Test of Metal p-4

by Mathew Stover

  I delved deeply into the mysteries of mana quenching and?theric tempering, and I invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana-sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles. It is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures-but not for long.

  I went days at a time without sleep, learning to use mana to keep myself alert and focused, for my nights were passed risking my life against bandits and my freedom against thief-takers to search out new and ever-larger caches of etherium.

  I learned to make my new arm do not only all the work of my old one, but everything else my imagination could devise. Though I am no more gifted a mage than I am a rhabdomant, I again found ways to exploit my minimal talents to accomplish maximal results. When my arm was completed, it comprised more than ten pounds of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip. Merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage-and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.

  One black midnight, I alone, without witness, assistant, or aid, performed the ritual that severed my arm of useless flesh and permanently attached the arm that would make a scruffy, ill-fed scrapper’s boy into a man to be reckoned with. A man with the power to revenge injury a thousandfold.

  A mage.

  When morning came and the Masters saw what I had achieved, they elected to elevate me to Mastery and immediately began preparations for the weeklong ceremony. I thanked them, and walked out from the Guild Hall that same morning, never to return. This time, I did not look back.

  I had what I’d wanted from them. Master is just a name. Names are nothing.

  Power is everything.

  I had not been out of the Mechanists’ Guild a week before I was approached by the Seekers of Carmot.

  It seemed the Seekers had been aware of me for some considerable time, as early as the first year of my apprenticeship to the artificer. I later learned that several of the rippers I had killed had been aspiring Seekers. The Anointed Fellows of the Seekers of Carmot had been most impressed, as these aspirants had been possessed of talent for magery in proportion to their avarice… yet they had fallen before a Tidehollow boy whose talent was limited to a knack with gadgets.

  When that knack had produced an arm of tempered etherium, the Seekers decided I might be useful, and so allowed me to study at their Academy.

  The Seekers of Carmot styled themselves a noble order, committed to the service of all Esper. The carmot from which they’d taken their name was an arcane substance necessary to the production of etherium, some sort of catalyst that allowed the Anointed Fellows to create etherium by infusing?ther into sangrite.

  They created etherium.

  Supposedly.

  And they would teach me the secret. Supposedly.

  And they were committed to giving etherium away until it became as common as dirt.

  Supposedly.

  The Seekers of Carmot had been the last thing I’d ever believed in.

  When I discovered the truth, I demonstrated to them that my talent wasn’t so much a knack with gadgets as it was a knack for using gadgets to kill people.

  In the end, I had come to appreciate my father’s lesson. Only two things would never fail me: death and my right arm.

  My arm was everything I had. It was everything I would ever have.

  When I awoke in that red crystal cave to find attached to my right shoulder an arm of mere flesh, already corrupt and rotting, that was exactly what had been taken from me.

  Everything.

  When I regained consciousness, I undertook to examine my new appendage. It appeared, in every functional sense, identical to the one I had severed some years before. Missing were only an array of minor scars across my knuckles and into the palm of my hand-souvenirs of a particularly tricky midnight etherium retrieval-and a much larger scar along my biceps, a knife wound. This scar, while I had still used my flesh arm, had been a useful reminder to never assume I had killed the last bandit.

  So: the limb very likely had been regenerated. Another extravagance of power-and an astonishingly potent personal affront. There is literally nothing else that could be done to me that would hurt as much, as deeply, and on so many levels.

  Without my real arm, the one I had created, I was nothing more than a Tidehollow scrapper. I had been made into my father.

  Except with a better vocabulary.

  I tallied up the facts of my situation, relevant to whose prisoner I was most likely to be: life, sanity, nudity, maiming, and the bitterest psychic wound I could even imagine.

  Framed in those terms, the conclusion was obvious.

  “Bolas.” I said it aloud, but not loudly. I knew I didn’t have to. “I know you’re here.”

  As a demon is said to be conjured by the sound of its name, after only a single heartbeat he materialized out of the rose-tinged gloom, all sixty-some-odd feet of twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon.

  “You always were clever,” he said, and casually backhanded me with one wall-size fist so hard that I flew across the cavern, slammed into a jagged wall, and sank to the floor, stunned into immobility.

  “Hello, Tezzeret,” said Nicol Bolas. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

  TEZZERET

  THE DRAGON’S JEST

  The hand I brought to my mouth came back bloody. Hot oil trickled down the back of my head: scalp wound. No concern there: my great mass of thick hair would both absorb blood and trigger coagulation. If any bones were broken, they didn’t yet hurt, though I anticipated that once the shock wore off, I would be in considerable pain.

  Bolas paced toward me across the cavern, smiling, which on a dragon indicates neither amusement nor friendliness. It’s a display of how many large and pretty teeth he has, and how sharp they are. “Tezzeret, Tezzeret,” he murmured, insufferably pleased with himself. “Tezzie-may I call you Tezzie?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  Almost too fast to be seen, his foreleg lashed out, and he seized me in his talons. “The list of what you can’t stop me from doing is, I’m pretty sure, infinite.”

  To demonstrate the truth of this, he tossed me sharply upward, as a child might a ball. I bounced off the ceiling, got a mouthful of fresh blood when my teeth clacked together and ripped open my cheek, and then tumbled helplessly back into his grasp.

  It occurred to me that Bolas might possibly have done all this simply for the pleasure of killing me personally.

  “I admit and confess that you are larger than I am,” I said, a bit thickly due to the blood and ragged scraps of the inside of my cheek. “You are stronger than I am. You can snuff my life with a thought. Can we skip the rest of your Intimidate the Naked Prisoner game and jump straight to what you want from me?”

  His talons closed around me so tightly that black splotches bloomed in my vision. “But I like this game,” he said. “What I like best about it is that it’s not over until I get bored. By then you’ll be free…” He smiled again. “Or lunch.”

  He let up on the pressure, as I’d known he would; if he aspired to mutilate an unconscious body, he had no need to use mine. “How long have you been here?”

  “Before just now?”

  This answer meant either that he thought me stupid, or that he was playing stupid.

  Stupider.

  I decided to explain. “You didn’t arrive by teleport-no air displacement. Nor did you shift in from the Blind Eternities-even you can’t planeswalk swiftly or accurately enough to make that sophomorically dramatic entrance. Finally, I could smell you.”

  “Smell me?” One scaly brow ridge took on a deeper arch. “Really?”

  “At first, I thought it was my armpits. I have two words for you, ol
d worm.” I held up a finger. “Dental.” I folded that finger and lifted the next. “Floss.”

  I fully expected him to crush me until I passed out; or, alternatively, that he would start bouncing me off the walls again. Instead, he did what I was least expecting: he chuckled and set me down. He then lowered himself into what might have been, for a dragon, a comfortable position, looking for all the Multiverse as though he’d just stopped by for a friendly chat.

  Bouncing off walls seemed to be a more attractive option.

  I waited for him to speak. He seemed content to simply recline on the crystal floor, wrap his tail around his neck, and chuckle. A dragon’s chuckle is very like rubbing two bricks together. Against your teeth. I didn’t wait very long; if I wished to play patience games, I would have chosen an opponent younger than, for example, human civilization. “You need me for something.”

  “Need you? Don’t insult me. It amuses me to employ you in a particular task. If you fail?” Bolas rather absently began to clean out his nose with the tip of his tail. “That will amuse me, too. If you succeed, you may be rewarded… with other tasks.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “The opportunity,” Bolas said, “to obey me by choice.”

  “I’ve had better offers.”

  “It’s not an offer,” the dragon said. “It’s a description of reality. Do you understand the difference?”

  “Let’s not start on what we do and do not understand,” I said. “What specifically do you want of me?”

  “Not yet. There is one feature of our new working relationship that I’ve really been looking forward to showing you.”

  “Are we back to Intimidate the Naked Prisoner already?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, we are, but with a new rule. As much as I enjoy bashing you into the rocks, the scent of your blood is making me peckish. And I can’t be wasting my life showing up to slap you around every time you need it. I’d hardly have time for anything else. So I’ve brought a friend for you.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “You do now,” he assured me, in a cheerfully evil tone, like a demonic used-carriage salesman. “But don’t worry, he won’t hurt your reputation. And he doesn’t have a reputation to worry about. I call him Mr. Chuckles.”

  “I’m bored already.”

  “I can fix that,” the dragon said. “Though I suppose you’re right-Mr. Chuckles is an undignified name. Let’s call him Jest, shall we? And make him a doctor. Doctor Jest. Do you like it? Doesn’t matter.” This seemed to tickle the dragon in some private way, as though it referenced a joke only he knew. “Doctor Jest, be polite. Introduce yourself to Tezzeret.”

  This introduction took the form of a shattering blast of agony so overwhelming that I instantly collapsed. It felt like being hit by lightning while I was roasted alive in wasp venom. Over and over and over. I spasmed into convulsions, which did me the favor of banging my head into the floor hard enough to knock me unconscious.

  Briefly.

  “I know you’re awake, Tezzie. Sit up.”

  My hand found yet another scalp wound. “Do I have to?”

  “Unless you’d rather get the invitation from Doctor Jest.”

  “All right. All right, don’t,” I said, my voice husky. I had probably been screaming. I didn’t remember. “Doctor Jest?”

  “You don’t think he’s funny? I just about laughed my tail off.”

  “What is it?”

  “He.”

  “He. Whatever. What is he?”

  “You don’t need to know,” Bolas said. “All you need to know about your new best friend is that he has only two purposes in life. The first, as you’ve discovered, is to cause you pain. Unsupportable agony, in fact.”

  “Anytime I do something you don’t like.”

  “Almost. I don’t ask Doctor Jest to read my mind. So he has some leeway; he’ll hurt you anytime he thinks you might be doing something I won’t like-or that you might be about to. Get it?”

  “So that ‘obey me by choice’ business was a joke.”

  “You never did appreciate my sense of humor.”

  “I get it,” I said. “You don’t have to show me again.”

  “The other thing Doctor Jest lives for is to make sure you don’t do anything foolish, like try to run away from me. At your first inkling of attempting to planeswalk without my express permission, he will put you right back here. And I think you understand that here is a place you can’t get out of on your own. Still with me?”

  “I told you: I get it.” I held up my right arm of meat. “Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it better if I’m not crippled. If this task is something you prefer I succeed at, give me back my arm.”

  “Well…” The dragon shrugged. “Can’t really help you. Sorry. Best I can do is cut off the new one.”

  “Give me my real arm and I’ll do it myself. I have before. Is watching me suffer your petty revenge more important than this task you raised me from the dead for?”

  “Raised you from the dead? Don’t flatter yourself. I undid some of Beleren’s damage to your brain, that’s all.”

  “Ah.” At the time, that was all I could think to say.

  “It’s kind of complicated. You were dead enough for me; I’m not a philosopher. He just didn’t bother to finish the job on your body. Probably thought you’re not worth the trouble.”

  Not worth the trouble. “I’ll have to thank him. Personally.”

  “If you find him, I wouldn’t mind thanking him a bit myself. He’d make a better agent than you ever will.”

  “And my arm?”

  “It was gone when I found you,” he said. “Probably a lovely parting gift from Jace. Lying in some swamp on Kamigawa, I’d guess-if he’d tried to take it with him, I’d have known. I did arrange for the new one. Don’t you like it?”

  “I’m not that attached to it.”

  The dragon gave me a cough’s worth of courtesy laugh. “So… wait, Tezzie. Really? You thought I raised you from the dead? You thought I took off your arm? Really?”

  “I was reasoning from available evidence.” And, I realized, my conclusion was accurate even though both of my premises were flawed; a curious phenomenon, and one that might bear further investigation.

  Bolas shook his head pityingly. “I know you have an irrationally high opinion of yourself, but seriously, Tezzeret, get a clue. You’re not remotely that important.”

  “Important enough for you to arrange all this.”

  “Tezzie, it’s not about you. Really. You’re here because I have spent a very long time setting up an exceedingly elaborate prank, and you’re the only person I know who’ll really appreciate it. You’re audience. Nothing more. Well-let’s say, you’re an educated audience.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “You’ll be impressed.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Satisfaction guaranteed or double your money back. Do you remember,” Bolas said, mock coy, “when we first met?”

  “Sure I remember. You wore red. The demons wore black.” Even the threat of agony wasn’t enough to make Bolas interesting. “Ah, the romance of Grixis when the corpse fungus blooms…”

  Bolas started scraping those bricks together again. “The question’s relevant, Tezzie. We met not long after you murdered the Hieresiarch of the Seekers of Carmot.”

  My jaw locked; playtime was over. “I murdered no one.”

  “You ripped a sick old man’s head off his shoulders and left it on the desk in his study,” Bolas said. “What should I call it? Self-defense?”

  “Call it a better death than he deserved,” I said through my teeth. “Amalex Pannet was just another bandit.”

  “A bandit? That wheezy old fart? What did he ever steal from you?”

  “Three years of service.” Even now, well beyond a decade on, the wound was raw. “Three years of devotion. Three years I spent doing their scut work. Enduring their petty humiliations. Three years st
udying their useless pretend wisdom to show them I was worthy of learning their made-up fraud of a mystery. Three years of belief in their horseshit.”

  “You sound like you’re angry all over again.”

  “Not again,” I said. “Still.”

  “After all these years? Whatever happened to forgive and forget?”

  “I don’t forget, and I don’t trade in forgiveness; I give none and I don’t expect to get any. There are consequences,” I said as evenly as I could manage, “for abusing my good nature.”

  Bolas snorted. “What good nature?”

  I sought to replicate his too-many-teeth smile. “The good may be rhetorical. The consequences aren’t.”

  “Oh, Tezzie, I’m flattered,” Bolas said, splaying one taloned foot against his chest like a blushing debutante. “A threat? Just for me? You shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s not a threat, Bolas. It’s a reminder.” I could play his redefinition game, too-better than he could.

  He pretended to find something interesting on the ceiling. “And what was your original disagreement with the Seekers of Carmot? You killed what, four of them? A respectable body count, especially against an order of mages. Why so angry?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know.” My jaw ached with strain. “The Seekers were your damned hand puppets in the first place! You invented the whole festering Order!”

  “Humor me.” The dragon turned his eyes on me, and the fake insouciance evaporated, leaving only bleak malice. “I’m about to spring the punch line, Tezzie. This little prank that I’ve been setting up for years. Decades. Play along.”

  This did not sound like a friendly request.

  “All right,” I said. I managed a deep breath, and another, and got a better grip on my temper. “All right. I joined the Seekers of Carmot for only one reason: to learn the secret of etherium creation. I had considerable hope invested in them and their secret. I had spent more than ten years, with great effort and at considerable personal risk, to amass the etherium for my right arm.”