Reign of Stars

by Tim Pratt

  "If the Sovereign thinks I'm sabotaging the League—" Zernebeth said.

  Skiver waved his hand. "No, no, it'll never come back to you, you're in hiding. We'll put the word out that Bothvald's security is so sloppy that his lieutenants are selling secrets for coin while they can, because they know the whole League is in danger of dissolving entirely under his mismanagement, and they want to get rich while they can." He snapped is fingers. "We'll start a whisper campaign—a little coin can buy a lot of wagging tongues spreading plausible lies. Maybe use Alaeron's friend Malica—she knows people on the streets of Starfall and at court, and can arrange some rumormongering for us, I'm sure. We'll make sure this message is on everyone's lips, or at least in the back of their minds: Bothvald is a fool, and the Technic League is too weak to defend itself while he's in charge. We'll let everyone know that when Zernebeth was the most powerful voice in the League, no one dared to meddle in their affairs, but now that this prancing fool Bothvald has risen to prominence, it's open season on the League's interests—and the Sovereign's interests. Spread those rumors in court, and all over Starfall, where it's sure to reach the ears of the captains and the Sovereign, too. Then when they hear about the robberies, their faith in Bothvald will disappear like ice on a summer's day, and he'll be out."

  "I...it's better than any plan I have conceived," Zernebeth admitted.

  Skiver nodded. "We just have to make sure this whisper campaign avoids the port cities and the border outposts—you don't want word of the League's weakness spreading beyond the borders, or else our little plunder squad will be joined by outside freelancers, and we won't be able to control them once Zernebeth is back in power. The point is, everything should be havoc and chaos while Bothvald's in charge, but the moment Zernebeth is reinstated—peace and plenty and prosperity reign supreme, and all our thieves slink away with their well-gotten gains."

  Zernebeth grunted. "This could work, assuming you can find capable confederates."

  "Then I'll put the wheels in motion," Skiver said. "Char, care to deliver a few messages for me? You can go a lot faster flitting through the air than I could go on horseback, or riding a chair perched on the back of a mechanical spider, or whatever you people do around here. I need to arrange a meeting with some of my nearest and dearest, or at least the closest local equivalent."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  While Skiver scribbled notes, using up an alarming quantity of their stash of paper and ink in the process, Zernebeth took Alaeron's hand and led him into the black box. She took a moment to admire the room inside, then shut the door, giving them a level of privacy that was basically unassailable. She led him to the four-poster bed and pulled him down to the sheets. "I have no potion to help you with the chill of my skin..."

  "I don't care," he said. "I was afraid I'd lost you. What's a little numbness, if I can have you in my arms?"

  After, they lay together under the covers, chatting idly. Zernebeth propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him thoughtfully. "I understand your loyalty to me—I am wonderful, after all. But you talked about how Bothvald offends you, and I wondered...why doesn't Skiver offend you in the same way?" She caressed Alaeron's thigh, as if trying to take some of the sting out of her words. "He seems a simple thug, obsessed with amassing a fortune, not much unlike Bothvald in that respect. He hardly strikes me as a man of vision. His plan to oust Bothvald demonstrates a certain low cunning, but it's still just about thieving, really."

  Alaeron shook his head. "Skiver doesn't mind if people think he's stupid, or selfish, or thuggish. And he does spend a lot of his time scheming over ways to make money. But you have to understand—he doesn't care about money for its own sake. He cares about it because other people care about it, and do their best to get it and keep it, which makes taking it away from them an interesting challenge. Skiver doesn't live for money—he lives to be amused. For the thrill of risk, and for those little moments when one decision can change lives and cause ripples of consequence that travel through whole crowds of people. His vision isn't my vision, admittedly, but he's not one of those short-sighted creatures living a life of unexamined stimulus-and-response, either." Alaeron paused. "Also, my hunger for knowledge and truth is often very expensive, and at the same time it isn't always particularly profitable, so having someone in my life who amasses money and favors and connections the way a corpse attracts flies is quite convenient. And unlike most investors I've met, Skiver doesn't particularly care if any of my experiments ever turn a profit—he just cares if they're interesting." Alaeron put his hand on Zernebeth's leg, just above her knee, and let her cold flesh soak in some of his warmth. He felt a surge of confidence and smiled. "I think I can say without fear of contradiction that my experiments are almost always interesting."

  "Mmmm," she said. "It's possible I've misjudged your friend. His plan to restore me to power is an intriguing one, and even if it doesn't work, it should make life for Bothvald uncomfortable. I'm not saying I'm wrong about Skiver, mind you, but I am open to having my opinion swayed."

  "That is the mark of a true scholar," Alaeron said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Few Short Scenes About Rogues

  The common house in Hajoth Hakados where they met to form their conspiracy was called the Gentleman Bastard, in honor of some legendary criminal with unusually good manners. Beneath a thin veneer of respectability it remained a meeting place for people who dabbled on the wrong side of the law in the north. ("And that's a tricky proposition," Skiver said, "since the people who make the actual laws up here are among the worst criminals you could ever imagine, without a hint of honor or a splash of class.")

  Alaeron sat with his back against the wall, looking at the paladins in their gleaming armor milling among the sharp-eyed locals. Skiver was hunched forward, elbows on the table, deep in conversation with the woman beside him. "We've got that incorporeal fella I told you about, though we've got to use him sparingly, or people will realize Zernebeth's involved with the League's bad luck. And there's you, and your crazy priest, and a couple of your boys for muscle, and Alaeron's friend Redfang, and truly that's a decent enough crew all by itself. But apart from you, none of them are all that experienced in the ways of out-and-out criminality, and rapid strikes are best here, hit a lot before they can organize a defense. Who do we know who could help us out, Genthia, in terms of leading another team?"

  The pirate captain cocked her head, musing. "Well, there's always Gad..."

  Skiver shook his head. "Nah, he'd want to take over and run the whole thing his own way. Not to say he couldn't, I've never known a better man when it comes to conjuring up a plan, but I've already got ideas about how to do this thing, and adding Gad would be too many cooks in the kitchen. What about Rodrick and Hrym? Didn't I hear they were blundering around in the north recently?"

  The name Rodrick rang a faint bell for Alaeron, though he wasn't sure why. Genthia shook her head anyway. "No, I heard they took passage down south to some island in the Obari Ocean, working on yet another scheme to get rich or die trying, I'm sure. They're too far away to do us any good. Hmm. There's someone, I don't think you know her, a general confidence trickster but also a dead shot with a bow. She goes by Jaya—"

  Skiver laughed. "Oh, yes. We've met. She could be good, but..." He glanced at Alaeron.

  Alaeron suppressed a groan. Jaya had accompanied them on their journey to the ruins of Kho. He'd believed, for a while, that she might be falling in love with him...which was, of course, exactly what she'd wanted him to believe, to make him willing to kill and die for her. He couldn't fault her reasons, but he didn't much like being used. That said, he'd seen her fight demons and monsters without losing her cool, and he couldn't deny her effectiveness. As for loyalty...Well. She'd be as loyal as they could afford, and Skiver was still fairly flush with coin from his import operation.

  "It's fine," Alaeron said. "She'd be an asset to the mission. But, ah, if I could possibly avoid seeing her..."

  "We'll put yo
u with another team," Skiver said. "Don't worry about that. Now, we could use a couple more bodies, all-arounders with broad skill sets would be best, but someone besides me who knows their way around a lockpick would be good, since I know your idea of tickling open a strongbox involves taking an axe to it..."

  They worked out the details, Skiver showing Genthia the notes Zernebeth had made about potential targets, discussing how to coordinate the attacks for maximum profit and maximum embarrassment for Bothvald. Alaeron sipped his weak beer and tried not to dwell on the heartbreaks of the past. Why think about Jaya, and what she'd meant to him, and how she'd ultimately betrayed him to return to a lover he hadn't even realized existed?

  He had Zernebeth, now, and this would work, and they would have a future—he could join the Technic League, and be Zernebeth's right hand, and coax her into changing the entire culture of the organization, making the captains into cooperative seekers after knowledge instead of a bag of rabid cats. With the resources at the League's disposal, they could do so many great things—restore the flying cities of the Shory Empire, unlock the secrets of the stars, crack Silver Mount open like a nut and sift its contents. If the captains could only be convinced to work together, instead of squabbling and fighting for power and influence. All the time and effort wasted on coups and counter-coups and keeping secrets when it could be used for something worthwhile, like going into terrifying holes in the ground and finding the wonders within—

  "All set?" Skiver said. "We've got a tight schedule to keep. This is a big country, and we've got a lot of ground to cover if we want coordinated strikes."

  "Ah." Alaeron blinked. The light in the windows had shifted; he'd been lost in thought for some time. But why not? He'd been constructing an entire future in his mind, and that took time.

  First you made the future in your mind. Then you made it happen in reality.

  "Yes, of course," the alchemist said. "Onward to, ah, plunder, then. And pillage. And so on."

  "Spoken like a true marauder." Skiver grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. "You and I need to have a little chat about bombs."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Ten days after that initial planning session, Alaeron and the pirate priest, Cantor, plus two crewmen from Genthia's ship to do the heavy lifting, looked down on the village of Skumble from the ridge of a hill. Skumble was barely a village, really, more of a mining camp devoted to extracting every last scrap of value from a wreck the League had discovered not far from the Battle of Grasyhot the year before. Zernebeth said it was the most lucrative active site they had at the moment.

  Skumble wasn't without its terrors. In particular, the camp was troubled by the intermittent appearance of thick greenish fogs that seemed to move of their own volition, driving those who breathed the vapors hopelessly insane. As a result, the miners and their overseers had impressively airtight structures, with chimneys and windows that could be sealed tight, all built to exacting League specifications, where they could lock themselves in and hide until the fog moved on.

  "Bombs are ready," Alaeron said. He'd concealed time-release smoke bombs, his basic recipe with an additive to make the clouds green, around the camp. "Are you ready to cloak us in mist, Cantor?"

  "The gaseous emissions of the Great Fundament are always easy to summon," the priest intoned, making the pirates snicker.

  The strongest building in Skumble was a windowless warehouse of heavy stone set some distance away from the barracks, with guards on all four sides and another on top, armed with weapons provided by the Technic League. A League lieutenant was on site, too, inside the building, which was wrapped in enchantments to make it doubly safe.

  According to Zernebeth, that building contained pounds of skymetal wire and ore, including most of the more exotic varieties, due to be shipped back to the League compound in just a few days...unless something happened to it.

  "All right," Alaeron said, counting under his breath. Smoke began to rise silently beyond the barracks, and after a moment the lookouts sent out the cry of alarm—"The fog, the fog, beware the fog!"

  The people in the camp raced for their barracks as the green smoke eddied and drifted toward the buildings—moving as ordinary smoke, not sentient fog, but no one seemed to notice. The guards watching the warehouse rushed inside the building, the one on the roof leaping down to join the others, and within moments the bustling camp was eerily silent, sealed up tight. Other bombs on longer delays would continue to release smoke for some time, giving them ample time to complete the operation, Alaeron hoped.

  Alaeron produced two bottles, handing one to Cantor. "Ready, Father?"

  "Servants of the Divine Fundament are always ready," Cantor said, with the smug solemnness of every cleric Alaeron had ever spoken to.

  Alaeron pulled the stopper from his bottle. Another cloud of colored mist shot forth to envelop the team, and together they began moving down the hill, the fog hopefully concealing them from any lookouts peering out of the sealed windows in the barracks.

  They reached the storehouse, and Alaeron climbed up the ladder to the roof, emerging from the concealing mist and crouching low to minimize the chance of being seen. The alchemist peered down into the chimney, which was sealed with a movable flap...but it was merely fog-proof, not acid-proof. He poured a flask of bubbling vitriol into the chimney, and in a moment it ate a hole in the metal flap.

  Alaeron tossed the bombs he'd prepared down the chimney. He listened, and heard gratifying thumps, and one shout. Drat—one of them had been far enough from the chimney to avoid being knocked unconscious by the gas bombs...also tinted green, just in accordance with the general theme. Alaeron had hoped to knock them all out in one shot, but this could be good—it might save them having to break down the door. He peered over the edge of the roof and watched as the door opened, one of the guards stumbling out, wide-eyed and afraid.

  One of the pirates hit him in the face with a club, and that was that. Alaeron climbed down and got to work. The interior of the warehouse was mostly clear of gas—it was a fast-dissipating compound—and full of bins heaped high with ore. The guards and their supervisor sprawled on the floor, snoring and drooling. The pirates, who had some experience at more thoroughly subduing people who were already pretty well subdued, tied the men up and put canvas sacks over the heads of the captives while Alaeron opened up and activated his black box.

  The pirates found the box incredibly eerie, but with proper coaxing and promises of extra gold, they finally got to work dragging the skymetal from the warehouse into the black box, piling up the crates of ingots and lead-lined casks of poisonous rare metals inside where Skiver's imports had so recently been heaped. Once the warehouse was entirely empty, Alaeron collapsed the black box again, put it in his bag, and signaled to the pirates that it was time to go.

  By then a couple of the guards were awake, and one of them—probably the League lieutenant—shouted from beneath his canvas hood, "You won't get away with this! The League will hunt you down!"

  Alaeron put as much disdain into his voice as he could muster. "The League? You used to be scary, when that one-armed ice witch Zernebeth was in charge, but now that Bothvald is running things? The man might as well wear ribbons in his beard. The League is nothing to fear anymore. You'd better find a new line of work."

  Skiver would have come up with a better exit line—for one thing, he knew how to be pithy, while Alaeron tended to overexplain, belabor, and ramble on and on when brevity would be more appropriate—but Alaeron thought it got the point across.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "Ooh, this place, it's just crying out for larceny." A day after Alaeron's successful daylight raid on Skumble, Skiver sat in a chair outside a charming establishment called the Fire in the Hole in Lackthroat, a town in the north of Numeria famed for its heavily armed mercenaries and its dens of vice, all the latter paying a healthy percentage of profits to the Black Sovereign in exchange for protection—mostly from the Black Sovereign himself. Skiver thought, not for the fi
rst time, that government was really the greatest criminal racket in the world.

  The capital was some distance from Lackthroat, so the tribute was sent along to the Sovereign on a monthly basis, and rather than transport the money in a caravan filled with heavily armed men—because something like that would surely attract bandits in the wastes—the Sovereign's tax collectors used a low-key approach, with the strongboxes transported in a boring-looking train of carts glamoured to look like they were carrying vegetables when in fact they were full of armed guards. But the caravan's real defense was secrecy, and with Zernebeth giving them inside information gleaned during her time as League liaison to the Sovereign, that advantage was lost. "We're going to pluck this town like a ripe peach," the thief said with satisfaction.

  Redfang picked his teeth with the point of his knife, which counted as good table manners and a mark of sophistication by local standards. "Don't talk to me about peaches. Breakfast here was salty oat mush." They were the only ones out on the porch, since passing horses sometimes splashed mud on the boards. Not the most sanitary place to have a drink, but it afforded enough seclusion to talk privately.

  "I was speaking, what do you call it, metaphorically." Skiver scanned the street, making sure their hirelings were in place. The men were loitering entirely too conspicuously, but so were various other mercenaries who were better at posing than working, so that was all right. "There's so much money running through this place, it would be easy to reach down and scoop a little out of the stream."

  "You have to be careful, reaching into streams. There are some fish with nasty bites." Redfang belched. "You can also get liver flukes."

  Skiver tried to decide if that was a metaphor or not, and hadn't reached a conclusion by the time the first vegetable cart arrived and parked in front of a boarded-up storefront. He shook his head in professional disappointment. The underlings the Sovereign had hired to handle tax collection here were amateurs by Skiver's high standards—probably chosen for their loyalty to the king rather than their skill. Just look at this setup! An "empty" shop across the way was the local pickup location for the Sovereign's portion of the gold skimmed from the gambling houses, comfort houses, discomfort houses, bathhouses, and houses of ill repute that made up most of the local economy. But an abandoned shop on a prime street in a town thriving like this was the opposite of inconspicuous—it stuck out like a unicorn in a herd of goats.