a mule. "You could summon a slave to carry those for you," Alaeron said.

Skiver sniffed. "I'm Andoren, Alaeron. I don't hold with slavery. I felt uncomfortable enough having them bring in a tub and hot water last night, and when one asked me if I wanted someone to ‘warm my bed' I very nearly lost my temper. I've bedded men in exchange for coin, now and again, but that's business, entered into freely by both parties—someone who'll be whipped or worse if they don't obey isn't my idea of a willing partner."

"Peace." Alaeron held up his hands. "I wasn't saying you should sleep with the slaves, just that someone would be happy to do the carrying for you."

"Happy? Ha. There are no happy slaves in Starfall, any more than there are honest men in my extended family. I'll do whatever I can do myself by myself, thanks. Be careful you don't go native, now. Being at the top of the heap here in Numeria could be pretty pleasant, if you don't think about all the people you're standing on top of."

"I have no illusions about the nature of the League," Alaeron said, and that was true; he just didn't think about it much. Terrible situation, certainly, and if he'd been sitting in a taproom back in Almas and heard that the peasantry had risen up and deposed the Black Sovereign, he'd have cheered with everyone else at the spread of liberty and so on, but really, it was nothing to do with him.

"Meet you back here before the big party?" Skiver said.

"I think so. I've got some, ah, League business to take part in first, apparently."

"I can't wait to meet this Zernebeth." Skiver went out the door, then poked his head back in from the hallway. "After all, any woman who can distract you from your research long enough to get into your pants must be quite something, eh?"

Alaeron blushed ferociously as Skiver walked off, chuckling.

∗ ∗ ∗

Alaeron had never attended a meeting of the Technic League council, the gatherings where captains squabbled for resources, made outrageous demands, and tried to find out what secrets their fellows were hiding without giving anything away themselves. The meeting room was in the basement of the main building of the League compound, in an egg-shaped room with silvery walls dominated by an immense table in the shape of a right triangle, which seemed to be made from the charred fin or wing of some otherworldly vehicle. Alaeron sat in a low chair against the wall, along with a handful of other people who weren't captains but had some sort of status that allowed them into the chamber—favored apprentices and lieutenants, no doubt.

Zernebeth sat at one point of the triangular table, with ten captains arrayed around the other sides, presumably ordered in some significant if mysterious way. The gnome was there, fiddling with a device made of interlocking rings. Others included the man with the metal eyepatch; four Kellids—two men and two women—with shaved heads and silver jewelry in their ears, dressed in matching black cloaks, sitting close together on the long edge of the triangle; a bored-looking sorcerer who might have been Varisian, wearing star-patterned robes and making flames dance in the palms of his hands; an elaborately tattooed Shoanti waiting patiently with folded hands; a dwarf wearing immense red-tinted goggles and openly assembling what appeared to be a long gun from the factories of Alkenstar, but altered to incorporate Numerian relics; a birdlike brunette woman who wouldn't have attracted a second glance from Alaeron if she'd been sitting beside him at a café in Almas, sipping a cup of tea she'd apparently brought in with her; and a smirking Ulfen man with long blond hair and a perfectly trimmed beard, sitting at Zernebeth's right hand. They were a motley crew, demonstrating a diversity unusual for the nation, but that was the nature of the League: any arcanists with the strength and intelligence to brave the interior of the Mount and emerge with useful things were welcome in the League, until they ceased to be useful or successful.

Zernebeth pounded on the table with a hammer of adamantine; the fact that the table's surface didn't break meant it was made of similar stuff. "We have a few items of business to discuss." She spoke Taldane, the common trade language of all the Inner Sea nations, rather than the Hallit most people in the country spoke, presumably as a nod toward the diversity of the gathering. "Lofan and his conspirators didn't survive their visit to the subbasement. It seems our artificial hearts still need a bit more work. Oh, well—lesson learned. If anyone else wants to kill me and steal my secrets, at least have the decency to be better at this business than I am, all right? Krastus has claimed Lofan's workshop, and my cohort agrees he should have it—he needs a place to keep the augmented animals he's been working on, and I like the idea of half-clockwork dogs shitting all over Lofan's precious Tian carpets. Elias, I know you want more prisoners, and I spoke to the Sovereign's Minister of Retribution about it in my role as liaison to the court, but things have been quiet lately among the people. You'll have to make arrangements with one of the other captains to take their share of the condemned—or else go out and subtly stir up some dissent among the populace, get some conspirators and revolutionaries arrested and handed over to us."

She turned and gestured toward Alaeron. "This is an alchemist I've taken on as an assistant. I don't propose to give him membership in the League, but he has skills I need for a particular project, so no one kill him, all right? His face may be vaguely familiar to some of you—he's the one who killed Gannix, and left me for dead in Silver Mount."

The dwarf laughed harshly. "And you're rewarding him?"

"I'm giving him a chance to redeem himself. I'm sending him into the Battle of Falheart in the next day or two to follow up on a rumor I heard from some half-drunk shepherd. If he brings back something useful, I'll grant him amnesty. If not..."

"It's a death sentence." The soft-spoken Ulfen looked at Alaeron and lifted an eyebrow. "You go willingly?"

This was the first Alaeron had heard of going to the Battle of Falheart—site of some old conflict, a cursed place none dared to approach, though he didn't remember details—but he shrugged. "I was under a death sentence anyway. I've been hounded by assassins since I left this place. This arrangement, at least, gives me a chance to escape the shadow of my past crimes."

The Ulfen grunted. "Killing a Technic League captain isn't a crime, necessarily, it's just politics—if I recall correctly, your real crime was stealing relics that belonged to the League."

"And if he replaces them with something of greater value, I will argue strongly that he should be forgiven," Zernebeth said.

"Still—" the Ulfen began. "Most irregular."

"Do we care about irregularities, or about results?"

"An excellent point." The Ulfen bowed his head. "Do continue."

"Oh, thank you, your entirely unnecessary permission to speak is welcome." Several other captains, presumably Zernebeth's allies and cohort, chuckled. "I trust most of you plan to attend the Sovereign's revelries tonight? Apparently he's fond of this cousin, so we may as well show the flag—it costs us nothing, and the Sovereign is easier to deal with when he thinks he's being respected. Except you, Callis. It's up to you, of course, but you might prefer to stay home. You know the Sovereign finds gnomes disturbing."

"Oh no," the gnome said, voice high-pitched and ethereal. "I won't get to eat spiced goat meat with a horde of barbarians, how sad."

Zernebeth chuckled. "Indeed. It is very good goat meat, though—no extra heads or anything. It will be a party, so we might as well enjoy ourselves, as much as we're able. Any other business? No? Fine." She rose, flapping her hands impatiently, and the others sauntered out, talking among themselves, followed by their assistants.

Soon only Alaeron and Zernebeth were left. "The Battle of Falheart, is it?"

Zernebeth snorted. "Of course not. You think I'd tell them where I'm really sending you? They all knew I was lying, of course, but I've started two nesting rumors about other places I'm sending you. The first is the place I'm actually sending you, but that information will be so easily discovered that they'll dismiss it as an obvious fabrication, too, and when they dig a bit deeper, they'll think the truth is that I'm sending you to the Gorum Pots."

"So where am I really going?"

"Listen for the rumors and find out. Or wait two days. You're too unpracticed at deception and discretion for me to tell you that now, Alaeron. Can't trust you to keep your mouth shut. As I discovered last night. Though I didn't mind in that context." She touched his cheek, then ran one cool fingertip across his lower lip before dropping her hand. "Speaking of, maybe I'll let you come to my rooms after the revels tonight, so go easy on the wine." She turned away. "Char!" she shouted, and her incorporeal apprentice drifted through the wall. Interesting—the chamber wasn't skymetal, then, but something more mundane. Maybe silver.

"Ma'am?" the incorporeal man said, paying no attention at all to Alaeron's presence.

"Keep an eye on Bothvald, would you?"

The apprentice opened his mouth, then shut it and nodded.

"Looks like your servant wants to object." Alaeron regretted speaking even as he was doing so. He'd always been bad at keeping his observations to himself.

"Yes, but Char is very loyal, so he didn't." Zernebeth sighed. "He wanted to point out that Bothvald—that's the blond one, by the way—was the captain who revealed Lofan's treachery to me. ‘Saved me from the adder nestled against my very breast,' to use Bothvald's own poetic turn of phrase—he's very loquacious for an Ulfen. Char thinks the man should thus be considered above suspicion. But Char realized I know that, and that I must therefore want Bothvald watched anyway, no doubt for my own sophisticated reasons. Correct?"

"Correct." Char looked at Alaeron with an expression so blank it could only qualify as smugness.

"And those sophisticated reasons are simply this: no one is above suspicion. Bothvald has proven his loyalty to me many times—he is first in my cohort—but he still bears watching. He wants to sit in my chair so badly I'm surprised he doesn't just settle himself into my lap. Speaking of, Alaeron, I have a few moments before my next meeting—care to help me pass the time?"

The expression on Char's face was still almost entirely blank, but it was no longer even remotely smug.

"With pleasure," Alaeron said.

Chapter Fifteen

Experimental Interrogations

Alaeron returned to his room feeling, if not refreshed, then at least very pleased with himself. The connecting door was open, so he strolled through in search of Skiver, but found only a slave busily stripping the bed. "Excuse me. Do you know where Skiver is?"

The slave, who wore a copper collar marking him as fit for little more than emptying chamber pots, gave Alaeron a terrified look and shook his head, muttering in Hallit, something about League business.

A cold ball of dread formed in Alaeron's stomach. He'd left Skiver alone here, in Starfall, even in the Technic League compound, without a second thought, because he was so used to the man's absolute confidence and his ability to lie, connive, outthink, or, if necessary, stab his way out of trouble. But Numeria was not civilized Almas, or even the entirely wild lands around the Ruins of Kho—it was a place with very specific rules, and they were rules Skiver didn't know. "Tell me what you know."

The slave bowed his head as if anticipating a blow. "League. Business." He repeated.

Alaeron took a step forward. "I am part of the League," he said, though it was stretching the truth to say so. "And so it is my business. Where is he?" The alchemist swallowed. "Where has he been taken?"

"This one...this one cannot say..."

"I have a magic box," Alaeron said. "Dug up from out of the ground. Perhaps you saw it, when you cleaned my room? A black cube, perhaps this big? I can open the box, and fold and unfold it until it becomes large—as large as a coffin. The League uses it to dispose of the corpses that are too devastated to be any use anymore. Anything that goes into the box disappears, forever. Would you like to go into the box? To see what's inside? Even I don't know that. I'm very curious."

The slave sank down to his knees, shaking his head, and then whispered, "The subbasement. The last subbasement. Captain Bothvald took him."

The laboratories. The ones where they did experiments on humans. Zernebeth had told him the very deepest basement was a special project, created at the Black Sovereign's direction to help root out treachery in the court. It was an experimental interrogation laboratory, where the most gifted torturers in the League or the Sovereign's employ used cutting-edge drugs and stress techniques (and actual cutting edges, because developing new techniques didn't necessarily mean throwing out the old ones) to get the truth out of people, or at least make them suffer mightily while they lied.

"How long? When?"

"Not long. Few moments. Captain said clean the room, he wouldn't be needing it anymore—"

Alaeron turned away. "Zernebeth? Are you listening?" No answer. Alaeron teetered for a moment, torn between trying to chase down his mistress to have her intercede on Skiver's behalf and taking more direct action. He could race all the way back upstairs to her rooms, but what if the door was barred, or she wasn't there? Surely she had preparations to make for the revels. But he had precious little real authority, so if he charged into the basement—

He had to charge into the basement. They could already be removing Skiver's eyelids or something. And if Alaeron didn't have real authority, he'd have to make do with fake authority—which was to say, terrible weapons.

∗ ∗ ∗

Alaeron brazened his way past the first guards with arrogance and a sneer; not that it was all that hard—anyone who walked into the basement without a good reason to be there would probably end up regretting the decision anyway, so why keep him out? The basements were dank and quite terribly lit, and they smelled of harsh chemicals splashed over old blood, but he found his way to the iron trapdoor that led to the experimental interrogation level without much difficulty. The guards there were better armed and less friendly—people being taken through that trapdoor were probably the sort to resist mightily, since their lives could hardly get any worse. "Is Captain Bothvald still down there?" Alaeron snapped.

"He is. Who are—"

"I'm the new personal assistant to captain Zernebeth!" he said. "I have an important message for Bothvald about the prisoner he just brought in."

The guards looked at one another and shrugged. Either Alaeron was telling the truth, in which case standing in his way would get them into trouble, or he was lying—in which case he'd be a liar in a dungeon with assorted torturers and a League captain, at which point he'd have worse problems than the guards could provide anyway. "Go on down." One of them knelt, unbarred the trapdoor, and lifted it open. Someone below sobbed and screamed, but it didn't sound much like Skiver. "They're in Room One."

Alaeron gave them his haughtiest look and walked down the stairs, resisting the desire to sprint. His hands strayed to his pockets, touching the vials there. He probably wouldn't be able to fight his way out of here alive, but he could do damage on his way down, and spare Skiver suffering. There were things worse than dying quickly.

The subbasement was better lit than the upper levels of the underground labs, with alchemical lamps hanging from hooks at regular intervals along the stone corridor.

"I'm a bloody guest here!" Skiver called from a room off to the left. "You can't—" he trailed off and fell silent, and Alaeron rushed to the door. Heavy wood, reinforced with metal at the edges. He pounded on it. "Open up in the name of Captain Zernebeth!"

The door opened, and Bothvald stood there, his expression one of polite interest. He looked Alaeron up and down. "Zernebeth sent you, did she?"

Alaeron wasn't about to let himself get distracted. He tried to shove past the Ulfen, but more or less bounced off; he might as well have tried to shoulder his way past a stone wall.

"Where I'm from, laying hands on a man in that way could be considered an insult, or at least an unwarranted liberty, and could thus be cause for a duel." Bothvald didn't sound annoyed—more as if he were informing Alaeron of something he might find interesting. "I haven't dueled since I was so young I barely had hair anywhere other than my head, before the thirst for wisdom led me away from the raiding life and brought me here, to the League, my true family. And yet, I still remember how to duel. It's very simple. You stick a sword in the other man before he can stick one in you. I ask you again: you say Zernebeth sent you?"

"You took my friend," Alaeron said, through clenched teeth.

Bothvald's eyes widened in what seemed like genuine surprise. "That scuttling little fraud is a friend of yours?"

"My companion, my bodyguard, my assistant, yes, and my friend, too. We're here in Starfall at Zernebeth's invitation, to undertake an important mission—"

"Oh, yes, your mission. To die at the Battle of Falheart. Hmm. Well, your friend was attempting to sell fake relics to some of the more credulous members of court. I caught him and explained to him the penalties for fraud and smuggling, which, for the sake of ease and convenience, are the same penalty: donating one's living body to further our researches." Bothvald tapped a finger against his lips. "But, all right. If you can promise to take responsibility for your cur, and make him come to heel, and explain to him that fifty percent of anything he sells—that's fifty percent of the gross—must be handed over to the League treasurer, which by happy coincidence is an office I hold, then I'll let you have him back, not noticeably damaged. All right?"

"Fine," Alaeron said.

Bothvald began to step aside, then paused. "One other thing. You're not really going to the Battle of Falheart, are you? Come, now. I know secrecy is key, but the League is a terrible place for secrets. I'll find out anyway—save me the tedium of investigating?"

"It's..." He slumped his shoulders. "Gorum Pots. I'm supposed to investigate a wreck there."

"Mmm. The hot springs. Try not to fall in. There's a reason no one's set up a spa there—the water is tainted by things other than sulfur." He put a hand on Alaeron's shoulder, his face all friendliness. "Thank you. And I apologize for the misunderstanding. If I'd known the dog was yours, I would have let you take care of punishing it yourself." He turned and called, "Release the prisoner," then nodded to Alaeron and walked away. "One coming up!" Bothvald shouted, presumably to the guards on the trapdoor, and then he was gone.

Inside Room One, a woman in a long black apron with her hair pulled back in a severe bun sighed and put a gleaming instrument of pincers and needles down on a table strewn with similar implements. "You'll have to carry him. We gave him something to quiet him down."

Alaeron hurried to Skiver, who was sprawled on his back on a metal table, tilted just slightly toward the feet. The table had gutters all around the sides, leading to a drain on the floor. "You drugged him? Why? I thought the point was to learn how to make prisoners talk."

"When someone goes to sleep whole and wakes up missing a hand or a foot, it makes quite an impression on them. They often become very talkative. If I can't work on him, please take him away. I have other uses for the table."

Luckily, Skiver was more lean and leathery than big and musclebound, so Alaeron was able to sling him over his shoulders and get him out the door without much difficulty. Once he'd reached the foot of the stairs he called to the guards, "Two coming up!" The door clanged open, and one of the guards looked down. "A little help?" Alaeron said.

"We usually don't bring dead ones through here." The guard scratched his chin. "There's the acid pit, and the incinerators, and of course all those things in the meat garden that like to eat corpses—"

"He's not dead, he's asleep, he's heavy, and I'm a member of the bloody Technic League, so help me!" Alaeron roared.

The guard was big enough that he could have picked Alaeron up and snapped him like a twig, but he paled and rushed down to help. Membership, even provisional membership like Alaeron's, had its privileges.

∗ ∗ ∗

He got Skiver into bed, then barred the outer doors of both their rooms. Whatever compound the torturer had used to knock him out didn't stay in the blood long, because he began moaning almost immediately, eyes fluttering open. "What—what happened—"

"You were—"

"That festering ass!" Skiver sat upright, snarling, looking around wildly. "The long-haired prancing pretty boy—"

"Bothvald, yes. A captain of the Technic League. He said he caught you selling fake relics—"

"They weren't fake. They were replicas! For those who can't afford genuine Osirian or Azlanti artifacts from antiquity, I offer high-quality copies, suitable for public display. Great conversation pieces, and a minimal loss if a drunken guest knocks them off the mantel. They'd only be fake if I was trying to convince people they were real. Besides which, we saw people openly selling bad imitation artifacts in the market square—"

‘‘Yes, but those people paid the League their percentage," Alaeron said.

"I would've made arrangements." Skiver sounded more sulky than enraged. He sighed. "But, yes, all right, I'd be annoyed if an out-of-towner wandered into my neighborhood and started doing business without permission. I should have made sure my connection to you was a more dependable umbrella before I wandered out in the rain. But they were talking about doing horrible things to me, Alaeron, a lot worse than having a serious conversation with a pair of brass knuckles, or even tying a sack of rocks to my feet and dumping me in a harbor."

"They're monsters." But Alaeron was frowning now, and thinking hard. "Except...Bothvald is a Technic League captain. Policing minor crimes is hardly his job. And even if he took notice of you, and decided you should be punished, why come to your room later and take you personally down to the subbasement? Why tell you where he was taking you, in earshot of a slave who could give the information to me? And how could he not know who you were, that you were with me? Information is the lifeblood of a League captain."

"Ah. A setup, then." Skiver scratched his nose. "What did you have to give him for my freedom?"

"Nothing much. A promise of half your profits—I know, but the alternative was literally death, Skiver. Oh, and he asked me where Zernebeth was sending me, and I told him Gorum Pots—"

"What's Gorum Pots?"

Alaeron shook his head, waving the question away. "A place we're not going. A plausible lie. But he didn't press me, feed me a truth serum, or try to impress on me the seriousness of his question, and he accepted it without apparent doubt. Perhaps because Zernebeth is spreading a secret rumor that Gorum Pots is my destination anyway, but...I think he knows better. Asking me that was a distraction, so if I grew suspicious, I'd assume that was the reason he took you, to find out where I was going. No, I was meant to save you all along."

"That's a relief. So if the question about your destination was misdirection, what's Bothvald really after? What was the point of the whole unpleasant exercise, eh?"

Alaeron frowned. "Skiver, do me a favor. Take off all your clothes."

"This is quite a time for you to switch over to my side of the sheets, Alaeron. Getting into the swing of the decadent court, are you? But I'm afraid you aren't my type, entirely too intellectual—"

"Please? It's important."

"Wait, you trained as a physician, didn't you? So this is a matter of professional interest?" Skiver stripped quickly, standing bare before Alaeron moments later, his body all ropy muscle and fading scars. Alaeron examined him carefully, bringing an alchemical lamp to bear, then grunted. "There. In the, ah...cleft of your, ah..."

"The crack of my ass? Feels like a bug bit me there, damn close to the worst place possible. I assumed it was some horrible Numerian vermin from beyond the back of the stars."

"No, there's a tiny stitch here, I think when you were unconscious in the subbasement, something was...implanted. Do you have a very sharp knife?"

"This day gets better and better," Skiver muttered.

After dousing the blade with alcohol—to clean the wound as he inflicted it—and making Skiver lay face down, Alaeron cut a tiny fingernail-sized metal disk out of his flesh. The stitch he put in to close the wound wasn't as neat as the torturer's had been, but it would suffice. "So what've you pulled out of my ass, then?" Skiver said.

"I'm not sure. Some kind of device that shows your location, I would imagine—do you remember how Kormak, the assassin, was able to track our relics when we fled to the ruins of Kho? This may be something similar, a piece of something larger, with a sympathetic connection linking the two."

"Ahhhh. So Bothvald did want to find out your real destination. He just didn't plan to find out by asking you—he was going to follow me, knowing where you go, I do too."

"It seems plausible. Hmm. What should we do with this thing?"

Skiver plucked the tiny disk from Alaeron's hand. "I'll carry it in my pocket, and hope it's not so sensitive Bothvald can tell it's not in my ass anymore. And when we see a good opportunity, we'll put it somewhere else."

Alaeron sighed. "Is this politics, Skiver? I hate politics."

The thief grinned. "I don't know about politics, but it's mischief, and I'm good at that. The bastard had me dragged to a basement, knocked me out, and put a flake of rust in my rear—I intend to make as much mischief for him as I possibly can."

Chapter Sixteen

In the Court of the Black Sovereign

Skiver and Alaeron dressed in their best finery, packed away safely in the black box during the journey. Alaeron wore dark breeches and a white shirt, with a pale green jacket and high boots. Skiver opted for black clothes accented with silver, slicking his hair back with a sweet-smelling pomade, and even shaving thoroughly for the first time in Alaeron's experience—normally the best Skiver managed was to shave well enough to make it look like he'd shaved yesterday.

Not long after nightfall a slave arrived to tell them it was time to attend the feast, and they left the Technic League compound for the more thorough decadence of the palace itself. The hallways were made of fine stone, alchemical lights hanging from the ceiling, and every niche and nook and cranny was stuffed with art objects and relics from surrounding countries. None of the art was offensive in and of itself, and some pieces would have been at home in any discerning art lover's collection, but they were haphazardly arranged with no sense of harmony or coordination, and the overall effect was one of vulgarity and ignorance—someone who had no idea how rich people filled their homes, doing their best to work out the proper behavior from first principles.

Alaeron paused to marvel at the juxtaposition of a huge Osirian jar with handles shaped like curving serpents and a lid shaped like a scarab, placed beside a chipped ceramic swan with outstretched wings. "I think the Sovereign has displayed literally everything he's ever been given as a gift by a foreign power, ambassador, or emissary, or looted during his wars of conquest."

"It's a bit like being in a junk shop, but better lit," Skiver said agreeably.

After walking what seemed a mile, they finally reached the feasting hall, the doors attended by slaves in golden collars. They stepped inside, where a fair-sized crowd had already gathered, and simply marveled for a moment.

"You can put the barbarian in a palace, but he's still a barbarian," Skiver said, whispering from the corner of his mouth. In contrast to the alchemical lanterns that hung elsewhere, the walls here were crowded with flaming torches, giving the scene a flickering and wild quality. A garland of humanoid (and occasional monster) skulls hung from the high rafters beneath the dome, and axes and swords, notched and hard-used in battle, decorated the walls as the room's only other ornaments. Long wooden feasting tables were lined up on a raised dais before the throne—a vast chair of pitted black metal, reputedly fashioned from a meteorite that had screamed out of the sky on the night of one of Kevoth-Kul's great victories. The crowd mostly wore ornate fashion doubtless copied from the courts of other nations, apart from a healthy smattering of Kellids in more traditional garb, which was to say furs and leather, with jewelry leaning heavily toward fangs and carved bones dangling on metal chains.

The throne was presently unoccupied, the Sovereign nowhere in evidence, but the long tables on the dais were crowded already with Kellids and members of the Technic League, including what appeared to be the entire council of captains (excepting the gnome). Bothvald wore silk in scarlet and black, and Zernebeth was dressed in a stunning dress the color of sea froth, accented with skymetal jewelry. They were leaning together, talking, and Alaeron thought better of going to see Zernebeth. Time enough later to tell her what Bothvald had done, and what Alaeron believed he was trying to do.

"This way, please." The servant who bowed before them wore only a thin gold chain around her neck to reveal her status as a slave; otherwise she was dressed as well as the courtiers. They were taken to one of many smaller tables near the walls of the hall, where the lower-status members of the court would be fed.

They took their seats and nodded hellos to their tablemates, and then a white-haired Kellid leapt up beside the throne and clapped his hands. Alaeron recognized him, vaguely, as the court skald, the bard/storyteller combination favored by the Kellid tribes, responsible for composing the songs and poems extolling the Black Sovereign's greatness, and a de facto master of ceremonies whenever such a role was called for. "We come together today," the man announced, "to celebrate the marriage of Tek Makul and his sweet young promised one!"

A grinning, handsome young man stood up from a table on the platform and shook his fist in the air, his terrified-looking bride smiling wide-eyed at his side.

"I'll save the pretty words for later," the skald went on. "For now, we feast!"

And so the feast began. First, slaves brought out a life-sized statue of a kneeling donkey made of brass, and set it on the table before the bride and groom-to-be. The donkey was laden with saddlebags, and the slaves threw them open, spilling out heaps of olives, white and black, along with what Alaeron suspected were fish eggs. The delighted diners began scooping up food with their hands as servants circulated in the rest of the room, bringing much smaller-scale statues similarly appointed to the tables along the walls. Skiver scooped up a handful of pale orange fish eggs from their ornamental donkey and chewed them thoughtfully. "Salty," he said. "Nice ass, though." He prodded the brass donkey's nose.

Next the servants brought silver platters, each bearing tiny bridges made of iron, arrayed with what appeared to be mice drizzled with honey and poppy seeds, surrounded by sausages and plums and the seeds of pomegranates.

Wine was poured liberally, sharp red and cool white, and Skiver drank freely, chatting with their well-dressed Kellid tablemates even though he spoke barely any Hallit and they spoke barely any Taldane. Alaeron was picking at a sausage, wondering what animal or animals it had come from, when the Sovereign finally arrived.

Alaeron hadn't seen the ruler of Numeria in years, but amazingly, the passage of time had not been all that unkind to the man. He was still hulking, still with long black hair, still with cold, cruel eyes—and if those eyes were shadowed, his skin too pale and slack, his muscles transforming to fat, and his general air one of decadent dissipation, at least none of that was any worse than it had been years ago. The League constantly tinkered with the formulation of the drugs the Sovereign lived for, and apparently had managed to work in some preservatives, or at least to offset some of the more deadly ravages of the substances milked from Silver Mount.

"My friends!" the Sovereign boomed. "My cousin marries tomorrow, and tonight, we send him off in high fashion." His gaze swept the room almost balefully. "You will celebrate, you will feast, you will rut, you will give in to every appetite—this is how you honor me and my family!"

Alaeron had never been more afraid not to have a good time. What if the Sovereign decided someone wasn't being sufficiently celebratory? The man's moods and whims could be terrifying and destructive. Alaeron reached for the nearest jug of wine. Alcohol, like all chemicals, had useful applications, and one of them was creating merriment where it wasn't necessarily felt otherwise.

The huge brass donkey was taken away, and servants next brought a tray topped by an immense statue of a hen wrought in silver, surrounded by straw, and placed that at the high table. At a whispered instruction from a slave, the husband-to-be began digging in the straw and came up with a fist-sized egg. He cracked it open with a spoon, laughed, and then took a huge bite from it, shell and all. Alaeron understood when the servants began distributing eggs to his table: they were made of some kind of pastry, stuffed with a "white" and "yolk" made of something sweet. The guests at the high table dug through the straw searching for eggs, laughing, as the Black Sovereign sat in his throne and ate from a tray resting on the naked back of a kneeling slave, the food placed in his mouth by other slaves, scantily clad men and women seemingly drawn from every nation of the Inner Sea, to feed his vain love for variety. It was amazing he didn't have someone to chew his food for him.

Alaeron was already full from the sausage and olives, and the courses showed no sign of stopping. His head was beginning to swim from the wine, and a group of slaves had begun wandering the hall, singing something in Hallit that Alaeron couldn't quite catch; nevertheless, he thought it was probably obscene, based on the way the bride-to-be blushed. One of the guests knocked a beautiful silver dish onto the floor, and rather than picking it up, a slave swept it into a pile of refuse along with spilled food and straw, an ostentatious show of wealth on the Sovereign's part.

Alaeron's hands were sticky after the sweet egg pastry, and when a servant came by with a pitcher, Alaeron allowed some to be poured over his hands, realizing too late that it was perfume, not water. Other slaves were scattering the floor with sawdust, presumably to soak up spilled wine, but even the sawdust was perfumed, mixed with rare spices and sending up a cloud of scent that clashed terribly with the food. At some point, the slaves became mostly naked, and there were a lot more of them kneeling around the Sovereign, and several others performing various acrobatic displays.

The vulgarity on display was astonishing, and it didn't stop. Things began to blur together for Alaeron as he more deeply dipped into the wine, but he remembered an entire skeleton, human in shape but actually constructed from sheep and cow bones, being cracked open so guests could feast on the marrow; heaping platters of testicles and kidneys, from what animal Alaeron didn't dare guess; young sow's udders; sea scorpions; whole honeycombs, speckled with tiny bees made of spun sugar; and servants bearing miniature silver ovens, from which they dispensed fresh bread.

The more he drank, the more he wanted to talk to Zernebeth, wondering if what they'd done together twice so far was more than just a trick to make him loyal. But she was always deep in conversation at her table, or whirling around the dance floor (once even with Bothvald), or leaning to whisper in the Sovereign's ear. Eventually Alaeron drank enough to lose track of her.

At that point, the Sovereign clapped, and a dozen hunting dogs were released, dashing through the hall and devouring all the spilled food before being driven out again by their keepers. Alaeron looked at Skiver, who was laughing uproariously, deep in his cups. Thinking the dogs might signal the end of the feast, Alaeron began to rise, but then the servants returned, setting yet more food before them.

A whole boar for the main table, and smaller pigs for the other tables, all surrounded by tiny piglets made of cake. A slave with a long knife cut open the huge boar, and a flock of thrushes flew out of its belly, flying wildly around the room. The slaves distributed nets to any guests who wanted them, and soon drunk courtiers were standing on tottering tables, trying to capture the thrushes as the terrified birds—first sewn inside a dead pig, then released into cacophony—frantically tried to escape.

Then another huge pig, muzzled and dressed in bells, was led through the hall on a leash, only to be led back out again and later returned on a platter, apparently boiled, and set before the bride and groom.

The Sovereign pushed a pair of slaves out of his lap, stood up, and bellowed, "Bring me the cook!"

The room went silent as slaves scurried to obey, bringing out a small man in a bloody apron. "Your Grace?" he said.

"Look at this pig's belly." The Sovereign's voice was a low, furious growl. "See how it bulges? You didn't remove its guts before you cooked it, did you?"

The cook quailed. "I—Your Grace, it was a mistake, I'm sorry, I was so rushed—"

"A mistake?" the Sovereign bellowed. "Forgetting the pepper is a mistake. You'd have my guests, my family, eat the shit-filled guts of a pig?" He snatched up a slender cane—Alaeron didn't want to know why he had one of those close to hand—and began whipping the chef, who hunkered down and sobbed.

"Gut the animal now!" the Sovereign shouted. "Here, on this table!"

The chef rose, bleeding through his clothes, and took a knife as two servants turned over the pig's carcass. He slit open the pig's belly—but instead of guts spilling out, heaps of blood sausages and puddings poured all over the table. There was a moment's quiet, and then the Sovereign laughed, and everyone else did, too, and the bleeding cook took a bow before returning to the kitchen.

"It was a joke?" Skiver said. "What, they planned that little skit?"

"Apparently."

"But...the Sovereign really beat the man! Even knowing it was a trick, he beat him!"

"The Sovereign takes his jokes very seriously, it seems."

The feast wore on, with more food than anyone could possibly want, most of it wasted or thrown to the dogs (who now roamed freely). There were "fish" made from pork bellies, and "pigeons" shaped from lard, and quinces in the shape of sea urchins, all seemingly meant to be admired for the cleverness of making one food look like another rather than for any qualities of taste.

Alaeron did try one of the elaborate cakes brought out to the table, wanting something bread-like to soak up the alcohol in his belly, but it was coated with some bitter yellow spice, and he spat it out. "This is terrible!"

"It is," Skiver said. "That spice is not meant for sweets, but I hear it's good in savories. It's also expensive—I brought a sack of it imported from Katapesh and sold it to the head cook, and I think they used every bit of it tonight...I suppose just to show that they could waste something so valuable."

Finally the Sovereign rose, threw one slave over his shoulder and grabbed another by the hair, and shouted, "Wake up and celebrate, you milkwater weaklings! If any should leave this feasting hall before dawn, he'll be served at the wedding feast tomorrow night, his mouth stuffed with cherries!" That pronouncement was, bizarrely, met by cheers, and the Sovereign went away, carrying his bed slaves and trailed by his guards.

The festive havoc did not entirely diminish when he departed, but it certainly slowed down, and the bride leaned against her groom and appeared to fall asleep on his shoulder.

Skiver yawned. "I believe it's dawn already, but I don't want to be the first one to leave."

"Probably wise," Alaeron agreed.

Someone touched his shoulder, and he looked up into Zernebeth's icy eyes. "Come with me," she said. "I have a cure for your hangover."

"I'm not hungover," he said.

"Only because you haven't slept yet." She tugged Alaeron out of his chair, and he waved vaguely to Skiver, who raised a glass to him and grinned.

"Bothvald..." he muttered as she led him into the hallways, back toward the League compound.

"No, thank you," she said. "I've never been one for groups in my bed, and if I were, I wouldn't choose him. Pursue him on your own if your interest lies that way."

"No, he...he tried to kill my friend..."

"That mangy dog you brought with you, who tried to drink all the Sovereign's wine personally? Who can blame him?"

"He...Bothvald...it was a trick, to find out where you were sending me..."

She sighed. "Alaeron, we can talk treachery tomorrow—or, that is, later today. I just spent an entire night enduring the Black Sovereign's idea of pleasure. Would you deny me some pleasure of my own?"

"I...would not," he said. Then he leaned over and vomited.

Zernebeth tsked. "Never mind," she said. "You can tell me about the treachery now after all."

Chapter Seventeen

Dawn Departure

Some hours later Zernebeth said, "You're going to the Felldales."

Alaeron rolled over on the feather-stuffed mattress—no horrible springs here—and looked into his lover and mistress's face. "That," he said, "is truly terrible pillow talk."

She did him the courtesy of faintly smiling before sitting up, sliding out of bed, and putting on a watered silk robe. "You leave in the morning, before first light, with one of my lieutenants I trust—as much as I trust anyone—and a handful of guards to do the fighting and lifting, and to act as trap detectors."

"Trap de— Oh. I see. Send them into dangerous places and see if they get chopped in half. Seems a waste of a life."

She shrugged. "If they value their lives, they'll be very careful, won't they?"

"One hopes." Alaeron sat up, feeling remarkably well rested, all things considered. Zernebeth's hangover cure really was remarkable, though she said if taken too often it would do more damage to his liver than alcohol would. And, of course, he had the loose-limbed, tingly good feeling that came from vigorous and wholesome exercise. "The Felldales. Really? Craters and valleys, strange monoliths, colored mists that devour people, and, of course, annihilators? Those Felldales?"

Zernebeth sat at her writing desk and began flipping through papers. "We send expeditions in there, every so often. They don't tend to come back, but I think most of them are just murdered by the locals—there are people living there, in the hidden valleys. Some I'm sure have never even heard of the Sovereign or the League. They can be...quite strange. But you won't be wandering around looking for likely sites to pillage. You'll have a destination."

"Yes, I've been wondering. Where exactly am I going, and why do you think I should go there?"

"Do you remember the letter I sent you? When I offered you this job?"

Alaeron chuckled. "Yes. I vaguely recall it."

"I was not entirely honest when I described my experience trapped inside the Mount." She turned in her chair and faced him. "I said I was preserved, and put into stasis, and that much is true, but there was more—something I didn't dare commit to paper and send partway across the world. Something I wouldn't even send in a cipher. But here, in my rooms, I am secure, and so I'll tell you: Silver Mount granted me a vision."

Oh dear, Alaeron thought. Had Zernebeth been bitten by religion?

"It was many visions, actually," she went on, her gaze faraway, lost in a memory. "I saw the stars, and I saw them through eyes that were not my own, eyes capable of detecting subtle gradations in heat and density, of seeing the winds of electricity and magnetism wreathing celestial bodies. I saw endless darkness broken by pinpricks of light, every one a possibility, every one a disappointment. And I saw something else, too: I saw the Rain of Stars. From the perspective of one of the stars."

"You think you...tapped into some sort of ancient memory? Shared the experiences of someone or something long dead?"

She shrugged. "There was no emotional component. I didn't feel like I was someone else—I simply saw. Perhaps what I experienced is what the denizens of the Mount had instead of books, or stories, or conversations. I believe that some guiding hand shaped the visions, though, edited them into a particular sequence—it was not a blank recitation of facts, but an artful presentation..." She shook her head. "In the vision, I saw Golarion, our blue-green world, rise up out of the black and grow larger, and then there was light, fire, heat, something wrenching and going terribly wrong, and suddenly, instead of a pebble suspended in the dark, our planet was a rock being hurled at me, and then my perspective seemed to shift, and I became something much smaller and more constrained, in a little room, and I was falling, falling. But there was a window, Alaeron, or perhaps a screen, or—I don't know. I could see beyond my own confines, though. I could look out that window, and see parts of the Mount itself, hurtling downward, cracking and breaking off and catching fire. But there was one part..." She took a deep breath. "It was a dome, of sorts, bulging from the side of the Mount. Bulbous, almost onion-shaped. It didn't seem to break away—instead it seemed to lift away, like a mosquito taking flight, as if it had detached intentionally, with purpose. Triangular wings unfolded from its sides, and I believe it actually flew, under its own power. That it didn't just plummet downward—that it was guided."

"Like a lifeboat?" The idea was fascinating.

"Perhaps. Or a command center. Or something designed to land on worlds like ours, a landing party. Or maybe it was a living thing, an alien parasite from the depths of space, that had clung to the ship to feed, and fled when the death of its host seemed imminent, the way fleas will leave the corpse of a dog. How can we possibly know? It flew away, but then...something went wrong. Another piece of the Mount broke free, and crashed into the black dome, and the parasite began to spew colored steam from its back, venting gases and fluids into the darkness. It spun wildly, and it crashed...but I saw where it crashed. I saw the marks it dragged in the earth when it landed. Oh, the country has changed since then, almost out of all recognition, but I am almost certain I know where it is—at the end of the longest of the many devastated valleys in the Felldales. When it crashed, it drove itself deep into the earth, and the years have surely driven it even deeper. But it is there, and mostly whole. I think it might be the most significant wreck in all of Numeria, next to the Mount itself, and it is wholly unknown to the League—except for me. And now you." She frowned. "Something...I think something wants me to find it, and offered me that particular vision to guide me. But that's only suspicion, not observation. You think I'm mad, don't you?"

"It's one hypothesis," he admitted.

"Let me show you something." She opened a drawer and removed a coin-sized, irregularly shaped bit of black glass. "This was found embedded in my body when they removed me from the Mount. Its effect isn't as powerful as what I experienced, not by orders of magnitude, but...here, touch it."

Alaeron raised an eyebrow and took the glass.

The effect wasn't as striking as what Zernebeth had described, but his vision did swarm with black spots, and he thought he glimpsed something—dark and twisting corridors, and a door covered in circles of various sizes, and a seething purplish cloud that sparkled with something like starlight, but darker. Something like a voice seemed to whisper, just at the edges of his hearing, insistent and mad. He gasped and dropped the glass. "That—"

"What did you see?" she demanded.

He described it as best he could, and she grunted. "Not quite what I saw. But, you see, there are visions, somehow embedded in the structure of the Mount—or at least that room where I nearly died."

"I...Consider me convinced. What else did you see?"

She laughed. "Everything spinning, and red flames, and darkness. And after the darkness—I saw me. And you. Entering the chamber in Silver Mount where you left me to be shocked and swallowed by the machines. That wreck, Alaeron...if someone tried to fly it away from the Mount, it could contain something profoundly important, something worth saving while the rest of the Mount was left to plummet to the ground. I schemed to take over the League; I pored over maps and drawings of the landscape, trying to match what I'd seen to reality; I spent all this time preparing, to gather the resources to go...but I walked myself into a trap. I can't leave here without jeopardizing my position in the League. My allies need to be managed and kept in line, and if I lose my power, someone else could gain enough power to take the expedition away from me. I won't have that. This wreck is mine. I needed someone I could trust. Someone with no interest in or aptitude for politics, but with sufficient intelligence, ambition, and survival skills to manage the expedition on my behalf. I immediately thought of you."

"I suppose I am the man for the job."

She laughed. "You don't bother with modesty. I admire that about you."

"I am well aware of my limitations, but if you want someone to crawl into a hole in the ground and see what he can find there...I was made to do that."

"And so you shall. Given Bothvald's meddling and his abduction of your friend the dog, I think you'd better get on your way. I don't fault Bothvald for his ambition, but it's inconvenient. First thing tomorrow, I'll send you with the team I mentioned—and you can take Skiver, I suppose. You'll start off heading to the east, to continue the charade that you're going to Gorum Pots or the Battle of Falheart, but my man will lead you around toward the Felldales on a roundabout path, toward my best guess for the position of the wreck. In my vision, one of the wings remained sticking up out of the ground, and I think even with the centuries that have passed, some portion of it might still protrude, and provide you with a marker. I doubt the substance of that craft could be damaged much by the elements, and I can draw the shape of what I saw to help you."

"If there's something to be found, we'll find it."

"I know you will." She gave him a cool smile. "Your amnesty depends on your success."

Alaeron threw the blanket off his lap. "Are you sure there's nothing else I could do to earn clemency?"

She clucked her tongue. "There's a time and a place, Alaeron. I'm done being your mistress for the moment—now I'm your master, and you should prepare for your journey. Besides, I want all your available blood in your brain, where it can do you some good."

Alaeron sighed. "Too late for that. But I suppose my hydrostatic balance will reassert itself in time."

"I do so love it when you talk technical to me," Zernebeth said.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Odds we'll die?" Skiver said.

"What, both of us?" Alaeron paused in the middle of packing his bag. "Probably fairly low. More likely one of us will die and the other will see it and run away. We're both adept at running away."

"All right, odds one of us will die, then."

"We're resourceful men, experienced, we've survived Technic League assassins and the ruins of Kho...I'd say probably two chances in three."

"Hmm. Good odds if you're the one running the house. Not so good if you're the player."

"Ah, but the potential rewards are so great."

"They always are. What else do you think draws the suckers in?" Skiver kicked the heap of crates piled in the room, painstakingly moved out of the black box, bound for their eventual destinations in the homes of the city's elite. "Zernebeth gouged me on this deal, you know."

"She paid you up front, in gems and skymetal. I wouldn't have done that—I would have taken a few things on consignment, or promised you a percentage in profits, and then bet on you dying out in the wilderness so I'd never have to pay."

"Ha! You have paid attention to my little lectures on how to build a good business. I made a profit, no mistake, even giving the League its cut, and the skymetal is worth a lot more back home than it is here, but I was hoping to get rich enough to set up my own little fiefdom in the River Kingdoms, buy myself a palace. I'd look good in a palace."

"Who needs a palace when we have my remarkable expanding black box?"

"Your sense of decadence leaves something to be desired," Skiver said. "Though speaking of decadence, after the Sovereign's feast, I could go for simpler pleasures myself. Those revels gave me a taste for bread and water and a straw mattress. Nothing that tries too hard."

"If you're ready to forgo luxury, you're in luck." Alaeron clapped him on the shoulder. "You're off on an expedition for the Technic League now. Comfort is a thing of the past."

∗ ∗ ∗

Alaeron had hoped Zernebeth would see him off, if not with a warm (well, chilly) embrace then at least with a curt nod or a few words of stern advice. Instead, before dawn, she simply barked through the jewel in his ear that his team was waiting outside the city gates, the same place Lodger had dropped him off. Then she was gone, without so much as a "good luck."

Skiver seemed untroubled at being awakened a few hours after going to sleep, and shouldered his pack without complaint, following Alaeron out of the compound and through the relatively quiet streets to the same gate they'd entered before. The door was watched by either the same guard or his twin, who gave a surly nod and let them out into the cold pre-morning. A group of men and women stood around, muttering and securing equipment to pack mules.

"Greetings, sir!" Lodger said, bounding up to them with far too much enthusiasm, face probably friendly under all the twitches and tics. "Nice to see you again. I'll be handling transport for our little band."

Skiver groaned. "Not the bloody annihilator again."

"Alas, it broke down," he said. "One of the legs snapped off at the joint when it stepped into a hole. But fear not—we've got something even better than the annihilator." He gestured with a flourish toward a long, low shape against the wall.

"That's something you ride on?" Skiver said. "I thought it was a row of barrels."

"The finish is beautiful lacquered wood, yes," Lodger said, as if Skiver had been paying his vehicle a compliment. "Come, look. Meet the crawler." He led them to the vehicle, which was perhaps twelve feet long and looked more or less like...

"A wooden caterpillar," Alaeron said. The crawler was long and wormlike, made of overlapping wooden panels, which presumably concealed machinery that would allow it to bend and twist and flex. Underneath it had scores if not hundreds of small, jointed legs. The back of the caterpillar was open, with a few bench seats and a lot of storage space.

"Really it's made of metal, mostly, and wire, and so on." Lodger thumped the front. "The wood is just to make it prettier. Wheeled vehicles aren't much good in the—" He caught himself, looked around, and said, "Where we're going. We need something that can cope with uneven terrain. The crawler's legs are longer than they look, and it can get over most any obstacle, just like an inchworm or a caterpillar would. A few of the guards will ride in back there, the rest following on horseback."

"Definitely a form of transportation suitable for our dignity, eh?" Skiver said. "So what happens if it rains?"

"It hardly ever rains this time of year. But there are some oilcloth cloaks stowed under the seat, just in case."

"This is one of the most miserable vehicles in the Technic League fleet, isn't it?" Alaeron said.

Lodger's cheerfulness could not be dislodged. "I think it has a lot of...rustic charm."

Oh well. Zernebeth probably didn't want to make it seem like they were on a mission of any importance. Lodger introduced them to the guards, a rough bunch of mostly Kellids armed with swords and a few bits of more advanced Technic League weaponry, though not as much as Alaeron would have liked, given that they were going to the place where mechanical horrors lived. But the Felldales were huge, and there couldn't be that many deadly automatons wandering around, could there?

He didn't even try to retain the names of the guards. Skiver would do that. In fact, by the time they got where they were going, Skiver would be friends with half and pretending to be friends with the other half while he pondered whether it would be better to cheat them at dice or at cards.

"Take us past Silver Mount?" Alaeron said.

"Ah, the scenic route." Lodger supervised the loading of the caterpillar—weapons, food, surveying equipment, pickaxes, shovels, magical scrolls. The guards crowded into the sideways benches in the very back of the crawler or mounted horses, while Alaeron and Skiver were given the padded bench up front, just behind the driver's seat in the caterpillar's "head." Lodger took that position and shoved a lever, turned a crank, and activated other arcane machinery to get the crawler going. It growled noisily, then settled down into a steady rumble that you might not hear coming if you were sleeping at the bottom of a pit filled with dirt with wax plugs shoved into your ears.

The crawler's legs whirred away underneath, churning up the dusty road heading north from the capital, past the hovels and shacks set up outside the protection of the walls, where the truly wretched citizens lived. The ride was smoother than the annihilator, at least, but it was slower, too—as fast as an ordinary coach, maybe, but maddening since Alaeron knew how fast the League's better vehicles could go.

As per his request, Lodger took them in a wide loop around the Mount. The sun was just beginning to rise, glimmers of light catching the Mount's polished sides. Alaeron could never quite decide what the Mount resembled. The smooth and bulging contours of its sides sometimes reminded him of the overmuscled bodies of gladiators, being peculiarly organic-looking, but it had jagged peaks and spines as well. Its shiny surface was marked by rivulets and trickles and occasional veritable waterfalls of fluid in various colors and no colors at all, sometimes luminous, sometimes steaming, sometimes crawling viscous as oil, sometimes rushing faster than water, flowing as if propelled.

Something caught Alaeron's eye—a shadow of a shape, high up on the Mount, like a gargoyle crouching on one of the peaks. He shivered, and considered raising the alarm. What if it was one of the flying automatons called myrmidons? They were seldom seen this close to the capital—there were people on the wall with weapons designed to strike such monsters from the sky anyway—but that didn't make it impossible.

Then the light shifted, and the man-sized thing was gone. Perhaps it had only been a shadow after all...Or...

"I still can't quite believe you've been inside that thing." Skiver's voice, which normally expressed itself in a range that went from amused to darkly amused to sardonic, sounded awed—even reverential.

"It's a bit hard for me to believe sometimes, too."

The caterpillar scurried past half a dozen Gearsmen, who were milling around one of the access hatches cut into the base of the Mount. The grim automatons all stopped, turning their heads to watch their vehicle's progress. Skiver could barely look at them, but Lodger gave the creatures a merry wave as he went past. Apparently being in the League long enough could make anything seem routine.

Something flickered in the corner of Alaeron's vision, up in the sky, and he turned his head, but there was nothing there. The gargoyle-that-wasn't-a-gargoyle again? Just a passing bird? Something else entirely?

I'm just paranoid, he thought. After all, last time he'd ridden away from Starfall, he'd been pursued by furious members of the League with murder on their minds. This latest exodus was just stirring up the same old memories, no doubt.

But for the entire roundabout and meandering trip toward the Felldales, even as he passed the time chatting with Skiver and pointing out the horrific and bizarre features of the landscape, he couldn't shake the feeling that something was keeping track of him, hovering just out of sight.

Chapter Eighteen

Felldales

What is that?" Skiver said.

They'd reached Gorum Pots, a place filled with pits of molten mud and bubbling sulfurous hot springs, and had stopped to eat, since trying to dine while the caterpillar wriggled along was a recipe for motion sickness. Skiver had just glimpsed some of the local wildlife—in this case a great worm nearly ten feet long, with orange bands running along its body, wriggling beside a mud pot.

"Zhen worm," Lodger said. "Harmless, mostly. They don't have mouths, so they can't bite, but they ooze a sort of slime that breaks down flesh. They eat lizards, rats, the occasional bird that's too stupid to fly away in time. People, if they get a chance."

"Huh." Skiver took the tiny flake of metal from his pocket and held it up where Alaeron could see. "What do you think?"

Alaeron snorted around a bite of dried meat. "Why not? The zhen worms like steam and heat, so they'll stay in this general area."

"Should I, ah, just..."

"Stick it in?" Alaeron said. "I don't see why not. The acidic slime shouldn't have much of an effect on skymetal." He turned to the guards. "Do any of you gentlemen or ladies have a set of mail gloves? Something that could grab a zhen worm without getting dissolved?"

The heavies conferred, then one of them passed over a pair of gloves laced liberally with chainmail. It was less warrior garb and more like something a butcher would wear to keep from accidentally lopping off one of his fingers while reducing a carcass to its component parts, but it would do the job. Skiver pulled them on, grasping the little metal chip as tightly as he could between fingers made clumsy by padding.

He left the shadow of the caterpillar and approached the zhen worm warily. It didn't have eyes, but it sensed him coming somehow, because it writhed away, forcing Skiver to dart forward quickly, reaching down to grasp the worm with his free hand. He did get a hold on it, but it was like seizing a convulsing muscle: the thing twisted and pulled, and Skiver's feet went out from under him. He fell ass-down in the damp soil, cursing, as the worm jerked and jumped. He slammed his other hand down as hard as he could, smacking the worm down and driving the tracking device into its flesh in the process, so that only a tiny corner of the chip protruded from its slick flesh. Then he let go, and the worm wriggled away at high speed, diving into a mud pot and out of sight.

Skiver got up, carefully refusing to glance at the guards—they were openly cackling—and rinsed the gloves off in the nearest hot spring pool, the thick, mucus-like slime coming off the gloves in ropy tendrils. "Much obliged," he said, tossing the gloves back to the guards, who saluted him mockingly.

"I suppose I shouldn't ask what the point of that exercise was?" Lodger said.

Alaeron opened his mouth, but Skiver didn't give him a chance to speak. Zernebeth had assigned Lodger to take them to the Felldales, so he was probably as trustworthy as anyone in the League, but Skiver didn't go around casually giving out information the way Alaeron did. "Oh, Alaeron bet me I couldn't slap a zhen worm's ass. I was just proving him wrong."

Alaeron, at least, seemed to understand what Skiver was doing. "I said you couldn't slap a zhen worm's ass because it doesn't have an ass, as far as I know. It eats through tiny holes in its skin, and I presume it excretes the same way."

"Sounds like the whole thing's an ass, then. Proves my point."

Alaeron snorted. "All you've proven is your willingness to look ridiculous."

"That's surely worth something, isn't it?" Skiver said with a grin.

∗ ∗ ∗

They moved on, continuing their roundabout route to the Felldales. Late in the afternoon they passed to the north of a sizable forest—a welcome sight to Skiver's eyes, though he was hardly a lover of nature. So far Numeria seemed to be little more than barren plains populated by reclusive tribes, with stunted trees and thorny scrub the principle forms of vegetation. Even trees were better than all that open space for a city boy like him. Soon enough the trees receded out of sight as they headed west, following no particular road. It was just after dusk when Lodger called the halt. "My advice is, we should camp here and head into the Felldales tomorrow. Obviously it's your mission, and if you want us to press on in the dark, across broken ground, where even the wild tribes fear to tread, then—"

"We're convinced." Skiver said. "I'd just as soon die in the daylight. You, Alaeron?"

"Mmm?" The alchemist was absorbed in thought again, gazing at the rippled landscape of low hills stretching out to the west. "Oh. Of course, yes, we'll resume in the morning."

The guards were mere hirelings—Lodger was the only genuine member of the League on this expedition—but they were competent professionals who'd clearly done this sort of thing before. They chose a spot on high ground with good sight lines, then set up a perimeter, driving wooden posts topped by strange metal and glass boxes into the ground at ten-foot intervals in a large, loose circle around the camp. Alaeron interrogated them endlessly about the nature of the devices, and Skiver didn't pay much attention, but he got the impression they would start to shriek and flash if anything larger than a cat passed between two of the poles. As far as perimeter alarms went, it beat hanging a bunch of bells on a string and dangling it at knee height, Skiver supposed, but he wished they had a wizard to do a proper ward; he was old-fashioned about such things.

Alaeron set up his black box, and the two of them retired inside to sleep while the professional murder types kept watch outside. "There's a chance we'll crack the seal in the morning and they'll all be dead or gone," Alaeron said. The orbs of light hovering near the ceiling dimmed when you shouted at them, but they never went out entirely, so the alchemist's profile was just visible in his bed. "Which would be disconcerting."

"It would be more disconcerting to sleep out there and get killed or stolen away ourselves," Skiver pointed out.

"True. Sweet dreams." Alaeron spoke without apparent irony—but then, he used special potions to sleep and wake both, so the concept of lying awake worrying was probably foreign to him. Alaeron seemed fairly cheerful lately, at least—sleeping with that blue-tinged Zernebeth agreed with him, and he was about to break into a forbidden place to find what was hidden inside, which Skiver knew always made him happy.

Skiver himself was less thrilled with the whole trip. The bit where he was dragged into the subbasement had worried him badly, and though he'd turned an adequate profit selling his supplies to Zernebeth, he hadn't made out quite as much like a bandit as he would've liked. Really, he should have said farewell to Alaeron that morning and made his way back to Almas with his riches...but the alchemist was a friend, one of the few true friends in Skiver's life, and Skiver was worried about him. Alaeron could be so damnably trusting in his way, and the League was a vicious bunch of sadists and lunatics.

Besides, there was opportunity for more profit. Being friends with the fella running an expedition to pillage a wreck for relics wasn't a bad position. Skiver would keep an eye open for opportunities to smuggle any small and easily concealed relics they found out of Numeria when they returned home. So he wasn't here for entirely sentimental reasons, right?

He rolled over on his pallet, and eventually managed to forget he was lying inside a coffin-sized magical box for long enough to actually fall asleep.

∗ ∗ ∗

In the morning they emerged, and no one was dead—Lodger said the night had passed uneventfully, apart from some strange green lights on the horizon to the southwest, and a terrible distant keening sound that went on for an hour or so shortly before dawn. Pure serenity by Numerian standards, in other words.

After a breakfast of dried meat and hard-boiled eggs—not bad, really; Skiver thought the eggs might even have come from an actual bird—they made for the highest visible hill so Alaeron could get a sense of the landscape and decipher Zernebeth's directions for this mysterious wreck they were searching for.

The Felldales were hideous. Alaeron stood on top of a boulder—who knew, perhaps the extra three feet of elevation really made a difference—while Skiver waited below him, gazing out to the west. He could see for miles, but there were additional miles folded into the landscape that were invisible to the eyes: the Felldales seemed to consist mostly of long narrow valleys, like gashes in the landscape, as if a monster the size of a moon had dragged it claws across the land millennia ago. Here and there twinkling outcroppings marked the land, bits of embedded wreckage from the Rain of Stars exposed by years of rain and wind.

"Most of the smaller fragments fell here," Alaeron said. "The pieces that flew off the Mount, presumably, came screaming in at an angle and tore up the ground." He fished in his pack and took out some sort of fancy spyglass, with a multitude of lenses arrayed on movable metal arms.

"What's that?" Skiver asked.

"Zernebeth calls it the ‘omniscope'—different enchanted lenses to detect magic, the undead, things like that." He adjusted it, pulling a ruby-red octagonal lens into place, then peered through the eyepiece, scanning it across the landscape. He grunted. "Lodger, come take a look at this."

The Technic League lieutenant obediently scrambled up the rock, took the scope, and looked where Alaeron pointed. "That does seem to fit the profile Captain Zernebeth provided," he said. "I don't see anything else that looks likely, though the range of the spyglass isn't large, so if we go deeper into the Felldales, we may find more candidates. We can start for that one, though." They clambered down and opened up a map on the ground, making notes and arguing in low voices over measurements, consulting with one of the guards who'd survived a prior excursion into the Felldales, apparently at the cost of his eyebrows, two fingers on his left hand, and his entire sense of humor.

Skiver knew he didn't have anything significant to contribute, so he organized a little dice game with a couple of the idle guards, in the interest of keeping up morale. He allowed himself to lose some out-of-circulation coins from the days when Andoran was a monarchy—they weren't even valuable as antiques, since they were counterfeit, but as far as the guards knew they were real foreign currency—while he won a couple of silverdisks in addition to more conventional coins.

"We're ready," Alaeron declared, and they loaded up the crawler again and set off over fell-hill and fell-dale. The alchemist looked wistfully at bits of metal twinkling in the light, poking out of cracks in the ground and jumbled among rocks, every one doubtless crying out to be explored or at least prodded thoroughly, but he kept on-mission, occasionally muttering to himself or, more rarely, muttering in a different tone that suggested Zernebeth was making demands in his ear.

They finally reached their destination: a hill topped by a crooked, tapered spire of some smoky-black glass, twice as tall as a man. But surely glass wouldn't have survived out here for so long? As Alaeron and Lodger walked around the thing, debating abstruse details of its position and composition, Skiver drew a knife and tapped its blade against the glass. The strike rang like metal on metal. Not glass at all, then, but something stranger.

"Skiver, we're moving on," Alaeron said.

"This isn't our treasure trove, then?"

Alaeron shook his head. "Too small, and the angle's wrong. This is probably a fragment of what we're looking for, though, and we've seen another likely structure off to the west, so we may be on the right track."

"Fair enough." He returned to the crawler, deciding not to voice his extreme skepticism about the whole enterprise. They weren't trying to follow the account of some scout or advance party, or reconstruct the journey of a dead adventurer based on entries in a bloodstained journal—they were traveling in a place that was apparently incredibly dangerous (though mostly just seemed to be boring) based on the near-death vision of a half-crazy captain of the Technic League.

Skiver had seen magic, and he'd seen ancient technology in the ruins of Kho, and he knew miraculous things sometimes happened...but not that often. Most of life was just trying to find your next meal, steal your next measure of gold, hold your lover tight, and bite the other fella before he had a chance to bite you. Miraculous visions passed on from the brain of a dead ancient monster through metal and electricity struck Skiver as pretty unlikely compared to the alternative explanation: the hallucinations of a dying woman.

Of course, when they reached the site of the wreck a few hours later, Skiver was forced to think: That's me set straight, then.

∗ ∗ ∗

"The pillar of glass is at the right angle," Lodger said. "The shape is right—it's the same sort of flattened, blunt triangle." Skiver peered over his shoulder and saw the bit of paper where Zernebeth had sketched the shape of the wreck from her vision. Then he looked up at the hill ahead of him, and he had to admit: perfect match. "I don't think we're going to find a better candidate, Alaeron."

The alchemist was up on the hill, standing on the east side of the tower, shadowed from the rays of the plunging sun. He stomped down on the ground, then turned and slid back down to the level ground where the crawler and the guards were waiting. "This is it." There wasn't a hint of doubt in his voice. "Let's start digging."

Lodger hmmed. "It's getting late, we might want to set up camp—"

"If they're too tired to dig, I have stimulants," Alaeron said. "If they refuse to work, give me a shovel and I'll do it myself."

"I'll see about setting up camp," Skiver said, patting Lodger on the shoulder. "I'm only good at manual labor in a supervisory capacity."

Lodger grunted and went to the guards, who picked up their picks and shovels without any noticeable grumbling. They worked for the Technic League, after all—they were probably just happy to be given orders by someone who didn't have a giant metal spider for a face, or who prodded them along with a few lashes from an electrified whip.

"We could use the Earth-Mover." Lodger lifted something like a metal staff with a greenish crystal on top from the back of the crawler, struggling like it weighed as much as he did. "It displaces rock and—"

"Not yet." Alaeron shook his head, staring at the hillside. "It may be useful later, but I don't want to risk damaging anything before I see what we're dealing with. Best to begin delicately." He pointed. "Two-man teams, one shovel, one pick, start there, and there, and there, digging down at an angle, about this steep." He demonstrated by tilting his hand. "Come, before we lose the light."

The workers set to their task, with Alaeron walking among them, occasionally seizing a shovel or pick to do something himself. Skiver busied himself gathering wood for a fire—not easy in a place so barren, but there was enough dry scrub to manage—and setting up the cook pots and other camp necessities. He even walked off a ways and dug a latrine, feeling obscurely guilty that everyone but him was chipping away at the earth. He was nearly done with the trench when Alaeron's hand fell on his shoulder. "Eh?" Skiver said, looking around. "Something wrong?"

"Something right," Alaeron said. "I think we found a hatch. Care to help us get it open?"

"Hmm. Are there untold riches behind it?"

"Without a doubt." Alaeron grinned.

Skiver tossed down the shovel. "All right, then. Beats digging ditches."

Chapter Nineteen

Delving into the Wreck

After fifteen minutes, Skiver smacked his hand against the exposed hatch—which looked like little more than a raised oval of black glass taller than a man—and said, "This doesn't need a lockpick, Alaeron, it needs a bloody crowbar."

"Hmm. I hope we have something that can scratch it." The door did have a lock, probably, in the form of six interlocking and overlapping circles all made of the same featureless black glass that rang like metal. The circles were much like the ones Alaeron had seen in his vision, when he touched the bit of black glass Zernebeth had brought out of the Mount—further proof that this was the right location. The circles could be twisted and rotated, presumably in order to open the door, but Skiver had worked through various configurations before giving up in frustration.

"Sorry, this is just...most locks I can understand. This was made by someone or something who doesn't think like anybody I've ever known."

Alaeron patted him on the shoulder. It was a shame. He'd hoped to give Skiver something useful to contribute. The truth was, the thief didn't have a lot to do out here. Skiver was a formidable fighter, but they had guards armed with Technic League weapons; the thief was also good at manipulating people and getting the better end of bargains, but there weren't even tribespeople to barter with here—Lodger said there was no sign of humanoid habitation, as if the area were shunned, even more so than the rest of the Felldales. Alaeron wasn't even sure why Skiver had wanted to come along, unless he had hopes for fruitful pillage, which was admittedly the likeliest explanation.

Alaeron sent two of the guards with their pickaxes to attack the door, standing almost shoulder to shoulder and alternating their swings, focusing on the center of the rings. Their picks bounced off without noticeable effect.

Time for another approach, then. Alaeron went into camp, opened up the black box, and went inside, sorting through his shelves and drawers until he found his nastiest, most reactive, most explosive compounds. He mixed a flask of acid—it took two tries, since the first vessel he tried melted on the worktable—and took it carefully outside, holding it in gloves laced in adamantine. Lodger and the guards stood at a respectful distance, while Skiver went and hid behind the crawler. Alaeron descended into the hole partway, then hurled the flask at the door.

It shattered on impact, as intended, and sprayed ferocious liquid all over the door. The viscous acid spattered on the ground, melting instantly through the dirt and doubtless on down through the rock, and the tunnel filled with eye-wateringly acrid fumes...but the door wasn't even marked.

Alaeron trudged back to the black box, returned with a sack of powder that would neutralize the acid, and scattered it around liberally in the tunnel, thinking furiously. He could make bombs, but would they do any better than the acid? Maybe, and there was no way to tell without trying...but it would be very noisy, very messy, and might draw the attention of the vile beasts said to dwell in the Felldales.

"Progress report," Zernebeth barked in his ear.

"We seem to have reached an impasse," Alaeron said. "Could you tell Char to come out where I can see him? I'd just wander around camp shouting for him, but I can't be certain he's lurking within earshot."

A long silence, then she said, "You noticed him, then."

"I did, yes, crouched up near the top of the Mount, watching, when we first left Starfall. At first I wasn't sure what I'd seen—but then I thought, I've seen him descend through a roof, so floating to the top of the Mount should be easy enough. Just out of curiosity—how high can he fly? I assume he needs to breathe?"

"Alaeron, what are you talking about?"

"Oh, it's just, we know that breathable air becomes scarce the higher one goes, that it's very thin on the peaks of the world's highest mountains, so presumably it disappears entirely at some point if one continues to ascend. But if Char had a potion, like a draught for breathing water, do you think he could go all the way to the moon—"

"Why would I send him to the moon? What's on the moon that's any use to me?"

"I've heard there are portals leading there," Alaeron said wistfully, looking up at the sky, deep blue, nearly cloudless, and bereft of visible planetary bodies. "But if you could float upward endlessly at will, you wouldn't even need a portal, you'd only need the time to travel. Aren't you curious what's on the dark side of the moon, the side we can never see? What's hidden in the Moonscar?" It was an article of faith for Alaeron that any secret on Golarion would reveal itself to him if he gave the subject his full attention, but it pained him that there were secrets in the depths of the sky he would never glimpse—except by pillaging any remnants they dropped on the surface here. Which returned him to the matter at hand. "At any rate, perhaps Char can help with my current situation. Why did you send him after us, anyway?"

"To watch your friend Skiver, mainly," Zernebeth said. "He's a thief and a sharp dealer, and I don't trust him."

"He wouldn't steal from me," Alaeron said, mystified. "We steal from other people."

"Has it occurred to you that he might consider me other people?" she asked.

"Ah. Well. There's that. You weren't worried Char would try to murder me again, and endanger the mission?"

"I told him to keep his competitive impulses in check until you find what you're looking for—or definitively fail to do so. What is it you think he can do to further your goals?"

"Walk through a wall, I hope," Alaeron said. "We can't breach the hatch—"

"You found a hatch? You found the wreck?"

Alaeron blinked. "Oh. Yes. Sorry. Didn't I mention?"

∗ ∗ ∗

Char arrived not long after, descending from the sky, a sight strange enough to make even Lodger gasp. Once the incorporeal apprentice was settled on the ground—or hovering near it—Alaeron strode toward him, hands held up in a placating fashion. "I know we've had our differences, but I propose to make a temporary truce until—"

"My mistress has ordered me to obey you." Char's voice was even stranger than before, full of eerie resonances and echoes; he sounded like a man speaking from the bottom of a well. Alaeron wondered if his condition was worsening. "Her will is my guide. What would you have me do?"

Alaeron led him down the tunnel dug at the base of the hill and showed him the hatch inside. "I'd like you to go through there, and if possible, find a way to open the door. Failing that, perhaps you can reach inside and destroy the mechanism, pulling out some essential machinery—"

"You plot my death." The anger in Char's voice was obvious, weird echoes or no. "You know skymetal is poisonous to me—"

"Hmm. Well. First of all, this black glass isn't any of the seven forms of skymetal I know about. Arguably it is skymetal, since it has some of the properties of a metal and presumably fell from the sky, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's poisonous to you. In fact, are you sure all skymetal affects you negatively? Adamantine, obviously, I proved that to my personal satisfaction, and it's the most common, but have you experimented with all the others?"

Char scowled and shook his head.

Alaeron nodded. "Very well. I propose a simple test now. Stick your finger through the glass. If it causes you agony...at least it's just in a finger. In that case, I'll explore other options, which probably involve making most of this hill explode, possibly calling down the wrath of the twisted tribes of the Felldales and any wandering monsters in the vicinity. But I think this is, at least, worth a try—"

Char pushed past him—except there was no pushing, just a deeply unpleasant tingle as his incorporeal out-of-phase body briefly overlapped Alaeron's, reminding the alchemist that he'd never gotten around to buying or commandeering a skymetal vest.

Char pushed his hand into the door up to the wrist. He grunted, then stepped through entirely.

Alaeron listened intently, and thought he heard the tinkle of metal raining down on metal, and then distinctly heard a click.

Char's head appeared from the door, looking surreal, like a trophy animal mounted on the wall in the lodge at Iadenveigh. "I have removed everything small enough to fit in my hand from the interior of the door."

Alaeron wanted to ask him what it looked like inside the wreck, but instead he called to the guards, then turned back to Char. "No horrible choking gases inside, I trust?"

"Not that I noticed. I do still breathe."

"Hmm. I wonder if the molecules of air that enter your aura or zone of influence change phase to match your reality, too...after all, gas isn't really incorporeal—anyone who has felt the wind knows that—and of course, for your body to extract any value from the air..."

The guards arrived with prybars, distracting him from his train of thought, and Alaeron pointed out a hair-thin crack that had appeared around the hatch. They wriggled in their tools, leaned with all their weight, and the hatch popped open, falling to the floor of the tunnel with a thud. The door was almost four feet thick—even lying on its side, a dwarf could have hidden behind it.

"Lights!" Alaeron called. Lodger and Skiver appeared, handing out alchemical lanterns. Alaeron fixed a small headlamp with a mirror behind it to his forehead, so he could have his hands free, and that anywhere he looked would be illuminated. He pointed to two of the guards at random, one with outlandish mustaches and one heavily tattooed woman. "You two watch the camp, and make sure we aren't disturbed. The rest of you, with me."

"Am I to accompany you?" Char said. Alaeron couldn't tell if he hoped the answer was "yes" or "no."

"I need all the tools I can lay hands on, so, yes. Lodger, bring the Earth-Mover. It might be useful."

"This is very exciting," Lodger said. "I never get tired of this part. I remember the first time I breached a wreck—"

Alaeron stopped listening, and stepped into the darkness beyond the hatch.

∗ ∗ ∗

The corridors were human scale, but damaged and canted, making progress difficult. Even if the wreck had been level instead of tilted at an angle, there were strange ridges, ripples, and bumps in the black glass walls, ceiling, and floor—signs of damage, or just the way they were made? The passageways looked almost organic, or at least created by something alive, like tunnels made by worms or holes by gophers. Alaeron had a brief vision of immense gophers with teeth capable of gnawing through black space metal, and smiled a little. Wouldn't that be a disappointment, if this thing turned out to be a cage for rodents from beyond the stars.

The corridor twisted, narrowing in some places so much that people had to go through single file, opening up in other spots wide enough for three to walk abreast. It seemed like a terribly inefficient way to lay out a building, or a ship, or whatever this was.

The guards included both those skilled in martial arts and those more talented in the arcane, and bobbing globes of magical light added illumination, with the uneven, reflective walls casting glimmers back at them. There were very few openings in the corridor, just the occasional square hole in the ceiling, and when Char floated up to investigate one, he reported that it was just a small square room, big enough for one person to kneel inside, perhaps.

"Murder holes," Skiver said.

"What do you mean?" Alaeron found the phrase equally chilling and mysterious.

"Oh, it's something you put in castles or fortifications. Holes in the ceiling, so if the enemy breaches your defenses and comes pouring in, you can hide up there and drop hot oil or heavy rocks on them, or stab down with spears. Usually they're covered with grates, you know, to keep people from climbing up. This long, winding tunnel, narrowing and widening, that feels like something you'd put in a fortress, too, make the enemy go the long way around, give you a lot of chances to kill them before they can get anywhere worthwhile."

"Huh." Alaeron folded Skiver's speculation into his ongoing and evolving theory about what this place might me.

"It's a bit like volcanic glass, isn't it?" Lodger said, pausing to touch the wall. "Like someone hollowed out a great rock and attached fins to it. Presumably engines of some kind, too."

Alaeron grunted. The idea had occurred to him as well. There were rocks floating in space, some very large—they crashed into the world sometimes, and left craters. Perhaps this had started life as such a stone. "What's the compass say? It feels almost like we're looping around—or spiraling inward."

"It's stopped working entirely, I'm afraid." Lodger's weirdly modulated voice was cheerful, as always. "Often happens in the wrecks, you know. Some kind of interference. But I feel like we're curling around ourselves, too."

"I can walk through the walls," Char said. "Scout ahead."

Alaeron considered, and for no reason other than the desire to lead this expedition, and be first to see anything there was to be seen, he said, "No, best if we all stay together for now."

The apprentice scowled, but shrugged, and continued drifting along in Alaeron's wake.

The tunnel finally branched, and that's when the first of them died.

∗ ∗ ∗

"May as well flip a coin." Skiver leaned against the wall, arms crossed, looking half-asleep, which Alaeron knew meant he was more deeply engaged and thoughtful than usual.

Alaeron sighed. "I've never found a useful protocol for which branch to choose when presented with two equal choices. In the absence of screaming, mysterious lights, or eldritch hums from one direction or the other, we may as well go right. The general trend of the tunnel's directionality has been curving rightward, so if we're curling toward some inner space—"

One of the guards started down the right branch, apparently taking Alaeron's musing as an order. A clattering noise came from the ceiling, and the man fell, shrieking, as something the size of a large housecat dropped onto his head. Blood spurted, probably from the man's neck, but it was only seconds before his entire head and shoulders were reduced to a ruin. The thing attacking him looked like a blur of needles spinning around a metallic sphere covered in blinking lights.

"Automaton! Kill it!" Alaeron shouted, and the startled guards lifted their weapons and began muttering spells. But it was Lodger who struck first, aiming the Earth-Mover and pressing the button that activated it.

The device was a blunt instrument. It operated something like a wizard's spell of telekinesis, but its effects were limited only to rock and metal, and it had absolutely no finesse. If you needed to punch a man-sized hole in the side of a mountain, the Earth-Mover would do it, crushing even bedrock to sand and compressing the shattered particles so intensely they sometimes literally caught fire. The force wave—which looked a bit like a heat shimmer radiating from the crystal at the end of the Earth-Mover—struck the automaton like a giant's fist, without moving the guard's ravaged corpse an inch. The automaton smashed against the curving wall of the corridor and slid down the wall, sparking tiny lightnings and emitting a high-pitched whine that trailed off to silence.

Alaeron knelt by the guard, though there was no point, really. He was beyond any healing the alchemist had ever heard of; even those capable of raising the dead generally preferred the bodies to be relatively intact, and this man's upper body had been reduced to bloody gruel. Alaeron, of course, didn't know the guard's name—he'd thought of him as "Baldy" because his bare and burn-scarred scalp was his most obvious attribute. Back when he had a head.

Nothing to be done for him now. Alaeron moved on to the automaton, which was more interesting. The blurred needles were three dozen small, multi-jointed limbs, about a third of them tipped with small serrated blades or hooks, presumably what had been used to tear Baldy to pieces. The rest had the sort of crystals Alaeron had seen on the automaton in the earthworks, the one that had emitted a beam of killing heat—but while that crystal had been clear, these were clouded, like smoked glass. Had their mechanisms burned out? If they'd been working, baldy might have been cut to pieces by rays of light instead—or the automaton might have shredded him with needles while slicing the rest of the party with its heat beams.

"Came from the murder hole." Skiver pointed upward. "Think we're getting close to something, and it's being protected?"

"That is tempting to contemplate," Alaeron said. "But it could be a mistake to ascribe motivations we understand to whoever made this place. We should definitely move forward more carefully, though. Char, if you'd scout the corridor, and let us know what we're dealing with?"

The apprentice grunted and drifted ahead, ignoring the dead body.

Lodger looked at the body. "He was a good man. We fought giants together on the northern border." He looked up. "You know, if you'd let Char scout ahead earlier, this man might still be alive."

Alaeron sighed. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm...leadership isn't my strength. Understanding things like that"—he pointed to the broken automaton—"is what I'm good at. If you're more comfortable setting the, ah, operational parameters, in terms of security and so on, that would be fine. I'd rather not have to think about such things anyway."

Lodger grunted. "Well...All right, then. I say we keep going, let Char scout the corridor and give the all clear, and try to create a map of this place, as best we can."

Zernebeth clucked in Alaeron's ear. "You're showing weakness. Lodger is reliable, but he'll never make captain—he lacks the necessary imagination. Who cares if one of your party died? That only proves he lacks worth."

"The more men I have alive, the more hands I have to carry out the treasures we'll find," he said. "What does it hurt to let Char scout?"

"I gave you control of this mission. If you choose to exercise that control by delegating your responsibilities, that is within your remit."

"I'll take that as acceptance, then." He wished he could turn off the connection between Zernebeth and himself; it would have been satisfying to end that sentence with enforced silence, but short of tearing the jewel from his ear, he couldn't achieve it. She fell silent, anyway, and then Char returned. "Three more murder holes, each with one of those many-legged monsters waiting inside, and then another hatch, jammed half-open."

"What's in there?" Alaeron said.

"I was told to scout the corridor." Char's voice was chilly. "The room beyond the corridor was not mentioned."

Ah. So it was like that. The minor rebellion of following only the letter of his instructions. Well, whatever made the man happy—at least he wasn't trying to kill Alaeron anymore.

"Skiver, do you think we can lure out the automatons?"

"I took the dead man's boots for that very purpose," the thief said, holding them up. The other guards looked at him with the distaste of the professional soldier for the looter, but Skiver had never much cared what people thought of him, and he didn't show any concern now. "Lodger, keep the Earth-Mover ready."

Skiver tossed one of the boots ahead, under a murder hole, and another deadly orb fell down, legs whirring. Lodger blasted it with the Earth-Mover, and he and Skiver repeated the procedure for the next two holes. These automatons were profoundly stupid, at least—but they were clearly immensely patient. If they could be repaired, and their instructions altered by the Technic League, their uses would be myriad.

Horrible, but myriad.

Alaeron peered at the half-open hatch at the end of the corridor, and perhaps at the center of the nautilus-like wreck, if his mental map of the curving passageways was correct. "Char, take a look inside?"

The apprentice drifted through the door, then called, "Nothing moving in here. Lots of things not moving, though."

Chapter Twenty

Silver Statues

Alaeron went into the chamber first, Skiver close behind, then Lodger leading the rest. The chamber was roughly circular, about twenty feet across, and as Char had promised, it was full of things. One section of the wall had once been hidden behind a sliding panel, but at some point in the long centuries the panel had sagged and fallen free, revealing rank after rank of—

"Murderballs," Skiver said. "That's my name for them. I coined that."

"It's an apt enough description," Alaeron said. There were scores of the deadly orbs that had killed Baldy, slotted inertly into storage racks, their limbs folded up neatly. Unlike the ones in the corridor, these had intact, clear crystals tipping many of their limbs, which might mean their beam weapons were still operable.

Lodger whistled. "If Zernebeth can get these things up and running, she'll be ruler of the Technic League for life. No one would dare stand against her."

"That's not all." One of the guards slid open another panel, which moved on invisible tracks as smoothly as if it had been oiled yesterday. "Look here." The others gathered around and stared at a sort of cabinet that contained what looked like a weapon rack for swords...but instead of a sword, it held an object like the Earth-Mover, staff-shaped and tipped with a crystal. The shaft was made of the green, magic-resistant skymetal called noqual, and just in terms of material costs alone, the staff would be enough to make a man wealthy. If it actually worked, if it still did whatever it was made to do, its value would be immeasurable. Alaeron gently reached out and touched the staff. A hairline crack ran from the top, just below the crystal, about halfway down the shaft, but it didn't seem like significant damage, and he had hopes that it might still be operable.

The guards began prodding and pushing at the walls in earnest, then, mostly without effect—but a curved portion of one wall did slide open at a guard's thump, revealing another hatch door. This one, however, didn't have just one set of six interlocking circles embossed on the surface, but half a dozen sets, and a cursory examination showed that turning one ring could have effects on neighboring rings, too. Skiver whistled. "That is a fiendish lock. There must be something precious behind that, eh?"

"Char?" Alaeron said.

The apprentice, who'd been holding himself aloof, came forward and attempted to pass through the door, but stumbled back, wincing. "It's...there's skymetal in there. Adamantine. And other things, ribbons of different metals, some of them stinging, some of them terribly cold, some burning like coals—" He turned and vomited, incorporeal spew becoming solid when it splattered on the ground, making the guards leap back in dismay. Char wiped at his mouth. "Some of it...sickened me."

"Interesting," Alaeron said. "Hit the door with the Earth-Mover, Lodger?"

The lieutenant lifted his staff and unleashed a bolt of force, but the door didn't budge. Alaeron grunted. "Should have known. The door is made of the same black glass as the rest of this place, and when you used the Earth-Mover before, it didn't take chunks out of the walls. Still, if we hadn't tried it, we would have wondered." He squatted down and considered the door. "Clearly this is some kind of lock. If we can find the right pattern, perhaps it will open for us. The possibilities are...numerous." That was an understatement; he started trying to calculate possible configurations of all the rings and rapidly lost count. Perhaps if he took a potion to boost his intellect, to increase his focus...He should have stopped by Malica's place and talked to her about her new recipes for such things. Zernebeth's fondness had...distracted him from making thorough preparations.

"Look here." Skiver had managed to slide open another panel, and Alaeron allowed himself to be distracted from the potential treasure trove to look at the actual one. It seemed to be a cabinet full of spare parts, including fragments of the murderballs, but also coils of skymetal wire, vials of quickiron, and bottles of substances Alaeron had never seen before, viscous and clear and bubbling and frothy and striated with colors. The days, the weeks it would take to test them all, to identify them or declare them new and unknown, and then to decide what they should be named—

"There's a lever here," a guard said—the one with a necklace of teeth and gearwheels and the elaborate facial tattoo. Lodger and the other guards were trying their luck with the vault door, twisting the circles around in a haphazard, disorganized way, but the tattooed man either lacked their fondness for puzzles or had been crowded out, because he'd managed to open a small cabinet, no bigger than a hatbox, and reveal a green metal lever inside. "Maybe this opens the door," he said.

"Don't—" Alaeron said, but it was too late. The guard reached up and pulled the lever down. Alaeron hadn't experienced any presentiment of disaster—he'd just wanted to examine the lever and, if it seemed wise, pull the thing himself, rather than letting some lackey employed by the Technic League do the honors.

A transparent barrier slammed down from the ceiling like a falling portcullis, dividing the room in half. Alaeron, Skiver, and the tattooed man were on the side closest to the entrance, while Lodger, Char, and the rest were on the side by the vault door.

"Oh no," Alaeron said—and there was the presentiment of disaster.

The guards on the other side, cut off from any escape, pounded on the glass with fists and weapons, and they were clearly shouting, but no sound penetrated the barrier.

"Pull the lever again," Skiver said, remarkably calm, and the tattooed man said in a panicked voice, "I did, I did, it's not working."

Char drifted through the glass to their side. "Lodger would like you to know he doesn't find this humorous, and would like very much to be set free—"

Small panels set high up on the wall above the vault door slid open, and nozzles appeared. They began to spray out a thick, silvery fluid, which rained down on Lodger and the guards. The men covered their heads at first, but there must have been a paralytic in the liquid, because soon they froze in place. The spray coated their bodies, the silver fluid seeming to move of its own volition after it struck them, flowing against gravity to cover every bit of flesh and hair and clothing. Over the next few minutes, while Alaeron stared in horror, the men and women beyond the glass wall were transformed into silver-coated statues of themselves.

Char looked at them for a moment, then floated wordlessly up, through the ceiling, and away. Must be nice to be able to escape so easily, Alaeron thought.

"I—I didn't mean—" The tattooed guard let out a howl of anguish and ran from the room.

The spray of fluid slowed, then stopped, and the nozzles receded. The glass barrier rose up, making the room whole again, but Skiver and Alaeron didn't move. "Any chance they're still alive under that stuff?" Skiver said.

Alaeron shook his head. "When they were paralyzed, their chests stopped rising and falling—their lungs weren't working anymore. Some of them may have suffocated before their faces were covered in that spray. It's possible the spray simply stopped their hearts, too."

"What the hell was that?" Skiver said. "Why would you have a lever that does something like that—"

"Containment," Alaeron said. "To stop something from getting away. If it manages to escape the place where you've locked it up, you can seal it in glass, paralyze it, coat it in metal. Make it safe. That door, Skiver...I don't think it leads to a vault."

"Ah. Your theory that Silver Mount was a prison again?"

Alaeron shrugged. "Even if the whole ship wasn't a prison, perhaps this part was. And even if it wasn't, ships can have brigs. What if this is a guard station? That could explain the weaponry, if that staff is a weapon—the murderballs certainly are. And what if the murder holes weren't designed to keep things from coming into this place, but to keep something from getting out?"

"Speaking of getting out," Skiver began, but Alaeron didn't hear the rest. "Progress report?" Zernebeth barked in his ear.

Alaeron made a hold on gesture to Skiver. "Zernebeth, we breached the wreck, but there were defenses. Almost everyone is dead. Lodger is lost, all but three of the guards—"

"I didn't send anyone I couldn't afford to lose," she said. "Is there anything of value in the wreck?"

"Is there..." He took a deep breath. "Yes. I would say so. Immeasurable value. Weapons, some kind of staff, automatons, mysterious vials...It's everything you could hope for. And there's a door, too, one we weren't able to open—"

"So there could be more treasure, beyond the door?"

"Ah. My working theory is that there's something quite dangerous beyond the door—"

"Dangerous things are the best treasure. Alaeron." He wanted to object, to explain, but she kept talking, real excitement in her voice. "You've done well—better than I'd hoped. How would you like to become my lieutenant, an official member of the Technic League, and oversee the full excavation of that wreck over the next weeks or months?"

Alaeron blinked. He'd led numerous men and women to their deaths, and instead of it being denounced as a failure, he was being offered a promotion. Numeria was a place of madness.

"You would have almost complete autonomy," Zernebeth went on, "and I'd let you keep a portion of what you found for your personal researches. You'd have a fine lab, all the slaves you needed, and the sort of resources and latitude you couldn't dream of in the southlands. Here, no one here cares if the knowledge you seek has a terrible price—we only care about results."

"Zernebeth...I don't know what to say—"

"Say yes. I'll even let you keep warming my bed occasionally. It's diverting enough. You're teachable."

"I...It's a wonderful offer, but..." Working for Zernebeth as a sort of independent contractor was one thing, but to truly join the League would mean swimming in deeper waters. True, he'd have access to greater resources, but he'd have to learn to play politics, and deal with avaricious, evil people who thought nothing of assassination and slavery—the other lieutenants would constantly try to tear him down, and to take his place as Zernebeth's favorite. Char would surely return to his murderous ways. To have any real power and stability in the League would mean surviving all that for long enough to become a captain, and to become a captain he'd have to do unspeakable things...and, worse, spend a lot of time paying attention to subjects other than his researches.

"Don't think too long," she said. "I don't like ingratitude. I—what are you doing here? I'm in a private conference—how dare you! I'll have your head—Bothvald, what's the meaning of—"

Then Zernebeth stopped talking entirely, no matter how much Alaeron shouted her name. He stared at Skiver. "I think something happened to Zernebeth."

His friend frowned. "Like what?"

"I don't...it sounded like someone interrupted her, she was shouting...She mentioned Bothvald."

"Oh. Ohhhh. That's bad for her, isn't it? And not much better for us."

"The League...power goes to those who can seize it. Zernebeth had the backing of most of the captains, but she also said politics wasn't her strength. I wonder if it's Bothvald's? If he convinced the other captains to back him, to stop supporting Zernebeth, he must know she wouldn't go without a fight..."

"You think she's dead, then?"

Alaeron shook his head slowly. "She knows so much, so many secrets. The League captains hoard secrets. Bothvald would keep her alive at least long enough find out what she knew, which could take a long time. She's strong—"

"She may be strong, but she's not much good to you as a patron if she's in one of those black cells in the bottom basement, eh? If she's on the outs with the other captains, I can't think they'd have much affection for her handpicked servant, by which I mean you." Skiver gazed at the statues for a while. "I hate to say it, Alaeron, but I think our Numerian adventure might be at an end. What do you say we take some of these items of interest here, those mystery bottles, steal the crawler, and make for the border?"

Alaeron opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, closed it again, and began to stare up at the ceiling.

"Ah," Skiver said. "Loyalty, then. Well, it's what keeps you looking out for me, so I guess I can't fault it. You want to try to keep Zernebeth from being dead. I'd say ‘What's the plan?' but I can tell you're still working on it. Could we get out of here, at least? Those silver statues make me nervous."

Alaeron picked up Lodger's Earth-Mover—at least that hadn't been in his hand when the silver mist rained down—and took the green metal staff, too, handing it wordlessly to Skiver. They went out, along the corridor, and eventually reached the fork in the path. The tattooed guard who'd inadvertently encased the others in metal was dead on the ground, a broken murderball resting beside his corpse. They'd cleared their path into the wreck, but there were other passages, and they had defenses, too. The guard had put up a valiant fight, judging by the broken pieces of machinery scattered around him, but the orb had gotten in a lucky slash and severed his jugular.

"And then there were four," Skiver said.

"Five," Alaeron said dully. "Two guards, us, and Char."

"Four humans," Skiver said. "And one of whatever Char is now. Cut off, without support from Starfall. You think we'll be welcome if we go back? Zernebeth's pet and his manservant?"

"No," Alaeron said.

"But you want to go back anyway. To save her."

Alaeron nudged the murderball with his foot. "Yes."

"Hmm. I might argue with you...but Bothvald sent me to the subbasement so people could practice new ways of piling up pain on me. I wouldn't mind sticking a thumb in his eye." Skiver hmmed again. "We have the advantage of some firsthand experience with the cells, anyway, unless you think they'd keep her somewhere else?"

Alaeron shook his head. "The basements are the most secure place in the League compound. I only got you out because I walked in the shadow of Zernebeth's authority. As outsiders, possibly even fugitives, going after a much more important prisoner, no offense...it won't be that easy next time."

"All right, pass over that particular problem. Say we do get her out. What then? We all escape to the south? And you can keep sleeping with her, and maybe the two of you can live in your laboratory and discover all sorts of wonderful secrets together?"

Alaeron hunched his shoulders. "It sounds a bit far-fetched, when you say it out loud that way."

"Eh, the alternative is, we just run away, and then someone you care about dies. If we try to save her, it could go bad, and it may not turn out the way you want—but if you don't try, it definitely turns out badly. So let's give it a try."

"You're really with me, then? You're a good man, Skiver."

The thief shuddered. "Don't say that where anyone can hear you, all right? I have my reputation to think about."

They continued following the spiral out of the ship, keeping their eyes open for more murderballs, but making it to the surface again without incident. Char waited in the mouth of the tunnel, "sitting" cross-legged, floating a few inches above the earth. He opened his eyes when they appeared.

"You failed my mistress," he said. "You are unfit to lead. You are unfit even to follow—"

"Bothvald has staged a coup and locked up Zernebeth," Skiver said.

Char's eyes went wide and he rose to his feet as smoothly as water pouring from a pitcher. "How do you know this?"

Alaeron tapped the gem dangling from his earlobe. "She was asking me for an update, and I was giving her exactly the bad news you were talking about, when she was...interrupted." He chose not to mention that he'd been offered a position comparable to Char's own. No need to erode their common cause, and it was irrelevant now, anyway. "It sounded like she was taken, rather than killed, but..." He shrugged.

"I must go," Char said.

"Hold up, there," Skiver said. "We're going to rescue her, all right? We've got a better chance working all together than going our separate ways."

"Southern dog," Char said. "Why would you risk your life to help my mistress?"

"Woof," Skiver said cheerfully. "Us dogs, we're loyal. The guards up in camp—we lost the idiot who pulled the lever, by the way, he blundered into another little ball of madness—are they loyal to your mistress too? Handpicked for this mission and all that?"

Char grimaced. "Lodger was the only one of them Zernebeth trusted. The others are hirelings. They work for the League, but if Zernebeth has been betrayed and cast down...she's not the League anymore."

"Hrm." Skiver rubbed his chin. "We'll maybe keep them in the dark for the moment, then, let them know we've had some losses and need to return to the capital for reinforcements, like that, so they can at least protect us on the way—"

A horrible chattering noise reverberated throughout the tunnel, like thousands of firecrackers going off at once in their camp. It ended abruptly, and then a human voice shrieked in horror, along with horrible sounds Alaeron thought might have been horses screaming. Char wordlessly rose up through the ceiling, but not far—his feet and ankles stuck out of the ceiling, one of the more dreamlike images Alaeron had ever encountered in waking life. He had a fairly good idea what the noise had been, and in a way, it shouldn't be surprising—it really was just their luck—but he still felt a grim sinking feeling when Char drifted back down and spoke a single word.

"Annihilator."

Chapter Twenty-One

Jailbroken

Skiver whistled. "One of those huge scorpion things? It made that racket?" Skiver thought it had sounded like someone shaking a steel bucket full of rocks.

"A projectile weapon of some kind," Char said. "Flinging tiny bits of metal at very high speed. The ground is a chewed-up ruin, and the crawler was cut nearly in half, which is better than the horses. They're in far more pieces. The annihilator snatched up one of the guards—the one with the mustaches, I think his named was Goddoff—and seems to be leaving."

"The other guard?" Alaeron asked.

Char shrugged. "Dead, or fled."

Skiver didn't know what Alaeron was thinking, but it seemed like the right time for playing it safe. "So we wait here a bit, make sure the annihilator doesn't come back to sniff around this hole we're in, and then assess the situation, eh?"

"I will watch from the skies." Char drifted up again.

"He's a handy fella to have around." Skiver thumped the ceiling of the tunnel with his fist. They settled down to wait, preferring the rough dirt walls here to the eerie black metal ones inside. Alaeron took the green metal staff back from Skiver and began examining it carefully, making a point of keeping the crystal on the end pointed back toward the ship—sensible if it were capable of producing some sort of destructive blast.

After perhaps an hour, during which Skiver mostly practiced walking coins across the backs of his knuckles and pondered the logistics of a jailbreak, Char returned. "The annihilator has traveled some miles away. I did not see the other guard. In the darkness, my vision is limited, and she may be hiding, or under cover in one of the nearby valleys, or even eaten by the annihilator, if indeed it eats—who can say?"

"I'll look over the crawler," Alaeron said, scrambling toward the mouth of the tunnel. Skiver followed as Char scoffed at him.

"The annihilator blasted it in half, you fool—"

"Across, or lengthwise?" Alaeron said.

Char frowned. "What?"

"Across. Or. Lengthwise."

"Across, but—"

Alaeron climbed the rest of the way out of the tunnel, and Skiver joined him.

Night in the Felldales was cold, and the moon cast a silvery sheen over everything, making the camp oddly stark and beautiful, even in its devastation. The alchemist headed straight toward the crawler, which did indeed have the look of a smoking ruin. Skiver wandered around the camp, picking up pots with neat round holes pierced through them, looking at the churned and devastated ground, the bedrolls reduced to fragments of cloth and feathers, the firewood smashed everywhere. Alaeron's pack, with the black box inside, had survived safely inside the tunnel, at least. Skiver wondered if the cube could have withstood the onslaught if it had been left outside. The annihilator had done so much damage in mere seconds, with a single burst from its terrible weapons...

If the League ever took control of a fully functioning annihilator, it could conquer the neighboring countries with ease—not that its members could work together long enough to plan a real conquest. The Sovereign would be pretty formidable with such a weapon, too, if he could be distracted from feasting and wenching. The League and Kevoth-Kul deserved each other. Skiver glanced up at Char, who hovered about ten feet above the camp, slowly rotating. One hell of an eerie sentinel, but Skiver was happy to have him on the job.

Alaeron called, "I can salvage this." He lifted the Earth-Mover, aimed it at the back half of the crawler, and fired. The rear end of the vehicle tore loose, rolling like a tumbleweed, severed raggedly from the front. The large seating area where the guards had ridden, along with their supplies, was gone, but the front driver's seat and the smaller two-seat section directly behind it seemed intact. "The engine still works," Alaeron said. "In fact, it should move more quickly, now that it won't be so long and ponderous and weighted down. If we run flat out, we can get to Starfall before morning."

"Wonderful," Skiver said. "We should probably figure out what to do when we get there."

"I can hear you," Alaeron said.

"Good. Now, I have some experience with getting bad people out of worse places—"

"I understand."

"Then you won't mind if I make a few suggestions—" Skiver went on.

"Yes, Char is with us."

Skiver finally twigged that Alaeron wasn't talking to him. The alchemist might have put a hand to his ear or turned away or given some other signal, but when you were getting a message from your soon-to-be-dead imprisoned boss and lover, the one with skin like ice and a mechanical arm, the social niceties would naturally fall away, Skiver supposed. He waited patiently until Alaeron met his eyes. He said, "That was Zernebeth. They...they disarmed her."

Char drifted back down to their level. "Of course they did."

"No. Ah. I mean. They...ripped off her arm. The one she built."

The incorporeal apprentice nodded. "Yes. It was filled with weapons, rare metals and crystals, and laced with enchantments. I'd wondered how they subdued her, actually, without her laying waste to their assault just by waving her arm."

"Apparently Bothvald came armed with paralyzing weapons. She didn't expect to be attacked in her rooms that way..." Alaeron shook her head. "She's been locked up, but they didn't find the jewel she uses to communicate—it's hidden underneath her flesh, permanently embedded just beneath her ear. She can't talk too much, because she's afraid the guards will hear, but she told me enough to know how to help her."

"How long do we have?" Char asked. "Before Bothvald kills her?"

The fella had a way of getting to the point, Skiver thought.

Alaeron ran a hand through his hair, making the wild thatch even wilder. "Bothvald convinced the other captains that Zernebeth was mad—that her time in Silver Mount had driven her insane, made her believe she was a prophet, that she saw visions. Apparently she ranted a fair bit about that sort of thing when she was first rescued from the Mount, during her recovery, so it wasn't hard to make a case." Char nodded, frowning, and Skiver remembered that he'd nursed her through her recovery. "Bothvald also said she'd wasted League resources in the pursuit of her unsupported visions, going so far as to send a team to the Gorum Pots—where we all perished in boiling mud, our remains eaten by zhen worms."

Skiver snorted laughter. "I guess he found that little bit of magic metal he hid in my body and leapt to the wrong conclusion, eh? That's a bit of luck, if he thinks we're all dead."

Alaeron nodded. "They haven't started torturing her, yet—Bothvald is busy consolidating his power, doling out gifts from her lab to cement loyalty, and so on. But she expects the hard questioning to start soon. She won't tell them anything, and once they realize that, they'll bring out the machines to empty her mind...which won't leave her any mind to think with when they're done."

Skiver rubbed his hands together briskly. "We'll have to go get her first, then. What do we have to work with?"

"I can make it most of the way into the basements," Char said, "but there are cells lined with skymetal, on the bottom level, where they keep prisoners who are mutated or otherwise powerful, and I suspect she is confined in one of those."

"Any egg can be cracked," Skiver said. "What kind of weapons do we have?"

Alaeron shrugged. "The Earth-Mover...which will work fine on the stone-and-metal walls of Starfall, and the walls around the compound itself. But it's not subtle. I can make bombs, also not subtle. Oh, and this." He picked up the green metal staff.

"You want to trade it for Zernebeth's freedom?" Char scoffed. "The League will just take it, and lock you up too—"

"Ah, no, I thought we could actually use it."

Char scowled. "We have no idea what it does."

"Hmm? Of course we do. I do, anyway. I just spent an hour in a tunnel with nothing much to do but examine it." He held the pale green staff aloft, tilting it in the moonlight. "See, the staff has a shell of noqual, the skymetal that deadens magic. The noqual helps to shield the wielder from the effects of the inner core of horacalcum."
He ran his thumb along the shaft. "There's a tiny hairline crack here, so perhaps the containment isn't perfect, or the horacalcum's properties interact somewhat destructively with the noqual, but the damage seems quite minor—"

"So what's horacalcum, then?" Skiver said, because Alaeron often needed to be reminded that not everyone shared the contents of his head.

"Oh! It's a skymetal that alters time—or perhaps merely the perception of time, I'm not entirely certain yet, I'd need to do some controlled experiments. The power of the horacalcum is directed—I'm not entirely sure how—and focused through this crystal, allowing the effect to be aimed. There are small knobs, here, and I can use them to speed up time for an individual or a limited area, or slow time down for them—it's all the same effect, of course, it's just a matter of whether you're an observer or participant, whether you seem to be going faster or other things seem to be going slower—"

"Explain it to me," Skiver said, "like I'm as drug-addled as the Black Sovereign, and you're dancing for your life."

Alaeron chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded. "I can aim it at an enemy and make his movements slow to less than a crawl, so that every blink of his eyes takes five minutes, or I can aim it at a warrior, and turn him into a blur of lightning speed."

"How can you know that?" Char demanded.

Alaeron shrugged. "I've examined many artifacts from the Mount. There are certain common principles of design. The operation of the relic is self-evident, really. But if you'd like proof, then—" He pointed the staff at Skiver, and before the thief could object, he twiddled something on the shaft.

Alaeron's mouth, though it was still moving, slowed down to the lazy gapings of a fish. He was still making sounds, but they were low, slow, and distorted. Skiver took a step back, and the soil he scuffed hung in the air, tumbling slowly around his feet. He looked at Char, who flickered faintly in and out of focus, his edges even blurrier than usual. "Oh, this is nice," Skiver said, and walked around, stooping to pick up rocks, then releasing them in midair, watching them hang for seconds and then slowly, slowly descend, like balloons. Alaeron had a potion that allowed him to move quickly, turned him into a blur, but Skiver had never imagined what it must be like to be inside that blur. Eerie and wonderful. And the possibilities for larceny were both obvious and endless.

"So there you have it," Alaeron said, and the rocks all fell to the ground at once, and Skiver rocked on his heels as the rush of ordinary time flowed back around him. "You see, I can turn it on and turn it back off again. I could slow Skiver's time sense so that we moved so quickly he wouldn't even see us, and he might not notice anything was even wrong, except perhaps for a certain change in the light around him—the interaction of light and time is fascinating and I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of it yet—"

"Let's use that to rescue Zernebeth, then," Skiver said. "And also bombs."

"Why bombs?" Char said.

"Mostly? Because Alaeron likes bombs, and he's had a bad day, and he deserves to have some fun."

"I do," the alchemist admitted.

∗ ∗ ∗

The crawler got them back to Starfall before dawn touched the horizon. Skiver wasn't particularly worried about the plan. The Technic League was formidable, but it wouldn't be expecting an attack, especially from people who were presumed dead. The element of surprise, plus the power of the time-altering staff, should work in their favor; if nothing else, they could probably escape if things went horribly. The only real problem was Alaeron's reluctance to follow the plan. They argued about it, hidden behind a heap of boulders a few hundred yards beyond the city's wall.

"I should be the one to rescue Zernebeth," Alaeron said. "She's counting on me—"

"You really want me tossing bombs?" Skiver said. "And, not to belittle your skills, which you know I hold in high esteem, but—which one of us has more experience climbing over walls and breaking down doors, eh?"

Alaeron sighed. "Now I know how Char feels. Useless." The incorporeal apprentice was perched up on the Mount, keeping watch, prepared to swoop in and do...something, if disaster befell them. He could have helped with the jailbreak, but his condition was so distinctive, it would have been hard to disguise his involvement. Skiver's plan was to make it look like Zernebeth had escaped on her own. They all agreed she wouldn't enjoy people thinking she'd needed to be rescued.

"You think I want to put myself in danger?" Skiver said. "I'd rather sit back and drink a whiskey and have a young man wearing not much at all rub my feet, and that's just for starters. But you're always talking about the right tool for the job, aren't you?"

Alaeron nodded. "I don't like it, but I see your point. Fine. I'll be the distraction."

"Good man." Skiver had retrieved his bag of burglar's tools from inside the black box, and now it was slung over his shoulder, along with the Earth-Mover, a weapon heavy as a dead dog. He held the staff from the wreck in his hands. "So once I give myself a blast with this, how long will it last?"

"I don't know. Five minutes? Ten? We can hope." He shrugged. "It will feel a lot longer. You can always give yourself another blast if it wears off. Assuming it holds up." The hairline crack had developed a tributary, also tiny, but it was an ominous development. Alaeron thought the crash might have damaged the staff.

"Good enough. I'll wait for the booms and then get started. Ready for your jolt?"

Alaeron nodded, and Skiver pressed the little indentation on the staff's shaft, and heard a click. The alchemist essentially disappeared, though there was a bit of a blur, racing off toward the north.

Skiver set out for the wall, crouched as low as he could with all the ordnance strapped on his back. He'd barely gotten within arrowshot of the guard tower above the League compound when he heard the first explosion, followed rapidly by several more. Alaeron could throw bombs with great speed even unaugmented, but sped up by the staff from the wreck, he was a one-man demolition crew. Most of the bombs arced high, hitting the top of the wall, where they did remarkably little damage, having been constructed to be more sound than fury.

The guards boiled out of the tower Skiver was watching and ran toward the devastation, shouting and hefting weapons that looked bizarrely overcomplicated and probably did outrageously horrible things, like boiling all of a man's blood at once or pulling spines out through eye sockets. The League didn't limit itself to bows and arrows when it came to its defenses.

Skiver braced the base of the staff against the ground, closed his eyes, and pressed the button. He didn't feel much, but when he cracked open one eye, he saw the bombs Alaeron was lobbing in the distance hang in the air like dark stars, bursting into slow-motion cascades of light, blossoming into luminous flowers of white and yellow fire. The slow explosions were, in fact, the most beautiful things Skiver had ever seen in his life, and if he'd had the soul of a poet, he would have been forced to spend a few moments trying to find a way to describe their beauty in a way others could understand.

But he had a different kind of soul, so he just grunted; said, "Pretty"; and then went on with his work. At the base of the wall, he unbuckled his bag and took out the grappling hook and rope, gave it a few spins and tossed it toward the top of the wall, which was thoughtfully studded with hunks of random metal. Once the grappling hook left the little bubble of sped-up time around him, it floated up slowly, like a dandelion seed on the breeze. Skiver could have rolled and smoked a cigarette in the time it took the hook to snag on a bit of metal. He tugged on the rope, and it seemed solid enough, though the way it rippled slowly at the hook end was a bit eerie.

Skiver resecured his bag, slung it over his shoulders with the weapons, and began to climb. Once upon a time he'd been good at this sort of thing, scaling walls to break into the usually-less-secure second-story windows of fine houses, but he'd been younger then, and his muscles ached a bit as the sack on his back tried to drag him to the ground. Still, the old instincts were there, and his body knew what to do, though it complained about it more now, and in a short time he'd reached the top of the wall.

The guards were some distance away, shouting and waving their arms at glacial speeds. Skiver collected his grappling hook, ducked into the guard tower, didn't see anyone, and hurried down the stairs to ground level. From there, he emerged into the Technic League compound. There were a couple of League hirelings some distance off in the yard, pointing at the explosions in the sky—really, it was more a fireworks display than an attack, though no one would realize that yet—but the only person nearby was the guard watching the entrance to the main compound, a tall Kellid in dramatic black leathers, arms crossed over his chest.

Skiver kept moving, knowing that if he stood still for too long he'd be visible, so he was dancing and dashing to and fro as he hooked his grapple around the man's ankles, and then wound the rope around his body tightly. The guard didn't seem to notice anything was amiss until the rope was wrapped all the way around his legs, and by the time he started to widen his eyes, the rope was wrapped all the way around his arms, binding them close to his body. He opened his mouth to shout, and once it was wide enough, Skiver shoved a wadded-up sock—dirty, because he was already doing the man a favor by not killing him, what more could he expect?—into the man's gob. Skiver grabbed the guard and dragged him—it was like moving a bookshelf—toward a pile of scrap wood, and left him resting in the sawdust and spider webs.

Skiver returned to the door and pushed his way in, not even needing his lockpicks. The League justifiably felt secure, here in its center of power, and presumably having to lock and unlock the door all the time would annoy the captains, so the security was cake. Skiver raced through the halls, passing slow-motion people moving with ponderous purpose through the halls—responding to the commotion outside, probably. How much real time had passed since Alaeron started tossing his bombs? A minute? Less?

He slipped past the guard at the top of the stairs leading to the basement without difficulty. There were cells even in the upper basement levels, where prisoners with some small chance of seeing daylight were held, and he considered releasing them on humanitarian grounds and just to add to the general confusion, but decided to focus on the mission at hand. He remembered the way to the deepest subbasement—it wasn't a journey he was likely to forget. There were two hulking men standing watch by the iron trapdoor to the black cells below, and stealth wouldn't serve him here. He could open the trapdoor quickly, but its motion would certainly be noticed. He darted behind one guard and blindfolded him with a strip of cloth, then did the same with the second, and while they were opening their mouths in alarm and reaching up to their faces, he coshed them each over the back of a head with his blackjack. The trapdoor was closed with a bolt, but the cells weren't made to keep people out, so he opened it up and slipped down while the guards collapsed in slow motion.

The cells in the basement were locked, but he had picks and the semblance of all the time in the world, and he opened three cells before he found Zernebeth—leaving the doors standing open to give the poor souls inside a chance to escape if they still had feet to walk on.

Zernebeth was strapped to a table tilted at a forty-five degree angle, dressed in ragged cloth, with strange strips of metal around her single wrist and her forehead. A chirurgeon in a leather apron stood near the door, holding a device that looked like a corkscrew mated with a choke pear. Must be the morning-shift torturer. There were manacles hanging on the walls—either practical ones or just decorative, for the ambiance—and he disarmed the chirurgeon and bound her in chains before moving on to Alaeron's cold blue lady love.

They'd never been formally introduced, but he'd seen her around, mostly at the Sovereign's horrible feast, and she'd struck him as an impressive figure—tall, self-assured, strong, and with that eerie mechanical arm. Now she was a one-armed victim, her hair wild and disarrayed, with a bruise growing on her cheek and a black eye on the other side—good for her, she'd put up a fight—and yet...she was still impressive, eyes looking at the door calmly, aware something was happening, even if it was happening too fast for her to comprehend.

He aimed the green staff at her and pressed the button. The casing developed another crack, joining the first two, and he thought he saw a greenish pulse of light through the casing. He dearly hoped whatever energies were leaking from the thing weren't poisonous.

Zernebeth blinked at him, the only thing in the immediate vicinity moving at her speed now. "Interesting. Did that come from the wreck?"

"Yeah." He began cutting the leather straps that bound her with a dagger. "Useful toy."

"Mmm. Alaeron is the one making all that noise?"

Skiver nodded. "He wanted to come for you himself, but he's better with explosions, and I'm better at climbing walls."

"It will be difficult for me to climb down a rope with one arm," she pointed out.

"True enough. But we're not going out that way." He showed her the Earth-Mover, and Zernebeth rewarded him with a smile.

Women didn't do a thing for Skiver when it came to lust or romance, but in that moment, he could understand why Alaeron was willing to breach the walls of Starfall to save her. When a woman like this smiled at you, you knew you'd done something worth smiling at.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Going to Ground

After Alaeron let his last bomb fly, he raced back to the crawler, hoping things had gone smoothly for Skiver. The guards up on the wall were still firing their terrible weapons, which he'd dodged easily, their bolts and projectiles and beams moving as slowly from his perspective as leaves falling in a gentle wind. The green staff was really remarkable. His own temporally distorting potions didn't last as long or work as well, and gave him terrible headaches besides.

After a few moments watching the wall, he was rewarded by a slow explosion, as a hole gradually opened up beneath the guard tower, chunks of metal and stone flying outward, like a cloud of dust. The Earth-Mover was a blunt instrument, but its effectiveness could not be denied. Skiver and Zernebeth appeared a bit later, once the debris had cleared enough for them to duck through the hole they'd made. There was no point in driving the crawler toward them—in this sped-up state, the vehicle would seem to move more slowly than honey flowing on a cold morning. In what was, objectively, surely mere seconds, the two reached his position, and Alaeron embraced Zernebeth, who kissed his cheek.

Zernebeth was wearing a strange headband and bracelet, that looked like..."Noqual?" he said.

She nodded. "Enchanted, to keep me from casting spells. You can help me remove them later. That bastard Bothvald. He took my arm and my voice."

"It's fortunate then, that, you have loyal friends."

"You did well," she said.

Skiver grunted—Alaeron had the feeling she hadn't complimented his part in this rescue—and stowed his gear in the crawler. "Should we slip back into regular time?" he said.

Alaeron nodded, helping Zernebeth into the crawler—she looked so fragile with her arm missing—and then taking his seat in the front, by the controls.

"We should head southeast," Zernebeth said.

"Way ahead of you," Skiver said. "All the way to Almas."

Zernebeth laughed. "No. Not that far."

Skiver opened his mouth, presumably to object, then shrugged and lifted the green staff, aiming it at Alaeron, Zernebeth, and himself in turn, restoring them to the normal flow of time. There was definitely light leaking through the cracks in the staff now.

Normal time was very loud, the echo of the Earth-Mover breaching the wall still ringing in the air, guards shouting, and weapons firing, fortunately all in entirely the wrong direction. Under the little bit of cover of darkness that remained, Alaeron pointed the crawler south, and they scuttled away as fast as they could.

∗ ∗ ∗

Char rejoined them soon, floating along solicitously beside the crawler, fussing over Zernebeth like a hen over its chick, until she crossly waved him away and said she was fine, she was a perfectly healthy woman who happened to be short one arm, not an invalid.

"Try to remove the bands on her forehead and wrist," Alaeron said.

Char scowled at him, but reached out, and grunted. "They are skymetal, but they cause me no pain."

Alaeron nodded. "As I theorized, it's not all skymetal that interacts badly with your, ah, medical condition. I wonder if—"

"Get them off," Zernebeth snapped.

Char concentrated, touching the bands and making them incorporeal, then lifting them away from Zernebeth's flesh and dropping them to the floor of the crawler. "Ah," Zernebeth said. "That's better."

"Glad you're feeling so spry," Skiver said. "But where exactly are we going? Our plan, such as it was, included getting you loose and out of the country—"

"Nonsense." Zernebeth leaned back in the seat, stretching her one arm over her head and yawning. "I have to oust Bothvald and take my rightful place as first among equals in the League again. I have too much to do to let him overthrow me."

Skiver sighed. "No offense, but I think that ship, as they say, has sailed, and is halfway over the horizon by now—"

"You are a smuggler and thief of low ambition." Zernebeth's dismissal of Skiver was total. "You cannot possibly understand me. But Alaeron does. Don't you?"

"Ah," he said. "I, that is...the situation does seem rather dire..."

"You cunningly arranged an escape, and as both you and Skiver moved too quickly to be perceived, and are believed to be dead besides, the other captains will assume I engineered the escape myself, summoning explosions and blasting open the wall and striding out under my own power—why, you've already laid the groundwork for restoring my legend, Alaeron."

"In point of fact, it was Skiver who came up with the plan, and making it seem like you escaped without our help, that was just to make sure everyone still thinks we're dead in Gorum Pots, so no one will come looking for us—"

"Part of great leadership is delegating tasks to specialists," she said. "Your...friend's criminal background provided him with certain skills, but you were the one who directed him and gave him the task of finding a way to free me, yes?"

Skiver snorted. "Just doing my job, ma'am."

"That's not really how—"

"We'll go to Hajoth Hakados," Zernebeth said. "It's a river city, only nominally under Numerian control—it's on the border with the River Kingdoms, and if the political winds ever change at the right moment it could well become a River Kingdom in its own right. Enough traffic passes through that no one is likely to notice the arrival of a few strangers. It is...amenable to fugitives."

"Sounds like my kind of place," Skiver said.

∗ ∗ ∗

The citizens of the thriving port of Hajoth Hakados made a good living from the river trade, and from supplying the crusaders passing through on their way up the Sellen River to Chesed and on to the Worldwound, to die fighting the good fight. (The enterprising people of the city didn't see any reason those crusaders should fall to the hordes of demons with perfectly good coins still in their pockets, so they worked hard to remove as many of those coins as possible first.) As a result, there were plenty of accommodations in the form of inns and spare rooms, but Alaeron's band wanted something with a bit more privacy. Skiver's instincts for finding fellow members of the criminal fraternity paid off, and he acquired exclusive use of a small house on the outskirts of town once owned by a man who'd gotten in debt to the wrong people and paid with his life. He grumbled about having to finance their hideout with the money he'd made selling luxury goods to Zernebeth, but at least they were flush with coin to finance...whatever they were going to do.

They settled into the house, furnished with chairs and couches that were too low-quality to bother selling, and walls covered in utterly bare bookshelves, their contents presumably pillaged to pay off the former homeowner's debts. They all collapsed on couches and armchairs—except Char, who sort of hovered over a chair—with Skiver taking the initiative to activate the black box and duck inside, returning with provisions: fresh water, dried fruit and meat, and the hard biscuits beloved of military organizations, which remained edible (if not tempting) for months. They all ate, even Char, and contemplated the dim room and their dimmer circumstances. Eventually Alaeron began to pace, a habit Skiver was used to—the alchemist said making his body move sometimes served to free his mind.

"The problem is Bothvald." Zernebeth spoke at last. "The rest of the League I can overcome, but that smug Ulfen...I confess, I underestimated him. He is not a passionate seeker after truth, not in the way we are, but he's talented when it comes to higher mathematics and tinkering with relics—and worse, he's good at politics, something I neglected during my time at the head of the League. I don't think Bothvald wants power for anything, except its own sake...but I'm not sure, offhand, how to wrest the power away from him now that he's taken it."

"Bothvald is everything I hate in all the world." Alaeron seethed, pacing back and forth and up and down the room. "Him and everyone like him, with their lack of true ambition, their focus on becoming comfortable and rich and contented, all for no purpose—wallowing in velvet all day, drinking rare vintages from jeweled goblets, becoming a creature of pure sensation. Or crushing your enemies for the pleasure of watching their life and hope drain out of them. Why? How can anyone live with a worldview so circumscribed, so narrow, so focused on the utterly trivial? What must it be like inside Bothvald's head? Cramped as a coffin! You can't be a living man inside a coffin, a coffin is only comfortable if you're dead, and so I can only conclude that his mind is dead, his spirit is dead, and if he nevertheless gives the appearance of life, it is an illusion, like the mindless spasms of a severed tentacle. Bothvald has no reasons for the things he does, or at least, no reasons I recognize as valid—he shits where he lives and fouls his own nest and poisons his own fields in pursuit of pointless nonsense." Alaeron stopped, head lowered, then slowly lifted his gaze to Skiver, who looked at him with something like admiration, and at Zernebeth, who looked at him with something like satisfaction. "Bothvald offends me," Alaeron said. "Him and all his kind."

Skiver declined to comment, but he didn't think Bothvald was all that drastically different from Zernebeth or any of the other captains. He probably loved relics and exercising power, like all of them did. But he had to concede it had been a pretty good speech.

"So what will you do?" Zernebeth asked softly. "How will you address this terrible offense?"

"I will destroy him," Alaeron said.

"Fair enough," Skiver said. "How, exactly?"

At that, Alaeron slumped. "I haven't worked it out yet."

"Mmm," Skiver said, scratching his nose. "Well, I gave it a bit of thought myself on the trip, and I think I see a way we can get rid of Bothvald, and even make a bit of coin in the process."

"I'm not sure you're the one best suited to make plans—" Zernebeth began.

"No," Alaeron said. "Hear him out. Skiver rose through the ranks of the criminal gangs in Almas to a position of comfortable power, and really, the League is a criminal gang, of sorts. No offense, Zernebeth. You might call this his area of expertise. What did you have in mind, Skiver?"

At least Alaeron defended him to his blue mistress. That was worth something. Skiver said, "The League only cares about results, yeah? Bothvald took over because he convinced the other captains he was a bigger, better bastard than you are, right?"

Zernebeth winced, but nodded. "That is true."

"So—we prove them wrong. Make them think Bothvald is incompetent. We humiliate him, cause problems for the League, make his mismanagement cost them money and resources. While we're at it, we'll annoy the Sovereign, too, and let him know his troubles can be traced back to Bothvald—I know the League doesn't answer to the barbarian king, but if he's angry at the captains things won't run smoothly, and that's bad for business. If the Sovereign decides Bothvald has to go, and the League doesn't feel all that motivated to protect him, he won't last long. We just need to arrange a few disasters and lay them at Bothvald's feet."

"How do you propose we do that?" Zernebeth said.

"Oh, I can handle the details. I know a few people who'd love the opportunity to take some coin and treasure from the League. They haven't, because they're afraid...but we've got an inside man, you see. The until-just-yesterday head of the League herself, who can give us privileged information about the best League and Numerian operations to plunder for coin, and the best way to do it."

"If the Sovereign thinks I'm sabotaging the League—" Zernebeth said.

Skiver waved his hand. "No, no, it'll never come back to you, you're in hiding. We'll put the word out that Bothvald's security is so sloppy that his lieutenants are selling secrets for coin while they can, because they know the whole League is in danger of dissolving entirely under his mismanagement, and they want to get rich while they can." He snapped is fingers. "We'll start a whisper campaign—a little coin can buy a lot of wagging tongues spreading plausible lies. Maybe use Alaeron's friend Malica—she knows people on the streets of Starfall and at court, and can arrange some rumormongering for us, I'm sure. We'll make sure this message is on everyone's lips, or at least in the back of their minds: Bothvald is a fool, and the Technic League is too weak to defend itself while he's in charge. We'll let everyone know that when Zernebeth was the most powerful voice in the League, no one dared to meddle in their affairs, but now that this prancing fool Bothvald has risen to prominence, it's open season on the League's interests—and the Sovereign's interests. Spread those rumors in court, and all over Starfall, where it's sure to reach the ears of the captains and the Sovereign, too. Then when they hear about the robberies, their faith in Bothvald will disappear like ice on a summer's day, and he'll be out."

"I...it's better than any plan I have conceived," Zernebeth admitted.

Skiver nodded. "We just have to make sure this whisper campaign avoids the port cities and the border outposts—you don't want word of the League's weakness spreading beyond the borders, or else our little plunder squad will be joined by outside freelancers, and we won't be able to control them once Zernebeth is back in power. The point is, everything should be havoc and chaos while Bothvald's in charge, but the moment Zernebeth is reinstated—peace and plenty and prosperity reign supreme, and all our thieves slink away with their well-gotten gains."

Zernebeth grunted. "This could work, assuming you can find capable confederates."

"Then I'll put the wheels in motion," Skiver said. "Char, care to deliver a few messages for me? You can go a lot faster flitting through the air than I could go on horseback, or riding a chair perched on the back of a mechanical spider, or whatever you people do around here. I need to arrange a meeting with some of my nearest and dearest, or at least the closest local equivalent."

∗ ∗ ∗

While Skiver scribbled notes, using up an alarming quantity of their stash of paper and ink in the process, Zernebeth took Alaeron's hand and led him into the black box. She took a moment to admire the room inside, then shut the door, giving them a level of privacy that was basically unassailable. She led him to the four-poster bed and pulled him down to the sheets. "I have no potion to help you with the chill of my skin..."

"I don't care," he said. "I was afraid I'd lost you. What's a little numbness, if I can have you in my arms?"

After, they lay together under the covers, chatting idly. Zernebeth propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him thoughtfully. "I understand your loyalty to me—I am wonderful, after all. But you talked about how Bothvald offends you, and I wondered...why doesn't Skiver offend you in the same way?" She caressed Alaeron's thigh, as if trying to take some of the sting out of her words. "He seems a simple thug, obsessed with amassing a fortune, not much unlike Bothvald in that respect. He hardly strikes me as a man of vision. His plan to oust Bothvald demonstrates a certain low cunning, but it's still just about thieving, really."

Alaeron shook his head. "Skiver doesn't mind if people think he's stupid, or selfish, or thuggish. And he does spend a lot of his time scheming over ways to make money. But you have to understand—he doesn't care about money for its own sake. He cares about it because other people care about it, and do their best to get it and keep it, which makes taking it away from them an interesting challenge. Skiver doesn't live for money—he lives to be amused. For the thrill of risk, and for those little moments when one decision can change lives and cause ripples of consequence that travel through whole crowds of people. His vision isn't my vision, admittedly, but he's not one of those short-sighted creatures living a life of unexamined stimulus-and-response, either." Alaeron paused. "Also, my hunger for knowledge and truth is often very expensive, and at the same time it isn't always particularly profitable, so having someone in my life who amasses money and favors and connections the way a corpse attracts flies is quite convenient. And unlike most investors I've met, Skiver doesn't particularly care if any of my experiments ever turn a profit—he just cares if they're interesting." Alaeron put his hand on Zernebeth's leg, just above her knee, and let her cold flesh soak in some of his warmth. He felt a surge of confidence and smiled. "I think I can say without fear of contradiction that my experiments are almost always interesting."

"Mmmm," she said. "It's possible I've misjudged your friend. His plan to restore me to power is an intriguing one, and even if it doesn't work, it should make life for Bothvald uncomfortable. I'm not saying I'm wrong about Skiver, mind you, but I am open to having my opinion swayed."

"That is the mark of a true scholar," Alaeron said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

A Few Short Scenes About Rogues

The common house in Hajoth Hakados where they met to form their conspiracy was called the Gentleman Bastard, in honor of some legendary criminal with unusually good manners. Beneath a thin veneer of respectability it remained a meeting place for people who dabbled on the wrong side of the law in the north. ("And that's a tricky proposition," Skiver said, "since the people who make the actual laws up here are among the worst criminals you could ever imagine, without a hint of honor or a splash of class.")

Alaeron sat with his back against the wall, looking at the paladins in their gleaming armor milling among the sharp-eyed locals. Skiver was hunched forward, elbows on the table, deep in conversation with the woman beside him. "We've got that incorporeal fella I told you about, though we've got to use him sparingly, or people will realize Zernebeth's involved with the League's bad luck. And there's you, and your crazy priest, and a couple of your boys for muscle, and Alaeron's friend Redfang, and truly that's a decent enough crew all by itself. But apart from you, none of them are all that experienced in the ways of out-and-out criminality, and rapid strikes are best here, hit a lot before they can organize a defense. Who do we know who could help us out, Genthia, in terms of leading another team?"

The pirate captain cocked her head, musing. "Well, there's always Gad..."

Skiver shook his head. "Nah, he'd want to take over and run the whole thing his own way. Not to say he couldn't, I've never known a better man when it comes to conjuring up a plan, but I've already got ideas about how to do this thing, and adding Gad would be too many cooks in the kitchen. What about Rodrick and Hrym? Didn't I hear they were blundering around in the north recently?"

The name Rodrick rang a faint bell for Alaeron, though he wasn't sure why. Genthia shook her head anyway. "No, I heard they took passage down south to some island in the Obari Ocean, working on yet another scheme to get rich or die trying, I'm sure. They're too far away to do us any good. Hmm. There's someone, I don't think you know her, a general confidence trickster but also a dead shot with a bow. She goes by Jaya—"

Skiver laughed. "Oh, yes. We've met. She could be good, but..." He glanced at Alaeron.

Alaeron suppressed a groan. Jaya had accompanied them on their journey to the ruins of Kho. He'd believed, for a while, that she might be falling in love with him...which was, of course, exactly what she'd wanted him to believe, to make him willing to kill and die for her. He couldn't fault her reasons, but he didn't much like being used. That said, he'd seen her fight demons and monsters without losing her cool, and he couldn't deny her effectiveness. As for loyalty...Well. She'd be as loyal as they could afford, and Skiver was still fairly flush with coin from his import operation.

"It's fine," Alaeron said. "She'd be an asset to the mission. But, ah, if I could possibly avoid seeing her..."

"We'll put you with another team," Skiver said. "Don't worry about that. Now, we could use a couple more bodies, all-arounders with broad skill sets would be best, but someone besides me who knows their way around a lockpick would be good, since I know your idea of tickling open a strongbox involves taking an axe to it..."

They worked out the details, Skiver showing Genthia the notes Zernebeth had made about potential targets, discussing how to coordinate the attacks for maximum profit and maximum embarrassment for Bothvald. Alaeron sipped his weak beer and tried not to dwell on the heartbreaks of the past. Why think about Jaya, and what she'd meant to him, and how she'd ultimately betrayed him to return to a lover he hadn't even realized existed?

He had Zernebeth, now, and this would work, and they would have a future—he could join the Technic League, and be Zernebeth's right hand, and coax her into changing the entire culture of the organization, making the captains into cooperative seekers after knowledge instead of a bag of rabid cats. With the resources at the League's disposal, they could do so many great things—restore the flying cities of the Shory Empire, unlock the secrets of the stars, crack Silver Mount open like a nut and sift its contents. If the captains could only be convinced to work together, instead of squabbling and fighting for power and influence. All the time and effort wasted on coups and counter-coups and keeping secrets when it could be used for something worthwhile, like going into terrifying holes in the ground and finding the wonders within—

"All set?" Skiver said. "We've got a tight schedule to keep. This is a big country, and we've got a lot of ground to cover if we want coordinated strikes."

"Ah." Alaeron blinked. The light in the windows had shifted; he'd been lost in thought for some time. But why not? He'd been constructing an entire future in his mind, and that took time.

First you made the future in your mind. Then you made it happen in reality.

"Yes, of course," the alchemist said. "Onward to, ah, plunder, then. And pillage. And so on."

"Spoken like a true marauder." Skiver grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. "You and I need to have a little chat about bombs."

∗ ∗ ∗

Ten days after that initial planning session, Alaeron and the pirate priest, Cantor, plus two crewmen from Genthia's ship to do the heavy lifting, looked down on the village of Skumble from the ridge of a hill. Skumble was barely a village, really, more of a mining camp devoted to extracting every last scrap of value from a wreck the League had discovered not far from the Battle of Grasyhot the year before. Zernebeth said it was the most lucrative active site they had at the moment.

Skumble wasn't without its terrors. In particular, the camp was troubled by the intermittent appearance of thick greenish fogs that seemed to move of their own volition, driving those who breathed the vapors hopelessly insane. As a result, the miners and their overseers had impressively airtight structures, with chimneys and windows that could be sealed tight, all built to exacting League specifications, where they could lock themselves in and hide until the fog moved on.

"Bombs are ready," Alaeron said. He'd concealed time-release smoke bombs, his basic recipe with an additive to make the clouds green, around the camp. "Are you ready to cloak us in mist, Cantor?"

"The gaseous emissions of the Great Fundament are always easy to summon," the priest intoned, making the pirates snicker.

The strongest building in Skumble was a windowless warehouse of heavy stone set some distance away from the barracks, with guards on all four sides and another on top, armed with weapons provided by the Technic League. A League lieutenant was on site, too, inside the building, which was wrapped in enchantments to make it doubly safe.

According to Zernebeth, that building contained pounds of skymetal wire and ore, including most of the more exotic varieties, due to be shipped back to the League compound in just a few days...unless something happened to it.

"All right," Alaeron said, counting under his breath. Smoke began to rise silently beyond the barracks, and after a moment the lookouts sent out the cry of alarm—"The fog, the fog, beware the fog!"

The people in the camp raced for their barracks as the green smoke eddied and drifted toward the buildings—moving as ordinary smoke, not sentient fog, but no one seemed to notice. The guards watching the warehouse rushed inside the building, the one on the roof leaping down to join the others, and within moments the bustling camp was eerily silent, sealed up tight. Other bombs on longer delays would continue to release smoke for some time, giving them ample time to complete the operation, Alaeron hoped.

Alaeron produced two bottles, handing one to Cantor. "Ready, Father?"

"Servants of the Divine Fundament are always ready," Cantor said, with the smug solemnness of every cleric Alaeron had ever spoken to.

Alaeron pulled the stopper from his bottle. Another cloud of colored mist shot forth to envelop the team, and together they began moving down the hill, the fog hopefully concealing them from any lookouts peering out of the sealed windows in the barracks.

They reached the storehouse, and Alaeron climbed up the ladder to the roof, emerging from the concealing mist and crouching low to minimize the chance of being seen. The alchemist peered down into the chimney, which was sealed with a movable flap...but it was merely fog-proof, not acid-proof. He poured a flask of bubbling vitriol into the chimney, and in a moment it ate a hole in the metal flap.

Alaeron tossed the bombs he'd prepared down the chimney. He listened, and heard gratifying thumps, and one shout. Drat—one of them had been far enough from the chimney to avoid being knocked unconscious by the gas bombs...also tinted green, just in accordance with the general theme. Alaeron had hoped to knock them all out in one shot, but this could be good—it might save them having to break down the door. He peered over the edge of the roof and watched as the door opened, one of the guards stumbling out, wide-eyed and afraid.

One of the pirates hit him in the face with a club, and that was that. Alaeron climbed down and got to work. The interior of the warehouse was mostly clear of gas—it was a fast-dissipating compound—and full of bins heaped high with ore. The guards and their supervisor sprawled on the floor, snoring and drooling. The pirates, who had some experience at more thoroughly subduing people who were already pretty well subdued, tied the men up and put canvas sacks over the heads of the captives while Alaeron opened up and activated his black box.

The pirates found the box incredibly eerie, but with proper coaxing and promises of extra gold, they finally got to work dragging the skymetal from the warehouse into the black box, piling up the crates of ingots and lead-lined casks of poisonous rare metals inside where Skiver's imports had so recently been heaped. Once the warehouse was entirely empty, Alaeron collapsed the black box again, put it in his bag, and signaled to the pirates that it was time to go.

By then a couple of the guards were awake, and one of them—probably the League lieutenant—shouted from beneath his canvas hood, "You won't get away with this! The League will hunt you down!"

Alaeron put as much disdain into his voice as he could muster. "The League? You used to be scary, when that one-armed ice witch Zernebeth was in charge, but now that Bothvald is running things? The man might as well wear ribbons in his beard. The League is nothing to fear anymore. You'd better find a new line of work."

Skiver would have come up with a better exit line—for one thing, he knew how to be pithy, while Alaeron tended to overexplain, belabor, and ramble on and on when brevity would be more appropriate—but Alaeron thought it got the point across.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Ooh, this place, it's just crying out for larceny." A day after Alaeron's successful daylight raid on Skumble, Skiver sat in a chair outside a charming establishment called the Fire in the Hole in Lackthroat, a town in the north of Numeria famed for its heavily armed mercenaries and its dens of vice, all the latter paying a healthy percentage of profits to the Black Sovereign in exchange for protection—mostly from the Black Sovereign himself. Skiver thought, not for the first time, that government was really the greatest criminal racket in the world.

The capital was some distance from Lackthroat, so the tribute was sent along to the Sovereign on a monthly basis, and rather than transport the money in a caravan filled with heavily armed men—because something like that would surely attract bandits in the wastes—the Sovereign's tax collectors used a low-key approach, with the strongboxes transported in a boring-looking train of carts glamoured to look like they were carrying vegetables when in fact they were full of armed guards. But the caravan's real defense was secrecy, and with Zernebeth giving them inside information gleaned during her time as League liaison to the Sovereign, that advantage was lost. "We're going to pluck this town like a ripe peach," the thief said with satisfaction.

Redfang picked his teeth with the point of his knife, which counted as good table manners and a mark of sophistication by local standards. "Don't talk to me about peaches. Breakfast here was salty oat mush." They were the only ones out on the porch, since passing horses sometimes splashed mud on the boards. Not the most sanitary place to have a drink, but it afforded enough seclusion to talk privately.

"I was speaking, what do you call it, metaphorically." Skiver scanned the street, making sure their hirelings were in place. The men were loitering entirely too conspicuously, but so were various other mercenaries who were better at posing than working, so that was all right. "There's so much money running through this place, it would be easy to reach down and scoop a little out of the stream."

"You have to be careful, reaching into streams. There are some fish with nasty bites." Redfang belched. "You can also get liver flukes."

Skiver tried to decide if that was a metaphor or not, and hadn't reached a conclusion by the time the first vegetable cart arrived and parked in front of a boarded-up storefront. He shook his head in professional disappointment. The underlings the Sovereign had hired to handle tax collection here were amateurs by Skiver's high standards—probably chosen for their loyalty to the king rather than their skill. Just look at this setup! An "empty" shop across the way was the local pickup location for the Sovereign's portion of the gold skimmed from the gambling houses, comfort houses, discomfort houses, bathhouses, and houses of ill repute that made up most of the local economy. But an abandoned shop on a prime street in a town thriving like this was the opposite of inconspicuous—it stuck out like a unicorn in a herd of goats.

A wizard emerged from one of the carts—he was wearing a cape and a big hat and carrying a knobby walking stick, and might as well have had a sign that read "WIZARD" hanging around his neck—and walked with a few "carters" into the shop. They emerged a bit later, the men staggering inexplicably from the weight of carrying a crate spilling over with bunches of spinach. The wizard might have at least glamoured the strongboxes full of coin to look like something dense and heavy, like onions or beets, so the guard's efforts would look more plausible. The men struggled to load the month's take into the cart, then returned for two more loads.

"No last-minute snags," Redfang said. "It all went just like your informants said it would." Redfang had been disappointed to hear that Alaeron's plan to blow up the Technic League had failed due to technical difficulties, but had been happy to join with their Plan B, striking at the League and the Sovereign's financial concerns. If his friend Shadowstalker had told any stories about waking up concussed and confused in the woods with muddled memories, Redfang hadn't mentioned it, and Skiver wasn't about to ask.

Skiver tossed back the last of the sweet brown liquor that passed for the local delicacy. "In a perfect world, I'd come back next month, and the month after that, and the month after, and observe every little thing, and make sure I knew the route and the routine up one side and down the other. Safer that way. But I feel better, seeing everything go exactly the way our League turncoat said it would, at least so far."

"I don't know much about crime," Redfang said. "I can see your point, though, about being careful—you do the same thing when you hunt. Know your prey, and know its territory. Still, this isn't about the money—it's a political act. It's about breaking the power of the League."

When they'd recruited Redfang, they hadn't told him they were working to overthrow one Technic League leader so they could install another. Just the first part. Skiver had assured Alaeron that it wasn't a lie, just a failure to provide the full details. Besides, they'd gotten Zernebeth to promise to leave Iadenveigh alone once she was back in power, so it would all work out for the best for Redfang's people anyway. "You don't want your share of the money, then? You'll take your pay in politics?"

"I'm an idealist, but I'm not a zealot," Redfang said. "Coins and gems will do just fine. I can find a noble use for them, fear not."

The whole transfer of wealth to the carts took just a few minutes, and the wagons began the laborious process of turning around and heading back the way they'd come.

Idiots, Skiver thought. Who loaded a cart full of vegetables and took it out of a place like Lackthroat, which probably needed all the food it could get? Where the hell were they supposedly planning to sell it instead? He thought of the Sovereign's horrible parody of a feast, and this was the same sort of thing, a terrible impersonation of a slick criminal enterprise. The Sovereign chose his counselors and generals based on whim and nepotism, and it showed. The League, by contrast, was smart, you had to give it that, and despite its viciousness it was at least a pure meritocracy—you got power in its ranks by proving you deserved it.

Zernebeth wasn't really the best person to run the League by its current standards—after all, she'd been ousted, hadn't she? Her interest in knowledge for its own sake made her a poor fit, in a way—gangster-philosophers were good in stories, but in practice, they lacked the ruthless focus that more pragmatic criminals possessed. Bothvald was probably more effective. Shame he'd sent Skiver to the subbasement, then. He'd made it personal, so Skiver was happy to engineer his downfall.

Their hirelings had already drifted away to prepare themselves for their parts in the plan, so Redfang and Skiver rose and strolled down an alleyway. Zernebeth had provided them with suggestions for shortcuts—from memory, in a town she'd only been to a couple of times; there was no denying the woman's intellect—and by squeezing down passageways far too small for vehicle traffic, they managed to get well ahead of the slow-moving carts.

The ambush point was carefully chosen, on a block where a fire had ravaged the buildings and they hadn't been repaired or replaced. There were rumors of ghosts in the vicinity, so no one spent much time here, providing a useful level of abandonment. The vegetable carts came this way because it was the fastest route to the side gate they used in their laughable excuse for discretion. Perfectly ordinary carts going out of their way to use an awkwardly placed minor exit—nothing suspicious about that at all.

The vegetable carts turned the corner, and once they'd progressed well along the street of ravaged buildings, two of Skiver's hirelings stopped their own cart across the path, blocking the way. Two others knocked over a pile of crates behind the last cart to block escape in that direction, though it wasn't really necessary, since horses weren't famed for their ability to push carts in reverse.

The guards knew something was wrong immediately, to their credit, and emerged armed with the silvery, curving, weird weapons presumably procured from the League. They should have looked like they were carrying rakes and shovels, but if they noticed their illusions had stopped working, they showed no sign.

Really, such amateurs.

Their fancy weapons didn't do them any good when they didn't have anyone to point them at, though. The hirelings had scurried for the shadows as soon as they blocked the path, and Skiver was watching from behind an overturned, half-burnt wagon.

While the guards looked around for someone to kill, Redfang shot two with arrows from his perch in one of the burned-out buildings, and their sniper on the other side took care of two more. The wizard stumbled out and lifted his staff...and nothing at all happened.

Alaeron had provided time-delayed magic-dispelling bombs, which Skiver had hidden in the area where the carts were stopped, and they'd worked their anti-magic right on schedule. The wizard was out of luck. Another arrow took him out, and the rest of the guards decided to run for it, which worked about as well as one might have expected.

Skiver mostly avoided murder in the course of larceny when he could, simply because it brought less heat than simple theft, but Redfang wanted dead League members as part of his pay package, and Skiver had obliged.

The hunter came down from his perch, and Skiver emerged from his cover, summoning the hirelings with a whistle. They stripped the bodies of valuables—taking everything but the weapons, which Skiver needed—and then hauled the corpses away, tossing them in the burned buildings where they wouldn't be noticed for a while. Skiver thanked them for their good work and paid them off, and the hirelings waved cheerfully as they moved their cart out of the way.

Skiver climbed onto one cart, and Redfang another, with Genthia's mate Bugbear taking charge of the third. The illusions of vegetables were gone, but they found some old horse blankets and threw them over the strongboxes, and that worked just fine to disguise the contents. Sometimes the simplest ways were the best.

They got out through the barely-even-guarded side gate without incident, and split up a mile or so outside of town. Redfang took one strongbox for his personal enrichment and to contribute to the Banner of the Stag, the pirate took another to pay Genthia and her people for their ongoing assistance, and Skiver took the rest. He waited at the prearranged place farther south, and Alaeron arrived not much later, with tales of his successful raid on Skumble. They added the strongbox containing the Sovereign's gold to the lovely hoard they were growing inside the black box.

Not a bad day's work at all. "Should we start making our way back to Hajoth Hakados?" Alaeron said.

"It's a long trip, and the sooner we get started, the sooner we finish."

"I wish I knew how the other attacks went."

"Don't fret. Genthia's a professional, and so's Ja—so's the other one. We'll meet up and get a report when we're back home, but I'm hopeful. Try not to worry—just consider the next week a camping trip, eh?"

"Just like the old days, when we went to Kho," Alaeron said. "Sleeping rough in a strange country."

"Not all that rough. It's my turn to sleep in the nice bed in the black box tonight, by the way. We've got more money this trip, too. And, I hope, fewer monsters. I'll take

Numeria over Kho any time."

∗ ∗ ∗

Two days later, while they hid beneath the cart in the vain hope that the monster in the sky wouldn't come back for another pass, Alaeron said, "Do you still prefer Numeria to Kho?"

"Just now I hold them in about equal esteem," Skiver said, listening hard for the sound of death from above. Their horse, at least, had finally succumbed to its injuries and stopped screaming, lying still in its traces at the front of the cart.

Alaeron fumbled in his pack and brought out the black box, setting it down beside them and pressing the button to activate it. The box did its unfolding trick...which had the unfortunate side-effect of raising up one end of the cart as the box grew taller. As soon as it was fully opened, Alaeron slammed the button to open it, and they rushed inside as the roar of the monster's approach grew louder.

Skiver leaned against the closed door inside the cube. "Now what?" he said.

"We wait?" Alaeron suggested.

"Wait for how long? Do these things ever get tired? What is it, anyway?"

"A myrmidon," Alaeron said. "An automaton that flies using a device on its back—or rather that's part of its back—a sort of engine that spews fire. They also have those tentacles it used to kill the horse on its first flyby. Sometimes they launch explosives, though this one hasn't, yet, so perhaps it used up all its bombs."

"Think it works for the League?"

"The League has made some attempts to, ah, domesticate such things, because they'd obviously be marvelous guards, but they aren't easy to control. I think this one is wild, and this particular stretch of nowhere is the place it considers its territory."

"Shame we don't have the staff that slows down time. That'd be handy."

Alaeron sighed. "Agreed. It made sense to leave it with Zernebeth, so she could escape if Bothvald's agents managed to track her down. But, yes, it would give us an edge."

"How do we fight this thing? I can't imagine knives would be much good."

"Electricity is our best chance. I do have some lightning bombs."

Skiver sighed. "So we try to fight it?"

"Or we can stay here for a week or two, and hope it decides to go away."

"I will be very annoyed if we die in the course of helping your friend Zernebeth get her old job back. Especially since I'd die without ever knowing if my brilliant plan worked. All right, then. Where are these bombs?"

Alaeron opened a cabinet and began mixing chemicals into clay vessels, then closing them with stoppers. "All right. If I can hit it in midair, the electricity should disrupt its flight. With luck, falling from a great height might damage it sufficiently to let us escape."

"Should," Skiver said. "Might. Well, I'm convinced."

Alaeron put the bombs in a belt lined with pouches, then slung the belt over his shoulder. He stood before the door, took a deep breath, and said, "If I don't make it, tell Zernebeth I—"

"If you don't make it, neither will I," Skiver said, "so let's concentrate on making it, shall we?"

Alaeron hit the button that opened the door and stepped outside. Skiver hovered in the doorway, watching as the alchemist moved from underneath the shadow of the cart, looking skyward—

The myrmidon landed no more than thirty feet away. Skiver hadn't gotten a good look at it before, and he wasn't thrilled about getting a good look now. Shaped a bit like a man, though far larger, it resembled the Gearsmen he'd seen in Starfall: a roughly humanoid metal man. But this one had long flexible metal tentacles dangling from beneath the baleful red eye, and huge pincers instead of hands.

Alaeron tossed three bombs so quickly it was practically simultaneous, and the thing dodged the first two—but the last was a direct hit, right in its hideous eye. The red glow there faded as lightning crackled all over its body, and it jolted and shuddered for a moment, emitting a high-pitched keening sound, then fell silent and still, transformed into an inert heap of junk.

The alchemist threw the rest of his bombs at it, just to be on the safe side, and it didn't react. Skiver stepped out of the black box. "Is it dead?"

"I'm not sure it was ever precisely alive. I'd be a lot happier if I'd hit it when it was thirty feet above the ground, and if it had smashed itself to pieces by tumbling out of the sky. I wish I understood its nature better." The alchemist edged forward—

And one of the tentacles lashed out, missing Alaeron's face by only a few feet. The myrmidon's eye began to glow again, and though it moved forward jerkily, one of its arms twitching pointlessly, it was still impossibly fast. Alaeron and Skiver both turned toward the safety of the black box, diving through the door...

But Alaeron couldn't close the door fast enough. They managed to dodge to the side as the myrmidon blundered through, crashing into crates of ore and scattering priceless metals to and fro. The automaton unleashed some sort of energy weapon, and Alaeron's bed exploded into a cloud of burning feathers, obscuring the automaton's form...except for that glowing red eye, so bright it was clearly visible as it turned in their direction.

Without thinking, Skiver dove back out the door, Alaeron close behind him. The alchemist slammed his hand down on the button that closed the door, and the cube sealed itself tight and began collapsing back into its portable form, letting the raised end of the cart drop with a thump hard enough to crack one of its wheels.

For a moment Alaeron and Skiver sat in the dirt, staring at the black box.

Alaeron sighed. "I loved that box. And that bed. That was my second-best bed."

"Now your third-best bed is your second-best bed," Skiver said. "You know there are vast riches in there. Gold stolen from the Sovereign. All that skymetal."

"The myrmidon is quite valuable, too," Alaeron said. "If you could sell it before it killed you. Which you couldn't."

"At least we're alive," Skiver said at length. "And I've got a decent bit of coin on my person and in my pack and in my boots. I never like to keep all my money in one place, especially a magic black box that I can't personally even open."

"Good, good," Alaeron said vaguely. "That's good, especially since most of our food was in the black box, too. I...I suppose we should start walking?" He picked up the cube, examined it—keeping his finger well away from the red button, Skiver noted with approval—and then stowed it in his pack.

"This long trip just got a lot longer," Skiver said. "If anyone bothers us, I suppose we can just open up the box and let the myrmidon come flying out. That would be a pretty fair distraction."

"I'm not sure our own fiery death counts as a distraction, exactly," Alaeron said. "At least, not primarily."

Chapter Twenty-Four

Triumphant Returns

How did Genthia's attack go?" Alaeron asked some days later, when Skiver returned from his meeting with the others at the Gentleman Bastard. He was soaking his feet in a tub of hot water—they'd bought horses eventually, but it had still been a physically grueling trip back to Hajoth Hakados. "And the, ah, other team?"

Skiver sprawled on one of the run-down house's couches and blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. "Like a dream. Genthia hit the gambling house in Chesed, and it was just like Zernebeth said it would be. They didn't leave a copper in the place. Jaya's strike on the League outpost near the northern border wasn't as lucrative in terms of coin, but she got away with some impressive weapons, which sends a message, too. The miscellaneous fires, raids, and bombings we arranged mostly went off without any trouble."

"And what's the opinion in the capital?" Alaeron turned to Char, who was sitting cross-legged and floating about five feet off the ground. His job had mostly involved flitting to and fro around the country, carrying messages, spying on their enemies, and coordinating things. Numeria was a damnably large place, and a man who could fly was a great help when it came to logistics.

"Bothvald is in seclusion in the League compound, reportedly consulting with the other captains, and the Black Sovereign is by all accounts enraged. Not so much because of the wealth he's lost, though that stings, but because people dare to steal from him at all—especially since everyone believes turncoats among the League's ranks helped the thieves. A few of the lieutenants are muttering that Bothvald is good at talking, but bad at running things."

"And what are they saying about me?" Zernebeth's tone was cool, almost offhand, but Alaeron knew what she was hoping to hear: that the people were clamoring for her return, that only she could save the day, that they were embroidering banners with pictures of her face.

Char cleared his throat. "Your escape is...seen as another black mark against Bothvald."

Zernebeth scowled. "Does anyone suspect I had anything to do with the crimes?"

"I have not gotten that sense, mistress."

"I was afraid of this," Skiver said. "Your escape was bound to be read one of two ways: either you're too powerful to be contained...or Bothvald is so incompetent he couldn't even keep a one-armed has-been like you locked up. Our efforts have only reinforced the latter impression."

Alaeron winced, Char hissed, and Zernebeth looked at Skiver as if he were a previously unknown form of slime mold. He held up his hands. "I'm sorry, I know you don't want to hear it—but am I wrong, Char?"

"I have...heard that approximate sentiment expressed." The apprentice spoke like the words cut his throat as they emerged.

Skiver nodded. "Luckily, the fact that no one thinks you're a threat means no one believes you organized the raids—everyone accepts our story about Bothvald's obvious weakness emboldening the criminal element and inspiring treachery among the League's underlings and such. He's likely to be run out of town by the other captains or by the Sovereign any time now, yeah?"

"I am not so sure," Char said. "Bothvald is very clever. After the raids, he executed two of the League lieutenants and Captain Leonitas, claiming they were to blame for the inside information given to the thieves. The Black Sovereign was mollified to receive their heads, and killing Leonitas earned him the loyalty of some of the man's enemies." Char shook his head. "We've shaken Bothvald, and his position is yet precarious, but we have not toppled him."

"So we haven't even succeeded in toppling Bothvald," Zernebeth said icily. "Let alone made any progress toward our true purpose, which is putting me back in power."

"I thought it might come to this," Skiver admitted. "So I had one last score in mind. Something big and flashy, to put us over the top. Bothvald won't be able to put it on Leonitas's head, since he's already been rendered headless. With a little work, this could be just the thing we need."

∗ ∗ ∗

In the end, Alaeron insisted on coming along, even though Skiver assured him it wasn't necessary. His role was simply to sit outside the walls, in the crawler, with the time-altering staff, prepared to intervene if anything terrible happened. Skiver had sketched out an elaborate plan that involved Char descending into hidden tunnels beneath the palace, opening gates that were never unlocked, allowing Skiver, Genthia, and...that woman...to slip inside, overcoming the elaborate defenses that Bothvald himself had installed, and reaching the Black Sovereign's private vault.

There really was such a thing, where Kevoth-Kul kept items that were especially precious to him. The greatsword he'd used to conquer the nation. The skulls of the enemy chieftains and giants he'd personally slain, which he'd had gilded, for some reason. Jewels and tribute of particular value given by neighboring nations in an attempt to keep him from invading, back before he'd ceased to be a threat to anyone but his own citizens. Also, a cache of the rarest and hardest to distill of the Black Sovereign's favorite drugs. Items, in other words, of great personal significance, the loss of which would sting Kevoth-Kul in a way the theft of mere money never could.

The vault was lined with adamantine, so Char couldn't simply ghost through and steal them himself. They were counting on Skiver's skill with lock picking, Genthia's willingness to cheerfully murder anyone who stumbled upon them, and...that woman's...mastery of the treacherous arts in general to see their way through.

Alaeron sat in the crawler, in the dark, waiting. He tried to think about the wreck he'd uncovered in the Felldales, and how he would handle the exploration once Zernebeth was in charge again and all was right with the world. But instead he kept thinking about...that woman.

All right, don't be childish: about Jaya. He hadn't seen her—she'd met the others closer to Starfall—but he knew she was out there. He'd once been infatuated with her, stupidly looking for love where she saw only opportunity, but now he knew better, he was more mature, more worldly, he'd been through so much—

"Hello, Alaeron."

He jumped—so much for being casual and sophisticated—as Jaya appeared from the shadows, Kevoth-Kul's immense greatsword leaning against her shoulder as if she carried swords nearly as long as she was tall every day. She was a vision of loveliness, long dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, dressed all in clinging, shadow-gray, practical thieving clothes—she was like the opposite of pale Zernebeth.

Before Alaeron could react to her presence, Jaya leaned the greatsword against the crawler, then stepped forward and kissed his cheek. "I've always felt terrible about how things worked out between us, Alaeron. I'm glad I was able to come and help you with this. I wouldn't even let Skiver pay me my usual rate—only half, as a gesture of apology." She took his hands, looked into his eyes, smiled, and then disappeared back into the dark.

Alaeron hadn't said a single word. Not that he could think of anything to say, even now that she was gone. He had expected to feel a surge of rage or hate when he saw her again, but instead all he felt was...a sort of vague fondness, like you might feel toward a beloved nephew who'd disappointed you, but for whom you nevertheless had a certain natural affection. Maybe this meant he'd gotten over her—both over the betrayal of her pretending to care about him when she didn't, and over the fact that he'd gone right on caring about her afterward, anyway. Perhaps his complicated feelings for Zernebeth had overwritten his differently complicated feelings for Jaya.

He could not remember when an idea had given him more relief.

The others arrived moments later, Genthia and Skiver lugging a chest between them, Char drifting along in their wake. "—couldn't believe it when she kissed that guard right on the mouth!" Genthia was saying. "And then the woman just collapsed, her eyes rolled back, at first I thought it was because it must be such a good kiss, but Jaya told me she had an alchemical sedative on her lips!"

"That's our Jaya," Skiver said, as Alaeron absently rubbed his cheek. He hoped Jaya had rubbed the poison off her lips before kissing him. Skiver glanced at the sword. "She gone already, eh? Places to go, people to do wrong." After they wrestled the chest onto the crawler, he patted Alaeron on the shoulder. "You all right?"

"Fine," Alaeron said, and was amazed to realize he meant it.

∗ ∗ ∗

Char brought the good word to their house in Hajoth Hakados two days later: "Bothvald fled the city before the Sovereign could put his head on a pike. The rumor is he's headed to Brevoy, though no one seems to know for sure, and the Sovereign sent riders after him in that direction. Kevoth-Kul is furious at the loss of his precious things, especially since Bothvald assured him his private vault couldn't be breached. Of course, since only Bothvald knew the precise nature of those defenses, the Sovereign assumed he was involved in that theft, and probably behind all the others."

"Too bad for Bothvald he consulted with me about the vault's security," Zernebeth said. "I thought my assistance with that project had cemented his loyalty to me. Not the sort of mistake I'll make again."

"When a League servant found all those gilded skulls I hid in Bothvald's rooms, and word got back to the Sovereign..." Char shrugged. "Bothvald was doomed. The League couldn't protect him from the Sovereign's wrath, and they didn't want to—the other captains think Bothvald betrayed their secrets to thieves in exchange for riches."

"Perfect," Zernebeth said. "Now they know passing me over in favor of Bothvald was a horrible mistake."

"So you return to Starfall tomorrow?" Alaeron said.

"Yes. I'll arrange a meeting with the other captains. I want you at my side. And Char too."

"I never get invited to the good parties." Skiver sighed.

Zernebeth rose from her divan, walked to Skiver in her stateliest manner, and then—shockingly—extended her hand. After a moment's hesitation, he took it, and she shook it solemnly before letting go. "I thought you were a simple thug, Skiver—but it seems I misjudged you. You're a complex thug, and I can appreciate the distinction. Nevertheless, I should return with Char—who is still a member of the League—and with Alaeron, whom I made a point of welcoming back to the League's ranks so recently. Your presence would be rather more difficult to explain, and anyway, it's better if one of us remains in the shadows, in case things go badly."

"Makes sense," Skiver said. "For what it's worth, you're not quite as horrible a human being as I'd assumed, either."

Zernebeth turned and beamed at her two apprentices. "Tomorrow, to Starfall, and back to the heights of power."

∗ ∗ ∗

The captains of the Technic League sat arrayed around the triangular table, listening patiently while Zernebeth gave a speech that was simultaneously imperious and gracious, the upshot of which was that she was willing to return to the ranks of the League, assuming she received all due honors, and if the other captains were willing to implement some necessary changes to security to avoid future fiascos like the one that began with her ousting.

It was an impressive speech, and she was an impressive figure, Alaeron had to admit. She was still one-armed, but she'd shopped in the market that morning and was arrayed in what passed for full dress among Technic League captains: an armored garment of rare metal scales, crisscrossed by leather straps dangling with tools and weapons, and shining black boots capable of stomping dissent into mush.

Still, Alaeron wasn't sure the speech had worked its intended magic. He was hardly a student of human nature, but the blank expressions on the faces of the League captains worried him.

The captain with the metal eyepatch—Elias, Alaeron thought his name was—spoke first. "You're delusional. Bothvald was a criminal fool, but what makes you think we want you back at all, let alone back in the best workshop? We only let you back in this chamber because we thought you might have some worthwhile information to sell."

The gnome captain chimed in. "You allowed yourself to be overthrown by a traitor and a thief, and he wasn't even a competent traitor or thief—he was caught! You aren't fit to sit at our table. We're better off without Bothvald and you both."

Zernebeth scowled. "My knowledge, my experience, surely you can't discount—"

"Oh, we'll buy anything interesting you have to offer," Elias said. "And in light of your past contributions to the League..." He glanced around at the other captains. "I suppose you could begin again, and try to prove your worth, as all aspirants to the League do. Bring us something good, something really extraordinary, and we might find a room for you, and allow you back on a probationary basis."

"Too merciful," the gunslinging dwarf captain muttered, but the others shrugged and murmured assent. Alaeron had the impression they didn't care one way or another.

"Now if you'll excuse us, Zernebeth?" Elias said. "This room is really only for League members. You're welcome to stay, Char—your devotion to Zernebeth was fine when she was a rising star, but you've tethered yourself to a sinking stone, lad. You've got too much promise to waste on her."

Zernebeth tried to rally. "If I could have a few men, to take on an expedition—"

The captains chuckled. "Leave us, Zernebeth, while you still have one arm left," Elias said. "The chirurgeons are disappointed they didn't get to vivisect you. You did a fair bit of damage in your escape, you know, and we could hold you accountable for that. Don't make us regret our largesse."

Alaeron touched her shoulder before she could say anything else, and she walked out, head held high, face composed, giving no sign at all that her heart was broken. Char scowled around the room and followed them out.

Once they were outside the compound's walls, she said, in a low voice, "Char. I want you to stay in the capital. Pretend you've forsaken me, all right? That you care more about your career than our friendship. Keep an eye on things here, and gather any intelligence that might be useful to me. Anything I can use against the other captains, or to get leverage, or garner support..."

The apprentice nodded, then sank down into the ground and out of sight.

"Perhaps if you brought them the time-stopping staff," Alaeron said.

She shook her head. "We both know it's cracking—the case is broken, and it's getting worse. The thing could fail at any moment. It's powerful, but it's not enough."

"I've still got the black box in my pack, with the myrmidon inside..."

"I'm not sure a wild automaton would do my cause much good," she mused. "We could put the box in their meeting room, hidden under the table, and if we could contrive a way to open it by remote control, and release the myrmidon into their midst, it might kill all of them. If there were no living captains, no one could say I wasn't a captain...but, no, myrmidons are immensely destructive, it might wreck half the city before anyone brought it down. The boxes seem to require a personal touch to open anyway."

"Ah. Still. It was a...bold idea," Alaeron said.

Zernebeth looked at the sky and chewed her lower lip for a moment. "I need something awe-inspiring, something so impressive they'll have no choice but to take me back." She turned her gaze to his face. "Get Skiver, and the crawler. Take me back to the wreck in the Felldales. Perhaps there's another staff, one that's not cracked. Or we can find whatever must be locked in that vault you couldn't open." She seized his hands, and though her skin was cold, her eyes were so bright they looked almost fevered. "There's something there. My vision was so clear, so compelling! It meant something, Alaeron, I'm sure of it. And whatever that wreck contains, I can use it to force them to give me back the life I deserve." She paused. "And the life you deserve, too."

"I'll do my best to make sure we get what we both deserve," Alaeron said.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Here we are again," Skiver said. "Something came by and ate the corpses of the horses, I guess, but otherwise it doesn't look any more disturbed than it was when we left." Skiver climbed out of the crawler and walked across the churned earth toward the mouth of the tunnel that led down to the wreck. "Let's—"

He shouted and dove out of the way just as a loud humming noise filled the air, then abruptly ceased. Alaeron raced over, but Skiver was unharmed. "Someone's down there," he said. "By the door to the wreck. I saw 'em move, just before they aimed their weapon—some kind of nasty Technic League thing."

Zernebeth stalked toward the wreck, though she was cautious enough not to stand at the mouth of the tunnel. "Who dares fire upon members of the Technic League?" she bellowed. "I'll feed you to the things in the meat garden if you don't explain yourself now!"

"Captain Zernebeth?" a bewildered female voice said. "Is that you? But—Captain Bothvald said you were dead!"

Zernebeth said, "Do I know you?" in icy tones.

"I—I'm Carys, captain, the League hired me as a guard..."

The name was faintly familiar, and a moment later it clicked for Alaeron, just as Skiver said, "She was the other guard. The one the annihilator didn't take, the one we thought was dead or fled...Bothvald must have found her, and found out about the wreck."

"Do you have something we can toss down there to get rid of her, without too much destruction?" Zernebeth whispered. "I don't want the tunnel to cave in."

"I, ah, of course, I—"

"Carys?" Zernebeth called, and then, in her most imperious voice, "What are you doing her? We thought the annihilator killed you."

Carys's voice was small and nervous. "When that monster attacked, I...I knew we couldn't fight it. I saw it pick up Goddoff in its claw, he was screaming and begging for help, and...I just panicked. I ran, and tried to hide, and stumbled on a hill tribe that tried to kill me, but I made my way back to Starfall. I nearly died of thirst on the way. Captain Bothvald made sure I got the care I needed. He said you were dead, and told me I was the only survivor of the expedition to Gorum Pots. I told him we hadn't stayed in Gorum Pots, that it was just a stop along the way. I—I'm sorry—"

"Is Bothvald here now?" Zernebeth demanded.

"Yes, ma'am. He told me to return here, to secure the site, to make sure no one else found it...I was so frightened, but he gave me a vial of something that took all my fear away, except now it's wearing off. He arrived this morning, and said to defend the wreck against anyone who tried to enter."

"Throw your bomb," Zernebeth said in a low voice, and Alaeron tossed a clay orb into the tunnel. Carys shouted, and there was a another weird hum, and then silence.

"Carys?" Zernebeth called. She frowned. "Is she dead?"

"The bomb releases a cloud of sleeping gas. Unless she's wearing filters in her nose, or is under the influence of some protective spell..." Alaeron shrugged. "She should be snoring by now."

"We'll have to risk it. Arm yourselves." She took the green staff—there were dozens of cracks in its case now—and Alaeron had the Earth-Mover; Skiver said he was fine with his knives, thanks. They went down the sloping tunnel, Alaeron in the lead, and there was Carys, looking bruised and battered, asleep beside one of the League's weapons, shaped vaguely like a crossbow, but with something like a spyglass welded on top, and no bowstring.

Skiver picked up the bow-gun. "All right, I'll take this and knives. I know when to take a hint."

"Bothvald." Zernebeth said something in a language Alaeron didn't know, but he was willing to bet it was profanity. "I can't believe he got here first. He wants to steal everything from me."

"He's outnumbered three to one," Skiver pointed out. "The odds against him are almost bad enough for me to feel guilty. Almost."

"Perhaps. Unless he's opened the door that you and Alaeron couldn't," Zernebeth said. "Depending on what he's found in there, we could be the outnumbered ones."

"Cheerful thought," Skiver said.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Behind the Black Door

They proceeded down the curling corridors, approaching the murder holes with caution in case Bothvald had seeded them with traps, but apparently he'd been more concerned with charging forward than keeping anyone from following him. The corpses they'd left behind were gone, though whether Carys had removed them in the course of securing the site, or whether some operation of the wreck had dealt with the disposal, Alaeron wasn't sure. Zernebeth knelt by the remnants of some of the murderballs and prodded them, scooping up the pieces and putting them in her pack—planning to break them down for useful components later, Alaeron assumed.

They approached the room at the center of the spiral, and Zernebeth gestured for silence. She rushed through the door, Alaeron and Skiver at her heels, as she lifted the staff and fired a pulse of time-altering energy.

Bothvald was standing by the door to the vault, among the silver statues, and when they arrived, he looked at the newcomers, and sighed theatrically. "You."

Zernebeth lifted the staff and depressed the button again, but again, there was no discernible effect on the Ulfen, though the staff pulsed with light, and developed more hairline fissures in its case.

"Interesting," Bothvald said. "Many beam weapons pass easily through glass, but not in this case." His voice had a strange, crackling quality, and he reached out to tap on the nearly invisible barrier that once again cut off his half of the room from theirs. "I wonder if it's a shortcoming of the weapon, or a property of the glass? I'll have to take samples and find out. If you'll excuse me, I was just about to open this door." He turned back to the vault.

"We couldn't hear Lodger and the others when the glass wall came down before," Skiver said. "Why can we hear him?"

"I can hear you, too." Bothvald didn't turn away from his examination of the wheels and dials on the door. "There's a switch here that activates some sort of communication system. If you blather too much, I'll turn it off so your idiot voices don't disturb me. But I'd rather not do that—then you wouldn't be able to hear me gloat."

Alaeron went to the lever on the wall and shoved it up and down, hoping to trigger the nozzles of silver fluid again, but nothing happened.

"I disabled all that, and rerouted control of the barrier to this side as well," Bothvald said. "I thought a little protection might be useful. Carys is a hard worker, but a bit unreliable after her harrowing experiences in the Felldales, so I didn't count on her to keep intruders out. Still, she led me here. I must say, Zernebeth, I thought your mutterings about a great undiscovered trove of relics were madness. Especially when I heard you talking about those visions you had! I hid enchanted objects in your rooms so I could hear every word you spoke, of course. Basic intelligence gathering. I know you think I betrayed you, tricked the League into casting you out—but I was acting in entirely good faith. I thought your experiences in the Mount had made you insane. Consider this my apology. Once I'm back in charge of the League, I'll see that you're given a stipend. Maybe we'll find you a nice farm to retire on."

"This is my wreck, Bothvald," Zernebeth said. "My visions led us here."

"And yet, you're the one on the outside, looking in. Ah, yes, I see. I'll have this open in a moment."

"What?" Alaeron said. "What do you mean ‘you see'? How could you have figured out the proper combination?"

Bothvald snorted. "You couldn't? It's just mathematics, runaway. You and Zernebeth, you're tinkerers, engineers, you twist knobs and turns dials and connect wires to see what might happen, but you don't understand anything, not really. Not the underpinnings, the essential foundations of the world. The song of numbers and relationships and proportions, that language is universal—it doesn't matter whether you're a denizen of Golarion or some far star, we all speak the same tongue when it comes to math, and so I understand the creatures that locked this door. Better than Zernebeth ever did, even with visions poured from their minds into hers." He twisted the last circle, and there was a thunk. "To be fair, I did drink an alchemical extract that boosted my intellect considerably, but I would have figured it out anyway—just not quite as quickly, perhaps."

The hatch hissed as it unsealed, the oval sliding outward. Bothvald grasped the edge with his fingers and then turned to look at them through the glass again. "Run away," he said. "Because whatever I find in here, I'm going to carry it out with me, and if at all possible, use it to kill you."

The vault door opened onto darkness.

"If you're right, and that thing is a cell, surely the prisoner died long ago," Skiver said. "Nothing but dust left, right?"

"I—" Alaeron said, and then Bothvald gasped.

"How...peculiar," the Ulfen said, stepping toward the doorway and ducking inside. "Mmm, I wonder..."

He trailed off, and Alaeron went to the glass, trying to see what Bothvald saw. The Ulfen's body blocked most of the view to the interior, but Alaeron got a glimpse of a thick, purplish-black, glittering cloud hanging in the room. Poison gas? But it seemed weirdly coherent, not dissipating—

Wait. He'd seen that same cloud, when Zernebeth's shard of glass gave him a vision. This was the true secret the wreck contained. But what was it?

Bothvald shouted and fell backward out of the vault, collapsing on the floor, as the purple smoke crawled up his body, disappearing into his screaming mouth and his nostrils, making him choke and cough and shudder. The Ulfen thrashed and rolled, ending up on his hands and knees, and when he lifted his head and looked through the glass, his eyes were no longer pale, but a uniform dark purple, even the whites.

Alaeron thought of the strange green fogs that haunted Skumble, and of the murderous black smoke Redfang had described in Iadenveigh. This mist must be a similar creature...except instead of bringing death or madness to its victims, this smoke seemed to want their bodies.

Bothvald—or what had been Bothvald—rose up on his knees and pressed his hands against the glass. He spoke, but it was no language Alaeron had ever heard before, like nothing a human tongue should even shape, all hacking consonants and slushy vowels.

"I've...heard that kind of speech before..." Zernebeth whispered. "In my vision. It is the language—one of the languages—of the denizens of the Mount."

"There's your prisoner, then." Skiver shuddered. "I see the point of the glass, now. You'd want something airtight. And the silver spray, to fix that thing in place—or to lock it up inside whatever body it tried to take over." He glanced at the useless lever on the wall. "Think you can figure out how to undo whatever Bothvald did to disable that, Alaeron? Because I'm thinking the smoke that crawled inside Bothvald is no friend of ours."

"I think I can—" Alaeron said, but before he could finish the thought (let alone begin the process), Bothvald lurched across his half of the room and pressed his hand against a seemingly arbitrary portion of the wall. The glass barrier began to rise, slowly, and with a great grinding and screeching...but it rose, half-inch by half-inch.

"Fight, or run?" Alaeron said.

"Fight. Always fight," Zernebeth said.

"All right, then." Skiver lifted his not-quite-a-crossbow. "Think if we kill the body, we kill the smoke? Or will it just come flowing out again and try to take over your body, or Alaeron's, or—gods forbid—mine?"

"This staff was stored in this room." Zernebeth brandished the staff. "I assume because the people keeping this thing captive believed it would prove useful. I have no reason to doubt the wisdom of the ages. Once the barrier is lifted, I will slow the creature down, and lock it back up in that vault, Bothvald's body and all, until I figure out a way to study it safely."

But the thing inside Bothvald wasn't waiting patiently for them to attack. It tore a panel off the wall—obviously breaking a couple of Bothvald's fingers in the process, which it didn't appear to notice, suggesting it didn't feel pain—and began tearing out wires, twisting them together in new configurations, and jabbering to itself in its atonal, bubbling language.

"Ah," Skiver said. "Let's reconsider running, eh?"

"What—" Alaeron said, and then looked. He shouted, "Go!"

To her credit, Zernebeth didn't argue, just raced for the corridor, the others hard on her heels.

They ran because the ranks and ranks of murderballs, resting patiently on their racks in their alcove, had begun to glow, and stretch their deadly limbs, and clamber out of the wall.

∗ ∗ ∗

They raced down the corridor with the sound of clattering metal legs close behind them. The spiraling passageway kept them out of the line of sight and fire, but they heard the hums and hisses of beam weapons being discharged, and if the orbs caught up with them, Alaeron knew they'd be cut down instantly.

They reached the mouth of the tunnel, and Zernebeth and Skiver scrambled up into the sunlight, rushing right past Carys's sleeping body.

But Alaeron stopped, turned, and faced the entryway to the wreck. All the orbs had awakened at the same time, and if he could assume they moved at a relatively uniform rate...He crouched down behind the thick fallen door to the wreck, making it into a makeshift barricade to give himself some cover.

"Alaeron!" Skiver bellowed from above. "You lunatic, come on, we have to go!"

"Not yet!" he shouted. This was his wreck, and he wasn't about to let a bunch of scuttling automatons scare him away—at least, not before he ran out of weapons. Besides, they might well chase them and cut them down in the open plains anyway.

Behind the barricade of the broken door, Alaeron prepared his defenses—and his offenses.

The orbs arrived. Alaeron had never actually seen rats desert a sinking ship, but it must look something like this: a solid wave of scuttling things, literally crawling over one another in their haste and eagerness. The orbs were funneled into the narrow confines of the tunnel, some of them moving so quickly they ran sideways along the curving walls, together forming an almost solid mass of metal. They set off their beams, destroying one another in their zeal to destroy Alaeron, but his barricade deflected or absorbed the energies. He ducked down, aimed the end of the Earth-Mover over the barricade toward the entry to the wreck, and depressed the button. And again. And again. And again.

Booming wave after wave of sound emerged from the gun, and he kept hitting the button until the sound stopped—he'd depleted the Earth-Mover's charge. A shame. The device had served them well.

He dropped the Earth-Mover and took a bomb in each hand, ready to toss them—but there was no need. When he peeked over the edge of the door, he saw the corridor littered with the shattered wreckage of the murderballs, blown apart like a row of shacks in a hurricane. A few of the orbs were still mostly intact, but they were just as inert as their more shattered fellows. "It's all right!" he called. "I, ah...broke them."

Zernebeth and Skiver returned, surveying the wreckage. She knelt, selecting the least damaged murderballs, and put them away in her pack. Then she rose and gestured with the green staff. "Come. Let's kill Bothvald." She set off down the corridor.

Skiver slapped Alaeron on the shoulder. "That was brave and stupid and probably saved all our lives. So if she won't say thanks, I will."

"It's appreciated."

"Good," Skiver said. "Now, like she said. Bothvald. Killing. Let's do that."

They hadn't quite reached the place where the corridor branched when the wreck began to hum and lurch and started trying to drag itself up out of the ground.

"Bear piss and watered wine!" Skiver shouted. "This is bloody Kho all over again!"

Zernebeth steadied herself against the wall as the wreck tilted sharply to the left. "What? Kho?"

"Skiver and I found a lost city of the Shory Empire," Alaeron said. "One of the flying cities. Someone...tried to make it fly again. Well, part of it. A small part. The city as a whole was rather broken."

"You found a Shory city." Zernebeth looked at him in wonder. "And here I was under the impression that your life became more boring when you left Numeria."

"Do you think this thing can actually fly?" Skiver said. "Because if so, I'm jumping out before it gets off the ground."

"It's been buried for generations, deep under dirt and rock," Zernebeth said. "Even if its systems are intact and the thing inside Bothvald knows how to operate it, I can't imagine it could actually get off the ground, unless it has weapons that can break it free of the surrounding earth—"

She was interrupted by a singularly loud explosion, so huge Alaeron felt it in every bone of his body. It made his teeth vibrate.

"Weapons, right!" Skiver shouted. "Sounds like Bothvald found some. If this thing gets into the sky—"

"We'll never be able to loot it properly!" Zernebeth said, and raced down the corridor they hadn't yet explored.

"I was thinking more that we'd be trapped with a possessed madman in a flying metal death machine," Skiver said. "But she's got admirable focus, eh?"

They went down the corridor after Zernebeth. Bothvald had come this way first, and killed the orbs waiting in their murder holes, leaving them sparkling and broken underfoot. This corridor didn't spiral nearly as far as the other one had, and it took them to a domed room filled with curved chairs that grew from the floor. The whole dome was translucent glass—or something glasslike—though the current view was nothing but packed dirt. Bothvald stood at a sort of lectern near the front, jabbing at a panel of lights that were occasionally amber but mostly red. A horrid buzzing, grinding sound emerged from somewhere underfoot, arcane engines tearing themselves apart.

The thing inside Bothvald turned his head to look at them. "Not...stop." Its voice was a strangled parody of Taldane. Had it stolen the language from Bothvald's brain? "Going...home. Not...right...here. Monsters. All monsters."

Zernebeth lifted her green staff and pointed it toward Bothvald. The staff was more cracks than not at this point—it looked like a bit of porcelain that had been smashed and glued back together.

The staff pulsed, and then crumbled in Zernebeth's hand, the crystal on the end falling to the floor and shattering, the exotic metals turned to brittle flakes by the strange energies it had been unable to contain.

The Ulfen slumped, eyes rolling back, and the purple smoke began to pour out of his mouth in a rush.

Then the wave of time-altering energy—the staff's last gasp—hit him, and Bothvald hung suspended in mid-collapse. The purple smoke still flowed, but almost imperceptibly now. Roiling slowly in the air, it was almost pretty.

"Alaeron," Zernebeth said, voice stiff. "Do you happen to have a flask or bottle?"

Alaeron always had a flask or a bottle, and he handed a heavy leaded-glass vessel with a wide mouth and an airtight stopper to his mistress. She approached the area of slowed time carefully, holding the bottle upside down before her and muttering enchantments, and they all stood and watched for a full ten minutes as the purple smoke curled into the waiting bottle, filling it up. They waited another five minutes to make sure Bothvald didn't have any last reserves of sentient smoke inside him, and then Zernebeth shoved the stopper into the bottle and stepped back. She held it up, looking at the smoke swirling within, seething and so purple it was nearly black.

"What are you going to do with that?" Alaeron said. He wondered about the vision Zernebeth had seen, the glimpse he'd received himself. Had something in the Mount wanted to set that thing free? Or to make sure it wasn't set free? Whose bidding were they doing here, if anyone's?

Zernebeth smiled. "I'm going to take this fascinating creature home and put it somewhere safe, where none of the other captains can get at it, and where I can study the entity inside at my leisure."

"Ah," Alaeron said. "Fair enough. I don't see how you're going to buy your way back into the League's good graces with that thing, though. And now you don't even have the staff..."

"Let me worry about that."

While she peered at the swirling alien entity in the bottle, Alaeron went to the lectern and looked over the lights. As he watched, they winked out, one after another, and the grinding below them stopped abruptly. He pushed at the lights, looking for switches or toggles or buttons, but could find no way to activate them at all. Whatever the thing inside Bothvald had done to turn on the wreck's weapons and engines—if they were engines—Alaeron could not reproduce it.

Skiver came to stand beside him. "Flying machines," he said, and shuddered. "I hate them." He glanced at Zernebeth. "Do you think she's planning to get this thing up and running, fly it back to Starfall, impress the League that way?"

"I'm not sure what she has in mind," Alaeron said. "Zernebeth, do you—"

"You boys occupy yourself for a bit," she said. "Maybe set up camp, make that guard help you if she's awake again—we'll be here at least a night or two, I think. I'm going back to the room where our purple friend was imprisoned. There were some spare parts there I think I could use." She wandered off, muttering to herself.

Skiver and Alaeron exchanged glances, shrugged, and then went to see if the wreck's movements had caved in their tunnel to the outside or not.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Aforementioned Glory

Zernebeth spent most of her time at the wreck in seclusion, working on some secret project—when they asked what she was doing, she just said it was a surprise for the captains in the League. Alaeron occupied himself with fruitlessly attempting to understand the workings of the wreck's control room, and Skiver played cards with Carys, making friends, as he did everywhere.

Alaeron didn't exactly envy him—he mostly didn't like people enough to want to make friends with them—but it did seem like a useful skill. Good he had Skiver on his side to handle it, then.

Finally Zernebeth declared herself ready to return, and they loaded the crawler and set out for Starfall. Char found them shortly after they arrived, and tried to tell Zernebeth what information he'd garnered, but she just waved it away and said, "No, no, not necessary, just tell the captains I have something they'll be very interested in. Arrange a meeting. Make sure they're all there, or as many as possible—Elias especially."

Char bowed his head and slipped away. The rest of them settled down in an inn, waiting to see how things turned out. Zernebeth was quietly jubilant, but whenever Alaeron tried to ask what she had planned, she said she wanted to surprise him, and he gave up.

The next afternoon, Char and Alaeron accompanied Zernebeth to the captain's meeting. They were in their customary places...except Elias, who'd taken the position of authority where Zernebeth had once sat, the gunsmith dwarf at his right hand.

"Captains," Zernebeth said. "I have found a great wreck in the Felldales."

Elias sniffed. "We'll send some people to investigate, and if the find is worthwhile, we'll give you a bit of silver. This hardly warrants all the captains. Don't waste our time again." He began to rise.

"Oh, no, I already proved the wreck's worth," she said. "I found a few things. Some...little friends. Want to meet them?"

"What—" Elias began, and then gaped as the automatons crawled out of Zernebeth's bag.

Alaeron stumbled back against the wall, by instinct. Three murderballs, scuffed and patched but clearly functional, scampered out onto the table on their cunning multi-jointed legs. A fourth emerged and climbed up Zernebeth's chest, settling onto her shoulder like a pet.

"Hmm," Elias said. "They're not entirely without interest, but I don't see—"

The murderball closest to him lifted one of its legs, and drew a line of fire down the middle of Elias's face, cutting through his metal eyepatch, and his nose, and his cheek. He fell out of his chair, dead. The dwarf beside him leapt to his feet, but Char was there, reaching into his chest and pulling out his heart, dropping it on the table with disgust.

The murderballs spread out on the table, lifting their limbs and pointing them at the remaining captains. "My little darlings," Zernebeth said fondly. "They were sick, and I nursed them back to health, and they're so grateful." She reached up and stroked the one on her shoulder. "Now, Elias and Xanos there were obviously not my allies, and they've been dealt with accordingly." She glanced around the room. "Now, I wonder—where do the rest of you stand?"

∗ ∗ ∗

After the terror came a party, welcoming Zernebeth back to the fold. Their feast didn't have as many courses as the Sovereign's had, or any bits of bloody theater, but it was still absurdly decadent. Alaeron danced with his friend Malica a bit, but mostly he watched Zernebeth, who moved among the captains, the lieutenants, and favored underlings, cementing her power and rebuilding her reputation, a murderball familiar perched on her shoulder the entire time. She'd retrieved her prosthetic arm from whichever captain had claimed it, and she looked gleaming, deadly, and majestic.

After a while Zernebeth slipped away from the other captains and took Alaeron's hand. She led him to a corner and pressed him back against the wall, then kissed him, deeply. "This party lacks a certain something," she said.

"What's that?"

"You, naked, in my bed."

"We should definitely remedy that," he said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Zernebeth's old rooms had been looted, and she hadn't recovered everything yet, but there was a bed, and they didn't need much else. Come to think of it, they didn't even strictly need the bed, though it made things more pleasant.

They made love, slept through the last hours of the night, then spent a long and languid morning together, discussing their plans for the League. Alaeron told her his ideas about encouraging the captains to share secrets with one another, to allow all of them to progress more rapidly in their researches. Hoarding secrets was fine if all you cared about was power, but if you cared about truth and knowledge—

Zernebeth kissed his face. "You're a visionary. Once you're a captain, you can make your proposals, and I'll lend you my full support. We will do great things, don't worry." She reached over and removed the earring from Alaeron's ear, placing it gently on the table beside the bed.

"You don't want to talk to me anymore?" he said.

"I no longer need to keep track of you. You've proven yourself." She put her face close to his neck. "And when I want to talk to you in the future, I'll whisper in your ear this way instead."

They lingered for a while, but eventually the sun rose higher, and at a moment that seemed no different from any other, Zernebeth leapt from the bed. "I have to go see the council of captains, Alaeron. A few details to work out concerning my triumphant return. Make yourself at home here, in the meantime." She dressed in her finest League attire, all black leather and gleaming silver and deadly weapons.

"We're embarking on a new age, aren't we?" he said. "We can achieve so much."

"How could we not?" She blew him a kiss as she departed.

The past days had been exhausting, so Alaeron rolled over and sank into a deep and dreamless sleep, possibly the first truly untroubled rest he'd had since returning to Numeria. He finally dared to believe things might actually work out.

So it was quite alarming when he was flung out of the bed onto the floor. When he opened his eyes, naked and afraid, he saw one of the Kellid Technic League captains standing over him, flanked by two Gearsmen. "Take the traitor," the Leaguer said. "Throw him into a cell. And when I say throw, I mean throw."

The hands of the horrible metal men were cold, even colder than Zernebeth's, and Alaeron's struggles mattered to them as little as the desperate writhings of a worm did to a cruel boy.

They took him to the basement of the compound—though not the subbasement, a small mercy—and hurled him into a dim cell. Skiver was already there, not naked but with his clothes torn and a split lip, sitting on a dirty mat of straw. Alaeron rose and rushed to the bars as they clanged shut, shouting after the departing League captain and the Gearsmen. "Wait! What's the meaning of this! Zernebeth will be furious!" A horrible thought occurred to him. What if the other captains had turned on her at the meeting? Caught her unawares, found a way to deal with her familiars, killed her? She—

"Zernebeth is the one who betrayed us, Alaeron," Skiver said, voice low. "You really do have the worst luck in love. Not that it's entirely luck, of course. I'm being generous."

"I...what? What do you mean?"

"About luck, or about Zernebeth? Ha. The fella who dragged me out of my bed was chattier than yours, I guess. He told me why I was being tossed in prison. It turns out, you and me were the ones who arranged all those thefts. Did you know we were secretly working with Bothvald all along? He gave us secret information, and we sold it to our villainous friends in the criminal fraternity, et cetera. Zernebeth had her suspicions about us all along, thought we were playing her false when we claimed loyalty to her, but she wasn't in a position to do anything about it until she was welcomed back into the League, don't you know."

"That's madness," Alaeron said.

"Nah, totally plausible. After all, didn't you once kill a captain of the Technic League, and steal all those relics from Silver Mount? I'm not saying there aren't any holes in her story, but who's going to argue with a woman who has a clutch of pet murderballs?" He shrugged. "Anyway, here we are. In the second most horrifying basement I've been locked up in this year."

"I can't believe it." Alaeron paced in the cell, thinking frantically, trying to find an angle, an alternative explanation, a reason that Skiver's captor would have lied. "Zernebeth would never do that—"

Skiver snorted. "Of course she would! Alaeron, you're like a brother to me, but you do persist in thinking the best of people who don't deserve it. She's a captain in the Technic League."

"She's not like the other captains, Skiver, she's good—"

The thief shook his head. "No, she's not. I'll grant you this much—she's better. She's not a sadist, like so many others in the League. Her cruelties are incidental, not the whole point of the exercise. But the point of the exercise is the exercise of power, however she might have prettied it up with poetry about discovery and knowledge and truth when she was pillow-talking with you. I think she believes in that stuff, too, or thinks she does. Why not? She can be more than one thing. But one of the things she is is treacherous. All she cared about was taking power back from Bothvald. I didn't like the man, for obvious reasons, but I think you were wrong, when you said he was a grasping little shallow man of no ambition. That stuff he said in the wreck, about mathematics—I don't know what he meant, because when it gets more complicated than creating plausible accounts for a cover business, I'm lost—but it sounded a lot more high-minded in its way than anything I've heard out of your Zernebeth."

Alaeron stopped pacing, and slid down the stone wall at the rear of the cell, sitting beside Skiver. "But why? She got what she wanted. Why betray us, when we helped her?"

"Maybe you can ask her, if she attends your torture personally."

Alaeron moaned. "Skiver. I'm so sorry I got you into this."

He shrugged. "Coming to Numeria was a risky venture. I knew that when we got started. Besides, we're not entirely doomed yet. We've been in stickier situations."

"Differently sticky, anyway," Alaeron said.

"True enough." Skiver closed his eyes. "Just let me think for a bit."

His silence gave Alaeron ample time to brood over the choices he'd made. Deep down, surely he'd known what kind of person Zernebeth was. He'd let himself be distracted, confused, misled, turned around. "Women," he said bitterly. "The problem with women is, they're all liars—"

"Shut up with that noise," Skiver said sharply, without opening his eyes. "Women? You blame women? Blame a woman, named Zernebeth—one person who made her own choices for her own reasons. My friend Genthia's a woman, too, and she risked her life for us, just because I asked her nicely." He paused. "And gave her a great big sack of gold, admittedly."

"Jaya, too, though, she led me on," Alaeron began, and Skiver made a dismissive sputtering sound.

"Jaya didn't lead you on, Alaeron, she let you lead yourself on. She had an affair with a wizard while she was traveling with us—she never pretended she was carrying a torch for you. And anyway, the first day you met her you found out she was a notorious confidence trickster, a professional liar. So, yes, she lied to you, and she exploited your obvious affection for her—but she was doing her best to survive in a difficult situation. If you recall, she was facing almost certain death even if everything went perfectly on our little venture. I don't blame her for letting you wrap yourself around her little finger."

He opened one eye, but just to glare, then continued. "You might remember, quite a few Kellid assassins tried to murder you not so long ago, but I don't hear you saying, ‘The problem with Kellids is they're all obsessed with murdering me,' and if you did, I'd smack you upside the head for that, too. If there's one thing I've learned from years in the criminal enterprises, it's that anyone can do almost anything to anybody else for any reason, and villainy and treachery doesn't have a thing to do with race, sex, species, or creed." He paused. "All right, maybe creed, if you're a demon-worshiper, or something. But those other things, they're irrelevant. The problem with women is only the problem you have with women, which is, if someone lifts her skirt to show you a bit of ankle, you suddenly stop being a brilliant man with amazing insights into the nature of the universe, and become like a teenager again, thinking only with the contents of your breeches."

Alaeron thought of half a dozen retorts, each more biting than the last, but finally said, "You know, I never had many girlfriends. When I was younger. Or any, really. Or even that many since I've been older."

"You don't say," Skiver said. "Maybe next time try chatting up a woman who isn't a professional confidence trickster or the leader of an organization of evil arcanists. You might be surprised at how well it goes. Here's another wild suggestion for you: consider thinking of women like people instead of some entirely different order of being. Because that's what women are—they're people, just like you. They're not...sex elementals, or something."

"This is useful information."

"I'm a font of the stuff." Skiver lapsed into silence again. Alaeron went to the bars and looked out, and saw a guard walk past the end of the corridor. At least it wasn't a Gearsman. He tried to figure out how they might escape, to remember the way out of this particular basement, wishing he'd paid more attention when he'd been dragged naked and screaming down the steps, but it was all too disheartening to contemplate. He sat back down, shivering a little, wishing for a blanket, or even for a stitch of clothing.

Eventually a guard came and threw a few rotten vegetables and pieces of fruit through the bars, doing his best to strike Alaeron, snorting laughter when the black potato struck him in the chest and a disintegrating onion bounced off his shoulder. "Enjoy," he said. "Every meal could be your last." The guard sauntered away.

"Good thing you have friends in high places, or they might not have fed us at all," Skiver said.

"I thought you were asleep."

Skiver opened his eyes. "Trying to conserve my strength. Still have a brutal hangover from the party last night. Could you believe they ate a unicorn? Who does that?"

"I think it was a horse with a horn and a false beard."

"Never saw a unicorn up close. Seemed convincing to me."

"One of the captains took a bite out of the horn, though. I think it was made of marzipan or something."

"And those tiny live songbirds they were biting the heads off of. What's the point? They can't possibly taste good."

"They're very rare, though. Used to flourish in Numeria, when it was just a bunch of plains filled with a hundred different unaffiliated warring tribes. The birds were famed for their sweet songs, good music for slaughtering your enemies with huge swords. But they aren't doing so well anymore, only a few flocks left. The very definition of a delicacy."

"Numeria," Skiver said, "is a bloody madhouse, and if my choices were dying or living here, I might have to flip a coin and leave the decision up to fate."

Char rose up out of the floor, smiling horribly. "Living or dying?" he said. "Perhaps I can help make that decision for you."

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Bound South

Char. He'd been jealous of Alaeron, or offended by Alaeron, or both, and he'd wanted him dead. Now that Zernebeth had turned on them, had she sent Char to kill them, reach into their chests and stop their hearts? If they were tortured, after all, they might reveal some truths Zernebeth didn't want anyone to know.

I never did get that adamantine mail shirt, Alaeron thought. Not that I would have been wearing it when I was dragged from Zernebeth's bed anyway.

Alaeron stood with his back straight, trying not to show fear. If Char had come to kill him at last, he would at least go with dignity. Before he inevitably pissed and shat himself, of course. He'd seen enough death to know that, in extremis, dignity was a nicety the body didn't bother with.

Char floated out into the corridor, drifted down a ways, and then drifted back. "All clear," he called down the hallway.

Zernebeth sauntered to the door of the cell and looked inside, giving them a half-smile. "Hello, darling. And Skiver."

Alaeron stared at her for a moment. "Zernebeth," he said, annoyed at the way his voice cracked. "Why?"

She held up a hand. "Please. Just let me speak. First, I should say I'm sorry about all this. Best to get that out of the way up front. I don't usually bother with apologies, since I don't do things lightly and I don't often second-guess myself...but I am treating you rather roughly here. I know that."

Skiver snorted. She ignored him. "What you—really the two of you—did, it's remarkable. The pair of you engineered the downfall of a leading Technic League captain with a few days of planning. Which led me, inevitably, to wonder—what could you do to me, if you ever decided I needed to be disposed of?"

"Zernebeth, I'd never—"

The murderball on her shoulder lifted one of its limbs, and Alaeron fell silent.

She reached through the bars and touched his cheek with her cold fingers. "Oh, I know you're fond of me—I did certain things to ensure that fondness—but some of the things you say disturb me. Sharing information among the captains? If we lose our secrets, we have nothing. I certainly don't intend to share anything. All that talk about instituting reforms, to run the League more efficiently? How can I retain control if the captains stop fighting among themselves?" She clucked her tongue. "Besides, you're Andoren, both of you, and Andorens are notorious for their outrageous ideas about so-called human rights—as if anyone has rights they can't defend by strength of arms! Skiver, at least, has made no secret that he finds slavery distasteful, but where would we be without our slaves? No, no, it just won't do."

Alaeron blinked. "But—but I thought you cared about...about truth, knowledge..."

She nodded. "I am interested in unraveling mysteries, Alaeron, yes—but because that is the most interesting route to knowledge, power, and mastery. The way you choose to live, working always at the edge of your competence, forever pushing past the point of your own understanding, constantly taking on new tasks just when you've mastered the old ones—it baffles me. You chase failure, you seem to relish it, whereas I love success, Alaeron, and grinding that success in the faces of those who doubted me. Take this imprisonment as a compliment, really. I think you're too dangerous to keep around. Why, what if you outsmarted me, and rose above me in terms of influence among the other captains, and tried to institute your so-called ‘reforms'? You'd be skinned alive and hung in the sun for vultures to peck. Honestly, Alaeron—I'm saving you from yourself."

"Apart from the bit where we're imprisoned and awaiting torture and execution," Skiver said.

She sniffed. "Well. As to that." She tossed something into the cell, at Skiver's feet. He picked it up and grunted. "You did perform a great service for me. If Skiver is as adept as he claims, that lockpick will get you out of here. You'll have to make your own way out, but I've made sure the guard presence is unusually lax—most of the underlings are being given their own opportunity to celebrate my reinstatement in the League. You'll have to get past a couple of guards, but surely you can manage that? Your things are in the chest by the guard station. Not the black box, of course—I can't very well let you keep a captive myrmidon—but the rest. I stashed the crawler by the rocks, where you waited when you came to rescue me. It's old and broken anyway—you're welcome to it. I sent word to Iadenveigh, and your friends should be able to spirit you across the border to freedom, if you make it out of here alive."

"So the League assassins will keep coming after us, just like before," Skiver said. "Isn't that grand."

She shook her head. "Tomorrow I'll tell everyone the fugitives were hunted down and killed. I'm sure we can find a couple of bodies about your size to devastate with fire—there are always people who need killing. Or at least who won't be missed."

"How...kind of you," Alaeron said.

She smiled. "I will miss you, Alaeron. In my way. Think less of me, if you must...but I do hope you'll think of me." She turned on her heel and strolled away, leaving Char to hover, chuckling, in the hallway.

The incorporeal apprentice showed his teeth, though it wasn't right to call it a smile. "Apostate. It pleases me to see you cast down. You deserve no—"

Alaeron took a deep breath. "Not to interrupt your gloating, but tell me, Char: why did you want to join the Technic League?"

He frowned. "It's not about the League, particularly. The League is a means to an end. I used to be a killer, just another sword in a tribe full of them, and I spilled blood by whim or by the design of others. One night I looked up at the stars, and I began to wonder—what are they? Just pretty lights hung by the gods, or something else? And I looked around me, and there was so much I didn't understand, so much I'd never before realized I didn't understand. I wanted to know. Zernebeth promised to teach me. To open all the doors, and show me what lies behind them."

Alaeron nodded. "Good reasons. Reasons I recognize. Do me a favor: learn politics."

"Why would I want to do that?" he said.

"There's the problem in a single sentence," Skiver said. "The ones who should be in charge don't want to bother with it, and who can blame them? They have better things to do."

"Southern fools," Char grumbled, and sank down through the floor.

Skiver tickled open the lock to the cell, and they made it to the unattended guard station at the foot of the stairs and opened up the chest there. As promised, their clothes and most of their possessions were there, including all the extracts and mutagens Alaeron had kept in his coat, and Skiver's multitude of knives, plus a decent quantity of coin.

And nestled at the bottom of the bag was another black cube, a bit smaller than the last but otherwise identical, no bigger than a closed fist, just waiting to be activated. If it worked the same way the other black box had...well, it wasn't enough to make Alaeron forgive Zernebeth, but it was at least a peace offering. He could keep it for himself, or sell it to a king for more gold than he could spend in a lifetime.

There wasn't much doubt, of course, that he'd keep it for himself. There were other ways to get gold, but he'd probably seen his last rare Numerian relic.

"Ready?" Skiver whispered, crouched down, one hand on the door to the stairs, ready to rush for freedom.

"Let me drink this, first," Alaeron said, holding up a small vial with a wax stopper marked by the imprint of a fang.

"What is it?"

"Feral extract."

"Is that the one that turns you into a great hulking almost-mindless beast of a thing?"

"That's the one," Alaeron said. "I think I would be happier if I were a little bit stupider than usual right now."

"I mostly rely on liquor for that, but I take your point." Skiver slung Alaeron's pack over his shoulders.

Alaeron nodded, uncapped the extract, and drank it down. The reddish mist began to descend over his vision immediately, and for the next little while, he became a creature of action, unburdened by thought.

∗ ∗ ∗

The escape went well enough. Skiver assured Alaeron he hadn't killed anyone while he was in his feral state, and though Alaeron wasn't sure he believed him—there was a lot of blood on his clothes when he came back to himself, in the back of the crawler—he appreciated his friend's willingness to lie to make him feel better. Friends you could count on—those were important.

The crawler raced across the plains, Skiver handling the controls deftly. "When did you learn to drive this thing?" Alaeron called.

"Oh, I made a point of watching Lodger twiddle the knobs and push the levers," Skiver said over his shoulder, "and asked a few questions in the course of complimenting his fine driving, just in case we needed to steal the crawler and make our own way at some point. I'm good with my hands, and it's not so hard—running this thing is easier than swapping a set of true dice for a pair of loaded ones under the watchful eyes of a bunch of dock workers, or picking a suspicious rich man's pockets." He glanced behind them. "I can't wait to leave this wretched country. Too hot in the day, too cold at night, too dry all the time, and, oh, yes—full of monsters and treacherous bastards. I'm a criminal, Alaeron, on the wrong side of the law, but it turns out I like there to be a law. I've been called a rogue, but to be a rogue you need to have a civilization, something to push against, a framework to act outside of, eh? Up here, you can't be a rogue, or a card sharp, or a gentleman thief. You're just an animal, like everybody else."

Skiver sometimes got philosophical when they escaped from near-certain death, and Alaeron nodded along and made encouraging noises. His mind was racing, but he wasn't thinking of anything in particular. Just going over and over the same thoughts, wearing them down, worrying them smooth, wondering how he'd been such a fool, if he'd ever be exactly the same sort of fool again, and if not, what kind of fool he'd be next time instead.

He was a freezing fool, for one thing. The crawler moved at a good clip, and the night breeze was as chilly as Zernebeth's embrace. Alaeron opened up his bag and fished around until he found a jacket, the nice one he'd filled with gas canisters and used to threaten Zernebeth when he first arrived in Starfall, such a short time ago, though it felt like ten thousand years. The gas was gone now, but it was still a nice warm jacket, so he pulled it on, and pushed his hands deep into his pockets.

Something cool and round touched his left hand. As Skiver rambled on about the things he'd eat once they got back to Almas—Onionskin's eel pie was high on the list—Alaeron stared down at the object in his hand.

It was the earring Char had given him. The one Zernebeth had removed and put on the bedside table earlier that afternoon, promising that if she had anything to tell him ever again, she'd just whisper it in his ear. She must have put it in his jacket pocket, for him to find.

He held the jewel up to his ear, and listened, but there was no sound. Not now. But maybe someday.

Alaeron considered flinging the jewel into the grassland, leaving it to twinkle, for some passing crow to pick up and choke on. He should do that, he knew.

Instead, he slipped it into his pocket, and said, "Skiver, I don't know how you can think about food at all after that feast of ersatz unicorn and songbird, and all that rotten fruit flung at us in the cell. I'm happy to skip a few meals. What I'm most excited about is getting home and sleeping in my own bed."

"Funny, that," Skiver said. "I'm most excited about getting home and sleeping in someone else's bed."

Alaeron laughed, and Skiver did too, and the sound of their fellowship briefly warmed the cold and empty air of the land of fallen stars.

About the Author

Tim Pratt is the author of the Pathfinder Tales novels City of the Fallen Sky (also featuring Alaeron and Skiver) and Liar's Blade, as well as several Pathfinder short stories available for free at paizo.com/pathfindertales. His creator-owned stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and he is the author of three story collections, most recently Antiquities and Tangibles, as well as a poetry collection. He has also written several novels, including contemporary fantasies The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Briarpatch, and Heirs of Grace; the Forgotten Realms novel Venom in Her Veins; the gonzo historical steampunk novel The Constantine Affliction (under the name T. Aaron Payton); and, as T. A. Pratt, eight books in the urban fantasy series about ass-kicking sorcerer Marla Mason: Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, Spell Games, Broken Mirrors, Grim Tides, Bride of Death, and the prequel Bone Shop. He edited the anthology Sympathy for the Devil, and coedited the forthcoming Rags & Bones anthology with Melissa Marr.

He has won a Hugo Award for best short story, a Rhysling Award for best speculative poetry, and an Emperor Norton award for best San Francisco Bay Area-related novel. His books and stories have been nominated for Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Stoker Awards, among others, and have been translated into numerous languages.

He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Heather Shaw and son River, and works as a senior editor and occasional book reviewer at Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field. He blogs intermittently at www.timpratt.org.

Glossary

All Pathfinder Tales novels are set in the rich and vibrant world of the Pathfinder campaign setting. Below are explanations of several key terms used in this book. For more information on the world of Golarion and the strange monsters, people, and deities that make it their home, see The Inner Sea World Guide, or dive into the game and begin playing your own adventures with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box, all available at paizo.com. Readers particularly interested in Alaeron and Skiver's previous run-ins with the Technic League should check out Pathfinder Tales: City of the Fallen Sky, and anyone eager to play their own adventures in Numeria should consult the Iron Gods Adventure Path, or Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Numeria, Land of Falling Stars.

Absalom: Largest city in the Inner Sea region.

Abysium: Type of skymetal that sickens those who spend too much time around it.

Adamantine: The most common skymetal. Extremely hard and durable.

Alchemists: Spellcasters whose magic takes the form of potions, explosives, and strange mutagens that modify the caster's own physiology.

Alkenstar: A nation famous for the production of guns and gunpowder.

Almas: Capital city of Andoran.

Andoran: Zealously democratic nation just north of the Inner Sea.

Andoren: Of or pertaining to Andoran; someone from Andoran.

Annihilators: Mysterious Numerian automatons shaped somewhat like giant scorpions, and armed with terrible weapons.

Arcane: Related to non-faith-based magic.

Arcanist: Someone who casts spells through secular means using his or her own power and without appealing to a divine being for magical effects.

Aroden: The god of humanity, who died mysteriously a hundred years ago.

Automatons: Mysterious Numerian constructs far more complex than standard clockwork creations and yet not related to golems and other magical constructs. The result of alien technology.

Banner of the Stag: Militant group or Erastil-worshipers devoted to protecting towns and settlements from injustice.

Bard: An artist or performer able to harness his or her innate magic through art. Often cross-trained in combat and other adventuring skills.

Battle of Falheart: Supposedly haunted site of a historical battle in Numeria.

Black Sovereign: The ruler of Numeria—once a mighty barbarian warrior, but now hopelessly addicted to alien drugs supplied by the Technic League.

Brevoy: A frigid northern nation famous for its swordplay.

Cheliax: A powerful devil-worshiping nation located northwest of the Inner Sea.

Chelish: Of or relating to the nation of Cheliax.

Chesed: Port city in Numeria.

Djezet: Rust-red metal that's always in a liquid state, said to enhance magical effects.

Dwarves: Short, stocky humanoids who excel at physical labor, mining, and craftsmanship.

Erastil: Stag-headed god of farming, hunting, trade, and family, also known as Old Deadeye.

Felldales: Dangerous badlands in Numeria scarred by remnants of the Rain of Stars.

Gearsmen: Powerful metal automatons retrieved from Silver Mount, which obey the commands of the Technic League—at least, most of the time.

Golarion: The planet on which the Pathfinder campaign setting focuses.

Golden Aerie: Grand headquarters of Andoran's famous Eagle Knights.

Gorum Pots: Field of bubbling hot springs and dangerous mud pits in Numeria.

Hajoth Hakados: Nearly independent trading city on Numeria's southern border.

Half-Orcs: Born from unions between humans and orcs, members of this race have green or gray skin, brutish appearances, and short tempers, and are mistrusted by many societies.

Halflings: Race of humanoids known for their tiny stature, deft hands, and mischievous personalities.

Hallit: The language of Kellids.

Horacalcum: The rarest of known skymetals, with the ability to bend time.

Iadenveigh: Numerian town of hunters and trappers, fiercely devoted to the god Erastil and opposed to the Technic League.

Inner Sea: Vast inland sea to the south of Numeria, whose surrounding lands are the primary focus of the Pathfinder campaign setting.

Inubrix: Type of skymetal only partially in phase with reality.

Irrisen: A realm of permanent winter claimed by the Witch-Queen Baba Yaga and ruled by her daughters.

Katapesh: Mighty trade nation south of the Inner Sea. Also the name of its capital city.

Keleshite: Of or related to the Empire of Kelesh, a nation far to the east of the Inner Sea region.

Kellids: Tribal and violent human ethnicity from the northern reaches of the Inner Sea region, often viewed as uncivilized barbarians by other ethnicities.

Lantern King: One of the godlike fey beings called the Eldest; a patron of tricksters.

Linnorms: Immense, snakelike dragons with two forelimbs and rudimentary wings.

Mana Wastes: Region where an ancient magical war renders spells unreliable.

Myrmidons: Flying humanoid automatons armed with terribly weaponry.

Noqual: Type of skymetal uniquely resistant to magic.

Numeria: Land of barbarians and strange alien technology harvested from an ancient crashed starship near the nation's capital.

Numerian: Of or related to Numeria; someone from Numeria.

Osirian: Of or relating to the region of Osirion—a desert nation on the southeastern shores of the Inner Sea—or a resident of Osirion.

Plane of Shadow: A dimension of muted colors and strange creatures that acts as a twisted, shadowy reflection of the "real" world.

Qadira: Desert nation on the eastern side of the Inner Sea.

Rain of Stars: Ancient event in which some sort of huge spacefaring craft broke up in Golarion's atmosphere and fell to earth, forming both Silver Mount and myriad smaller wrecks around Numeria.

River Kingdoms: A region of small, feuding fiefdoms and bandit strongholds, where borders change frequently.

River Road: Road paralleling the Sellen River and leading from the Inner Sea up to the Lake of Mists and Veils near Mendev and Numeria. Popular route for crusaders traveling north to fight demons in the Worldwound.

Sargava: Former Chelish colony which successfully won its independence.

Sellen River: Major river that runs north from the Inner Sea all the way up to the Lake of Mists and Veils, creating a thoroughfare across most of a continent.

Shackles: Pirate isles southwest of the Inner Sea.

Shoanti: Ethnic group in Varisia composed of seminomadic tribes that refuse to congregate in cities; often marginalized by the region's "civilized" folk.

Siccatite: Type of skymetal that's always either very hot or very cold, for reasons not yet understood.

Silver Mount: A great vessel from another world that crashed down from the sky long ago in Numeria, forming a huge metal mountain that leaks strange ichors. Explorers sometimes breach its inner chambers and retrieve strange technological artifacts, most of which are subsequently controlled by the Technic League.

Silverdisk: Strange, coin-sized artifacts from the Rain of Stars, common enough in Numeria to be used as currency.

Skymetal: Metal that fell to Golarion from outer space, either as parts of mysterious craft or as meteorites, that has exceptional (and sometimes magical) qualities.

Sorcerer: Someone who casts spells through natural ability rather than faith or study.

Starfall: The capital of Numeria, located near the base of Silver Mount.

Taldan: Of or pertaining to Taldor; a citizen of Taldor.

Taldane: The common trade language of the Inner Sea region.

Taldor: A formerly glorious nation that has lost many of its holdings in recent years to neglect and decadence. Ruled by immature aristocrats and overly complicated bureaucracy.

Technic League: Corrupt society of researchers who comb through the wreckage of Silver Mount looking for strange technology that they can exploit for personal gain.

Tian: Someone or something from Tian Xia, the Dragon Empires of the distant east.

Ulfen: A race of warlike humans from the cold nations of the north, particularly the Lands of the Linnorm Kings.

Varisia: Frontier region at the northwestern edge of the Inner Sea region.

White Witches: The human rulers of Irrisen, who derive their power from Baba Yaga.

Wizard: Someone who casts spells through careful study and rigorous scientific methods rather than faith or innate talent, recording the necessary incantations in a spellbook.

Worldwound: Constantly expanding region overrun by demons a century ago. Held at bay by the efforts of crusaders.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife Heather for her never-ending support, and to my son River for giving me time to write when we both know I'd rather be watching cartoons and playing video games with him. Thanks also to my editor James Sutter for letting me play in Numeria, and to my agent Ginger Clark for taking care of the business end of things.