City of the Fallen Sky Read online

  First there was dust, rising in a swirling curtain around them. Kormak approached, his hulking figure a dark shadow in the sandy mist. He hurled something toward them—a knife? a bomb? it was too dark to tell—but the object was caught in the unnatural wind. The force churned up the earth, gouging out rocks, scrub plants, and hunks of the desert floor and adding them to the expanding maelstrom. The noise became monstrous: Jaya was shouting, and Skiver was shouting back, but Alaeron just crouched over his relic in the small circle of safety, watching as Kormak’s feet left the ground and he, too, began to spin.

  The ring of destructive force got wider and wider as the Kellid tumbled end over end around them. Kormak was not giving in to the wind: he was trying to swim in the vortex, doing his best to claw his way toward Alaeron and the others. But even his ferocious dedication couldn’t overcome the power of the artifact. He rose up in the wall of dust, which was now at least twenty feet high.

  Skiver and Jaya were both shouting in Alaeron’s ear now, but he was watching, trying to time his moment to stop the artifact and send Kormak flying—ideally back to the east, or at any rate not to the west, where they’d have to step over his broken body on their journey later. But the Kellid was now just one dark shape among many, spinning by faster than the eye could follow.

  Jaya grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, and Skiver screamed in his ear: “The obelisks! The elementals!”

  Alaeron froze, remembering the view through Ernst’s spyglass: a thousand lights, each a bound elemental, held in place by the sigils inscribed on weathered obelisks. And he was sending an expanding circle of destructive force toward those artifacts ...

  The Pathfinder Tales Library

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  Song of the Serpent by Hugh Mattews

  City of the Fallen Sky by Tim Pratt

  Nightglass by Liane Merciel

  Journals

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  "Blood and Money by Steven Savile

  "The Swamp Warden" by Amber E. Scott

  "The Seventh Execution" by Amber E. Scott

  "Plow and Sword" by Robert E. Vardeman

  "The Box" by Bill Ward

  City of the Fallen Sky © 2012 Paizo Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Paizo Publishing, LLC, the Paizo golem logo, Pathfinder, and Planet Stories are registered trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Pathfinder Campaign Setting, and Pathfinder Tales are trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC.

  Cover art by J. P. Targete.

  Cover design by Andrew Vallas.

  Map by Robert Lazzaretti.

  Paizo Publishing, LLC

  7120 185th Ave NE, Ste 120

  Redmond, WA 98052

  paizo.com

  ISBN 978-1-60125-418-4 (mass market paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-60125-419-1 (ebook)

  Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  (Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

  Pratt, Tim, 1976-

  City of the Fallen Sky / Tim Pratt.

  p. ; cm. — (Pathfinder tales)

  Set in the world of the role-playing game, Pathfinder.

  Issued also as an ebook.

  ISBN: 978-1-60125-418-4

  1. Alchemists—Fiction. 2. Good and evil—Fiction. 3. Imaginary places—Fiction. 4. Fantasy fiction. 5. Adventure fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Pathfinder adventure path. III. Series: Pathfinder tales library.

  PS3616.R385 C58 2012

  813/.6

  First printing April 2012.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For Ginger, who never stops fighting for me.

  Chapter One

  No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

  No one who knew Alaeron—alchemist, arcanist, artificer—would call him a coward. He was never one to let the possibility of explosion, corrosion, or permanent nerve damage stop him from mixing together exotic chemicals just to see what might happen. He never missed the chance to crawl into the booby-trapped ruins of fallen civilizations in the hope of discovering some fragment of forgotten wisdom. He'd even been known to sneak into the well-guarded libraries of wealthy idiots to steal precious texts from the less deserving. When it came to seeking knowledge without pausing to calculate the cost, Alaeron was one of the most courageous souls north of the Inner Sea.

  But his courage was not the sort that leapt at the opportunity to start a fight with a couple of well-armed thugs, and so he hesitated at the mouth of a certain alleyway located between a weaponsmith's shop and his own modest laboratory in an unfashionable section of Almas, capital city of Andoran. He'd intended to use the alley as a shortcut home, and thus avoid walking past the tannery, because the stink of rendered animals tended to overwhelm his sensitive nose—and, in his lab, the sense of smell was sometimes all that stood between him and accidentally poisoning himself and half the neighborhood.

  Today, alas, the narrow pathway was occupied by two men of a curiously disreputable sort: dressed well enough to pass for clerks, but with scarred faces that suggested rougher work. They were engaged in such work as Alaeron stepped into the alley. One, who wore a mangy fur cap despite the day's warmth, had a woman pressed against the wall, an unnecessarily long knife pressed to her throat. The other, whose tattered left ear lent him some resemblance to a violent tomcat, slapped a cudgel against his open palm.

  The part of Alaeron that had survived by his wits in hostile territory was tempted to just step back out of the alleyway again and take the long way home, stink of rendered animal fat and all. But he'd seen too much casual cruelty visited on the weak in recent months, usually when he could do nothing to help. In this case, he could easily intervene.

  Unfortunately, his hesitation made things difficult. If he'd walked away, there'd have been no harm done—to him, anyway. And if he'd launched himself into the alley without a moment's thought, pulling a few of the prepared vials he always kept on his person from his coat and tossing them at the attackers, he might have neutralized them before they even realized he was there. But his hesitation made things com
plicated, because Tattered-ear caught a glimpse of him and turned around. His eyes were the yellow of an alcoholic who'd nearly used up his liver—Alaeron's father had a similar piss-colored gaze, near the end—and his lips were as shredded as his ear, as if they'd been sewn up once, and the stitches torn out by hand.

  "Move along," he growled, gesturing with his club.

  Alaeron sighed. "No."

  The man cocked his head, eyes widening in surprise, and then a sly smile crept across his face. "You hear that?" he called over his shoulder to his compatriot with the furry hat. "He says ‘no.'"

  The other thug just grunted, not taking his eyes off the woman. Who could blame him? She was something to see: great masses of black hair, eyes dark and deep, skin the dark brown of the glass bottles Alaeron used to store silver sulfide—she must hail from the south, somewhere in Garund. What brought her to Almas, and more particularly to this alley, with these men? Alaeron's curiosity was the source of all his troubles—but then, it was also the source of all his delights, and now he wanted to know her story.

  Only one way to find out: save her, then ask.

  "Are these men bothering you, miss?" Alaeron called.

  "Fool," she said. "Run away!"

  "See?" Tattered-ear said. "We're all in agreement. Now, do you want to leave this alley right now on your own two feet, or in an hour or so in a corpse wagon?"

  "Have you ever been to Numeria?" Alaeron said.

  Tattered-ear scowled. "What? What are you talking about?"

  "Noo-mare-ee-uh." Alaeron enunciated each syllable clearly, gesturing widely with his right hand while his left slipped into one of his coat's innumerable pockets. "Far to the north. A harsh land, where the dread Black Sovereign rules from his decadent throne. Where the dark arcanists known as the Technic League pick over the ruins of ancient fallen stars for anything they can use to terrorize, or cozen, or otherwise profit by."

  "Cozen?" the man said, bewildered. The woman and the man with the knife were both staring at Alaeron. He recognized the look. They thought he was a madman. Ah, well. Genius is so seldom understood in its own time.

  "I have been there," Alaeron said. "I have searched the ruins, cracking the seals on chambers no man of this world has ever entered before, and do you know what I found there? Besides strangely glowing fungi and a lot of broken glass and corrosive pink slime, that is?" He drew his left hand from his pocket. "I found ...this!"

  Tattered-ear stepped back, raising his club defensively, then lowered it. "What's that, then?" he said.

  "I honestly have no idea." Alaeron gazed at the metal object in his hand. It was the size of a hen's egg, a dull non-reflective sort of silver in color, etched with dark blue lines in a seemingly random zig-zag pattern. There was a depression at the top—or the bottom, or on one side, who could say?—just big enough for him to slip the tip of his index finger into. "I wish I knew what it was," Alaeron continued. "But I know what it does. It does ...this."

  He pressed his fingertip into the divot. The object grew warm in his hand. The light in the alley took on a subtle, blue tinge, and the man with the torn ear gaped at him, unmoving. His fellow thug was also frozen, as was the woman he menaced—and everything else.

  Well, everything else in the vicinity. Alaeron wasn't sure how far the relic's field of slowed time extended—it seemed to move with him, so he'd never found the edge—but it couldn't possibly extend to the whole world, or even the whole city. It extended far enough, though.

  Alaeron slipped the relic back into his pocket, reached out, and plucked the club from the man's hand, placing it behind a broken crate, out of sight. He took the other man's knife, jammed the blade into a crack in the stone wall on one side of the alley, and leaned all his weight into the hilt, grunting, until the blade snapped off.

  He was counting in his head all the while—"one hundred twenty, one hundred nineteen, one hundred eighteen," and so on—and he judged that he had time to kneel and bind the ankles of the thugs with a couple of lengths of twine. He always had various things in his many pockets. Twine was among the least dangerous. He found the remnants of some torn sacks among the refuse on the ground and used more twine to bind them around the thugs as makeshift blindfolds. That should slow them down. Of course, he could be using this time to flee and put distance between himself and the dangerous men, instead of devising small obstacles and humiliations ...but this was more fun.

  At the last moment he thought to check their coats for money—after all, reagents weren't free. While he was all right financially for the moment, that wouldn't last forever. Alas, neither man had more than a few copper coins. Alaeron took them anyway.

  By the time he took the woman's hand and placed it against the still-warm relic, his mental count had gotten to "thirty," so when she stumbled forward a step, gaping, pulled into his own accelerated timestream, he didn't take time to explain, just grabbed her elbow and propelled her out of the alley and along the next street, where various citizens stood frozen in mid-stride, -argument, -barter, -banter, or -flirtation.

  "You're a wizard?" she said, and her accent was disappointingly non-exotic. Her ancestors clearly hailed from distant lands, perhaps even the depths of the Mwangi Expanse, but she sounded like any other woman Alaeron might encounter here in Andoran.

  She was rather more pleasant to look upon than usual, though.

  "Not a wizard, no, no," he said. "Just a tinkerer, that's all. Though I didn't make this device. I found it, and I'm trying to understand its purpose."

  "Seems obvious," she said, nodding toward the frozen people, the bluish air, the whole frozen world.

  "No, I don't think so. I believe the slowing of time is just a side effect, not what the relic is meant for." She frowned, and, as always, Alaeron attempted to fill the silence with something he found fascinating, without giving much thought to whether others would agree with that opinion.

  "It's impossible to know, of course, but I think ...well, look at it this way: Say you'd never seen a tea kettle before. You see one sitting on a stove, and it suddenly begins venting steam and emitting a piercing whistle. You'd have no idea what the point of the shrieking thing was—an alarm system? Some sort of terrible local musical instrument? An inefficient method for steaming vegetables? It would almost certainly never occur to you to pour the boiling liquid inside over some leaves, wait a bit, and then drink the resulting concoction. So it is with many relics—we can observe what they do, but we can't always tell why they do it, or why anyone would want them to do such a thing in the first place."

  By the time he finished his little speech, normal time had caught up with them, and if anyone found the sudden appearance of a pale man and a dark woman striding along at a good clip peculiar, no one let on. Almas was a tolerant city. If people wanted to go appearing out of nowhere, that was their business, as long as they didn't bother anyone.

  "We'd better get off the street," he murmured. "Care to come into my workshop?"

  She glanced around, then nodded. "Yes, is it—"

  "Just here." He steered her toward a low stone building, fitting his key into a lock of his own devising, twisting it once right, then once left, then once right again, then counting very slowly to five—better safe than asphyxiated by a gas trap—before turning the knob and easing the door open. He gestured, and the woman slipped inside. Alaeron came after her, taking a moment to rearm the trap above the door, and turning to smile at his guest.

  The smile was wasted on her. She was staring at Alaeron's lab. He tried to see it as a stranger would, but immediately gave up. Everything was too well-known to him—every beaker, every retort, every length of tubing, every rack of neatly stoppered vials, tops daubed with colored wax so he could tell which was which at a glance. Alaeron lifted a pile of books from a bench and gestured for her to sit, then bustled around one of the worktables. "Something to drink, ah ...what's your name?" he asked.

  "Jaya." She looked around at the potions and philtres and tinctures and shook her head slowl
y. "As for the drink, no, thank you." She paused. "But I should thank you for trying to help me back there."

  "I'm Alaeron. And just trying to help? I'd say I succeeded, wouldn't you?" He poured the last of his wine into a leather-wrapped cup and took a sip. Thin stuff, and sour, but better than water.

  She sighed. "Those men weren't muggers. They work for someone who believes I owe him money. He'll simply send more people after me."

  "Ah," Alaeron said. "Moneylenders of the less reputable variety. I may have need of such a man myself, but I don't suppose I'll ask you for a recommendation. Their methods of collection seem a bit harsh." Andoran was famed for the honesty of its banks—bankers who charged excessive interest could be charged with extortion and exiled—but despite the famously liberal policies of the legitimate financial institutions, there were still a few men willing to loan money to people the banks couldn't—or wouldn't—deal with: new immigrants without means, criminals trying to finance their endeavors, desperate gamblers with a history of defaulting on loans, and the like. He wondered which Jaya was. Perhaps all three.

  Jaya looked down at her hands. "I'm afraid I've made trouble for you. If my, ah, business associate finds out who you are, he might send someone to teach you not to interfere with his dealings."

  Alaeron waved that away. "I've been pursued by scarier men, believe me. If your situation has reached the point where people with knives are attacking you in alleys, perhaps you should consider leaving town? I've bought you enough time for that, anyway. I just advise you not to go north. At least, not too far." He shuddered.

  "Were you serious, about Numeria? I've never known anyone who came from there, but of course I've heard the stories. So outlandish ..."

  "Outlandish? Perhaps, but Numeria is the outlands, or near enough. Home to a thousand impossible things. I'm not from there—I'm a child of Andoran, actually—but I spent some time there not long ago, pursuing my studies."

  "What studies are those?"

  She seemed genuinely interested—rare, in Alaeron's experience, so perhaps she was just being polite because he'd saved her from being killed or at least cut up a bit by way of motivating her to pay her debts. He wasn't one to pass up a sympathetic audience, but the true details of his time in Numeria were complex, just this side of unbelievable, and painful to recollect, so he simply smiled widely and said, "Oh, this and that. Alchemy, mainly. Relics. Really any knowledge that's been forgotten, or has yet to be discovered. The study of why things are the way they are, and how they might be changed."