Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Skiver braced the base of the staff against the ground, closed his eyes, and pressed the button. He didn't feel much, but when he cracked open one eye, he saw the bombs Alaeron was lobbing in the distance hang in the air like dark stars, bursting into slow-motion cascades of light, blossoming into luminous flowers of white and yellow fire. The slow explosions were, in fact, the most beautiful things Skiver had ever seen in his life, and if he'd had the soul of a poet, he would have been forced to spend a few moments trying to find a way to describe their beauty in a way others could understand.

  But he had a different kind of soul, so he just grunted; said, "Pretty"; and then went on with his work. At the base of the wall, he unbuckled his bag and took out the grappling hook and rope, gave it a few spins and tossed it toward the top of the wall, which was thoughtfully studded with hunks of random metal. Once the grappling hook left the little bubble of sped-up time around him, it floated up slowly, like a dandelion seed on the breeze. Skiver could have rolled and smoked a cigarette in the time it took the hook to snag on a bit of metal. He tugged on the rope, and it seemed solid enough, though the way it rippled slowly at the hook end was a bit eerie.

  Skiver resecured his bag, slung it over his shoulders with the weapons, and began to climb. Once upon a time he'd been good at this sort of thing, scaling walls to break into the usually-less-secure second-story windows of fine houses, but he'd been younger then, and his muscles ached a bit as the sack on his back tried to drag him to the ground. Still, the old instincts were there, and his body knew what to do, though it complained about it more now, and in a short time he'd reached the top of the wall.

  The guards were some distance away, shouting and waving their arms at glacial speeds. Skiver collected his grappling hook, ducked into the guard tower, didn't see anyone, and hurried down the stairs to ground level. From there, he emerged into the Technic League compound. There were a couple of League hirelings some distance off in the yard, pointing at the explosions in the sky—really, it was more a fireworks display than an attack, though no one would realize that yet—but the only person nearby was the guard watching the entrance to the main compound, a tall Kellid in dramatic black leathers, arms crossed over his chest.

  Skiver kept moving, knowing that if he stood still for too long he'd be visible, so he was dancing and dashing to and fro as he hooked his grapple around the man's ankles, and then wound the rope around his body tightly. The guard didn't seem to notice anything was amiss until the rope was wrapped all the way around his legs, and by the time he started to widen his eyes, the rope was wrapped all the way around his arms, binding them close to his body. He opened his mouth to shout, and once it was wide enough, Skiver shoved a wadded-up sock—dirty, because he was already doing the man a favor by not killing him, what more could he expect?—into the man's gob. Skiver grabbed the guard and dragged him—it was like moving a bookshelf—toward a pile of scrap wood, and left him resting in the sawdust and spider webs.

  Skiver returned to the door and pushed his way in, not even needing his lockpicks. The League justifiably felt secure, here in its center of power, and presumably having to lock and unlock the door all the time would annoy the captains, so the security was cake. Skiver raced through the halls, passing slow-motion people moving with ponderous purpose through the halls—responding to the commotion outside, probably. How much real time had passed since Alaeron started tossing his bombs? A minute? Less?

  He slipped past the guard at the top of the stairs leading to the basement without difficulty. There were cells even in the upper basement levels, where prisoners with some small chance of seeing daylight were held, and he considered releasing them on humanitarian grounds and just to add to the general confusion, but decided to focus on the mission at hand. He remembered the way to the deepest subbasement—it wasn't a journey he was likely to forget. There were two hulking men standing watch by the iron trapdoor to the black cells below, and stealth wouldn't serve him here. He could open the trapdoor quickly, but its motion would certainly be noticed. He darted behind one guard and blindfolded him with a strip of cloth, then did the same with the second, and while they were opening their mouths in alarm and reaching up to their faces, he coshed them each over the back of a head with his blackjack. The trapdoor was closed with a bolt, but the cells weren't made to keep people out, so he opened it up and slipped down while the guards collapsed in slow motion.

  The cells in the basement were locked, but he had picks and the semblance of all the time in the world, and he opened three cells before he found Zernebeth—leaving the doors standing open to give the poor souls inside a chance to escape if they still had feet to walk on.

  Zernebeth was strapped to a table tilted at a forty-five degree angle, dressed in ragged cloth, with strange strips of metal around her single wrist and her forehead. A chirurgeon in a leather apron stood near the door, holding a device that looked like a corkscrew mated with a choke pear. Must be the morning-shift torturer. There were manacles hanging on the walls—either practical ones or just decorative, for the ambiance—and he disarmed the chirurgeon and bound her in chains before moving on to Alaeron's cold blue lady love.

  They'd never been formally introduced, but he'd seen her around, mostly at the Sovereign's horrible feast, and she'd struck him as an impressive figure—tall, self-assured, strong, and with that eerie mechanical arm. Now she was a one-armed victim, her hair wild and disarrayed, with a bruise growing on her cheek and a black eye on the other side—good for her, she'd put up a fight—and yet...she was still impressive, eyes looking at the door calmly, aware something was happening, even if it was happening too fast for her to comprehend.

  He aimed the green staff at her and pressed the button. The casing developed another crack, joining the first two, and he thought he saw a greenish pulse of light through the casing. He dearly hoped whatever energies were leaking from the thing weren't poisonous.

  Zernebeth blinked at him, the only thing in the immediate vicinity moving at her speed now. "Interesting. Did that come from the wreck?"

  "Yeah." He began cutting the leather straps that bound her with a dagger. "Useful toy."

  "Mmm. Alaeron is the one making all that noise?"

  Skiver nodded. "He wanted to come for you himself, but he's better with explosions, and I'm better at climbing walls."

  "It will be difficult for me to climb down a rope with one arm," she pointed out.

  "True enough. But we're not going out that way." He showed her the Earth-Mover, and Zernebeth rewarded him with a smile.

  Women didn't do a thing for Skiver when it came to lust or romance, but in that moment, he could understand why Alaeron was willing to breach the walls of Starfall to save her. When a woman like this smiled at you, you knew you'd done something worth smiling at.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Going to Ground

  After Alaeron let his last bomb fly, he raced back to the crawler, hoping things had gone smoothly for Skiver. The guards up on the wall were still firing their terrible weapons, which he'd dodged easily, their bolts and projectiles and beams moving as slowly from his perspective as leaves falling in a gentle wind. The green staff was really remarkable. His own temporally distorting potions didn't last as long or work as well, and gave him terrible headaches besides.

  After a few moments watching the wall, he was rewarded by a slow explosion, as a hole gradually opened up beneath the guard tower, chunks of metal and stone flying outward, like a cloud of dust. The Earth-Mover was a blunt instrument, but its effectiveness could not be denied. Skiver and Zernebeth appeared a bit later, once the debris had cleared enough for them to duck through the hole they'd made. There was no point in driving the crawler toward them—in this sped-up state, the vehicle would seem to move more slowly than honey flowing on a cold morning. In what was, objectively, surely mere seconds, the two reached his position, and Alaeron embraced Zernebeth, who kissed his cheek.

  Zernebeth was wearing a strange headband and bracelet, tha
t looked like..."Noqual?" he said.

  She nodded. "Enchanted, to keep me from casting spells. You can help me remove them later. That bastard Bothvald. He took my arm and my voice."

  "It's fortunate then, that, you have loyal friends."

  "You did well," she said.

  Skiver grunted—Alaeron had the feeling she hadn't complimented his part in this rescue—and stowed his gear in the crawler. "Should we slip back into regular time?" he said.

  Alaeron nodded, helping Zernebeth into the crawler—she looked so fragile with her arm missing—and then taking his seat in the front, by the controls.

  "We should head southeast," Zernebeth said.

  "Way ahead of you," Skiver said. "All the way to Almas."

  Zernebeth laughed. "No. Not that far."

  Skiver opened his mouth, presumably to object, then shrugged and lifted the green staff, aiming it at Alaeron, Zernebeth, and himself in turn, restoring them to the normal flow of time. There was definitely light leaking through the cracks in the staff now.

  Normal time was very loud, the echo of the Earth-Mover breaching the wall still ringing in the air, guards shouting, and weapons firing, fortunately all in entirely the wrong direction. Under the little bit of cover of darkness that remained, Alaeron pointed the crawler south, and they scuttled away as fast as they could.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Char rejoined them soon, floating along solicitously beside the crawler, fussing over Zernebeth like a hen over its chick, until she crossly waved him away and said she was fine, she was a perfectly healthy woman who happened to be short one arm, not an invalid.

  "Try to remove the bands on her forehead and wrist," Alaeron said.

  Char scowled at him, but reached out, and grunted. "They are skymetal, but they cause me no pain."

  Alaeron nodded. "As I theorized, it's not all skymetal that interacts badly with your, ah, medical condition. I wonder if—"

  "Get them off," Zernebeth snapped.

  Char concentrated, touching the bands and making them incorporeal, then lifting them away from Zernebeth's flesh and dropping them to the floor of the crawler. "Ah," Zernebeth said. "That's better."

  "Glad you're feeling so spry," Skiver said. "But where exactly are we going? Our plan, such as it was, included getting you loose and out of the country—"

  "Nonsense." Zernebeth leaned back in the seat, stretching her one arm over her head and yawning. "I have to oust Bothvald and take my rightful place as first among equals in the League again. I have too much to do to let him overthrow me."

  Skiver sighed. "No offense, but I think that ship, as they say, has sailed, and is halfway over the horizon by now—"

  "You are a smuggler and thief of low ambition." Zernebeth's dismissal of Skiver was total. "You cannot possibly understand me. But Alaeron does. Don't you?"

  "Ah," he said. "I, that is...the situation does seem rather dire..."

  "You cunningly arranged an escape, and as both you and Skiver moved too quickly to be perceived, and are believed to be dead besides, the other captains will assume I engineered the escape myself, summoning explosions and blasting open the wall and striding out under my own power—why, you've already laid the groundwork for restoring my legend, Alaeron."

  "In point of fact, it was Skiver who came up with the plan, and making it seem like you escaped without our help, that was just to make sure everyone still thinks we're dead in Gorum Pots, so no one will come looking for us—"

  "Part of great leadership is delegating tasks to specialists," she said. "Your...friend's criminal background provided him with certain skills, but you were the one who directed him and gave him the task of finding a way to free me, yes?"

  Skiver snorted. "Just doing my job, ma'am."

  "That's not really how—"

  "We'll go to Hajoth Hakados," Zernebeth said. "It's a river city, only nominally under Numerian control—it's on the border with the River Kingdoms, and if the political winds ever change at the right moment it could well become a River Kingdom in its own right. Enough traffic passes through that no one is likely to notice the arrival of a few strangers. It is...amenable to fugitives."

  "Sounds like my kind of place," Skiver said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The citizens of the thriving port of Hajoth Hakados made a good living from the river trade, and from supplying the crusaders passing through on their way up the Sellen River to Chesed and on to the Worldwound, to die fighting the good fight. (The enterprising people of the city didn't see any reason those crusaders should fall to the hordes of demons with perfectly good coins still in their pockets, so they worked hard to remove as many of those coins as possible first.) As a result, there were plenty of accommodations in the form of inns and spare rooms, but Alaeron's band wanted something with a bit more privacy. Skiver's instincts for finding fellow members of the criminal fraternity paid off, and he acquired exclusive use of a small house on the outskirts of town once owned by a man who'd gotten in debt to the wrong people and paid with his life. He grumbled about having to finance their hideout with the money he'd made selling luxury goods to Zernebeth, but at least they were flush with coin to finance...whatever they were going to do.

  They settled into the house, furnished with chairs and couches that were too low-quality to bother selling, and walls covered in utterly bare bookshelves, their contents presumably pillaged to pay off the former homeowner's debts. They all collapsed on couches and armchairs—except Char, who sort of hovered over a chair—with Skiver taking the initiative to activate the black box and duck inside, returning with provisions: fresh water, dried fruit and meat, and the hard biscuits beloved of military organizations, which remained edible (if not tempting) for months. They all ate, even Char, and contemplated the dim room and their dimmer circumstances. Eventually Alaeron began to pace, a habit Skiver was used to—the alchemist said making his body move sometimes served to free his mind.

  "The problem is Bothvald." Zernebeth spoke at last. "The rest of the League I can overcome, but that smug Ulfen...I confess, I underestimated him. He is not a passionate seeker after truth, not in the way we are, but he's talented when it comes to higher mathematics and tinkering with relics—and worse, he's good at politics, something I neglected during my time at the head of the League. I don't think Bothvald wants power for anything, except its own sake...but I'm not sure, offhand, how to wrest the power away from him now that he's taken it."

  "Bothvald is everything I hate in all the world." Alaeron seethed, pacing back and forth and up and down the room. "Him and everyone like him, with their lack of true ambition, their focus on becoming comfortable and rich and contented, all for no purpose—wallowing in velvet all day, drinking rare vintages from jeweled goblets, becoming a creature of pure sensation. Or crushing your enemies for the pleasure of watching their life and hope drain out of them. Why? How can anyone live with a worldview so circumscribed, so narrow, so focused on the utterly trivial? What must it be like inside Bothvald's head? Cramped as a coffin! You can't be a living man inside a coffin, a coffin is only comfortable if you're dead, and so I can only conclude that his mind is dead, his spirit is dead, and if he nevertheless gives the appearance of life, it is an illusion, like the mindless spasms of a severed tentacle. Bothvald has no reasons for the things he does, or at least, no reasons I recognize as valid—he shits where he lives and fouls his own nest and poisons his own fields in pursuit of pointless nonsense." Alaeron stopped, head lowered, then slowly lifted his gaze to Skiver, who looked at him with something like admiration, and at Zernebeth, who looked at him with something like satisfaction. "Bothvald offends me," Alaeron said. "Him and all his kind."

  Skiver declined to comment, but he didn't think Bothvald was all that drastically different from Zernebeth or any of the other captains. He probably loved relics and exercising power, like all of them did. But he had to concede it had been a pretty good speech.

  "So what will you do?" Zernebeth asked softly. "How will you address this terri
ble offense?"

  "I will destroy him," Alaeron said.

  "Fair enough," Skiver said. "How, exactly?"

  At that, Alaeron slumped. "I haven't worked it out yet."

  "Mmm," Skiver said, scratching his nose. "Well, I gave it a bit of thought myself on the trip, and I think I see a way we can get rid of Bothvald, and even make a bit of coin in the process."

  "I'm not sure you're the one best suited to make plans—" Zernebeth began.

  "No," Alaeron said. "Hear him out. Skiver rose through the ranks of the criminal gangs in Almas to a position of comfortable power, and really, the League is a criminal gang, of sorts. No offense, Zernebeth. You might call this his area of expertise. What did you have in mind, Skiver?"

  At least Alaeron defended him to his blue mistress. That was worth something. Skiver said, "The League only cares about results, yeah? Bothvald took over because he convinced the other captains he was a bigger, better bastard than you are, right?"

  Zernebeth winced, but nodded. "That is true."

  "So—we prove them wrong. Make them think Bothvald is incompetent. We humiliate him, cause problems for the League, make his mismanagement cost them money and resources. While we're at it, we'll annoy the Sovereign, too, and let him know his troubles can be traced back to Bothvald—I know the League doesn't answer to the barbarian king, but if he's angry at the captains things won't run smoothly, and that's bad for business. If the Sovereign decides Bothvald has to go, and the League doesn't feel all that motivated to protect him, he won't last long. We just need to arrange a few disasters and lay them at Bothvald's feet."

  "How do you propose we do that?" Zernebeth said.

  "Oh, I can handle the details. I know a few people who'd love the opportunity to take some coin and treasure from the League. They haven't, because they're afraid...but we've got an inside man, you see. The until-just-yesterday head of the League herself, who can give us privileged information about the best League and Numerian operations to plunder for coin, and the best way to do it."