Test of Metal p-4

by Mathew Stover

  This took barely a second, but in that time the cement around the drain burned away, and the top curve of the sewer collapsed, dropping a very large, very hot arthropod into the sewage, which did nothing at all to improve its temper; nor did the instant blast of superheated steam that very nearly blew it back up to street level. Catching itself at the rim, it started toward me along the ceiling, leaving a trail of burning footprints.

  This was when two more of the creatures clambered down through the hole and clattered along after the first.

  “Three?” I said. “Really?”

  I could just imagine Jace whipping up this little trick with his pyromancer, whistling cheerfully as they worked, thinking You know, one indestructible monster just isn’t enough. Better double the order.

  And one to grow on.

  “Um, hey there, Native Son?” Doc chirped in my ear. “Are we running yet?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “Yes, we are.”

  And we did.

  Pelting along the sewer tunnel as fast as my legs could carry me, I very soon discovered a piece of compelling evidence in favor of Bolas’s story that I had not, in fact, been raised from the dead: I found myself gasping and stumbling with fatigue in under a minute-very like how I might if I’d spent a span of time getting no exercise more strenuous than breathing. I was forced to funnel mana into my legs, which burned my limited reserve even faster.

  And behind me clattered the magma scorpions. They were gaining.

  “How much do you know about these things?” Doc hissed in my ear.

  “Not… a lot.” I took a sharp turn into a side tunnel that sloped more sharply downward. Running downhill was vastly easier, and I picked up speed. “They’re not… local.”

  “Really? There’s something you don’t know everything about? Stop a second-I gotta mark my calendar.” Doc, having no need to breathe, kept up a running commentary that made thinking even more difficult than being chased by indestructible monsters.

  “Magma scorpions,” I said between gasps of breath. “Shells… unbreakable. And hot… set afire… anything they touch. The barb… venom… magma… temperature of a planetary core…”

  “Oh, awesome. So if they don’t grab us and burn us to death, we get spiked with planetary core gunk in the back? That’ll leave a mark.”

  “No,” I wheezed. “Steam burst… blow me to pieces. Nothing left… to mark.”

  “That’s comforting. Um, hey, it sounds like they’re gaining. Are they gaining?”

  The growing heat on my backside told me all I needed to know. “Want me to… stop and look?”

  “Never mind.”

  It seemed, however, that our impending mutual demise was not enough to make him be quiet. “They’re still coming. They’re still gaining. Don’t they get tired? I mean, they’re really just giant bugs, right?”

  I did not have the breath to explain to Doc that while ordinary bugs-arthropods in general-are cold-blooded, and thus tire quickly when they overheat, magma scorpions are exactly the opposite; the heat generated by exertion makes them stronger. They tire only when they stop, which they weren’t going to do until I was on the well-done side of dead. Not to mention that they are an apex predator in their ecosystem, fearless, that their brains are larger than mine, and that they are, generally speaking, as intelligent as a medium-size dragon. And nearly as tough; there are only six ways to kill them, of which five would remain out of reach for too long to be useful.

  “Um, hey,” Doc said. “They sound different.”

  “What?” I was too busy running to waste time listening.

  “Still gaining-but down a third.” Doc, it seemed, could use my nervous system more precisely than I could. File the data.

  I stifled a curse that I didn’t have breath for anyway. “That means… there’re only two… there.”

  “That’s good news, right?”

  “They’re not… bugs,” I rasped. “The other… gone ahead to cut us off…”

  “Oh. That’s bad.”

  I declined to comment on his penchant for stating the obvious, because to do so would make me guilty of exactly that.

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’m open… to suggestions…”

  “Ohhh, sure, now he wants my advice. Yeah, let’s ask the guy who’s been alive for, like, three hours to come up with a plan. Great idea!”

  Two hundred yards ahead, the roof of the sewer burst into flame, burning so hot and fast that molten gobbets of burning cement cascaded into the sewer, blasting a wall of superheated steam toward us.

  “Can’t you fight them?”

  “I can,” I panted grimly. “Just not today.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Same… as before. You… shut up and I… run.”

  If there are guardian spirits of fortune somewhere in creation, they must have been smiling upon me then; just ahead was a dump valve.

  When hurricanes blow in across the Sea of Unknowing, the huge surge in rainfall can overfill the standard sluice pits around Tidehollow in less than an hour. The sewers are designed with dump valves that can be triggered from the city service center above to divert some of the billions of gallons of water and sewage that otherwise might drown the slums altogether. This was not from any concern for the residents, but only to avoid poisoning the fisheries that are Vectis’s main source of protein.

  “What? You’re stopping? Why are you stopping?”

  “Shut up.”

  I reached up to the gearing of the valve control and sent a shining thread of etherium up along my arm and gave it half a second to spread through the mechanism. I yield to none in my skill with devices; what another being can design, I can subvert, which I proved by causing an earsplitting screech of half-rusted metal as the valve into the dump shaft ground itself open. The etherium was warm to the touch as it trailed back up my arm, almost as though pleased with a job well done.

  “Great work!” But when I looked down, Doc discovered why it was called a dump shaft as opposed to, say, a dump tunnel-it is, in fact, vertical. “Um… really? Isn’t that kinda steep?”

  “Yes,” I said, and dived headfirst into darkness.

  Doc’s reply, “YeeeaaaAAAHHHH!” screeched in my ear as we hurtled downward, free-falling for some seconds. This was enough time for me to recover a bit of my breath, which would become vital, according to my best estimate, in a minute or so. Give or take ten seconds.

  “Hey…” he said uncertainly when he finally gave up screaming. “There aren’t any witchlight globes in here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then where is that light coming from?” He was referring to the rosy glow that now began to catch highlights on the shaft walls.

  I said, “Where do you think?”

  “Oh, come on! Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m starting to see why nobody likes you.”

  “Not now,” I said, tucking my knees while I reached out and brushed the shaft wall with my fingertips, just enough to flip myself feet-downward. “This is going to hurt.”

  “See, that’s exactly what I’m-”

  This was as much as he managed to get out before we hit the slant at the bottom of the vertical shaft. I was wrong about it hurting; the impact was a shattering blast that whited out my vision for a second or two. It would hurt later. After I came out of shock.

  If I lived that long.

  The slant was wet and covered with thick oilmoss, which meant that we slid along it not much more slowly than we had fallen. I had plenty of time to peer backward and see the following magma scorpion hit the slant-and set the oil moss instantly ablaze.

  Flames licked down toward us even faster than we could slide “What, fire?” Doc said. “You knew it was gonna catch fire?”

  “No.” I chalked it up to the exigencies of planning a clever escape while running for one’s life. “Take it as a lesson to shut up when I need to think.”

  “It’s not much of a lesson if le
arning it kills me!”

  “We’re not dead yet,” I said. “Chum.”

  At which point we burst down from the shaft through a cavern ceiling to the terminal chute of the spillway, whose semi-radical angle was shallow enough to send us skipping across the surface of the semicoagulated goo of the collection pool instead of burying us in it.

  “Hey, not bad,” Doc said as our spinning slowed. “Maybe you are a Giant Brain after all.”

  “I believe the appropriate phrase is, under the circumstances,” I said, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  I turned so that I could start sculling us toward the shore, just as several tons of burning magma scorpion hurtled out of the terminal chute. Straight for us.

  “This was your plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are completely-”

  The rest of his assessment was lost as the magma scorpion splashed down into the collection pool; instead of skipping across the surface as we had, the magma scorpion detonated with the titanic BOOM of a catastrophic volcanic event. White-hot stone went everywhere, and entire segments of scorpion armor flew shrieking like a lobster in the pot through the dank Tidehollow gloom. A huge swelling shock wave picked us up and hurled us onto the bank. I scuttled back from the muck, which had now caught fire with an odor very much like one would expect from well-fermented burning sewage.

  “Did you do that?” Doc sounded awed. “Sweet mother of petrified dingleberries…! How did you do that?”

  “That steam-burst effect,” I said with what I felt was, under the circumstances, entirely justified satisfaction, “works both ways.”

  “Wow. I mean, wow. Good plan!”

  “Thank you.” I jogged away from the collection pool even as people from the surrounding hovels began to stream out to see what the noise had been.

  “Where we going now?”

  “Tide caves.”

  “Tide caves?”

  “They lead to open sea.”

  “You’re saying-”

  “I’m not saying. Here, watch.” I stopped and looked back. In the uplight from the burning collection pool, I could clearly see one magma scorpion scuttling sideways across the cavern wall below the dump shaft. Even as I looked, the other one came out and went the other direction.

  “I believe what they’re going for is called, excuse the expression,” I said, “a pincers maneuver.”

  “Ah, I, ah…” Doc stammered. “Um, all right. We can run now.”

  “Thank you.” But when I started to run, the battering I’d taken these past few minutes finally announced its presence. Vigorously. Though it didn’t hurt nearly as much as a shot from Doctor Jest, it was enough to slash my foot speed to a limping stumble. “Can you do anything about the pain?”

  “Without doing permanent damage? Only this,” he said, and my whole back from neck to heels burst into flame. Metaphorically, but nonetheless vividly.

  This cleared up my running problem admirably. Not that I was in any way grateful for Doc’s assistance.

  “The human pain system,” he said conversationally, “is an interesting place. Ever notice that when you break your toe, you forget all about your headache?”

  I did not reply, as I needed all my breath for screaming.

  “Huh, wait-how’s this?” Instead of being on fire, I felt as though a colony of soldier ants had taken up residence inside my spine and was currently exploring its new territory. Thousands of ants marching along under my skin, along my veins, burrowing into my muscles, crawling around the inside of my ears…

  “Tolerable,” I said through clenched teeth. At least it didn’t hurt.

  “Itching uses the same nerves as touch/pain-that’s why scratching works, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “And thank you so much for mentioning scratching.”

  But at least we were mobile, which was fortunate, given that the magma scorpions had already rounded the collection pool and were nearing flat ground behind us. I ran with not only every ounce of my own energy, but with all the mana I had left. There was no point saving it for later until I found some indication that I would have anything resembling a “later.”

  The curious residents of the neighborhood gave back as I ran toward them. It seemed no one was interested in stopping, or even getting significantly in the way of, a large naked running man covered in fermented shit.

  “Aren’t you gonna warn people?”

  “Of what?”

  “Uh, giant, killer rock-bug monsters that set everything on fire?”

  “I believe,” I said, “the situation is self-explanatory.”

  This was amply demonstrated as people around us began to not press away from us so much as run after us, presumably on the assumption that having survived one of the beasts, I might actually know where I was going. This was a development of which I thoroughly approved, as a large mob of people at my back might slow the magma scorpions enough to let me reach a sculler skiff before they could overtake me-which was why I was astonished and no little amount dismayed to find myself stopping and turning back to the swelling crowd that followed.

  “They’re after me!” I shouted with all of my considerable natural lung power. Amplification would have expended mana that I could not spare. “Stay out of their way and they will not harm you! They’re after me!”

  They must have gotten the message, as they scattered in all directions, leaving me with a very clear view-vividly illuminated by the great swathes of fire that roared up from everything they touched-of the two remaining monsters coming after me faster than ever.

  I turned and, excuse the expression, streaked away.

  “Oh, sure, when I want to warn people, the situation is self-explanatory-”

  “Shut up.”

  There was very little I could do to evade them here in Tidehollow, besides which they were almost certainly tracking the etherium that had triggered their summoning-etherium I had no intention of abandoning. Ever. My best remaining idea was to run tiny hair-thin wires out of the etherium on my back, and stab them into my hamstrings and buttocks, using the etherium’s innate energy to add strength to my failing muscles and send us along at a very brisk clip.

  “This is good. This is fast,” Doc said. “How come we didn’t do this before?”

  “Because you never stayed quiet long enough for me to think of it.”

  “Awww…”

  “If you shut up now, I might be able to gimmick a way to fly.”

  “Seriously? Because that’d be really-”

  “Shut up.”

  He actually did, for a brief interval, during which I did not endeavor to think up a way to fly; I was too busy trying to think of a way to kill him.

  All too shortly, I ran out of ground. A lightning detour during a second or two that I was out of their line of sight sent me skidding down a steep and slippery path that ended in a salt-caked bank of an utterly, utterly still pool. Only a few yards beyond the shore, the pool and the cavern overhead faded off into dank and impenetrable night. The bank around me was featureless save for the sculler’s cleat of worn-smooth moonstone, glowing with a soft pearlescent light that did nothing to hold back the gloom.

  “Awesome!” Doc said. “Now all we have to do is swim-”

  “No.” I clapped a hand to the back of my head, and as I had expected, the exertions of the chase had reopened the scalp wound with which Bolas had so considerately supplied me. I took the handful of my blood and smeared it into the slightly concave summoning dish on the top of the sculler’s cleat, hoping that the admixture of sewage wouldn’t interfere with the cleat’s magic.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait.

  “We’re not swimming? I can make you-”

  “Do you know what sluice serpents are?”

  “Are they as bad as magma scorpions?”

  “Not remotely. But they are entirely bad enough to kill me.”

  “You mean us.”

  “There are also three distinct speci
es of kraken that use these tide caves as their spawning ground. Kraken are viviparous, and the young are born hungry.”

  “Uh. Yeah. I get it. We can wait.”

  The clatter of armored feet announced the approach of the magma scorpions even before the tunnel showed the light of the fires they left in their wake. I waded out into the tide pool as deep as I dared, salt water doing such unkind things to my varied array of cuts and scrapes that for a moment, the sting overwhelmed the itching.

  The magma scorpions moved toward me from the tunnel mouth with gratifying caution. One stayed on the bank, scuttling back and forth to cut off escape in that direction, while the other went to the cavern wall and began to climb.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “She.”

  “You can tell? How can you tell?”

  I glanced up to the erosion-pitted limestone of the cavern’s ceiling. “That’s where she’s going.”

  “What’s she think she’s gonna do from up there?”

  “Fall on us.”

  “Um…”

  “Summoned creatures usually accomplish their bound task or die in the attempt. Or-like this one-both.”

  “Uh… can you unbind them? Send them home?”

  “Not today.” To avoid more whining, I offered a scrap of hope. “But this kind of trigger-based summoning has a fixed amount of mana attached to it. Without a mage to maintain their presence, they’ll return to their own plane when the fixed mana is exhausted.”

  “Which will be when?”

  “No matter what everyone says about me,” I said, “I don’t actually know everything.”

  “Oh, ha ha. Ha. So what’s the plan?”

  “You need me to say it again?” A sudden stabbing crick in my neck forced my head back and turned my face toward the ceiling, where the magma scorpion was picking its way in our direction. “Stop that.”