I paused only long enough to reach inside the wall with the fingers of my mind; to trip a hidden catch, where none but a mage could use it. A section of the wall above the plinth turned sideways just long enough for me to slip through. Wading through the chest-deep trub, the slimy high-protein residuum of the wort, was an unattractive but necessary step; here in the midden, the trub was allowed to drain much of its water through gratings into the sewers, after which it was scooped out and pressed into the yeast cakes that are the only protein source most Tidehollow folk can afford.
At the buttress, I spent a bit more of my available mana to press the trub away from the stone; to give myself room to work, and also to clear a spot to set down the chunk of sangrite Bolas had given me. I didn’t know what dropping the sangrite into the trub might do, and I had no desire to find out.
There was no sign of any kind that a treasure might lie within the wall. This particular treasure had, in fact, been built into the wall at its first construction, when the brewery was expanded some seven or eight years ago-the brewery being a local venture financed and partly owned by the Infinite Consortium. Having built my career on etherium salvaged from inadequately concealed caches, I had made quite certain that this could not be found by anyone who did not already know it was there.
I pressed the flat of my left hand against the block I knew to be hollow, and cast my mind within it, allowing the device within to slowly define itself within my consciousness. Once it had, I tapped the device itself for the power necessary to recover it; being cast of pure etherium, it was a generous source. Though at clockworking I am not even competent, much less great, I know a trick or two; creating a localized hypertemporal field in an inanimate object is no large feat. Only seconds later, the stone collapsed to powder.
But as I reached for the device, my hand burst into flame-of a sort. I saw a flare of scarlet fire, and I felt my flesh char and peel back from the bone… but my instinctive recoil drew back my hand, uninjured. Not even smoking. And I had seen the flare and the flames only from my left eye.
The source of the pain was obvious. “Doctor Jest,” I murmured grimly. “Interesting. It seems you’re hooked into my optic nerves in addition to my touch/pain network.”
“WOW. YOU ARE A GIANT BRAIN, AREN’T YOU?”
I clapped the hand now to my left ear. The roar had been so overpowering that had it been actual sound, I should have been bleeding from a ruptured eardrum. That I was not, and that I had heard the titanic roar only with my left ear, made its source obvious.
“You can talk.”
“SO CAN YOU.”
Flinching, I could not help pressing my hand more tightly to my ear… though of course it could do no good at all. Bolas must have given this “Doctor Jest” access to my entire sensory system; the incredible roar had to be the result of direct neural stimulation, in very much the same fashion as had the pain. “Um, can you speak a bit more softly?”
“How’s this?” This time the voice was only that of a large man standing too close and shouting.
I took a moment to catch my breath and settle the triphammer race of my heart. “That’s… tolerable. Even softer would be better. Um, hello.”
“We’ve already met.”
“I recall,” I said grimly. “How should I call you?”
“Anything but late for breakfast.”
My hand went from my ear to my forehead. “You did not just say that. Please. You didn’t.”
“My friends call me Doc. You can call me Doctor Jest.”
I had to sit down. “Let’s go about this in something like an organized fashion, can we? So. You are conscious; are you a living creature, as opposed to a device?”
“Yes. Nineteen. And I’m smaller than a bread box. Whatever in the hells a bread box is. That one’s free.”
“Are you a naturally occurring creature? That is, you are not a homunculus, golem, nor other form of constructed life?”
“Yes. Eighteen. Wait-no, I’m not. Still eighteen. But… aw, crap. Truth is, I don’t know. I’m still kinda new at this consciousness business.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Why would I lie?”
Say rather, I thought, why would you tell the truth? “Why do I hear you only with my left ear?”
“Shrug. I might screw something up.”
“Did you just say shrug?”
“How am I supposed to gesture? Smoke signals?”
“All right,” I said. My head was pounding, and it wasn’t because of Doctor Jest. Well, it was, but not in the usual fashion, so… “All right, wait. Let me think.”
“I won’t hold my breath.”
“What?”
“Because I can’t, dumbass.”
“Look, can you… Can you please just be quiet for a moment? Not very long, I promise. Please.”
“Aww, you don’t like me anymore…”
“Please,” I said. What else could I do? To beg was my sole remaining option short of bashing my head into the stone until I lost consciousness and drowned in the trub.
Though that option became more attractive with every passing second.
After a few moments of careful questioning, during which I was tempted to kill myself only three times, my-our-situation began to come clear.
Doctor Jest was a fully conscious individual, who inhabited-or had some sort of magical bond with-my sensory nerves. He had exceptional control over them, though it seemed their activity remained largely electrochemical, as it is by nature-he spoke only through my left auditory nerves because misuse might cause nerve damage and deafness, and he was, as he’d said, still exploring the parameters of his power.
Beyond that, he knew-or believed, which amounted to the same thing, under the circumstances-that the binding that joined us could be unbound only by Bolas himself. His fate was linked with mine, since Bolas would have no reason to do either of us any favors until we finished his job. And any others that the dragon might think up in the meantime. Our fates were inextricably linked; whatever happened to me would happen to him as well.
I also discovered, to my considerable relief, that he could not read my thoughts. I was able to keep private my suspicion that Doctor Jest had no separate existence at all, being nothing more than a phenomenon of the alteration of my nervous system accomplished by Bolas in the process of repairing what Jace had done to my brain. I wouldn’t put it past the dragon, for example, to have built Doctor Jest into this meat arm he had inflicted on me.
We also determined why gathering sufficient power for any major effect seemed so difficult. Yes: ripping away my right arm had left me magically crippled-but that wasn’t the whole story. It seemed that while Doctor Jest had some not-inconsiderable powers at his command, he did not draw mana directly, but instead existed as a vampirelike mana parasite, living off my own reduced reserve.
“Another gift from Bolas,” I muttered.
“Yeah, I hate that scaly monkey dunker,” said Doctor Jest. “You know what he needs? A good hard boot to the nads. Do him a universe of good.”
“I don’t think he has nads,” I replied glumly.
“Can we try anyway?”
“You’re not thrilled to be working for him.”
“Is anyone? Is there a worse boss in the Multiverse?”
“If we ever find one, don’t tell Bolas,” I muttered. “He’d never resist proving us wrong.”
“So, how’re we gonna get him?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on,” Doctor Jest said. “You’re not the type to take this kind of rumpthumpin’ lying down.”
“You’ve been conscious less than three hours, and you’re already an authority on my type?”
“You’re planning something,” he insisted. “You gotta be planning something.”
“And if I am,” I said, “why would I tell you?”
“Aw, c’mon, Tezzie! I’m on your side! We’re in this together, shoulder to shoulder-ah, you know what I mean. Man to-well, to whatever I am.�
��
“Don’t call me Tezzie.”
“No wonder you got no friends.”
“I’m not interested in your friendship.”
“Aw, c’mon… I’ll let you call me Doc,” he offered.
Painfully aware-and I do mean painfully aware-that while no power at my command could cause Doctor Jest the slightest discomfort, he could make of my existence an endless carnival of suffering, I decided to compromise. “Tezz,” I said reluctantly. “You can call me Tezz.”
“All right! And we’re buds, right? For real. I’m your best friend?”
I sighed. “You’re my only friend, Doc.”
“That’s sad. Really. Man, do you have a crummy life or what?”
“If I do,” I said through my teeth, “you’re not making it any better.”
“Aww. That hurts, Tezz. Really.”
I decided to change the subject. Any discussion of hurt with Doc would potentially be cataclysmically one-sided. So I picked myself up-hmp, I suppose I picked us up to my feet-and stepped closer to the hollow stone that contained my device. “Doc?”
“Yeah, bud? Er, chum, you think? Best pal?”
“Doc, why did you stop me?”
“Huh?”
“When I reached for the device, you made me feel like my hand was on fire. Why?”
“Why? What am I, an idiot?”
With considerable exercise of self-discipline, I resisted offering an answer. “Why don’t you want me to pick it up?”
“Because whatever happens to you, happens to me,” he said slowly, overenunciating as though explaining the obvious to a small, not especially bright, child. “Can’t you see that whole friggin’ thing is just one big trap?”
“Of course I can,” I said. “I built it.”
Being a mechanist, when I went to hide a substantial amount of etherium, I had seen no reason to stash it as bullion or bars… and I have always had a knack for small, intricate automata. I had fashioned the entire stash into a trap-and a rather nifty one, if I do say so myself.
This trap would fishhook the hand of anyone other than me at first touch, and insinuate a network of hair-thin etherium wires transdermally, to hijack the thief’s nervous system and magically override the voluntary motor nerves, inflicting permanent paralysis. This would leave the thief alive, awake, and aware, but unable to do anything save, oh, for example, die of thirst. Or drown in a particularly large dumping of trub. Or meet some other unpleasantly lingering death.
No: the pertinent fact here was not that it was a trap, but that Doc could see it was a trap. My nifty little device no more resembled a trap than it did a clod of dung. Even an exceedingly skilled mechanist would have needed hours, if not days, to detect the hazard I had built into it-and would most likely have fallen victim to it in the process.
This meant that Doc had access to some portion of my memory, or that he could perceive things on a level that I could not. Or both. Any of these eventualities was interesting, and all were potentially significant. “How did you know?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Isn’t it?”
“Not to anyone but you.”
“Huh. No kidding?”
“Doc,” I said with uncharacteristic sincerity, “you have unplumbed depths of talent.”
“You’re welcome. That was a compliment, right? Right?”
I didn’t answer. My attention had been captured by a potential feature of the trap that had never struck me before. After all, if the device could hijack its victim’s motor nerves, it might do all manner of interesting things. It suddenly became obvious how I could tune it to hijack someone’s whole form and function-to make of its victim an unwilling telemin, acting wholly in my control-or as directed by the device, because I now saw also how I might imbue it with a consciousness of its own… to make it into, for example, a mechanical Doctor Jest. It was obvious. It wouldn’t even be difficult.
Curious that I’d never seen it before.
Perhaps among all the changes inflicted upon my form and function by Jace and Bolas, some few might have to be counted as positive. It was a sobering thought. Did I actually have something to thank Bolas for?
Or worse, to thank Jace Beleren for?
Distracted by this unpleasant possibility, I somewhat absently deactivated my device, only to discover there had been something I must have missed; I felt a tiny whisper of a mana release that had not been part of my design.
“What was that?” Doc said. “Did you see that? Was that supposed to happen?”
“No.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Yes.”
Above us on the wall, the stone began to burn.
“A bad kind of problem?”
“Potentially fatal.”
I had underestimated Jace again. Only now did it occur to me that anything I had known-anything-he could have taken from my mind when he attacked me. Including the location of my local etherium stash.
The burning stone sputtered and flared, white-hot now, so intense I had to shield my face with my useless right arm. The stone began to melt, dripping like hot wax, and where these droplets struck, what they struck ignited with unnatural intensity.
“We should be running away, right?” Doc said. “Why aren’t we running?”
“Fire is not Jace’s strength,” I said. “He’s a mind ripper.”
“That’s good news, right?”
“No.”
Where the stone burned away, the hole in the wall didn’t open onto the brewery. Through the hole I could see black clouds on fire, burning above a volcanic cone that spilled white-hot lava.
I was about to find out just how worried Jace had been about my possible return.
First through the fire gate came a glossy, jet-black lobsterish pincer bigger than I am, which latched on to the unburned stone, followed by another that did the same… Where they touched, the stone went red and soft, and from the joints of the pincers glared flesh that burned white as the sun. Because these claws did not belong to any variety of lobster, and I no longer needed to see the rows of compound eyes that were to follow, I intended to actively avoid seeing the upcurving jointed metasoma with a white-hot barb the size of a greatsword.
I am not, as a rule, given to either profanity or vulgarity, but when confronted at close range by hippopotamus-size scorpions whose very flesh is white-hot rock, I might be forgiven for indulging in both.
“Holy shit…”
Apparently Jace had been very worried indeed. Worried enough to have signed up at least one very, very serious pyromancer.
“That’s bad, isn’t it? I can tell it’s bad. What are we going to do?”
“We? Nothing. You’re going to shut up,” I said, “and I am going to run like hell.”
TEZZERET
THE HOME FIRES, BURNING
Being about to die did not strike me as sufficient reason to abandon either of my treasures. So it was that I undertook to flee with my etherium trap in one hand and my hunk of sangrite in the other. Even without having replenished my mana reserve, I can do surprising things with etherium by using its innate energy to power its action. Reasoning that the least flammable thing in the entire neighborhood was the neck-deep trub in the midden where I stood, I decided to put as much of it as I possibly could between myself and the magma scorpion.
I took a deep breath and went in headfirst. As I clawed my way blindly downward, my fingers found the grating of the sewer drain-a grillwork of chrome steel, set in cement. Encouraged not only by Doc yammering in my ear-“What are you doing? Are you crazy? It’s right up there! Why aren’t you running?”-but also by the sudden impact of something large and heavy landing on the surface of the trub above me, I engaged the etherium device with my mind.
Chrome steel is hard, but even the hardest metal can be overcome by the proper application of force. Working by feel, I brought out from the etherium an assemblage of gears, ratchets, and levers. Jamming levers through the holes in the grating, I then turned the device’s
innate mana wholly to working those gears and ratchets and levers to pry apart the bars of the grating as swiftly as possible… because the trub was becoming unpleasantly warm, and I could hear, through the slimy mass itself, a series of minor detonations, which I took to be the steam blasts generated as the scorpion struck blindly downward with its tail barb-a stinger made out of white-hot rock. Again and again and again.
I managed to avoid picturing what that stinger would do to my flesh.
With a squeal that came only dully to my ears, the bars gave way. Well-lubricated by the rotting, yeasty mass around me, I managed to slide through headfirst, and tumbled ten or twelve feet until I hit the sewage stream, which was only a few inches deep. It did nothing to improve the stench.
Entirely the opposite, in fact.
I pulled myself up from the muck and took a quick look around. Witchlight globes were strung every few dozen yards, enabling me to see a lot of straight tunnel to either side, and very little else.
“Hey, not bad,” Doc said brightly. “Now we run.”
“Not yet.”
“Yes yet,” he said, and punctuated his reply with a sensation that felt as I imagine it might if someone were to rip off my testicles. Slowly.
The pain dropped me to my knees. “If I pass out, we both die.”
The scorpion’s blazing stinger jabbed downward through the drain, unleashing a burst of steam and greasy smoke. “And dying is different from what’s about to happen exactly how?”
“You have to trust me.”
“Trust you? Never kid a kidder, chum.”
And somehow when he said it, chum sounded less like the word for pal than it did the word for the rotting fish guts one uses to attract sharks. “This is my hometown. I know every inch of it. That knowledge is the only chance we have.”
The pain vanished. “So what are we waiting for?”
The stinger struck again and again, and the sewer began to fill with smoke. I extended a hand-my right, from reflex, even though I couldn’t help flinching when it entered my field of view-and down through the drain and out of the smoke came my device, sprinting along on spider legs. I had it leap up and wrap itself around my arm, and then I passed the chunk of sangrite over to it. From there it was a simple matter of encasing the sangrite in etherium, and arranging the whole thing to make a sort of yoke, or a harness, holding the sangrite at my back and leaving my hands free.
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