"Look." Jaya beckoned, leading him to a short tunnel that led to a long, low, rectangular room hacked out of the rock. The room was a jumble of corpses, some pinned to the walls with spears: giant spiders, pale eyeless lizards, huge centipedes with mandibles like scimitars, and all manner of underground vermin. "Someone has been cleaning out these caverns," she whispered. "I wouldn't expect any creatures in this place to be that organized."

  "There are people down here," Alaeron said, frowning. "And by ‘people' I mean ‘creatures with some vestige of civilization.' The derhii we met beyond the Stone of Sacrifice mentioned humans living below, and said they had a new leader. I think they took Skiver." He gestured toward one of the caverns—which, naturally, sloped downward. Of course. "The disc likes this direction."

  They left the puddle of brightness created by the torches, but soon found walls covered in bioluminescent fungus, creating a bluish-green illumination that wasn't as good as real light but was much better than pitch blackness. The low tunnel sloped gently down, and the disc at Alaeron's wrist began pulling more sharply. The other artifacts in his pockets began to jostle, too, trying to reach their mate. "I think we're close," Alaeron said.

  A sudden gust of wind blew down the tunnel, and Jaya looked at him, eyes wide. "There's an opening to the surface somewhere here," she whispered.

  "Yes," said a voice beyond the end of the tunnel. "I wanted more air, good air, yes, so my people went to dig dig dig. Many died, yes, but sweet air down below now." The voice was male, and spoke Taldane with an accent that didn't sound remotely like any Alaeron had encountered in all his travels, all mushy vowels and clunking consonants. "Come! Come!"

  "So much for the element of surprise," Alaeron said. Jaya got her weapons ready, and Alaeron led them toward the end of the tunnel.

  The cavern they entered was like the throne room of a mad subterranean king. The space was dominated by a chair big enough to pass for a bed, dark wood carved all over with strange winged beasts. A man sat on that throne, his skin as black as the spaces between stars, far darker even than Jaya's deep brown coloration. His eyes were bright, wide, and piercingly blue, his head absolutely bare, and he wore tattered robes of purple chased with gold.

  Immense banners hung on the stone walls behind him, also a rich purple in hue, decorated with a golden symbol: something like a crown, topped with wavy lines that might have been meant to represent wind, or water. Boxes and crates were stacked along the walls, some filled with the soft gleam of jewels, some with the glitter of gold, and one holding small carvings: winged lions in jade, a black onyx tower on a base shaped like a cloud, a golden derhii holding a spear aloft. Torches flamed on all the walls, smoke rising up to the chimney this strange man had caused to be cut into the rock.

  "Welcome!" the man on the throne called. "Your friend has been saying you would come, yes, how glad I am to meet you all!"

  "Our friend?" Alaeron said.

  "That would be me." Skiver's gloomy voice emerged from nowhere. "He knocked me over the head and dragged me down here."

  The stranger leapt up from the throne—he was smaller than Jaya, but nimble and quick—and pulled one of the banners aside, revealing an alcove cut into the rock. The alcove held a black iron cage. The cage held Skiver.

  The rogue waved. "This mad bugger locked me up. I picked the lock twice, but when I try to escape, he just grabs me again and puts me back. He's faster than he looks."

  "Excuse me ...sir ..." Alaeron said. "But why have you taken our friend?"

  "For glory!" the man cried, looking up to the narrow chimney. "He will make my great city fly again!"

  Alaeron glanced at Jaya. He cleared his throat. "Your city? You claim to be Shory, then?"

  "A noble son of Shory." The man sat back down on the throne, shaking his head, then bobbing it, then shaking it again. "The empire is in disarray, yes? But I, I was born and reared to lead, and we will soar again, oh yes. Kho, the greatest of cities—it will rise again."

  "The Shory have been dead for thousands of years," Alaeron said.

  The noble shook his head and clucked his tongue. "No, not dead, only sleeping. These are the banners of Kho on my wall, and they will wave in the sky again. This was the chair of my father!" He smacked his hand down on the arm of his throne.

  "Cloth and wood from Kho would have disintegrated millennia ago," Alaeron said. "And, forgive me, so would men."

  "Oh no, no. I was sleeping. In my room, with this chair, and these banners, and chests of gems and gold, in a special room. My father made it, you see, so that we could be safe, if ever the city began to fall." The noble's left eye started to twitch. "The room protected me: wrapped in force, wrapped in time, to wait for rescue, to keep me safe until someone could find me. But no one ever did."

  "Stasis?" Alaeron murmured. He'd heard of such things—there were rumors of stasis rooms in the Silver Mount, places where time did not hold sway, where all the contents waited, frozen. Could this man truly be a Shory noble, sealed for millennia in a bubble of arcane magic? "How did you get out?"

  "One of the beasts in the ground cracked the seal," he said. "A crystalline thing, its flesh was glass, oh yes, and it turned my walls to glass, it woke me up, tried to turn me to glass. But I am a noble son of Shory. I cannot be killed by beasts."

  "Son of a dead empire," Alaeron murmured. "You could teach us so much! You're the last of—"

  "No, not the last!" The noble gripped the chair's arms and leaned forward. "There are sons and daughters of Kho in these caverns. Survivors of the Fall, who bred and lived in the dark, forgetting their pasts. Many generations lost, yes, and they are savages, but they are strong, good warriors, fighting forever in the dark, and they are learning now to fight together, stand together, to sing Shory songs of war. When I make Kho rise again, they will rise with me!" He giggled, and the laugh was terribly familiar, the same cackle they'd heard up above, carried by strange currents of air to the surface. "But you. You are outsiders. You are not Shory. So you will be fuel."

  Skiver suddenly lunged out of the cage, throwing a knife. It stuck in the Shory noble's arm. He glanced at the blade, plucked it free—he didn't even bleed—and dropped it on the floor. "I am noble," he said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. "A favored son of Kho. Blades do not cut me."

  The rogue sighed and slouched over to join Jaya and Alaeron. "That's the third time I've stabbed him," he complained. "The first time he just laughed at me, sounded like an asylum full of mad children. I keep thinking he might have a weak spot. But he doesn't, as far as I can tell. Except his mind."

  "What do you mean, we will be fuel?" Jaya said.

  "Surely Aeromantic Infandibulum was not based on human sacrifice?" Alaeron said, only belated realizing he should have tried to sound more horrified and less intrigued.

  The Shory gnawed on his fingertips for a moment—the nails were so cracked it made Alaeron shudder just to look at them. "I ...I do not know how the city used to fly. I am noble, I was not a pilot, not an engineer. I did not tend the arcane engines, there were people to do that for me."

  Of course, Alaeron thought in disgust. The only surviving voice of an ancient empire is a privileged rich man with no practical knowledge.

  "But I have a new way to make the city fly," the Shory noble said. "I will feed you to the astradaemons in the Domes, and they will give me fiendish magic to raise the ruins high!"

  "Astradaemons," Skiver said. "He keeps talking about those. What are they? Something to do with, ah ...asses?"

  "They eat souls," Alaeron said softly. "And you know...a place like Kho should be bursting with the spirits of the unquiet dead, but we haven't seen a single ghost. If there are astradaemons here ...they could have eaten all the ghosts. They must be the creatures that take the criminals your people sacrifice, Jaya. But now this lunatic is out procuring for them."

  "It is sad," the Shory noble said matter-of-factly. "She is very pretty, this one with the bow and arrow, and your friend, he is funny, so funny, always with another knife, ha ha! You I am sure are very nice also, man who talks and talks. Now, now, in the cage, all in the cage, I will take you to the Domes when night falls, then you go into another cage. The lesser daemons will prepare you. It takes time, I'm told, they like to season you with suffering and plagues, but soon the astradaemons will have a feast. A hundred more souls or so, they say, and Kho will rise—"

  "What Kho?" Alaeron shouted. "There's no city up there—you've seen it! Just rocks and broken stone jumbled in a valley. It's like saying a dismembered body will get up and dance again, like saying you'll drink from a cup that's been shattered and crushed into dust. Kho is less than a ruin."

  The Shory went very still. "It can be fixed," he whispered. "They have promised me, the daemons promised—"

  "Oh, well, a daemon promised," Alaeron said. "Making deals with daemons, that always works out well, they're quite reliable."

  "The Shory will rise again!" the noble shouted, standing up. "Do not tell lies, no lies, or I will tear off your arms and legs, yes, your soul does not live in those, you can go to the daemons without them—"

  "You don't need daemons," Alaeron said. "You need science. Skiver, do you still have Ernst's things?"

  "In my bag." He inclined his head to one corner of the cavern, where his things were jumbled. "This mad bastard dumped everything out on the ground."

  "I was looking for candied cloudberries," the Shory noble said, almost contrite. "I haven't tasted them in..." He giggled. "Five thousand years!"

  "I am a scientist," Alaeron said. "An arcanist, and an engineer. All the things you need. May I show you something?"

  The noble frowned and shrugged. "You can do better than the daemons can?"

  Alaeron sniffed. "Of course. Making a city fly? A trivial matter. Why, Kho used to be in the sky—it remembers flying. That makes it so much simpler, you know. And I won't require any souls. One of those boxes of jewels you mentioned, perhaps, as a consideration for my time...but we can talk terms later." As he spoke he began putting Skiver's possessions back in the bag, then lifted out the object he'd been looking for.

  "You lie," the Shory said, disgusted.

  "No," Skiver said. "Alaeron's the real thing, right enough. He's been inside the Silver Mount, that great mountain ship of a thing that fell from the sky? Oh, wait, that's after your time—"

  "Perhaps not," Alaeron said, rising. "No one is sure when the Silver Mount fell, and history becomes muddy when you're talking about timescales on the order of thousands of years, but it may have been before the fall of the Shory Empire."

  "The great silver mountain," the noble said, frowning. "In the north? It came down in the Rain of Stars, yes, long ago, we looked down on it once, flying above, but we did not fly too close, oh no, it's full of poison, that place. You have been?"

  "Been inside," Alaeron said. "Found its secrets. Came back out."

  "Then you ...perhaps you ..." the noble said.

  "Yes," Alaeron said kindly. "Could you come closer?"

  The noble stepped toward him, eyes wide. Utterly mad, Alaeron thought. But so hopeful. The man was almost sad. Except for the kidnapping, and the human sacrifice. "Now what I have here," Alaeron said. "Is not actually science ..." He raised the wand Ernst had taken off the hellspawn gambler in Absalom, what seemed like a hundred years ago. The end sparkled. Alaeron waved it at the noble.

  The Shory's eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed unconscious on the uneven stone floor.

  "And what if he'd been just as immune to magic as he is to knives?" Skiver demanded.

  Alaeron shrugged. "He was in stasis for six thousand years. It didn't seem likely he was immune to magical sleep. But if so ...I would have kept bluffing about being able to make his city fly again, I suppose, and waited for some other opportunity. Should we tie him up?"

  "He's strong," Skiver said. He stepped around the noble and pulled the banners down from the wall, rolling them up and stuffing them in his recovered bag. "Must be on account of being a noble, eh? He carried me under one arm like a bundle of sticks. Unless you've got a hundredweight of chain hidden in your bag, I wouldn't bother with bindings. Let's just grab some of these lovely Shory trinkets and leg it." He scooped up a handful of jewels, but mostly concentrated on the carvings: Vadim would want unique items, after all, things that could only have come from Kho, never seen elsewhere.

  Alaeron thought about the golden chain from the Silver Mount—it could wrap around things so tightly it would never let go unless you knew the trick of loosening it—but he didn't want to leave that down here, so they'd have to hope the mad noble stayed unconscious for a while. But thinking of the chain reminded him. "My artifact, please?"

  Skiver winced. "Noticed that, did you? Here you are." He pulled the red ring off his thumb and dropped it into Alaeron's palm. "Didn't do me a bit of good anyway."

  "Well, you're such a mess, it's quite a challenge even for a relic from beyond the stars to impose order on you."

  "I am happy to have Skiver back, too," Jaya said. "But I think we should go."

  "So how do we get out of here, then?" Skiver peered upward toward the circle of bright sky. "Climb up those ropes you two came down?" He spat. "That's not my idea of fun. Climbing up a rope's a bastard of a lot harder than climbing down one, too. You know how the Shory noble came down here? He jumped, with me in his arms, the lunatic, and just landed here on this ledge. I nearly shit myself. I should have. Would have served him right."

  I could fly, Alaeron thought, but besides being untested, he wasn't sure his extract of flight would allow him to lift two people—it was his first attempt, and might not be that strong. But ..."I may have a better way," he said. "May I try something?"

  "If it spares me dragging myself up a rope, go ahead," Skiver said.

  "If it's fast," Jaya said. "Who knows how long the noble will be sleeping? Or how often his people patrol these tunnels?"

  Alaeron swiftly removed the artifacts from his pockets and began to assemble them, combining them as he and Ernst had on the riverbank. When he had all the pieces put together and the golden chain wrapped around the gear, he pulled the disc off the string on his wrist and held it in his palm. Could this possibly be the solution? Taking the disc into himself?

  "Wish me luck," he said. The disc was too large to swallow, but if his theory was right, perhaps merely holding it inside his body would be sufficient to create a link between engine and flesh. He slipped the disc into his mouth.

  The moment it touched his tongue, a jolt went through him. The golden chain slithered up his wrist, his arm, and on around his chest, then looped around and around, pulling the rest of the artifacts with it. The gearwheel pressed against his chest like an exceedingly uncomfortable breastplate as the chain crisscrossed further, looping around his waist, arms, and legs, binding the machine to him and armoring him in links of gold.

  I am the machine, he thought. The machine is me.

  Suddenly, everything made sense. He felt his body rise up into the air, hovering over the ground, but he didn't go sailing off helplessly upward into space. Why would he? The disc gave him control, conscious control. The engine without the disc was like Zernebeth's arcane walker without a driver: full of power, and grace, and speed, but with no direction.

  But this device did so much more than grant the power of flight. He could see that now. That creature in the Silver Mount had been a pilot, or a navigator, or an arcane shipwright, or all three. Alaeron rose a little higher (distantly aware of Skiver gasping, but he was so small compared to the world Alaeron could see now, the alchemist barely noticed him). With a thought, Alaeron slowed down time, because sometimes things happened quickly, and more time was always useful to consider options. He looked around—not with his eyes, he had so much more than eyes now. He peered up through the layers of rock above them, and he saw how the ruins of Kho fit, how order had been turned into disorder, and how it could be repaired. The ruin was an error, and he was capable of correcting errors. With the order-creating power of the ring, combined with the colossal kinetic energy of the spinning top, he could create a whirlwind that picked up broken things and put them down again whole. He could fix what politics, or the Tarrasque, or simple decadence had torn asunder.

  Somewhere, something hurt. Not in his body, exactly, but not entirely in his mind. His vision turned from blue to red. There were too many pieces missing from the city, too many things broken, stolen, and shattered—too much entropy to overcome. Order had no chance here. The city couldn't be reassembled; there were holes in space, punctures connected to other planes, magic gone that couldn't be regained, and worst of all, he was trying to reach out with limbs he didn't have, to use tools he didn't possess—parts of the Silver Mount, perhaps, or psychic powers possessed by the ship's pilot/navigator/repairman that Alaeron lacked. He couldn't do it, couldn't fix this, couldn't make this disaster and wreckage, this collection of broken junk, into a city that flew. No one could. Someone was screaming at him and shouting a word. What word? Was it a name—

  He got dizzy, and he fell, the disc dropping out of his mouth to hit the ground. The rest of the engine started to lift him up in the air, once more a driverless coach racing as fast as it could, and Alaeron desperately clawed at the device on his chest, tearing the egg free from the ring. The artifacts fell into their component parts, dropping him on the ground, the chain shortening and going limp. He rolled over and vomited.

  "You're bleeding from your nose, one of your ears—there's blood in your eye," Jaya said, horrified. "What did you do?"