Ernst touched her cheek. "Pursuit by a deadly, implacable Kellid? Did you think that would discourage me from keeping company with you? Ha. I'll help you scare him away if he dares to show his face!"

  "Can't hurt having a wizard on hand if he does show up," Skiver said. "But he probably won't. Right?"

  "All it takes is a fast boat," Alaeron said. "Because we are on a very slow boat. He could catch up with us in a few days, if he followed us to Osirion. We need a faster craft."

  Skiver sighed. "I knew travel on a pleasure barge was too wonderful to continue. Back to sleeping on deck again, I guess. Everyone be sure to loot candlesticks and things from your cabins so we can afford to hire another captain."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "They say the city of Ipeq was made in but a single day," Ernst said, gazing up at the airy parapets. "Constructed by an army of djinn in service to the Pharaoh of Blades, granting wish upon wish. There are many arguments against creating buildings by magic." He gestured to the soaring towers, the weirdly geometric whorled walls, the fountains of leaping water. "But this city is an argument in its favor, I would say."

  "Until it all falls down," Skiver said, squinting, his expression a combination of awe and distrust. "A house built on wishes is a house built on dust. Pretty though."

  Ernst slapped the barge captain on his shoulder, and the man nearly fell over. The wizard's good nature could be forceful enough to knock someone down even without his hefty backslaps, Alaeron thought. "I was instructed to take you to the river's source," the captain said, for the dozenth time. "Truly, it is my honor to serve—"

  "Just take the letter back to Chuma," Ernst said. "It will explain everything." Alaeron had insisted on reading the parchment before it was sealed, wary of some treachery, but unless Chuma and Ernst had worked out a particularly elaborate code, the message was a tissue of pretty lies: it said they would take a small boat down a tiny tributary of the Crook, then an overland journey to the Gembasket, and return with riches untold.

  The captain nodded reluctantly and left them on the dock. Ipeq was not the bustling metropolis that Sothis was, being mainly a military town, home to a garrison of soldiers. Supposedly the army had magical tokens that could transform into a hundred scorpion boats capable of sailing swiftly downriver to reinforce the Sothan troops in times of trouble. Alaeron's people weren't able to get their hands on such a boat—just as well, as magic boats had a tendency to vanish after a set amount of time, no matter how fast they might be—but between Ernst's insistent personality and Jaya's winning smile they convinced the captain of a felucca to take them upriver for a price that was merely extortionate instead of outright robbery.

  In contrast to the pleasure barge, which had so many crewmen that Alaeron hadn't been able to learn all their names, the felucca had a crew of just three, and was powered by a large triangular sail. Light, small, and maneuverable, the boat could go far more quickly than the barge, but its comforts were considerably fewer. At least it was roomy, with space for ten or twelve passengers.

  "Mashed peas and flatbread," Skiver complained over their meal, scooping up a heap of the paste with his bread. "I miss the cooking on the barge."

  "Part of the joy of travel is enjoying the food of the place!" Ernst declared. "I wonder what they ate in Kho? Cloudberries? Rare birds that flew too high?"

  The felucca, named the White Heron, bobbed gently in the water, moored to a post on the riverbank, lit only by the moon. The river grew more dangerous from here, with sandbars to be poled around and treacherous shallows, and the captain refused to sail at night, despite their offers of extra coin. The barge had stopped for the nights as well, but they hadn't been in a hurry then.

  They ate and drank mostly in moody silence, Ernst's attempts at conversation failing to catch fire. The captain estimated that, with good winds, they'd reach the Slave Trenches of Hakotep in two more days, or on the third day at the latest. Soon their series of water voyages would be over, and it would be a hard hike over the mountains to an uncertain end. Some amount of brooding over the future was to be expected. First Jaya and then Skiver announced their plans to get some sleep, taking their blankets to the far end of the boat and stretching out on deck with the crew to slumber through the night.

  Alaeron lay back and looked at the stars, Ernst leaning nearby. "You took those relics from the Silver Mount, then?" Ernst said.

  Alaeron nodded.

  "Then they used to be up there, among the stars, perhaps."

  "The thought had occurred to me."

  "If you don't mind me asking, just from professional curiosity, one scholar to another, what have you learned about the relics?"

  Alaeron considered. Ernst was a scholar—and unlike Alaeron, who'd educated himself with stolen volumes or bought his way into the libraries of wealthy men in exchange for concocting alchemical wonders, Ernst had studied at proper schools. Perhaps he might be able to provide some insights. It was against the alchemist's nature to share too much ...but Ernst had agreed to let Alaeron copy whatever he wanted from the wizard's spellbooks, so some courtesy in return was called for.

  "When I first found the artifacts, they reacted to one another. Some have individual powers, properties I have discovered, but I believe they may actually be pieces of some sundered whole. A weapon, or an engine, or something else—who can say? If I can find a way to recombine them ..." He shrugged. "I would be very interested to see what that whole does."

  "Let's examine them, then!" Ernst said. "My expertise is more in imbuing ordinary objects with magic than in arcane technology, but I do have a good sense of how things fit together. Why not?"

  Alaeron hesitated. "If we activate them, even inadvertently, Kormak may sense them. Perhaps he didn't notice the disc, or it wasn't active long enough, but to do more would be to test our luck—"

  Ernst leaned forward. "Running from your problems is a sure path to sleepless nights, my friend. I do not fear some Kellid, terrible though he may be. Are we not terrible as well? Your potions and bombs, my spells, Skiver's knives, Jaya's bow—I'd call us a match for any man. And those artifacts of yours! Think of the edge they could give us. I say we study them, learn more of their powers, and hope the Kellid comes for us. Let us choose our ground, and be prepared. You say he comes armed with relics from the Silver Mount, yes? Well so do you. The only difference is, he knows better how to use his."

  Alaeron looked at the stars. Ernst wasn't saying anything Alaeron hadn't thought himself. Truly, he was not inclined to battle, but Kormak was inclined to nothing else. When could Alaeron stop running? Not as long as the Technic League's dog hounded him. On his own, Alaeron didn't think he stood a chance against the Kellid, but with the help of his allies—especially, though he was loath to admit it, Ernst—he might be more than a match. "You may be right," he said at last. "But we should talk to Jaya and Skiver about it tomorrow. It's not a decision we can make for them."

  Ernst slumped. "Of course. Caution, discretion, yes. You're right."

  Alaeron spread out his blanket and slept, one hand tangled in the straps of his pack. It was true they should talk to the others. But mostly he just wanted the relics to be his and his alone for one more night.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "Sure," Skiver said over breakfast—bean cakes and hardboiled eggs. "Let's kill him. I still owe the bastard for that knife I broke off on his coat. Let's lay a trap at the end of the river and see if he wanders into it. He's a great one for striding into places and burning buildings down, but there's precious little to burn in the desert."

  Jaya sighed. "I dragged you into my problems, Alaeron, so it's only fair I do my part to help you out of yours. I don't know what good my arrows will do against this man, but what strength I have is yours."

  "Between my magics and Alaeron's knowledge of poisons, we may be able to improve your arrows," Ernst said. He rubbed his hands together gleefully. "So, then, Alaeron—the relics?"

  They found a flat part of the deck, and Alaeron laid out the artifacts on their cloths. The short length of golden chain. The silver egg. The porcelain-and-gold top. The gray disc. The red ring, the size of a bracelet once again. The black gearwheel. "My approach was to attempt to discern their individual properties, in hopes of determining how they might fit together," Alaeron said. "The egg slows time for all but the wielder, or those he touches. The disc, as you've seen, hovers sometimes, but doesn't seem to do much else. The chain grows, adding links, and sometimes writhes like a serpent, but to no apparent purpose. The wheel sometimes turns, but it makes a terrible grinding sound. The red ring twists chance, making unlikely order from chaos. The top." He licked his lips. "The top makes ...tornadoes. Perhaps even hurricanes."

  Ernst lifted his eyebrow. "That last bit sounds useful."

  "Perhaps in the desert," Alaeron said. "I never dared use it in any populated area, because the destruction it creates is considerable."

  "All right." Ernst cracked his knuckles. "Let's see what fits together, shall we?"

  Alaeron nodded. He hadn't tried many configurations, afraid of possible disasters—the devastation created by the top had made an impression on him—but he was an alchemist, and that meant he shouldn't fear to experiment. "When we stop for lunch," Alaeron said. "I wouldn't want to risk putting any of these things together on the boat. They could do more damage than a giant crocodile."

  Ernst agreed, though his impatience was palpable. Skiver's initial impression had been right—Ernst was the opposite of the plodding, studious image of a wizard. Alaeron took some small pleasure in frustrating him. Hardly noble behavior—but then, Alaeron was no noble.

  The time finally came, though, and after wading through a marshy expanse they sat on the riverbank (first ensuring there were no crocodiles lazing there). Skiver and Jaya elected to stay on the boat, obviously afraid Alaeron and Ernst were going to blow themselves up.

  "Chains exist to bind things together," Ernst said. "Perhaps it should sort of ..." He wiggled his fingers. "Connect the other pieces?"

  "Perhaps," Alaeron said. "And gearwheels often drive chains. Perhaps the chain should wrap around the gear ..."

  They tried various configurations. Wrapping the chain around the gear did nothing. Trying to dangle the other pieces from the chain also yielded no results. Alaeron decided to focus more tightly. He made the chain his area of particular study, and learned that with the proper flick of the wrist he could make the chain extend itself greatly, going from a foot long to ten times that. The links slithered through his palm and wrapped around his wrist and halfway up his forearm, and for a moment he feared it might keep climbing to his neck and strangle him, but it stayed there. "This is a decent weapon," he grunted, slinging the chain out, letting it wrap itself around a clump of reeds, and jerking them, roots and all, from the marsh. Another flick of the wrist and the chain shortened back to a modest length swinging from his hand. "Some Technic League captain would have welded a spiked metal ball to the end and considered it a job well done."

  "Look!" Ernst crowed, and held up the ruby ring with the egg inside it. The ring had tightened around the egg as it did around a finger. "Fits together beautifully!" he said.

  Alaeron was annoyed. He'd dreamed about that very configuration, but hadn't gotten around to trying it. "Doesn't seem to do much, though," he said, taking the fused artifact from the wizard and turning it over in his hands.

  "Somewhat resembles the top, now, doesn't it?" Ernst said. "Rounded on the ends, thicker in the middle ..." The top was squatter, more flattened than the ring-and-egg, but there was a definite resemblance.

  "The gear," Alaeron said slowly. The axis of the gear had depressions on either side, just little dimples, really ...

  "Do you think it would fit?" Ernst said.

  "Let's try." Alaeron put the gear down on the cloth, and Ernst pressed the egg-and-ring against the depression in the gear's center.

  The artifacts snapped together like magnets attracting. Ernst hooted.

  "Still didn't do anything, though," Alaeron said.

  "Put the top on the other side," Ernst suggested, turning the gearwheel over.

  Alaeron lifted the top gingerly, afraid, as always, of what would happen if he accidentally set it spinning. He would never have worked this recklessly, this instinctively, on his own—his approach was methodical, careful, testing each object in isolation, then attempting to fit them together two by two until he'd tried every combination, with plans to eventually move up to permutations of three artifacts at a time ...but what had his caution gotten him? There was a time for methodical science, but that time was perhaps not when a murderous Kellid was coming after you.

  Alaeron slipped the pointed bottom of the top into the dimple on the other side of the black gear, and it snapped into place too.

  They sat staring at it for a while. "Well," Ernst said. "That's disappointing."

  "I don't see anywhere the disc can fit," Alaeron said, picking up the relic for a moment before placing it back down on its cloth. "Perhaps it's from another device all together, or maybe we're missing pieces of this one ..."

  "Try wrapping the chain around the teeth again. The links are just the right size for the gears to fit into," Ernst said. "I feel like we're close to something ..."

  Alaeron nodded, heart thumping in his chest, an exultation of impending discovery fizzing through his head. He'd felt this way when he'd discovered how to make the feral mutagen, how to create confusion bombs, and when seeing Ernst's spellbook had unlocked the secret of flight: he was on the cusp of a breakthrough.

  He wound the chain around the gear. He'd fitted only three teeth through the links before the gear began to turn, and this time, there was no horrible grinding sound, just a smooth hum. The chain wrapped around the gear completely—and then the trailing end wrapped around Alaeron's arm, his wrist, down his forearm, around his elbow, to his bicep.

  The gearwheel—the artifact combined—rose into the air as suddenly as a rock might plummet off a cliff, and the chain tightened and dragged Alaeron into the air after it. He squawked as his feet left the ground, and Ernst shouted something Alaeron couldn't understand. The device rose into the sky at an angle, dragging Alaeron after it, pulling through the air, out over the river, and up and up and up.

  Death by artifact, Alaeron thought. He should have known his life would end this way. Would the artifact stop working and drop him to his death? Or drag him up to the stars, where the device had come from originally? They said the air grew thin and hard to breathe atop high mountains. How thin would it be in the blackness of space? Surely there was some air up there, or else how would the sun burn? Would he fall into the sun?

  He looked down. He saw Jaya's face, staring up at him from the felucca, growing smaller.

  I will not die. He jerked his wrist, snapping at the chain, giving it the same flick he'd used before to shorten it.

  The chain came free. The device separated into its component parts, and all tumbled down. Alaeron tumbled with them. He scrabbled desperately in his pocket as he fell, vials and tubes dropping from fumbling fingers, until he found the one he was after, a small vial with a crude drawing of a feather etched into the wax stopper.

  He'd mixed the extract, which would make him as light as a falling leaf and enable him to drift gently down from a great height, as soon as he decided to study flying, because it's a fool who flies without preparing for the possibility of a fall. He gulped the contents of the vial, and suddenly felt lighter, buoyed up by wind, drifting the last few feet to land gently on the water. He touched down in the shallows, and the artifacts all gleamed there in the sand, fortunately not yet stolen by the current. Alaeron snatched them up and shoved them in his sodden pockets, along with as many of his extracts as he could recover, then splashed toward the shore. He'd traveled a hundred yards away from Ernst, but the wizard ran to him and helped him back onto dry land.

  "An engine of flight," Ernst said, shaking his head. "I have spells for flight, you know. And you can make a potion to grant you the same power, and with a great deal more control than that collection of broken parts could give you."

  "It wasn't just flight," Alaeron mumbled. "I think they wanted to go back to the stars."

  "The stars are no place for a man," Ernst said firmly.

  "And the disc," Alaeron said, brushing water from his hair. "We never found out how the disc—"

  Ernst was ignoring him. "At least they're decent weapons individually, some of them. The egg, the ring, the top. Even the chain, though it would be better with a spiky metal ball on the end, come to think of it. A disappointment, though, that all together those artifacts from the stars don't do anything more than a decent wizard can do on his own."

  Alaeron wasn't so sure. Ernst was too rash, too willing to jump to conclusions. He wasn't a scientist. But if he wanted to give up on studying the artifacts, that was fine with Alaeron. The wizard had pointed him in the right direction. Alaeron would take it the rest of the way.

  The disc, he thought. Somehow, the disc must be the key. But how does it fit? He would find out. He would.

  Skiver and Jaya arrived then, shouting, asking if he was all right, and Alaeron managed to give them a smile. "I'm fine," he said.

  "So you plan to sail over Kormak and drop bombs on his head?" Skiver said. "A bit bold, but then, you always struck me as a bold one."

  "When you fell, I thought you were lost." Jaya took his face in her hands and gazed into his eyes. "Do not do that again."

  "Fall?" he said lightly. "Or go flying?"

  She patted his cheek. "Flying is fine. Take me with you, if you like. But only after you learn how to land."

  "All right, back on the boat, you lot," Skiver said. "The captain says all this splashing about in the shallows attracts crocodiles, and we've got problems enough without those."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  They sailed on, the felucca flying over the water. The banks remained green, but less cultivated the farther west they traveled, and the going became harder, with many sandbars and shallows. At times they were forced to actually shove the boat over the sandy places and back into water deep enough to sail. The night after Alaeron's ill-fated experiment with combining the artifacts, there were strange roars to the north, and the captain muttered darkly in Osiriani.