Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

  "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 wen
t 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 the
y 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.