by Tim Pratt
"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?