Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

  There was a chamber beyond the jagged hole, and true to his nature, Alaeron stepped inside, raising his light high.

  The room was small and low-ceilinged, and there were ten or twelve bodies—it was hard to be sure, since some were in pieces—scattered on the canted floor. The oldest were just rags and bones, but a couple were fresh, probably only weeks dead, bearing deep and bloody cuts, some severe enough that the limbs were cleanly separated from the bodies. Intact swords, axes, and spears lay among the bodies, none so much as stained with blood, which suggested the weapons hadn't done their wielders much good.

  Or, alternatively, that they'd been used to attack something that didn't bleed.

  After a moment's thought, Alaeron sorted among the vials in his pockets until he found the right combination, and swiftly mixed them in a round-bottomed clay vessel the size of his fist. Feeling reassured, he stepped among the bodies, examining the curved room. There were holes in the walls, some revealing what looked like nests of metallic worms—skymetal wire, probably, and thus quite valuable. No wonder people had come to loot and pillage, though apparently none successfully.

  There was a door, or rather a rounded hatch, in the wall in front of him, presumably the inner door that Zernebeth said had never been opened. Was there a trap of some kind that triggered hidden blades when someone attempted to open the door? These people had been cut apart, not gassed or burned, so if he could avoid slicing knives or wires...

  Alaeron glanced around and picked up a boot. Still with a foot inside it—rather disgusting—but it did give the boot an impressive heft. He backed out of the chamber into the mouth of the tunnel, judged his distance, and threw the boot as hard as he could at the inner door.

  He was prepared for hidden panels to slide aside and razor-sharp death to fill the chamber. But instead, there was a distant sound, a bit like a child crying. Some sort of alarm or call to arms?

  The hatch slid open, and a thing emerged. The shadows made it difficult to see, but it was easy to hear. It buzzed like a wasp in a bottle, whirred like a flock of blackbirds taking off, clicked like a tapping cobbler's hammer. Alaeron was suddenly terribly aware of the bright light in his hand, a beacon for whatever creature this might be—assuming it had eyes, or something like eyes—and he wished the alchemical rod could be doused as simply as a candle or lantern. Then again, being down here in the dark would hardly be preferable.

  The thing inside the chamber squealed, a metal-on-metal sound, and at first Alaeron assumed it was some sort of battle cry. But when it moved forward in a jerky, uneven gait, he realized its limbs were made of metal, and they ground together in a way surely not intended by whoever had designed it.

  An automaton, then. They were one of the unique threats of Numeria. The metal men known as Gearsmen were the most famous examples, seen regularly in the capital, going about their inscrutable or vile business on the Technic League's behalf. But there were other mysterious creatures of metal and glass, animated by a power incomprehensible to scientists and arcanists both. Alaeron had glimpsed the things called myrmidons, which flew high in the air, watching for signs only they understood, lashing their strange wire tentacles, and he'd heard recent tales of the annihilators of the Felldales, things like immense metal scorpions that brought fiery death—and, more disturbingly, gathered wounded humanoids and took them away for their own alien reasons.

  This automaton wasn't quite like either of those. It was the size of a wolfhound, with a body that seemed composed of bits of metal left over from more ambitious projects, a cobbled-together junk-heap thing, apart from its profusion of multi-jointed limbs. Alaeron had a heap of scrap in his workshop at home, and he imagined that, if it suddenly took on life and began to wander around the room, it would look like this. Was it an automaton that had tried to repair itself over the years, using bits of the crashed ship to replace broken elements? Or was its bizarre appearance simply the product of some aesthetic so inhuman Alaeron couldn't understand it?

  The thing reached out with one of its—legs?—and there was a humming sound. The dirt at Alaeron's feet began to smoke, a finger-width black line appearing in the tunnel floor, and he leapt back, dropping his light in panic. The line of invisible fire passed over the lamp, shattering it, and spattering glowing alchemical fluid everywhere.

  Alaeron could easily imagine his blood mingling with that fluid in moments if he didn't get away.

  He tossed the clay orb he'd prepared, a mixture of lightning-fused sand, glands extracted from electric eels, and assorted stabilizing and amplifying agents. During his previous time in Numeria he'd been told that his best chance to survive an attack from an automaton was to have a wand of lightning, or a wizard handy with spells of electricity, but Alaeron preferred to be self-sufficient, so he'd devised these shock bombs instead. His aim was as unerring as ever, and the bomb struck the scuttling thing and broke open, sending surges of crackling whitish-blue miniature lightning coursing across its misshapen form.

  The approaching line of fire stopped, and the automaton slumped, limbs unmoving, the new smell of burning rubber and fresh thunderstorms overpowering the stink of death and alien fluids. Alaeron took a small, fist-sized globe of alchemical light from an inner pocket and advanced carefully on the machine. It was impossible to tell if it were dead—if "dead" was even the right term—but it seemed, for the moment, to be inert. He examined its limbs, noting the one it had used to generate the line of fire was tipped by a triangular prism made of glass. The glass had cracked when the automaton collapsed on itself, and no amount of fiddling with the limb caused it to react, so Alaeron gave up on his brief dream of owning a wand of invisible fire.

  He retrieved one of the axes from the killing floor and used it to smash up the automaton, curious about the nature of its interior, and found it impressively full of gear wheels and pistons and hair-thin wires, all wrought in such miniature that he could scarcely apprehend the details. Given a few months, and magnifying lenses, he might be able to make sense of it...

  "Alaeron?" Skiver shouted from some distance down the tunnel. "I heard a noise, all sizzles and pops. You'd better not be dead!"

  "I'm fine!" Alaeron called. "I found something fascinating. And then I killed it."

  "Hurry up and loot its corpse, because I see something approaching, and it doesn't exactly look like a carriage. Either it's our ride, or its something I'll need your help running and hiding from."

  "Erm. I'll, ah—be right there." He looked longingly at the inner door, still standing wide. He'd wanted to explore the whole place! Who knew what treasures there might be inside? Just a brief look...

  The space beyond the inner door was roughly the size of the cheapest room at a middling inn. The floor was covered in bits of scrap metal and broken glass, presumably spare or discarded parts for the automaton. There were no other doors, windows, hatches, or holes—just a simple, broken space. A sleeping chamber or storage room for the machine, perhaps. Certainly not the entry to a vault of wonders.

  Alaeron sighed. That inner door had presented a tantalizing mystery that had lured many to their deaths, and in the end, there was nothing of great value behind it. For something that actually existed, it seemed disturbingly like a metaphor.

  Alaeron pulled a bit of skymetal wire from the remnants of the automaton, coiling it up and sticking it in his pocket—might as well make a bit of money from this little diversion—and then headed back up the tunnel to join Skiver on the wall, gazing northward.

  "What do you make of that?" Skiver asked. Something was approaching rapidly, sunlight glinting on its polished surfaces, legs moving up and down as swiftly as needles in a gifted seamstress's hand. It was impossible to tell how big it was at this distance, but Alaeron thought it was probably the size of a cottage.

  "Ah. I was...just thinking about those." He swallowed. "I always kept my ears open for news from Numeria, and I began hearing rumors of these things not long ago. They're sort of...wild automatons. The locals call them ‘annihilator
s.'"

  "Annihilators." Skiver said the name like it belonged to a foreign and unsavory god. "Annihilate. Doesn't that mean...destroy without a trace?"

  "More or less."

  "How strong is that black box of yours, do you think?" Skiver said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Annihilator

  Skiver and Alaeron retreated into the inner ring of the earthworks, hoping the annihilator hadn't seen them. The alchemist activated the black box, and as always, Skiver felt deeply unsettled watching the little cube expand. He'd never let on that it bothered him, but seeing something so small become so large, unfolding in ways the eye couldn't follow, just seemed wrong.

  Alaeron tugged open the door and they went inside, the panel closing securely behind them. The alchemist lit a few of his smokeless lanterns and took a seat in a chair, drumming his fingers on the arm and gazing at the door. Skiver paced around the interior, which wouldn't have seemed all that cramped, except for all the crates he'd filled the place with. The opportunity to run a thriving import/export business while Alaeron mucked around in the wreckage of ancient history had proven too tempting to resist, especially since he didn't have to pay a penny in shipping. He was sitting on a fortune here—a significant, though not quite ruinous, portion of his net wealth—and now he wondered morosely if he'd ever get to sell it. To have all these fine products (and imitations of fine products, available at much more reasonable prices) spend life in the belly of some monstrous thing like a crab mated with a scorpion adorned with pointy and bladed chirurgeon's tools would be a terrible waste. Did the annihilator even have a belly?

  What happened if the black box fell over with the door side down? They'd be trapped. True, Alaeron and Skiver hadn't been able to budge the expanded box when they experimented, no more than they'd been able to crack the door open with sledgehammers or crowbars, but they weren't a clockwork monster the size of a house, were they?

  "It's not clockwork," Alaeron said.

  "Was I talking out loud?" Skiver said, genuinely alarmed at the notion.

  "Muttering, really. I just caught the one word. The annihilators aren't clockwork. Clockwork makes sense—when you take it apart you can see how the cogs and gears and flywheels mesh, how tension is transferred into motion. But the things that come out of the wrecks in Numeria...we call them automatons. They're not exactly constructs, golems, like a wizard would create, either—at least, techniques that destroy magic don't have any effect on them. Some of the automatons are intelligent. Maybe even most of them. We just...don't have the worldview to understand what they are, or what they want, if they want anything." He gestured at the heaped crates. "I never asked. What's in these?"

  Skiver frowned. That was a sudden shift in topic. Was Alaeron trying to distract him from their troubles? Or just struck by a sudden curiosity? Skiver didn't really have the worldview necessary to understand Alaeron's mind, sometimes. "You told me the nobles of Starfall, if you can call them nobles, like to play as if they're courtiers in some fancy palace, yeah?"

  "They imitate, as best they can, what they imagine the great courts of kings and queens might be like," Alaeron said. "It's a bit like a child playing dress-up, sometimes, but yes."

  "Well, then I'll help dress them, for a price. I brought them luxuries. Fine porcelain. The best dyes from Andoran. Assorted relics—and convincing fakes—that will look fine adorning a shelf. Jewelry, both paste and real, and as always, the paste looks better. A bit of fine Andoren lumber, though I bet I could have sold heaps of the stuff if I'd had time to put together a proper stockpile instead of grabbing what was handy. Spices from Qadira, picked up in Absalom at ruinous prices, but I can sell it for more this far north. Chelish wines, and swill made in a basement and poured into Chelish wine bottles. Silks. Oils and incense from Osirion. Really whatever I could lay my hands on without much notice. Your friend Zernebeth is a woman of power and influence, so I figure she can point me toward potential buyers."

  "I suppose," Alaeron said. Commerce never seemed to interest the alchemist much, but Skiver had discovered within himself a passion for trading—or, more specifically, for getting the better end of a bargain—that eclipsed his old and well-established love of stabbing people in the kidneys in the dark. Skiver had not, in any objective sense, moved into truly legitimate business, but smuggling and fraud were positively genteel compared to his old occupations.

  "How long do you think we should wait in here?" Skiver said, glancing at the door.

  "I haven't made a great study of annihilators—no one has, they only appeared recently, and it's impossible to get close enough—but I understand they emerged from the Felldales, the ruined lands to the west. They wander out, lay waste to whatever they find with fire and brute force, and then return with whatever they've stolen away. I am curious about what they do with the living people they abduct...though not quite curious enough to allow myself to become one of them, even if I am a great believer in the power of firsthand experience. I think if we stay here for a few hours we can probably—"

  Someone knocked on the door. Skiver and Alaeron glanced at one another, then stared at the door. The knock came again, harder, and there was shouting, too. The knocks sounded perfectly ordinary, but the quality of the shouting was strange: not at all like someone calling from the other side of a closed door, even a very thick one, but more like someone shouting up from the considerable depths of a cave, a voice distorted and full of peculiar echoes.

  "Would the annihilator knock?" Skiver said.

  "I'm not sure it could. Its legs are the size of trees."

  Skiver approached the door. "This thing could do with a spyhole." He raised his voice. "Who's there?"

  More shouting. Was that the word "League," or were Skiver's ears just feeling optimistic?

  "I suppose we should open it. We're not going to learn anything by sitting here." Alaeron rose and reached into his pockets, presumably for something lethal, though how lethal anything they had could be against an annihilator was an open question.

  Skiver's hand found the hilt of a knife at his belt and drew it free. Hopeless, probably, but he might as well die with steel in his hand. "All right, then. Let's see who's come calling."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "You tamed an annihilator?" Alaeron shaded his eyes from the afternoon sun and looked up at the hulk of the scorpion-like automaton. He could have stepped beneath its belly and been shaded entirely; the thing could double as a pavilion, standing still on its six immense, multi-jointed metal legs.

  The Technic League member—not a captain, but one of the small cadre of trusted lieutenants or apprentices who served one captain or another—who'd come to collect them shrugged, the movement barely noticeable within the general mass of his tics and twitches. Alaeron didn't recognize him from his previous time in Numeria, but turnover in the League was notoriously high. Lieutenants only rose in status by making greater, more deadly or intoxicating discoveries than their fellows, and so they competed with one another to go into the most dangerous places in the country. As a consequence, many of them died or were irreparably damaged physically, mentally, or spiritually. The annihilator-rider's name was Lodger, and though he'd once been a handsome man, he'd clearly suffered some kind of nerve damage, or else he was in intense withdrawal from a nasty drug.

  "We didn't tame it, exactly." Lodger's hands fluttered like wounded birds. "This annihilator was found staggering around near a sheep farm on the edge of the Felldales, stumbling like a drunkard or someone in a delirium, blasting holes in the ground or firing its weapons into the sky, falling over and then getting back up again." Lodger's cadence was jerky, his voice starting and stopping halfway through words and blundering haphazardly through the ends of sentences.

  "You're saying it was sick?" Alaeron said.

  Lodger shook his head, a greater movement within his constellation of lesser ones. "No idea. Sick, damaged, demented, tired of life? There's so much we don't know about these creatures."

  "So you fou
nd a damaged annihilator and brought it down—"

  "You make it sound so simple! The Sovereign contributed a host of warriors, and several League captains were on hand personally, along with their handpicked lieutenants—myself included—to subdue this thing. Even blundering around, it was lethal. Most of the men and women arrayed against it didn't survive. I caught the barest whiff of a noxious gas the thing emitted—we still don't know if it was a weapon or just some kind of leak—and ever since then I've had these...twitches. Those exposed directly to the gas convulsed and died. But in the end, it stumbled, and one of the captains got in a lucky strike with an energy weapon—though to hear him tell it, he intuited the weak spot and took careful aim. Anyway, those few of us who lived that long brought the monster down, and dragged it back to Starfall. Zernebeth thought it would be interesting to take it apart and see if we could seize control of its processes, and we did, more or less. She got the idea from a kind of parasitic wasp that turns cockroaches into slaves—"

  Alaeron nodded. "I've heard of those. The wasp slips its stinger into the roach's brain and somehow takes over its physical system, leading it around by tugging on the roach's antennae. You've done that here?"

  "Cracked open the annihilator's head, hooked in some wires, attached it to a board with a few levers and keys, like you might find on a piano or organ, and figured out how to make it walk around." He patted the leg of the behemoth affectionately. "Sorry to startle you. When we go this far from the capital, we like to make a big show. Keeps the peasants from getting ideas, and we're not too far from Iadenveigh here, so we can't risk any show of weakness. If I had time I'd head over in their direction and rip up a few great old trees by the roots, maybe smash a few huts, just to remind them the League could crush them anytime it chooses, but Zernebeth says I'm to fetch you back as soon as I can. Her ways are mysterious to me, but I do as I'm told."