"Let me consult with my associates for a moment," Alaeron said, beckoning Jaya and Skiver close. The moon was so bright he could see their faces clearly, which was too bad: Jaya looked terrified, and even Skiver was worried. "Trust me," he said. "I will take the noble away. He ...won't trouble us again. I'll return if I can, but if I can't ...This has certainly been a memorable experience. I've learned a lot."

  Jaya seized him and kissed him, a kiss more passionate than Alaeron had ever received, and when she released him and stepped back, he just stood, dazed—until Skiver planted a kiss on his mouth, too. He was far less sparing with his tongue than Jaya had been, and his chin far more stubbly. "There," he said, patting Alaeron on the cheek. "For luck, eh? Don't read anything into it."

  Alaeron wiped his mouth on the back of his hand—Skiver was a sloppy kisser, and the matter of his breath was best left unconsidered. "Be well," he whispered, then turned toward the noble, who was babbling about finding the other Shory ruins and looking for more stasis chambers, more sleeping nobility. Just what the world needed.

  "Majesty!" Alaeron called. "My associates will coordinate matters on the ground. You and I will ascend, and when we have a proper vantage point on the city as a whole, we will begin the great assembly."

  "Up!" the noble shouted.

  Alaeron lashed the engine to the center of the platform with the golden chain. "If I may, majesty, we are going much higher this time. I had best secure you as well, to make sure the royal personage is safe."

  The noble gestured impatiently. "Yes, yes, Aeromancer, do what you think best, only take us up!"

  Alaeron stretched out the trailing end of the golden chain and looped it around the noble's ankle, cinching it tight, then extended it farther, looping the chain around the fluted bars of the railing, chaining the engine and the noble alike to this little fragment of the city of the fallen sky.

  When he was sure the engine was securely bound, Alaeron touched the chain and slipped the disc into his mouth. He took the platform up as his senses expanded—and when they expanded, he noticed the fifth person in the ruins, crouched atop the crumbling tower beside them. Kormak, of course.

  As the platform reached the top of that tower, the Kellid leapt for it, making the whole balcony rock. Alaeron, his body hooked into the engine's workings, remained level as a spinning top, but the Shory noble had to cling to his throne to keep from losing his seat. "Interloper!" he shouted, and stood up.

  Finally, Alaeron thought distantly. Someone who can actually kill Kormak.

  But the noble took one step and fell on his face. He sat up and began clawing at the chain wrapped around his ankle, but of course it wouldn't come free. The chain was reluctant to unwind at the best of times, unless you knew the trick of it, and Alaeron had bound him well. The noble began to curse rapidly in his own language.

  "Treacherous apprentice," Kormak said, crouched on the swaying platform before Alaeron. "Did you think I would let you fly away, little bird? Some of the rats saw you rising up on this balcony earlier today. I thought you might come back here, so I waited. It pleases me to see blood pouring from your nose and your eyes, but you still draw breath, and that offends me. How would you like to die? I can hurl you to your death. But, no, I want to see the light go out of your eyes, I think."

  Alaeron was part of the engine now. It was hard to believe the Kellid had been so threatening before, because viewed from this perspective, he was insignificant: an unwieldy blend of fragile flesh, forced into concert with inappropriate pieces of technology, some of which seemed achingly half-familiar to Alaeron in this state.

  That technology didn't belong inside Kormak. It was disorderly, it was wrong, and with a flick of his wrist, Alaeron used the power of the engine to remove it.

  The steel bones in the Kellid's legs tore through his flesh. The Kellid gasped, dropping to the floor of the platform, and Alaeron expected him to slide off and fall. Instead, the man grunted, reached out with his hands, and began to drag himself toward Alaeron.

  Even deep in the workings of the engine, some part of Alaeron's mind and body knew fear. As his attention wavered, the platform shifted, and the noble squawked, furious. The movement of the platform worked in Kormak's favor, and the Kellid slid a foot closer. He grinned, blood frothing in his mouth, and wrapped a hand around Alaeron's ankle. The strength in his grip was astonishing, and with a sudden sinking feeling the alchemist knew he would be pulled down. The whole platform would fall from the sky like a dropped stone. They would all die—but Kormak clearly didn't care. "Caught you," the Kellid whispered.

  The disc in Alaeron's mouth tingled, and he brought his full focus to bear, making time slow to a trickle while he examined Kormak. There was more metal in him, but it was just a shell of dumb material around his heart, armor he wore on the inside, rendering him immune to heart-strikes from blades. But his heart itself, beneath the shell ...

  Alaeron could not speak because of the disc in his mouth, but if he could have, he would have told Kormak: The heart is an engine too. Just a pump for taking blood in and forcing blood out under pressure. The heart was a machine of flesh, its actions purely mechanical, and while the armor might stop a blade, it did nothing to improve the function of the engine it protected.

  With a thought, Alaeron stopped the Kellid's heart from beating.

  Kormak stopped trying to drag himself up Alaeron's body. He looked merely puzzled at first, then enraged ...and then his face went slack as his body's vital fluids stopped circulating. His grip on the alchemist's leg released.

  To stop a heart with a thought. The power of this artifact was intoxicating and monstrous. Alaeron tilted the platform, the movement prompting another dismayed shout from the Shory noble and sending Kormak sliding down and off the edge, tumbling away out of sight.

  Alaeron wondered if the Kellid's soul had taken flight when he fell, on its way to whatever afterlife they imagined in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, or if the astradaemons in the Domes would snag Kormak's eternal essence from the air and devour it.

  Alaeron looked up at the moon, a beautiful silver circle in the sky. His vision began to blur. He couldn't do this for much longer. The Shory noble had regained his seat, and he was clapping, shouting, "Yes, Aeromancer, we will tear out all their bones, all the upstarts, you will be my engine of war!"

  The alchemist looked over the edge of the platform. The ruins of Kho were down there, somewhere, though all he saw was darkness and a handful of tiny points of light that might been bonfires in the villages of the Uomoto. Just a few lights. So many fewer than the stars in the sky.

  Alaeron spat the disc out of his mouth, over the edge of the balcony, letting it fall away. His abrupt separation from the engine was jarring, and he fell to the stone balcony, realizing he'd been levitating a few inches without even knowing it. He scrabbled, grabbing hold of the railing and pulling himself up to his knees. The arcane engine whirred louder and they began to rise even faster, straight up. The Shory noble howled with glee as their rate of ascension increased, his plans to reconstitute the city apparently forgotten in the joy of flight.

  The air was getting thin, and terribly cold, biting through Alaeron's coat and making his ears and nose go numb. He reached into his pocket with shaking fingers and took out a vial, uncapped it, and swallowed the contents.

  Shame I never had a chance to test this one, he thought. I hope it works.

  "Your Soaring Majesty," Alaeron said. "Enjoy the stars."

  "The stars?" the last emperor of the Shory said, frowning, just before Alaeron stood and let himself fall off the edge of the platform.

  He fell, face toward the sky, and watched the platform ascend, briefly blotting out the moon before it began to shrink, diminished by distance. Alaeron's body twisted and turned over, and then he was falling with the wind blowing into his face so hard he had to squeeze his eyes shut, tears streaming across his temples and into his ears.

  He tried to fly, though he wasn't sure how exactly one went about that. However it was done, he wasn't doing it properly, that was for sure. He'd used the spell from Ernst's book as the basis for a formula to give him the power of flight, but he hadn't been able to find all the right ingredients. Unable to acquire an eagle's feather, he'd made do with ground batwing, doubtless intended for some necromancer's ritual. The substitution had seemed reasonable enough, in a theoretical sense, but in practice ...bats were not eagles. And falling was not flight. He'd used the last potion capable of slowing his fall the day Ernst and he figured out how to make the engine fly, and nothing else in his pockets would do him any good now.

  Alaeron wondered how long it would be before he hit the ground. Death on impact from such a height would be quick and painless, at least. And he'd get to find out what the afterlife was like, that was something any seeker after knowledge should relish. Though come to think of it, if he landed in Kho, the astradaemons would eat his soul. Shame his last kiss had been with Skiver. Jaya's had been more to his liking. He—

  By the gods, he was uncomfortable. Falling wasn't so bad, it was almost pleasant, but why was his coat so tight, it didn't fit at all, it was binding up his—his—

  Alaeron twisted frantically, tearing the coat off his body and flinging it away, where it caught an updraft and floated off into the dark. It was a wonderful coat, its many pockets full of wonderful things ...

  But it had been binding up his wings.

  Alaeron laughed as the wings unfolded from his back. They'd torn through his shirt, which was half rags anyway, but his coat had been woven of tougher stuff. He banked and soared and sailed, gliding in slow descending circles, shouting with joy—this was flying, not sitting in some chair on a floating balcony, but this, swooping on great leathery membranous wings, and he flew around one of the high towers of Kho, startling a few derhii who stared and pointed. "Hello!" he shouted at them, and laughed. He was alive. Kormak was dead. The would-be Shory emperor was chained to a rock well on its way to the spaces between the stars. Why not laugh?

  Though come to think of it, he had no idea how long this flight spell would last. He arrowed downward, using the moonlight gleaming off the Domes of the Polymatum to orient himself. Jaya and Skiver were still where he'd left them, though now they were standing over a ruined corpse. They squawked in alarm as Alaeron landed beside them in a crouch, folding his wings instinctively against his body. The wings—the result of his wonderful mutagen—were awkward and unwieldy now that he was on the ground, throwing off his balance terribly.

  "Are those bat's wings?" Skiver said. Jaya just stared at him, eyes shining in the moonlight.

  "No," Alaeron said. "They're no bat's. They're mine." But he grunted in pain as the heavy wings suddenly drooped and then tore loose from his back, falling to the ground and withering like fallen leaves. He reached back and touched his shoulder, and his hand came away wet with blood, but the wounds felt shallow, like he'd torn off two huge scabs. The mutagen could use some refinement, then. But it had gotten him to the ground in one piece.

  Jaya threw her arms around him, squeezing him tight, which hurt his fresh wounds, but he wasn't about to complain.

  "I was just cutting your Kellid's throat," Skiver said, tucking a knife away and gesturing at what remained of Kormak.

  "I told him that the man's legs are missing," Jaya said, releasing Alaeron. She never held him for long enough. But maybe, after they got back home ..."He won't be getting up again. But Skiver said ‘better safe.'"

  "Can't hurt," Alaeron said. Then he frowned. "Where did you get a knife? Didn't the rat-people disarm you?"

  "Took our weapons, our coin, and everything in our packs," Skiver said cheerfully. "Little plundering bastards. But they didn't take my coat, probably because it looks like such shit. Here, you can have it, you look cold." He took off the ragged garment and handed it to Alaeron.

  The alchemist took the coat, but almost dropped it, as it weighed far more than he'd expected. "What's in here?"

  "I cut a hole so I can slip stuff into the lining," Skiver said, winking. "Basic thief trick, that is."

  "So what have you stolen this time?"

  "A knife or two. A handful of jewels we took from his Shory majesty's cave. And a few of his other trinkets. I imagine they're the only treasures in this whole place that aren't tainted with some horrible disease or another, what with being sealed in a magic room for six thousand years. They'll have to be enough to satisfy Vadim, though I bet they won't." He sighed.

  "Well, as to that ..." Alaeron knelt by Kormak's corpse. He didn't want to look at the body—the Kellid had been a monstrous unstoppable killer, yes, but he was still a man, and Alaeron had seen enough dead men today. He opened the dead man's coat and found the weapons hanging at Kormak's belt, and on a strap across his chest: the tube that belched fire, a slim silver rod tipped with a copper ball, a lens attached to a handle, a six-fingered gauntlet with claws of black metal. "These are relics," Alaeron said. "Not from Kho ...but it's not as if Vadim will know that. They're unique, unlike anything he's seen before, and if anything, they're even older than the ruins here. And they're not poisoned, which is a point in their favor. Mixed in with those genuine Shory relics, these should serve."

  "Good enough for me," Skiver said. "I'm taking the bastard's coat for my own, though. I could use a coat you can't stab, or crush, or set on fire. Never needs cleaning either. Save me loads on my laundry bill." He wrestled the coat off the dead man and shrugged it on. Though Kormak was far taller than Skiver, the coat didn't drag on the ground when Skiver donned it, the hem shortening to just brush the tops of his boots, as it had on the Kellid. Magical—or technological—garments were so useful.

  A few derhii came spiraling down, two smaller, one huge with silver fur down his back. "You flew," the silverback said, pointing at Alaeron.

  He nodded. "I did."

  The derhii sniffed the air. "There are fires beneath the domes of Polymatum. Did you light those?"

  Alaeron shrugged. "Indirectly, yes."

  "And the madman who said he was a Shory emperor," the derhii said. "The one who came shouting at the bases of our towers, telling us we must be his slaves as we were in ancient times, threatening to kill our young. He has fallen into the sky, chained to a rock, screaming. Was that your doing?"

  "I do bear responsibility for that," Alaeron said.

  The derhii looked at one another. Then the silverback began to laugh. "You are a hero of the derhii, hairless one! We owe you a debt."

  "Good," Skiver said. "How about flying us out of here before the daemons and rats your hero didn't kill come after us?"

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Final Dispositions

  The derhii returned them to the village just as the escapees were arriving, and Alaeron and his companions entered along with the others. The entire village woke, and it became an impromptu festival as goats were slaughtered, disgusting fermented fruit drinks poured, and singing, dancing, and chanting bursting out around every fire. The village shamans clucked over the sick and took them away to work their healing arts, and one slathered a cooling goop over Alaeron's shoulder wounds, though she either didn't understand or pretended not to when he asked what the ingredients were.

  There were some oathbreakers and criminals among those who'd returned, people chained to the Stone of Sacrifice, but upon hearing of the horrors that befell those so sacrificed, the village elders agreed they would be merely exiled instead, and they were permitted to spend the night and take part in the feast.

  "Hell of a homecoming, that," Skiver said, shaking his head and sipping something that smelled of goat milk and alcohol. "Poor bastards."

  "Better than being experimented on by leukodaemons," Alaeron said, watching Jaya talk with her uncle, aunt, and cousins who'd been rescued from the cages in the fleshpit. "Do you think the monsters will try to take revenge on this village?"

  Skiver shrugged. "They've been there who knows how many centuries, and never come out before. I think they like to lurk in secret. Daemons like that have masters, don't they, just like everyone else? They serve Apple-John, or something, the Shory noble said. I imagine they'll get a stern talking-to for letting some of their prisoners escape. And with the Shory army stuck down there, they'll have plenty of victims to keep them busy, lots of souls to eat and that."

  Alaeron shuddered. "Don't remind me. Those people died because of me—"

  "Stop that shit talk," Skiver said. "They pledged their service to a lunatic, and they got what you get when you do that. You put an end to his reign, didn't you, and saved all these people in Jaya's village. How many would he have taken? He could have emptied these foothills in his quest for the sky. Now he won't. It's not a clean win, I'll grant you, but nothing in this world's clean, is it?"

  "I suppose you're right," Alaeron said.

  "Shame you lost all your relics," Skiver said.

  Alaeron nodded. "Yes. But I figured out what they were first. Frankly, they became a lot less interesting for me after that. And anyway, on the trip back, I'll be busy figuring out how to disable those weapons we took from Kormak. I'll let Vadim have them as interesting relics, but not as working weapons. That kind of power in criminal hands ...no offense."

  Skiver shrugged. "Vadim's a bastard. I don't blame you. He could have paid off my debts quick as that." He snapped his fingers. "Took it out of my wages, even. I could have stayed at home. But he thought I'd learn a lesson about gambling beyond my means if I had to flee the city just ahead of the leg-breakers. I learned some lessons, all right. Still, when I get you lot home with a sack of plunder, he'll make things square with the ones I owe. It'll be nice to get back home. I've had my fill of foreign parts. I need ale."