Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

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 p
ractice 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 a
nd 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."