Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

  "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 loo
k 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—"