Test of Metal p-4

by Mathew Stover

  The crick only intensified. “I want to see.”

  “I need my eyes for something else right now.”

  “More important than dying?”

  “How about instead of dying?”

  “Fine.” The pain vanished. “I’m in.”

  “Thanks so much.” I turned away from the bank and, as I had hoped, caught sight of a silent, spectral shape approaching through the gloom, gaining solidity as it came. Having a great deal less to fear from scullers than most, I have availed myself of their services in the past. Familiarity, however, did nothing to put me at ease as the creature poled its skiff toward us out of the darkness.

  The skiff had witchlight globes hanging from both its upcurved prow and similar stern, but while these lights were easily seen, they did not actually illuminate the shroud of shadows within the craft. The sculler itself was visible only as a thin drape of hooded cloak in the darkness. Its sleeves draped along skeletally thin arms fleshed with corpse-pale skin as it leaned on its pole to drive the skiff forward.

  “Uh, did I miss something?” Doc said dubiously. “Did we get killed already and just now woke up in Grixis?”

  I extended an arm, and the sculler bent his course toward me. Lacking leisure for haggling, I wasted no time in clambering aboard.

  The shadowy cloak turned the infinite black of its hood toward me, and one clawlike hand held the skiff pole vertical, motionless in the water. I extended my right hand for the creature’s inspection, but the sculler did not react.

  “What’s going on? Why isn’t it moving?”

  “They don’t start until they’re paid.” I touched my left eye. “We’re negotiating the price.”

  “This is negotiating?”

  I touched my temple with a single finger. “They don’t speak. No one knows if they understand language, or even hear. They don’t make noise of any sort. A habit you should cultivate.”

  The sculler did not move.

  Two fingers, and still no response.

  A glance back to check on the magma scorpion’s progress gave no reassuring news; even though the monster was picking its way with great caution, we had perhaps a minute.

  I put four fingers against my temple.

  “What do these buggers charge?”

  “Something of value.”

  “Erm.”

  “Something of value to me. Or I would have offered you already.” I laid my whole hand against my temple.

  “What’s with the fingers?”

  “I’m offering memories.”

  “Memories?”

  “Five of them. There are some experiences I cherish,” I said. Few enough, but some. “It doesn’t appear to be interested. Nor in my eye, and it doesn’t want my right arm.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Which is the problem.” Another glance back, and the magma scorpion twitched its metasoma at me, squeezing a handful of its burning venom from its barb. With a jerk of its tail, it flicked the white-hot glob of magma in my direction.

  The venom fell a few yards short. The steam burst it created rocked the skiff.

  “How about some of that etherium?” Doc was starting to sound desperate.

  “I’ll die first,” I said.

  “I can make you-”

  “You can make me pass out. Then we both die. Good plan.”

  The magma scorpion hurled another glob of venom, which blew apart when it hit the surface of the water and managed to splatter enough of itself up onto the bulwark to start a small fire on the far side. And, apparently understanding that we were not going to be escaping back into Tidehollow, the other magma scorpion had taken to the cavern wall as well, and was working its way toward us rather more swiftly than had its companion.

  “Wait-how about the sangrite? You’ve been hauling that chunk of petrified blood from the hells to Grandma’s and back again-it has to be important to you!”

  I reached behind my neck and had the etherium deliver the sangrite to my hand, which was as close to admitting he’d had a good idea as I intended ever to come.

  As its dull rose glow warmed my hand, the sculler-for the first time in my experience-showed interest in an item before it was even offered. It released its pole and took a step toward me, leaning forward to get a better look. The sculler extended one long-fingered, skeletal hand, as though the creature wished to feel the warmth of the sangrite with its own withered flesh.

  This gave me considerable confidence in my bargaining position.

  The etherium of my trap device had never been tempered or treated for hardness; it would be useless to try and form it into a blade capable of cutting the crystal. However, the near-infinite ductility of the metal offered an option. One of the hair-thin wires that had been feeding strength to my legs detached itself and quested over the surface of the crystal until it found one of the glowing flaws. There, I had it insinuate itself into the crystal, forcing more and more metal into the flaw until the sangrite cracked, calving a sharp-pointed shard roughly the size and shape of my forefinger.

  The sculler’s hand struck like a snake, snatching the shard from the air. It shook its other hand free of its cloak and cupped the crystal with both, bringing it up before the shadow gape of its hood as though entreating the blessing of a holy relic.

  A magma bomb now came from the other monster, and this one managed to strike full on the stern, setting the entire rear of the skiff on fire. The sculler didn’t seem to notice; it stood enraptured by the sangrite. I stood, grabbed the sculler’s forgotten pole, and shoved us away from the shore.

  “What’s with the boatman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come again?”

  “I don’t know,” I snarled, leaning into the pole to gain velocity. “We have bigger problems.”

  The magma scorpions seemed to be unwilling to let us simply float away, even though the aft quarter of the skiff was now burning merrily. They cast aside caution and began scampering after us at a profoundly dismaying speed.

  Leaning upon the pole for all I was worth, I managed to get us out through the cavern’s mouth into the echoing reach of the Hollows before the scorpions could catch up-but the Hollows are no place to sail blind. The numberless caves and caverns extend for tens or even hundreds of miles; some are navigable, some are dead ends, and some present in various hazards, from razor-sharp slashcoral to periodic sinkholes and tide spouts.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

  “Away from the monsters.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. I meant, do you know your way around down here?”

  “No.” My breath was going short again, but at least I didn’t have to run anymore. “Nobody does.”

  “Oh, great. What about a map?”

  “If there were maps,” I wheezed, “no one would need scullers.”

  As if triggered by this exchange, the sculler standing at my back suddenly screamed.

  The earsplitting shriek it unleashed was like nothing I’d ever heard: a horrible ragged ululation that rose and fell by no pattern I could discern. I discovered that even despite Doctor Jest’s phantom soldier ants, I could distinctly feel every hair on my body attempt to stand on end at once. I was possibly the first living creature in the history of Esper to hear a sculler’s voice… and that voice was eerie as a banshee’s wail and horrible as the death scream of a berserk dragon.

  “Uh, yow,” Doc said. “And probably yikes. Plan B?”

  Through the rising flames of the stern, I could see the magma scorpions scuttling up toward the gloom-shrouded ceiling. Without the sculler to take us to the open sea, we could only hope to keep ahead of the monsters until the summoning expired. This, given my physical exhaustion and mana-depleted condition, would be more difficult than it sounded-and it sounded impossible. Not to mention the further complication of the skiff being on fire.

  On top of all this, the skiff-pole lost contact with the tide pool’s bottom suddenly enough that I very nearly pitched over t
he side; without knowledge of the caverns’ submarine topography, I had blundered into water too deep for the pole. And there weren’t any oars.

  We were adrift.

  With a long, slow sigh, I sat down, unshipped the pole, and laid it across my knees.

  “What are you doing?”

  I was too exhausted to play any more banter games. “Getting ready to die.”

  Before either of us could pursue this line of conversation, the sculler suddenly spread its hands, raising them wide to the ceiling as though imploring a benison from some dark god. The ragged edge left its shriek, making it sound less like a scream and more like some kind of call…

  The sculler clapped its hands together with great force, driving the crystal of sangrite through both of its palms, nailing its hands together in an attitude of prayer. Some sort of milky ichor ran from the wounds, and while I was still processing the idea of being not only the first human to hear a sculler’s voice, but also the first to see a sculler’s blood, the creature’s hands burst into flame.

  They burned at first like a torch, but soon brightened, and the color of the flame became yellow as a watch fire, and very shortly the light they gave off was white as the inside of a blast furnace, along with a palpable heat. By this time, the creature’s arms were on fire to the elbows, and its call had begun to modulate, taking on a definite tone and a sort of rhythm, and seemed to be gathering harmonic overtones in the echoes from the cavern walls…

  The sculler wasn’t screaming. It was singing.

  And the echoes and harmonic overtones were no artifact of the tide caves-they were the answering voices of dozens of scullers, hundreds, who came poling their silent skiffs out from the dark-shrouded caves around us, forming an eldritch chorus of voices never raised before.

  The flames now spread across the sculler’s chest and up and down its cloak… and then like a scrap of burning paper, the sculler lifted into the air.

  It rose like the sun, and cast out the cavern’s permanent gloom.

  Even in the face of imminent death I could not restrain my awe. I found myself quite overcome with an inexplicable sense of sanctity, a distinct intuition that what we were witnessing here was something holy, beyond what mortals are meant to see-a sensation with which I was, to the surprise of no one who has ever known me, largely unfamiliar.

  But now, here, I found myself flooded with awe… and gratitude.

  Perhaps this is one more way in which I am not like other men: to be granted a glimpse of some deeper truth-a hint of mysteries beyond the mundane puzzles of day and night and health and work-meant more to me than my own life. Though perhaps other folk are not so different after all. Perhaps such a sight would mean fully as much to anyone who might ever be granted the gift of seeing it… but they’ve never lifted their eyes.

  I know that there are no true gods; that gods worshiped here and there throughout the Multiverse are imaginary-or worse, creatures like Bolas. That knowledge was bitter to me then as never before. When granted such an astonishing blessing, when feeling gratitude so profound that words stumble, too lame to evoke it…

  There was no one for me to thank.

  The magma scorpions themselves had paused in their pursuit, as though uncertain of the portent of this unexpected flare. They clung to the cavern ceiling, watching. Now engulfed in flame, the sculler continued to rise, higher and higher, while its fellows gathered around the burning skiff where I sat transfixed.

  The song’s interlocking harmonics rose toward a climax, and suddenly, shockingly, stopped. Even the echoes. I caught my breath.

  The only sound was the lick of flames from my skiff’s stern.

  And just as I was about to observe that the proceedings appeared to be about over, the burning sculler exploded in midair.

  A far more spectacular detonation than that of the magma scorpion, this had the look of a military explosive, or the burst of a fireball cast by a mage of the power of Nicol Bolas himself. It filled the entire upper reaches of the cavern’s ceiling with a blast of fire that scraped both magma scorpions off the rock and dropped them flat on their backs in the tide pool, adding their own explosive blasts into a roar that blew away my hearing.

  This may explain the silence from Doc as well.

  It was fortunate that I had sat in the skiff, as the huge swell of shock wave would certainly have cast me into the water-but even that, it may be, would not have presented the sort of hazard it might otherwise have.

  It appeared the scullers had decided to look after me.

  One of them nearby reached toward my skiff with one empty hand, which it then clenched as though plucking an invisible fruit. The fire at the stern was extinguished instantly, without so much as an ember remaining. Two other scullers maneuvered their skiffs in tandem, just off the forward bow to either side, and leaned into their poles in their usual slow, silent rhythm. Either the deep spot I had found was much smaller than I’d thought, or they had motive powers beyond the leverage of the poles, for they had no difficulty making headway, and though no rope or visible energy bound my craft to theirs, I found my skiff following along as though theirs were mountain geese and mine an obedient gosling.

  I was tempted to make an observation to Doc about being out of danger for the moment, but decided against it on the off chance that Doc’s uncharacteristic silence was not, in fact, due to temporary deafness. There was much to think about, and very little time to ponder.

  I knew all too well that this moment of safety would not last. Jace would know his trap had been triggered. And he knew of my sentimental flaw, which made it all too obvious where his next trap would be set.

  And if I didn’t get there fast, my father would be dead before I could spring it.

  THE METAL ISLAND

  THE FIRE THIS TIME

  On the shore of the Metal Island, under the blank etherium stare of the Metal Sphinx, the small blue sun between Nicol Bolas’s horns flickered once, then winked out. The jet-chains of energy that had linked the blue sun to Tezzeret’s head vanished as well.

  “Don’t stop now…” The human, still hanging within the crackling white Web of Restraint, seemed to be breathing with some difficulty. “You were just getting… to the good part…”

  “Quiet.” Bolas enforced his command with a gesture that sewed Tezzeret’s lips shut with white fire.

  The dragon lifted his head, and his immense forked tongue flickered out, stirring air into his even more immense nasal cavity, though what had captured his attention was not a scent. It was a peculiar imminence-a gathering of potential that was escalating toward the actual-and the sensation it produced was not one for which there are words in ordinary languages, because to feel this sensation required senses far from ordinary.

  “We’re about to have company,” the dragon said in a tone suggesting that unexpected guests were not necessarily unwelcome, as long as they brought food-or, alternatively, were food. “Some friend of yours? Oh, right, I forgot the friends thing. A lackey, then. Reinforcements? Who is our Special Mystery Guest?”

  Immobilized within the web of white energy, Tezzeret could do nothing but breathe and blink. So he did both for several seconds, until Bolas hissed in exasperation and gestured again.

  The white fire vanished. Gasping in sudden relief, Tezzeret collapsed on the etherium plinth between the forepaws of the Metal Sphinx. “You do that… a lot,” he wheezed. “Act before you think… then have to undo what you’ve done. Embarrassing, isn’t it? Must make you feel rather… ah, hmmm. What’s the word I’m looking for? Starts with st and rhymes with oopid?”

  Smoke trickled up from the fire in the dragon’s eyes. “Who is this incoming Planeswalker of yours?”

  “How can you tell a Planeswalker is coming?”

  “He starts breathing hard,” Bolas said absently. “It wasn’t a riddle? Never mind. I’ll let you make any necessary introductions.”

  The dragon wrapped himself in his wings and with a shrug wiped himself from existence. Even his f
ootprints disappeared from the etherium sand.

  With considerable protesting of his abused joints and muscles, Tezzeret slowly organized himself into a seated posture on the eastern edge of the plinth, letting his feet dangle above the riddle’s first line.

  Not far up the metal beach, air rippled with heat shimmer. This effect intensified until a thermocline refraction of the images of etherium and ocean spun into a shining swirl of metal and sea. Out from this swirl stepped a woman.

  Apparently human, she was large enough that one might be forgiven for speculating that a giant or two had contributed to her bloodline. She was nearly a head taller than Tezzeret-who could be fairly characterized as a tall man-and though Tezzeret was muscled like a boxer, the woman’s shoulders were half again the width of his.

  Her hair was gray, and cropped close to her skull in an “I’m too damned busy to waste time doing my hair” style. She was dressed in a similarly utilitarian fashion, heavy drakeskin boots, with tunic, pants, and jacket of tightly woven fibers of stonewort, a Bantian mountain herb widely recognized for its fire-resistant properties. The reason for her peculiar ensemble was prominently announced by the flames that licked from both of her hands, and the swirl of fire dancing across her head and shoulders.

  Due to an array of carefully maintained pyromantic magics, she herself was virtually fireproof; she wore stonewort and drakeskin because she had simply gotten tired of having to replace her outfit every time she got in a fight-which was, as announced by sundry scars on her face, neck, and head that she did not bother to conceal, an all-too-common occurrence.

  A more curious feature of her equipment appeared to be a sort of harness, constructed of thin metal cable strongly resembling etherium. As the woman strode forward from the mirror-swirl of reality, she dragged into the world a young man who appeared to be unconscious, tethered to her by the same cable that made up her harness. As soon as he was fully on the beach, she shucked her harness and undid the one around the young man’s chest. Exchanging her personal flame for a more general fire shield some ten feet in diameter, she threw him over her shoulder as if he were no more than a broken mannequin.