They hissed and scampered backward, gabbling in a language Alaeron had never heard before. He should have mixed an extract to help him understand foreign tongues, but he hadn't anticipated the need to treat with rats in armor. One turned and called out, and a larger creature emerged from the shadow of one of the domes: dressed in studded leather armor, terribly hairy, big as a tall child or a small man, with a pointy face. Rats with a wererat master? That seemed natural enough. "Humans," the wererat called in Taldane.

  "We've heard you might be willing to trade?" Alaeron said.

  The wererat cocked his head. "We trade with the derhii. We must. They are death from above. But you ...you are not death. You are lost."

  "Ah, no," Alaeron said, "we're looking for a friend who's lost, though—"

  "You. Are. Lost." The creature pointed a sharp-nailed finger at him, almost accusingly.

  A dozen more armored rats boiled forth from the shadows of the dome, bearing knives and spears and axes, jabbering in their peculiar language, yellow fangs glinting.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Pit of Endless Night

  Jaya's first arrow took the wererat in the throat. He fell screaming, clawing at his throat, his body twisting and shifting as he tried to transform. Were-creatures were not so easily killed, Alaeron knew, but a sharp arrowhead and a length of wood through the neck must hurt regardless. Alaeron wasn't pleased with their chances against a dozen filthy disease-carrying vermin, especially when the vermin were armed and armored, so he grasped the silver egg in his pocket and activated it, praying it wouldn't shatter into pretty shell-like fragments when he did. The time egg's surface was more cracks than not at this point, but it worked for him once more, and everything around him stilled and turned faintly blue.

  Jaya has loosed an arrow, and its velocity was such that it still moved now, albeit in slow motion, reminding Alaeron of an old riddle: how could an arrow get anywhere at all, when at any instant in time, the arrow must inhabit a single finite quantity of space? During that moment, it was occupying space, not moving, and since it was not moving, what carried it forward? All things are motionless in an instant, and time is nothing but a succession of instants, so therefore, motion is impossible.

  It made a certain amount of sense in theory, but the arrow and the murderous rats were moving anyway, in defiance of all thought experiments to the contrary, so Alaeron had best move, too. He eschewed artifacts now in favor of his more direct weapons, the bombs he'd mastered during his time with the Technic League. A bomb of fire; a bomb of ice; a bomb of splashing acid. He did not throw them, but walked toward the unmoving bevy of rats and placed the bombs before his enemies at strategic locations. When the bombs left his hands—or the range of his aura?—they hung unmoving in the air, and would not finish falling until the egg's effects ended. He hurried to Jaya and pressed her hand against the egg, making her gasp as she caught up with his timestream.

  "You cheat," she said, squeezing his hand. "I like that. Shall we take up a position behind them, where I can loose arrows? Once the little ones are dead, we can interrogate the big one to see if he knows where we can find Skiver. I think I have a silver knife. The prospect of permanent death might encourage him to open up."

  "Yes, but let's hurry. The egg won't slow time forever." They carried their gear around the crowd of rats, with Jaya pausing to kick away the wererat captain's blades. A pile of rubble by the eastern curve of the dome seemed a good spot for sniping, so they made their way toward it and climbed up the tumbled rocks to the top.

  Where they found someone else already stationed, crouching, frozen in the timeless moment. He was belly-down on top of the rock, with a long silver tube in his hands, pointed toward the place where Alaeron and Jaya had been. His clothes were torn rags, except for a clean dark coat of good cut. His face was a snarling mask of cuts and welts and bruises, and his hair was singed and burned half off his head.

  Kormak. And as Jaya gasped and Alaeron gaped at him, the egg's charge ran out, and they rejoined the forceful flow of time.

  The Kellid's eyes widened when he saw them, less than a foot from his face, but he'd already been in the act of triggering his device, and a wave of unspeakable heat flowed from the end of his silvery tube, just past Alaeron's face; it was like putting his cheek an inch from a red-hot stove. The bombs he'd placed went off at the same moment, the flame bomb with an explosive whump, and the rats began screaming. Alaeron grabbed the first vial his hands touched and slammed it into Kormak's face. The Kellid turned his head away, but not far enough—the vial broke across his brow and nose, driving sharp fragments of glass into his left eye. Alaeron recognized the pungent scent of the fluid that sprayed across Kormak's face. No corrosive acid or vile poison, alas, but a potion that allowed the drinker to see in the dark; the most dangerous thing in that was finely ground bits of carrot. Still, having it smashed into an eye blinded by glass wouldn't feel good.

  This was the second man from Numeria Alaeron had blinded. It was becoming a habit.

  Kormak rolled over, writhing and clutching his face, and Alaeron reached out to grab the weapon—the one he'd used to burn Alaeron's workshop, and the Dagger and the Coin, and Ernst himself, and who knew what else. But the silver metal was so hot he pulled back his hand before touching it, afraid he'd lose all the flesh off his hands.

  Jaya tugged at him, yelling, and they slid back down the boulder. Alaeron glanced back at the host of rats: some were on fire, some frozen solid, some twisting on the ground with grievous injuries. The stench of burning rat hair was monstrous. Kormak's beam had incinerated the column Jaya had been hiding behind. "Come on," Jaya shouted as a dozen more armored rats boiled up from the shadows at the base of the domes, and they raced off north, hoping they could escape in all the confusion.

  The eastern wall of the valley was close by, covered in crawling vines and bobbing flowers in red and green and yellow and purple. It would have been beautiful, even idyllic, if not for the screams of rats and the stench of battle. Maybe Kormak and the rats would kill one another, but Alaeron wasn't hopeful. Nothing seemed to stop the Kellid. Alaeron just hoped he hadn't burned Jaya's village to ashes in his quest to find his quarry.

  They took shelter beside a cracked fountain, in the shadow of a huge headless statue of a noble figure pointing skyward—though because of the tilt, the statue was actually pointing at the mountains to the east. "We have to find Skiver," Alaeron said. "And get out of here."

  Jaya shook her head. Her face was smeared with dirt and glistening with perspiration. She'd never looked more beautiful. "We have to kill Kormak. Not just in revenge for the way he murdered Ernst—to keep him from murdering us. He'll dog our heels forever, follow us back to Andoran ...we have to make an end to him. Skiver told me you were gifted at setting traps. Do you think you could set some here?"

  Alaeron looked around. "That tower," he said, nodding to an eighty-foot spire that leaned against the cliff wall. "It looks like it could collapse at any moment." He thought for a moment, then held up a vial. "Could you hit a target this size from, say, fifty yards?"

  She snorted. "As easily as you can lace up your boots, alchemist."

  "Then this could work," he said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "Alaeron!" Kormak called, and the alchemist flinched to hear the Kellid using his given name. It seemed so much more personal than being called "runaway" or "thief."

  Alaeron and Jaya were in the ruins of the tower, watching. The Kellid limped, blood running down his face, but he came on, implacable despite his wounds. "Did you think taking my eye would stop me? The Technic League will give me a new eye, one better than I was born with, as they did my old friend Gannix. I'm half machine already, boy. I have steel bones in my legs. They fixed up my heart after it got nicked by a knife—I should have bled to death, but now my heart is armored. I do not just bear their weapons—I am one of their weapons."

  They made his body a machine, Alaeron thought. For some reason, that made him think of the skeletal remains he'd seen in the Silver Mount, with bits of metal fused to the bones, a similar melding of biology and technology—

  That was it. Despite the enemy approaching, Alaeron smiled. The gray disc, the seemingly useless part of the machine—perhaps it was not meant to connect to the other relics directly, but to connect those relics to the wielder's body, just as some weapons and armor had been integrated into Kormak's body. What if the disc could act as a linkage that would bind Alaeron's body into the machine, make his own muscles and bones and mind a part of the engine? Could it work?

  He wasn't willing to have the disc surgically implanted into his body just to test the theory, and merely holding it in his hand was clearly not sufficient, as he had discovered, but perhaps there was another way, something less invasive. Unfortunately, Skiver had one of the relics necessary to test his theory.

  There was no time anyway—there was work to be done now. Jaya fired an arrow at the Kellid. It bounced harmlessly off his long, armored coat, but he turned and started walking toward the crumbling tower where they were hidden. Jaya and Alaeron hurried off their broken ledge, hopped down to ground level, and raced out the back of the tower. Jaya chose her spot, half-hidden by the soot-stained fragment of a marble staircase, and drew her arrow.

  "Wait," Alaeron whispered. "Wait until he's there ..." They could see Kormak moving on the other side of the tower, through the glassless windows, coming closer. Alaeron was terrified the Kellid would swoop out in a curve to try and flank them, but he came on straight, either too tired or too impatient for anything but the direct approach.

  When the shadow of the tower fell upon Kormak, Alaeron whispered, "Now."

  Jaya loosed. Her arrow struck one of the bombs Alaeron had planted around the tower. It was a delayed bomb, one Alaeron had set to go off in a few minutes, but shattering the vial would set it off, too.

  The vial broke, exploding outward in a blast of concussive force that triggered half a dozen other bombs. Their explosions set off others in a carefully constructed cascade. Every bomb Alaeron had prepared, his entire arsenal, was arrayed in a half-moon around the spot where Kormak stood. He was hit from all sides by shrapnel, fire, acid, frost, madness, stink—the full complement of Alaeron's abilities. Kormak didn't even have time to scream.

  And, as the alchemist had hoped, the bombs secreted around the base of the tower served to further destabilize the ruin. Tons of stone, crystal, and metal seemed to sigh, and then collapsed, burying Kormak beneath the rubble. The noise was immense, and great clouds of dust rolled forth from the devastation. The heap of shattered stone was twice as tall as Alaeron.

  Jaya stood up, waving dust clouds away, and scowled at the rubble. "I won't believe he's dead until I see his body, preferably headless. He survived an assault by elementals, after all."

  Alaeron nodded. "I understand. Though I suspect the elementals soon began squabbling amongst themselves. Still, I don't much want to dig through the rubble just to look for proof of life, do you? We'd need shovels, picks, and many days. Even if he's not dead, he's entombed, and we'll be gone long before he can dig his way out, metal bones or not."

  Jaya sighed. "I will never stop having nightmares about him. Even when I'm safe in bed somewhere thousands of miles away, if I hear a noise downstairs, I'll fear it's him."

  Alaeron put a hand on her shoulder. "Unless you're sharing a bed with me, I don't think you'll need to worry."

  Jaya raised one eyebrow. "That's not the way to tempt a woman into your bed, alchemist." She rose. "Come. Let's find Skiver. Is he in those domes?"

  "Ah." Alaeron blinked at her, then looked at the disc tugging at his wrist. "Huh. No. He's north of here, actually."

  "Good. I don't want to see where those rats make their warren. And we'd better leave before they come to investigate the sound of that tower falling."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  "The Pit of Endless Night." Alaeron peered at the vast hole in the earth before them. The disc on its string around his wrist tugged steadily forward and downward, urging them to descend. "How did I know it would be the Pit of Endless Night? Why not the Pit of Pleasant Afternoons?"

  "Could be full of treasures," Jaya said doubtfully. "Buried treasures."

  "Probably just monsters," Alaeron said.

  "Some monsters collect treasure."

  "You are ever the optimist." Alaeron paced around a small section of the pit, stopping at one of the many rivulets of water that poured down inside, split off from the river. The hole was easily fifty feet across, a drain that would never be filled, ringed by a circle of jagged black glass—presumably a dome like those of the Polymatum, but utterly shattered. "This was a tower," he said. "Look how smooth the sides of the pit are. It's a tower that was jammed down deep into the earth, a tower that goes down instead of up. Like an icepick jammed into body. Must have happened when the city fell." He knelt on the edge, though he was unwilling to lean too far forward to look down. There was nothing but darkness down there, but it was an echoey sort of darkness, the sound of falling water a loud and constant rush. Shame he'd smashed his potion to improve night vision into Kormak's face, though who knew if even that would have penetrated such profound gloom? "The tower must have broken through into some natural cavern or system of caves on impact. There's no telling what's down there."

  "Other than Skiver," she said.

  "And, presumably, whatever took him," Alaeron agreed. "How do we get down there?"

  "Ropes and grapnels," Jaya said, sighing. "Assuming we have enough rope."

  Jaya opened her pack, then froze. A strange, high-pitched tittering sort of laugh emerged from the cave. Alaeron went still as well, both of them staring down at the dark. The laughter was human, and distant, but distressingly manic and gleeful, the sound of something so far around the bend of insanity that it couldn't even see mere garden-variety lunacy from its vantage point. The roaring of some monster, or even the screams of the tortured, would have been preferable to the sound of that mad good humor floating up from the dark. After a few moments, it trailed off, and silence reigned again, broken only by the distant rushing of the river and the whistles of birds.

  "I wonder what's so funny?" Jaya said at last.

  Alaeron hefted a coil of rope. "I'm afraid we'll soon find out."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A Noble Son of Shory

  They opted not to use alchemical lights, afraid the illumination might attract unwanted attention from the laughter or some other denizen of the dark. No reason to make themselves glowing targets, after all. The downside was that they couldn't see anything much at all, except for a gradually shrinking perfect circle of blue sky above them. Alaeron had read once that if you looked up at the sky from the bottom of a well, you would see stars, even in bright daylight, but he now had experimental proof that such was not the case. Though to be fair, he wasn't at the bottom of this well.

  He wasn't convinced this well even had a bottom, though it seemed logical that it must, somewhere. They couldn't even talk properly because of the roar of falling water, so much louder now that they were in the echo chamber of the pit. Alaeron began doing mental sums. So many gallons of water, presumably falling into this pit for thousands of years, and it wasn't filled up, which meant ...well, nothing, really. Perhaps there was a subterranean river at the bottom. Or perhaps a thirsty creature, maybe some immense subterranean spawn of Rovagug, was drinking up every drop and pissing it out somewhere leagues away, creating a warm yellow sea. There was no way to tell, because there was nothing to see but blackness, and nothing to hear but noise. They'd reach the end of the ropes with nothing but infinity below them and a brutally long climb above—

  His feet touched solid ground.

  Alaeron grunted and felt around with his foot, probing the ledge beneath him, and determined it was solid enough to hold his weight. The wall before him sloped away inward, which suggested this might be a cave or at least a depression in the wall. Instead of pulling straight down, the disc on his wrist began to tug him slightly forward. Jaya's voice spoke, right in his ear: "I think there are caverns ahead."

  "No use groping in the dark," he said, and took a tube of green fluid from his pocket. He shook the vial vigorously, and it began to glow as the chemicals inside mixed, producing light enough to push back the gloom a bit. They'd found one of the embedded tower's windows, an upside-down arch, but instead of opening onto bedrock, it led to the mouth of a seemingly man-made tunnel that sloped sharply downward and beyond the range of sight. Jaya hammered spikes into the tunnel wall and securely looped their climbing ropes around it. It wouldn't do to get stranded in here. Alaeron had mixed his elixir of flight, but he wouldn't want to trust his life to the effects of an extract he'd never tested. He could always assemble the arcane engine and let it lift them out—except, no. Skiver had stolen one of the components. Ah, well. All the more reason to find him.

  Jaya shook up her own alchemical light, dangling on a string around her neck. "I wish we had Ernst and his sun-on-a-stick," she said, sighing.

  "His ability to hurl fireballs would be useful, too. Shall we?"

  She grunted. "Lead on. You have the Skiver-compass."

  Alaeron started along the tunnel, which spiraled down into the rock, offering a new blind curve every few feet. It would be trivial for someone to ambush them, and these lights advertised their location, but any creatures who lived down here were probably used to fighting in the dark, so Jaya and Alaeron needed to be able to see. And yet, as they walked down, down, down, nothing set upon them—no giant spiders, no subterranean underdwellers, no hideous oozes, no enormous fanged worms, none of the things Alaeron had encountered during his many previous delves into dark parts of the earth.

  "Light ahead," Jaya said, pointing, and Alaeron nodded and tucked his own lamp away under his coat. Jaya did likewise, and they crept down the tunnel, rounding a curve. They found a high-ceilinged cavern, lit by torches on the walls. Half a dozen tunnels branched from the room—some leading up, some down, some more or less level. The sound of metal clashing on metal emerged from one, but there was a regularity to the noise that suggested weapons practice rather than a pitched battle. Alaeron sniffed at another tunnel and frowned. "Someone's cooking down there. Since when do monsters that live in caves cook? I smell spices."