“Whoa, crap, she talks like you!” he hissed.
“I have a more melodious voice.”
“Um, yikes. Flinch. Cower.”
“And Doc-if I may address you thus-would you care to share exactly where and how you learned the word zoophiliac?”
“Ah… not really. That is, hmmm, if it please Your, uh, Wisdom, I respectfully answer, well, no. I would not care to. My thanks.” He tried once more to whisper. “How long do I have to keep this up?”
“Until you are satisfied you have sufficiently embarrassed us,” I said.
“Yeah, okay. I’m done then.”
“In the future, child,” Sharuum piped, “it may serve you well to remember that one never knows who might be listening.”
This was, I reflected, a useful admonition for me, too.
“In the interest of sparing your valuable time, Your Wisdom, may I speak at some length? I hope to briefly outline my understanding of the parameters of our situation, in hopes that you may be able to correct where I am mistaken, and enlighten where I am ignorant.”
She graciously inclined her head.
“Wow, you do have nice manners.”
“Shh.” I moved out from the lectern of the Codex and stood before the great sphinx, close enough that should she choose, she could crush me with her forepaw.
“This is what I know,” I said. “I know that Esper is lately engaged in a pair of brushfire wars-one of aggression against Jund, and one in defense against Grixis. I know that both of these brushfire wars are escalating to full military conflicts of a sort our land has never known; the significance of today’s bombing raid against this city is not lost on me. I know that we of Esper are far, far fewer in number than our enemies, and that the survival of our land rests wholly upon our superior arcane weaponry and command of magic. I know that our superior weaponry is dependent upon etherium, as is the depth of power of our mages, and that numbered among our land’s enemies are powerful beings who have come to understand the power of etherium, and who seek to deny that power to us by taking it for themselves. I know that even the limited war so far has exhausted, or nearly so, our land’s etherium reserves, and I know that the publicly proffered rationale for Your Wisdom’s travels has been to seek among the vedalken, the Ethersworn, the Proctors of the Clean, the Architects of Will, and finally here, to the Vault of the Seekers of Carmot, for any surplus etherium, and to seek those who might create it anew. And I know that this publicly proffered rationale is an intentional deception.”
This came out sounding a great deal more harsh in my ears than it had in my mind. For a moment I mentally stumbled, struggling for words to continue; for his part, Doc contributed a hoarse, “Tezz, buddy, listen-don’t piss her off. Really. Oh, crap-I think she’s really mad!” which was, as usual, the opposite of helpful.
But despite Doc’s alarm, Sharuum showed no reaction. She made no move of any variety. I was unable to determine that she was breathing. I swallowed, and took a deep breath of my own.
“It is legendary among the Seekers that Your Wisdom was the closest confidant of Crucius the Mad himself. The Seekers of Carmot teach their adherents that it was Crucius who installed you as Grand Hegemon, and that you learned more of his secrets than any other being, living or dead. That all Esper’s recent advances in the exploitation of etherium flow, ultimately, from you.”
I discovered I was sweating, though the Vault was dank and chill.
“If all this you say is true,” she said with slow and careful precision, “what significance do you attach to it?”
“That you know full well a truth known by only a few beings outside this very room: that the Seekers of Carmot have never had any secret of etherium’s creation. That you know full well the supposed Codex Etherium is blank. That no one other than Crucius himself has ever created etherium, and that carmot itself, the ‘missing ingredient’ of etherium, is entirely fictional. That there is no such thing as carmot. It has never existed and it never will.”
I found myself gasping a bit for breath. Apparently that’s another thing I’m still angry about.
Sharuum stared at me without moving for what felt like a very long time, then finally showed a hint of emotion by taking a deep breath and releasing a melancholy sigh.
“I am very sorry for your loss,” she said, and turned as if to leave.
“And I am very sorry for yours,” I answered sharply, “though my loss is real, and yours may be as fictional as carmot.”
She stopped in the doorway.
She stood very, very still.
“I will ask that you explain yourself,” she said softly, as though speaking only to the downward spiral of the Great Stair. “Please do so with the clear understanding that I may decide I am angry enough to destroy all of you and raze this sickening mausoleum of fraud to the naked rock it stands on.”
Baltrice gave me a look, brows raised over flames in her eyes, frankly asking my permission to commit regicide. I held up a hand, partly because I wished no harm to Sharuum… but mostly because Baltrice had no idea of the magnitude of power she faced. She’d be killed even sooner than I would, because-unlike me-she wouldn’t be running away.
“At a certain point in my researches,” I said carefully, “I could no longer avoid the question: Why is the Grand Hegemon of Esper really visiting the etherium cults? Any salvageable metal can as easily-more easily-be collected by any number of official mages and wizardly functionaries who have more power than they know what to do with; and why is she seeking an answer she already knows does not exist?”
“And you are certain of this?” she said, still facing away. “That the answer I seek does not exist?”
“On the contrary, I’m certain that it does. The answer is fictional only because the question is likewise. The real question has an answer fully as real.”
“Yet I have no answer at all.” Now she sounded only tired. “Sphinxes are creatures of questions. We leave answers to those naive enough to seek them. I wish you joy of your answers, Tezzeret the Seeker; elsewise there will be none to be found.”
She moved on out the door and very likely would have proceeded down the stairs and out of Vectis, back to her secluded island in the Sea of Unknowing, had I not said, “He’s alive, you know.”
I heard her stop. I heard her start again, and stop again. And then I heard her turn around. “I hear both truth and honesty,” she said faintly, a bit breathlessly, as though not allowing herself to hope. “How are you certain?”
“When I find him, shall I remember you to him?”
“Little mage…” Slowly, slowly, she came back to the door, her face wholly blank but her stare as fiercely concentrated as that of a hungry dragon. “Little human mage, how do you hope to achieve this, where the great powers of our world have failed?”
“I am little, and human, and a mage. But that is not all I am. You and I both know that our world is not the only world.”
Renn made a choking sound; I indulged in a passing fantasy that he’d swallowed his tongue. “Um, Tezzeret? Hey,” Baltrice said uncertainly, “are you really sure you want to be having this conversation? Here? With her?”
I moved toward Sharuum, slowly, reverently, to place myself once again between her forepaws. Laying my life at the mercy of her whim. Looking up into her ageless, beautiful face, I discovered that her eyes were damp with unshed tears.
“This conversation,” I said, “is why I have hazarded my life to meet you, Your Wisdom. To bring you this news, and to ask a single question.”
“I fear your question has no answer,” she said. “Crucius could not teach even me the creation of etherium. He said no Esperite could ever accomplish it, no matter how powerful. Nor did he share with me any slightest knowledge of carmot, of what it might be, or where it might be found.”
“Then I suppose we’re both fortunate that we’re less interested in the creation of etherium than we are in finding its creator.”
“I fear my beloved wanders beyond t
he walls of death,” she said solemnly. “For decades, the greatest of my servitors-and I myself-have sought him in every corner of creation, yet no trace of his passage has ever been discovered. I have even set clockworkers to shift in time back to when I know he was here… only to find that he is gone even from the past.”
Really? Now, that was interesting…
“I have dreamed…” she went on. “Still I dream… that he is returned, that he has come again to set the world aright. This Conflux-this catastrophe that has crushed Esper together with Naya and Bant, with Jund and Grixis-this was to him a dream of peace. Of wholeness and sanity. He said that etherium itself was the key to restoring a sundered universe… but the wars, the Great Maelstrom, wild destruction unleashed upon every living thing… This is what I fear he foresaw. This is what I fear he fled, in hopes that his leaving might somehow stop, or even slow, this unimaginable cataclysm that has overtaken our world. I fear his flight was to escape this future. To end, in sorrow and despair, a life he had devoted to the hope of peace. Elsewise why would he not return to save what shreds of our land that remain?”
“I can’t usefully speculate on why he hasn’t returned,” I said, “but you should know that he is alive indeed. My source is… uncommonly reliable.” An astonishing thing to find myself saying of Nicol Bolas, but I was done trying to lie to Sharuum. “Perhaps you simply don’t know how to look.”
“Uh-” Renn coughed, trying to clear his throat while he leaned as far away from Baltrice as he could without falling off his chair. “You mean where to look, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, my gaze never wavering from the great sphinx’s. “Of course that’s what I mean.”
“Ah,” she said. “Ah, little human mage, shall I give you the answer to a question you do not know to ask?”
“Any answer you might offer, Your Wisdom, will be gratefully accepted.”
“He told me once, centuries ago, that if he were to vanish wholly from the world, there would come, some years along, a mage in search of him. He said I would know this mage because he or she would be a created thing, not of this world, bearing not the slightest scrap of etherium. He said this mage would be a creature all of flesh while being only metal.”
“Were those his words? The slightest scrap?”
She nodded, and a wave of prickling climbed the back of my neck. “Go on.”
She said, “I had taken this to mean a mage of extraordinary strength of character, and of power so great he had no need of etherium enhancement. In truth, his very words crossed my mind when you, Baltrice, introduced yourself.”
“Me?” Baltrice managed to look flattered and profoundly skeptical at the same time. “Really?”
Sharuum smiled sadly. “Should you again venture to impersonate a mage of Esper, you’d do well to get yourself an actual etherium arm, and better a leg or two, as part of your disguise. Illusion deceives only those who do not think to look for it.”
“Yeah, okay, sure,” Baltrice said. “Uh, no thanks, okay?”
“Crucius said that on that day, I should say two things to this unlikely mage,” Sharuum said. “I’m afraid they may be of little or no use in your search. Crucius, like any sphinx, was fond of riddles, wordplay, and obscure aphorisms-and he perhaps more than most. The first was an epigram that I ventured just outside this door, to judge your reaction,” she said to Baltrice. “He asked me to say, ‘When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.’ ”
“Might even be true,” Baltrice said with a shrug. “If you’re enough of a coward.”
“It’s not a commentary on courage,” I said. Something about it struck me strangely. More than strangely; the saying seemed to coil around my mind, slipping around knots and in through nooks and crannies as it searched for something solid to latch on to. Where it could grow. It was an unfamiliar sensation, and wholly unpleasant. I found myself dizzily holding on to my forehead as if doing so could brace me against toppling over.
Partly in hopes of driving this effect away with a new thought, I asked, “And the second?”
“A much more traditional riddle: simple questions that require a complex answer. Riddles welcome that sort of inversion; the more complex the riddle, the simpler the answer… and the reverse.”
“All right,” I said unsteadily. “All right. I’m ready.”
“I suspect you aren’t,” she said. “It’s very simple, and those are the hardest of all. Crucius suggested I should ask you, where do you search for what can’t be found, and what do you say without saying? What is your sky when you’re tombed in the ground, and whom do you rescue by slaying?”
Baltrice snorted. “Oh, that’s deep. Be still my beating heart.”
“It’s not…” I had my hand on my forehead again. “It’s… I don’t know. I think it’s deeper than it sounds…”
“Crap, I hope so.”
And then I realized what Sharuum had actually just said. I looked up at her, and my chest felt as though it were being crushed within an invisible fist. “You said… Did I hear you correctly? Did you just say that Crucius suggested you should ask me?”
She smiled faintly, and this motion of her cheeks was enough to spill tears down her face. “He didn’t mention you by name, child.”
“Wait… wait,” I said. I squeezed shut my eyes and tried to massage ideas into my brain through the outside. Even thinking clearly about this riddle was impossible for me-it was too entirely alien. I understood the principle perfectly-surface paradox reveals a deeper answer-but it pointed to this answer in a language I simply could not decipher. Riddles? Metaphors? Epigrams and aphorisms? I am an artificer. A mechanist. I deal in fact. My business is force and reaction, torque and shear, mass and energy-what can be measured, calculated, and designed to work in the real world. I have entirely the wrong sort of mind for this kind of…
Oh.
“Wait,” I repeated. “Wait-Crucius. He was a clockworker as well as a mechanist, yes?”
Sharuum said, “He had many gifts. Clockworking was among them.”
“Then it is… at least conceivable… that he could have looked forward through time and seen us standing here, right?”
Baltrice was starting to look worried. “What are you talking about?”
“Analysis,” I said breathlessly. “Wait… It breaks down perfectly…”
“This is, ah, I mean, if I may…?” Renn said. “Clockworking is, after all, my specialty.”
“You want to help? Help me?” I said. “Who are you, and what have you done with Silas Renn?”
“I’m not a monster,” he said in a tone that clearly implied the phrase unlike you. “The direction of time is actually irrelevant to the function of magic. It’s equally probable that Crucius, as a clockworker, could have looked backward from the future and advised his previous self to confide his message to the Grand Hegemon.”
“A nonpertinent distinction,” I said to Sharuum. “In either case, he could have known I would be the one to whom you would tell these things. In fact, there is a specific flow of alternatives-I could draw a chart…”
“Tezzeret,” Baltrice said, “sooner or later somebody’s gonna worry about how long we’ve been up here. Worries like that can lead to bloodshed.”
I took her meaning. “All right. Specifically: either these messages were intended to be passed to me, or to someone else, right?”
“The latter is more likely,” Renn muttered sourly, but he was absolutely right, and I said so.
“Yes. I am one man. The spectrum of alternatives, in terms of statistical probability, makes the likelihood of me being the One in Question infinitesimal-but that’s irrelevant to the problem. If I am not the One, we have no useful solution; whatever we try can’t be expected to succeed. But if I am the One in Question…”
“I get it,” Baltrice said, her eyes wide. “If it’s you, then he knew it would be you-and the questions would be ones he knows you can answer.”
“Exactly. Granted that, we arrive
at another alternative: either Crucius wanted or expected me-us-to find him, or he didn’t. If he didn’t, then the questions are deceptions to lead us in the wrong direction… but if he did?”
“Tezzeret,” Sharuum said seriously, “listen to me and heed my word now. If you find Crucius-if you can bring him to me, or me to him, if even for a heartbeat, all that I have is yours. Everything. My treasure, my power, my subjects, my realm. Yours, for one more heartbeat beside my beloved.”
My brain whirling, I was barely paying attention. Where do you seek for what can’t be found?
When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.
“If Crucius the Mad wants to be found, and if he hoped I might be the one to find him,” I said, astonished at myself for this unexpected conviction, “I know exactly where to start looking.”
TEZZERET
A LONG AND WINDING ROAD, WITH ZOMBIES
The only good news in my forescout mirror was that we had finally reached our destination. The rest of the news was that our destination was surrounded by zombies.
A lot of zombies.
Someone had gotten here first.
A simple exertion of will twisted the levitation fields of our gravity sleds and dropped them both to the white sand. The gravity sleds had proven to be almost ridiculously useful up till now. Having designed and constructed them myself, I could take a certain pride in how well they had performed. Both were virtually pure etherium, representing the entire contribution of the Grand Hegemon to this expedition-her personal reserve of etherium, almost seventy pounds. The variable levitation magics-to provide motive power in addition to keeping them aloft-were quite standard, even pedestrian; the particular elegance on which I prided myself lay in the shimmering blue variable energy screens that had not only protected us from wind and sun, but also shielded the sleds themselves from the incredibly abrasive winds of the Glass Dunes, not to mention that the sleds themselves had only two moving parts.
I had hoped to ride them right up to the entrance of the Labyrinth, but clearly that was not to be. It would be a shame to disassemble them, but there was no help for it. Given this new development, I knew I’d need the etherium.
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