"This is ridiculous. You've stolen from me, and I demand—"

  "Oh, did you make these, then?" Skiver said. "You didn't steal them yourself, from some dirty hole in the ground or rich fella's collection? Stealing something that's already been stolen once is a time-honored tradition among thieves."

  "I am a seeker after knowledge, not a thief—"

  Skiver made a placating gesture. "Please, scholar, no offense meant, I am a thief, and it's an honest living, more or less. I don't mean any insult. Humor me—play along. What else do you have to do today? Pace around on deck hoping the beauty from the south will decide to come out of her room? Why not tell me a story? Like, say, where you stole—sorry, discovered—these little things? Do that, and I'll give you back this one that looks like a rich child's toy."

  Alaeron hesitated. He was more than willing to go to war over the relics, but if there were an easier way ..."How do I know you'll honor our agreement?"

  Skiver laughed. "I saw what you've got in your bag. All manner of acids and potions and such. I have to sleep sometime, and I'd rather not have you pouring acid into my eyes while I'm doing it, all right? I'll be honorable. I just want a game to keep things interesting. You can't tell me you don't hate being bored. And you must want to tell about your exploits. I've hardly ever met an adventurer who didn't."

  The man was ridiculous, his logic profoundly illogical, but telling a story was a small price to pay to get his relics back. "Fine." Alaeron sat down stiffly on the bunk.

  "I found them near the end of my time in Numeria. They were the reason for the end of my time in Numeria ..."

  Chapter Eight

  The Silver Mount

  Alaeron hated the Technic League. They weren't interested in knowledge, only in power. The majority of them were utterly incurious about the origin of the Silver Mount—they just wanted to plunder it for weapons they could use to enforce their control of the country, or drugs to maintain their power over their figurehead, the Black Sovereign. Of course, Alaeron wanted to plunder the Silver Mount too, but that was because he needed to understand.

  The least objectionable member of the Technic League was a woman named Zernebeth, who claimed to hail from the ice-locked and witch-haunted land of Irrisen, where the heirs of Baba Yaga ruled. Zernebeth had hair the color of snow and skin with a faint undertone of blue, and there were whispers that she possessed no small measure of fey blood. She certainly had an intellect that was vast and cold and analytic. Alaeron felt some small affinity for her because she'd left a land of dark magic, ruled by fear and superstition, in order to pursue her own voracious hunger to understand the world, a passion Alaeron shared.

  As two of the more obvious outsiders in Numeria, the two were naturally pushed together by other members of the Technic League, who assigned Alaeron to be her assistant. He was not a true member of the Technic League, and wasn't inclined to try and become one—the proofs of loyalty they required were monstrous—but he'd proven himself knowledgeable and resourceful enough that they were happy to use him as a sort of half-apprentice. The ruling members of that cabal were fundamentally lazy and decadent, bored even by the atrocities they organized for their amusement, but Zernebeth was different: she wanted nothing more than to wander the plains of Numeria, picking over the wreckage of the Silver Mount, and after months of him assisting her in collecting, cataloguing, and researching relics found in the smaller crash sites, she turned to him one morning and said, "You are ready to see the Silver Mount."

  Alaeron grinned at her like a fool across the breakfast table. She had never invited him into her bed, which was just as well—her skin was so cold it made his flesh go numb if she happened to touch his hand, and if she'd shown any romantic interest in him, he would have had a hard time coming up with a delicate way to refuse—but she let him sleep in a storage room attached to her apartments in the palace at Starfall, the better to wake him at three in the morning to ask his opinion on some esoteric point that had been worrying at her mind and keeping her awake. "Thank you." He paused. "When can we go?"

  She squinted into the middle distance, then nodded slowly. "Noon. It's the best time to see the Mount up close for the first time."

  Zernebeth could never be hurried, so Alaeron had to endure the remainder of the meal as she slowly ate and drank, then told him to clear the dishes away. They had servants for that, of course, but she didn't like letting anyone else into her rooms, so Alaeron was general housekeeper as well as apprentice. He'd barely slept in recent months, and he'd never been happier in his life.

  Finally she declared herself ready to set out, and strode from her rooms. Alareon engaged the complex lock on her door and hurried along after her. The palace at Starfall was a brutalist hunk of rock dressed up with bad imitations of the sort of tapestries and other art objects the Sovereign assumed royals enjoyed in the south. They passed a servant girl in a torn dress who scrubbed at a bloodstain on the stone floor while openly weeping, and Alaeron hesitated a moment. He did his best to lose himself in his work, but it was impossible to entirely forget that he was in a country that not only had a monarch, but a puppet monarch who cared nothing at all for his people, ruled by advisors who cared even less. Numeria was a malevolent dictatorship, and even more abhorrent to Alaeron given his Andoren upbringing.

  But Zernebeth didn't break stride, so Alaeron tore his eyes away from the weeping servant and hurried after her. He had vague dreams of finding some weapon in the Silver Mount, something so powerful he could use it to destroy the Black Sovereign and the Technic League both and liberate the oppressed people of Numeria, but he knew such notions were impossible from a practical standpoint. The Technic League had already found an ultimate weapon in the Mount—the Gearsmen—and that was firmly in their control.

  Outside the palace, Zernebeth led the way to her personal conveyance, which she called the "Yaga-walker." The vehicle had been a black carriage, once upon a time, but the wheels had been ripped off and replaced by four legs with multiple articulated joints, each one equipped with a vicious-looking three-toed claw. The top of the carriage had been torn off as well, and the entire seating area was now filled by a gray metal dome that housed whatever strange machineries and power source drove those legs. The only seat left was the high bench where the driver had once perched. At rest, the Yaga-walker resembled a crouching beast. Zernebeth had been inspired by the legendary chicken-legged hut of the witch queen Baba Yaga, though Alaeron secretly doubted that Baba Yaga's hut provided such a rough and bouncy ride.

  "Activate the engine," Zernebeth said, seating herself on the padded bench at the front.

  Alaeron sighed. He clambered into the interior of the Yaga-walker, stepping over the thick pipes and twisted wires and settling onto the decidedly unpadded remains of one of the passenger seats. He grasped the handle of the hand-crank, which Zernebeth had "requisitioned" from a blacksmith who'd used it to turn a small grinding wheel for fine work on blades. Now the crank was connected to some mechanism beneath the beaten metal dome—Zernebeth wouldn't let him look inside, as it was a device of her own invention that she didn't want copied—and after a few turns he felt tension in the handle, and something under the dome began to hum and rattle. Alaeron hurried up a short ladder and then onto the main bench (that strange engine got hot) as the four legs straightened, raising the whole carriage six or so feet off the ground. A pair of levers allowed control over the front and back legs respectively, and another lever acted as the brake, but it took a lot of practice to operate the thing without getting the legs tangled up together.

  It all seemed like a lot more trouble than just harnessing a horse to a cart, but then, horses tended to shy away from the Silver Mount, and some of the more exotic riding animals favored by the League—rare giant geckos, desert spiders grown to impossible size by strange radiations—would occasionally go into killing frenzies or mating heats once they got within a few dozen yards of the wreckage, or so Alaeron had heard.

  Zernebeth sat rigidly upright in her black cloak threaded with bits of silver wire, looking at the peons in the courtyard with disdain as they scrambled out of the Yaga-walker's path. Alaeron was already sweating in his own coat, and he couldn't understand how the brutal Numerian summer didn't seem to affect Zernebeth—being a creature of the cold, it seemed she should be more susceptible to the heat, but no.

  Alaeron steered the walker through the courtyard and out the gates, toward one of the roads that radiated from Starfall like the arms of—well, a star. The guards on the gate paid them no mind, and the walker picked up speed as it hit the hard-packed road, and soon they were racing along the flat plains, bouncing alarmingly as they went. Alaeron pulled a rope that set off a horrific high-pitched squeal to warn anyone on the path out of the way. The warning signal had been his idea. Zernebeth didn't seem to enjoy the idea of running down peasants with the walker, but she didn't seem especially bothered by it, either. He'd convinced her to implement the safety measure by pointing out that such a collision could damage the armatures of the legs.

  The Mount loomed before them. It was the dominant feature in the landscape, so huge it cast a giant shadow for much of the day. Alaeron had no idea how high it was, but it was taller by far than the highest spire in Almas, literally the size of a mountain, rising from a relatively rounded base to fragmented peaks, all craggy with jagged spires. It was silver, in the main, though dark liquid streaks ran down the walls, some of them as broad as rivers, many of them collected by servants of the League. Some of those liquids were terrible poisons or deadly corrosives, but others were potent and addictive drugs. Or, rather, they had the effect of potent or addictive drugs; that obviously wasn't what they were, but simply a side effect. That was the difference between Alaeron and the arcanists of the League: they only cared what the mysteries of the Mount could do, while Alaeron wanted to know what they were meant to do.

  The skalds of Numeria told of the Silver Mount's arrival in the deep and distant past: a great screaming falling star that looked bigger than the moon and broke apart high in the sky, dropping fragments that exploded on impact, destroying farms and villages. No one knew where the ship (if it was a ship, and not a palace, or even, as some believed, a living thing) came from—were there other worlds in the sky? Had it come from outside, some other plane, and encountered an unexpected obstacle in the form of Golarion itself? Whatever its origin, the Mount had fed the livelihood of countless adventurers and plunderers—and been the death of many more. For decades it had been in the complete control of the League, and as the walker drew near, they passed checkpoints manned at first mostly by human servants and, as they reached the inner ring of barricades, by the terrible Gearsmen who made League control absolute.

  The name was a misnomer, Alaeron thought as one of the Gearsmen beckoned the walker toward a spot just off the road. He had seen clockwork automata, and these were nothing like those—the Gearsmen were humanoid, but their bodies seemed made of smooth metal, like cooled quicksilver, but with the color of burnished steel. Some of them seemed like mobile suits of armor—without the joints—while others had the sort of faces children would make in clay dolls with their fingertips: indentations for eyes, a slash for a mouth, noses without nostrils or nostrils without noses. They looked like sculptures of humans created by a beginning artist who didn't entirely understand anatomy or fundamental physical proportions—something about the length of legs, or the torsos, or perhaps the position of the elbows or knees, simply seemed off.

  But that very alien-ness made them even more menacing. They seldom spoke, and Alaeron had never heard their voices—from what he'd been told about the ear-ringing qualities of their vocal harmonics, he was glad. They served the League as unkillable enforcers, immune to the thrusts of swords, indifferent to the fall of clubs. There were stories about one being crushed by a boulder, only to crawl out from underneath—in pieces—and put itself back together again. They were the bedrock of the League's dominance, and the greatest treasure ever found in the Mount.

  And yet, Zernebeth did not like them, and avoided sending them on errands. When Alaeron had asked why, she'd looked around, lowered her voice, and said, "Because sometimes they do not listen. Ninety-nine orders out of a hundred, they will obey unhesitatingly, but sometimes, they refuse, or do the opposite of what they're asked. They do not question, and they certainly do not explain—they just act. And in those moments, the League has no recourse. How do you punish an invincible metal man? So all we can do is ...accept their disobedience. If the Gearsmen decided, for their own incomprehensible reasons, to murder us all in our beds, they could do so without trouble. They are our guard dogs, and our pack animals, but they could turn on us in a moment. And yet, without them, how could we rule?" She shrugged. "I care not for League politics. I am only interested in the work. But without the League's dominance, I could not do that work. Sometimes I think the decision to use the Gearsmen was the greatest mistake the League ever made, as dangerously stupid as the bargain the Chelaxians struck with the devils who gave them an empire."

  The Gearsman guarding their chosen entrance to the Mount showed no inclination to murder them. It simply showed them where to put the walker, then led them toward the Mount.

  "A moment," Zernebeth said, pausing some distance away from the base of the great ship. "The sun is nearly at its peak. Look."

  Alaeron looked, just as the sun emerged from behind the highest peak of the Silver Mount and poured its light down upon the structure. He gasped, averted his gaze, then looked back through slit eyes.

  The mountain caught the sunlight the way a faceted gem catches lamplight: throwing sparkles. But these were sparkles on a monumental scale, great flashes of silver light so bright they outdazzled the sun that spawned them, and the whole mountain seemed to coruscate with light—it was, Alaeron thought, like looking into the blazing heart of discovery itself, so beautiful it was overwhelming, so powerful it might strike you blind. And there were colors in the lights, too, a full prismatic dispersion, including hues he couldn't even put a name to.

  The perfect confluence of sun and Silver Mount lasted only a minute or so. Then the sun moved on ever so minutely, and while the mountain still gleamed, it no longer seemed to radiate light from every curved and jagged inch of its surface. "Beautiful," Alaeron murmured.

  "Yes," Zernebeth said matter-of-factly. "There are colors there, shades of blue, that I have only seen in the heart of glaciers. Sometimes birds fly over at just the wrong moment, get dazzled, and fall dead to the ground." She patted the side of the Mount in a friendly way, as if greeting a family pet. "Inside, it is much darker, but there is beauty there, too."

  The patient Gearsman decided they were ready and hauled open a ragged hatch that had been cut into the surface of the Silver Mount—using tools forged from even more durable substances found inside the Silver Mount, no doubt, as most tools didn't even make a mark on the mountain's skin. "We will be the first ones through," Zernebeth said. "This is new as of a few days ago, and leads to a passageway no one else has explored."

  Alaeron couldn't help it: he grinned, widely and unselfconsciously. "I can't wait."

  His mistress passed him an alchemical lantern that glowed greenly, but brightly, and checked her own supplies—enchanted knives, ropes, a prybar, mesh sacks that could block the dangerous emanations produced by some relics—and pronounced herself ready. "You first," she said, and nodded toward the dark opening.

  That made sense. Send the expendable apprentice. He ducked through the opening, lantern held aloft.

  The opening led to a gently curving corridor of metal, smooth and polished as a surgeon's instrument, just tall enough to stand upright—if he'd gone up on tiptoes, he would have hit his head. "Left or right?" he said, as Zernebeth entered behind him.

  "Left, to start." She marked the wall with a blob of paint that fluoresced in his lantern's glow. At his questioning look, she shrugged. "Always mark your path in the Mount. Sometimes things ...shift. It's easy to become lost."

  As he moved along the slightly convex floor, he tried to mentally orient himself: if the Silver Mount was a ship, and it had crashed nose-down, then this hallway was sideways and perpendicular to ...but his spatial skills failed him, partly because the passage itself changed, narrowing and widening at irregular intervals, sometimes so tight he had to turn sideways to pass, other times so wide a battalion of Gearsmen could have marched down it in formation. "Is it all like this?" he said, whispering despite himself.

  "No," she said. "Some passages are more ...organic. Others seem to be stone. Some are made of a substance clear as glass, but infinitely more durable. Those are frustrating—we can actually see things on the other side of those clear walls, relics beyond counting, but we have yet to find a weapon or tool that can so much as scratch the surface of the walls, and there are no doors."

  "No doors here, either," he said, a bit glumly. The passageway slanted downward at a sharp angle, so steep he wasn't sure they'd be able to climb back up if they went down it—they'd practically have to slide instead of walking to descend."

  Zernebeth grunted. "Adhesive?" she said.