Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

  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 aw
ay 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.