“It’s an attractive proposition.” For good reason-she had clearly designed it that way.
“It’s like she read our minds,” Doc said.
“She didn’t have to,” I muttered.
“I’m sorry?” she said. “You’ll have to speak up, unless you want to take off that stupid helmet.”
“I’m more comfortable like this.” Her chain of reasoning had little effect on me. I don’t need an excuse to oppose Nicol Bolas and everything he does with every resource at my command. She didn’t need to spin an apocalyptically grandiose rationale to make me believe she’d do the same. I would have believed it if she’d offered no reason at all. To know him is to hate him.
None of it mattered. “How do we proceed from here?”
“First,” she said, “we get rid of Renn.”
“Kill him?”
She frowned at me. “Of course. What did you think?”
“I prefer plain language.”
“Bolas and I thought Renn might be useful. Before he sent me out here, he took Renn off somewhere and mind probed him or something. Renn doesn’t even know as much about Crucius as you do. Now that you’re here, he’s just extra baggage.”
“That’s not entirely accurate.”
“How about if you add on top that he’s going to kill you on sight? That he’s probably already killed Baltrice-no loss to me, I hate that lumbering bitch, but you always seemed to care about your people. And-”
Again she looked away, and a very pretty flush climbed her exquisite neck. Her tone, however, was flat and as ugly as the grinding of ill-fitting gears.
“So?” Liliana said. “How about it, Tezzeret? Are we on?”
I sighed. “I sympathize with your situation, and I hope you believe I would help you if I could. However-”
“There’s always a however,” she said bitterly.
“Yes. When it comes to reaching the center of the Crystal Labyrinth, Silas Renn is more necessary than you are.”
She stared at me in blank astonishment. “You think you can cut a deal with him? He’s completely insane-he can talk like a normal person, but inside he’s baying at the bloody moon.”
“I’ve allowed for that,” I said. “It’s said you have to be crazy to study clockworking, and the more you learn, the crazier you get. The ability to choose between realities can disconnect you from all of them. Crucius was known as the Mad Sphinx for a reason.”
“Is there no way I can change your mind?” She turned toward me, and I noticed her translucent silks had begun tending more toward transparent-but not as transparent as she was. “Are you sure…?”
“Liliana Vess,” I said gravely, “you are very likely the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Looking at you, I can’t so much as recall the face of another woman. If I were foolish enough to allow myself even a fantasy that you might actually be attracted to me, matters might be different. But it is my business to see things as they are. An unsentimental view of your offer makes the transaction all too plain.”
She didn’t seem abashed in the slightest. She found an even more fetching angle for her lovely eyes, and her silks continued to evaporate. “A girl does what she has to,” she said. “Just like you.”
“What I have to do doesn’t include you,” I said. “The sad truth is that I am interested only in finding Crucius-for that I need Renn, and he needs me. Neither of us needs you.”
Her face darkened; she even glowered beautifully. “You always were a bastard.”
“Possibly. My parents weren’t forthcoming on the subject.”
She turned and flounced to the door. “Well, screw you, then-”
“I’ve already declined.”
“And you can find your own damned way back to the Labyrinth!”
She could not be allowed to simply leave. I turned, extending a fist, reaching for her with an invisible hand of power, and the sunlight had a peculiar quality here, brighter and warmer than I’d ever experienced on-in-Esper, as well as displaying a distinctly more golden color. Bant, perhaps? I had not yet had the leisure to acquaint myself with the finer details of our newly conjoined planes…
I thought, Wait a minute…
Shortly the bones themselves began to move, lifting and twisting and fusing themselves into a web-work archway that anchored itself upon a ring fused of the remaining bone. In the very instant it was complete, an eldritch reality whorl distorted the view through the arch.
This isn’t right, I thought-but I wasn’t sure why. “Doc?” I said hoarsely. “Is there something wrong about this?”
“You mean other than the zombie gate and the fires and Baltrice not responding?”
“Baltrice…” I remembered something else about Baltrice, or thought I did, but I couldn’t quite bring it into mental focus. “Baltrice.”
“Tezzeret, what happened? Are you hit? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. It’s all right. Zombies stink.”
“Well sure they do, but-”
“Imagine swimming in nyxathid vomit.”
“Ooo. Damn, do I have to?”
“I have a fix. One moment.” I was able to mentally retrace my armor’s link to her ear-and-eyepiece, and adjust her anti-sand field as I had my own; she couldn’t be much use to me if she’s retching too hard to breathe. “That should cover you. Now it’s your turn to cover me.”
“I’m on it.”
That feeling of wrongness only increased. “Baltrice, change of plan. I might be under attack, and it could be Renn, and-I don’t know. I have a feeling that I can’t explain. Be on your guard.”
There was no response.
“Baltrice? Baltrice!”
When designing on the fly, it’s generally best to start from the middle, and work one’s way outward from there. Also, the cuirass and cuisses would be simplest to create, requiring no more than an approximate fit. All the jointing and lapped plating would come later. I held a hand above my etherium sled, and its dorsal surface began to ripple and bulge as I drew forth the metal for my first pieces of armor.
Doc said, “Eugh. What’s that smell?”
I ignored him. The rim of the Netherglass was some three miles away and downwind. Though zombies are rightfully notorious for their odor, I strongly doubted we could smell them from here.
Roughly five pounds of etherium poured upward toward my hand, pulling free from the sled in an inverted teardrop. Using both of my hands to aid in the focusing of my will, I softened the metal and spun it like dough for flatbread to form it into a disk of uniform thickness… and I smelled the odor Doc had been talking about. It wasn’t zombies.
It was blood.
The smell is unmistakable, but considerable blood must be spilled before the scent is obvious to an ordinary human nose, especially outdoors. And this odor was accompanied by a distinct undernote of sulfur, as well as a hint of the proteinaceous soot that arises from charred meat.
I had a thought that Baltrice might, conceivably, be cooking something on her sled behind me… but an animal she had freshly killed? In the middle of the Glass Desert? It was so improbable that I paused a moment, struck by an overpowering conviction that I had done this before. And that what came next would be bad.
“Just like deja vu all over again, isn’t it?”
I froze. If I live a thousand years, I will never mistake that voice, the blend of upsloper condescension and petulantly malignant mockery.
The etherium dropped into my hand, and I left it there. “Renn.”
“This is the part where you turn and attack, Tezzeret.” He sounded like he was looking forward to it. “Come on, don’t be shy.”
“Or turn and run,” Doc buzzed in my left ear.
I told both of them, “No.”
“You will, you know,” Renn said. “And soon. For all the good it’ll do you.”
“I didn’t come here to fight.”
“Oh, it won’t be a fight, Tezzeret. You attack, then take a nap. Hardly qualifies as combat.”
“Are you sure he’s wrong?” Doc said nervously.
“Nobody needs to get hurt,” I said.
Renn snorted a contemptuous chuckle. “That pyromancer of yours didn’t agree,” he said. “Kind of a hothead, isn’t she?”
In his mind, that had probably sounded funny. “Where is she? Is she alive?”
“Guess.”
“Renn-”
“You can try to beat it out of me.”
“Some other time.”
“He took out Baltrice?” Doc sounded appalled. “Just now? While we were standing here?”
“No,” I murmured. “He’s going to take her out after I leave. He won’t even get here until we’re in the middle of the zombies.”
“Then how can-why is he-I mean, what?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, really?”
“The armor was a great idea,” Renn said conversationally. “I’ve always admired your ingenuity. You’ll never know how many times you beat me. I should say, time lines where you beat me.”
Doc said, “Something tells me this isn’t one of those time lines.”
“Shh.”
“Finally, I just got aggravated enough with losing that I decided we should have our chat before you make any. This way, we skip the whole fight and get straight to the part where I torture you. A lot.”
Finally I turned. Renn leaned casually on Baltrice’s gravity sled, its etherium dulled by a thick coating of fresh-looking blood. The area around it was drenched until the powdered glass was wholly black. The scent of charred meat rose from his clothing-but it wasn’t his flesh that had burned.
“You don’t have to torture me, and you have no reason to harm Baltrice,” I said.
Renn snorted. “I don’t have to eat,” he said, gesturing with his etherium arms to his etherium chest, in which the sole remaining organ was his etherium heart. “But I eat anyway.”
“I’ll tell you what you need,” I said.
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“It’s why I came here. Specifically. To share what I know.”
“You always were tiresome,” Renn said. He pushed himself off the gravity sled, to stand balanced on the sand. His personal shields crackled and spit as they disintegrated the powdered glass on the wind. “Listen to me, Tezzeret. You’ve already told me everything you know. I’ve been torturing you for several days-recreational torture, really. Just for fun. To pass the time. I’ll get so bored after I torture Baltrice to death. You told me everything before I even touched her.”
“Does he know he’s not actually making sense?” Doc whispered.
“He is making sense,” I muttered, “just not to us. Get ready.”
“For what?”
“Then why are you here, Renn?” I spread my hands. “You know everything I know-why talk to me at all?”
“I don’t know everything,” he said, walking toward me. The golden haze of his shields intensified, and blazing white mana gathered itself around his fists. “I’m still trying to figure out how you escaped.”
“Did I? Well, well.”
“It’s not even possible,” he said. “I have you restrained by a mana siphon and shackles made out of these sleds, so you can’t use any magic at all, and I have you in a hundred thousand-to-one hypertemporal field. So I can watch you age. And then I blink… and you’re gone.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so,” he said, and lashed out with both hands. Blinding white energy erased the sun and the sky and the sand and everything in the universe except for Renn himself. It caught me and held me in its unbreakable grip, turning my own mana reserve against me, so that the harder I struggled, the stronger it became. “Tell me how you escape, and I’ll let you live long enough to try it again.”
“I have a better idea,” I said through my teeth, clenched hard enough to chip by the power of Renn’s binding. Focusing my will in a specific way-not unlike imagining a musical passage so vividly that I could change which mental instruments played it-did not require mana. “I’ll tell you when I see you again… about, hmmm, let’s say, twenty minutes from now.”
Renn tightened his magical grip until I could no longer breathe. “Really? And where you will be in the meantime?”
I could not speak to reply. Instead, I winked at him.
His sneer of triumph coagulated into a frown of uncertain disbelief that warmed me to the centers of my bones. Then I uncoiled the focusing of my will, exactly as I would have if I’d had command of my own mana… exactly as I would have if I were trying to planeswalk.
There followed an exceptionally gratifying blam, which erased Renn and the desert and the gravity sleds, to dump me gasping on the floor of a large, dimly lit cavern lined with glowing red crystals, which smelled strongly of dragon.
“Y’know,” Doc said peevishly, “you could have just asked…”
TEZZERET
BLOODSTONE, STONE, AND BLOOD
I shoved myself up to my knees, but my heaving chest and trembling legs wouldn’t let me rise the rest of the way.
“You think we could have cut that a little closer?” Doc said. “Not like we were in a hurry or anything.”
“Doc, please.” I squeezed my eyes shut and set my hands upon my temples, trying to squeeze the whirl in my mind down to a manageable torrent. “If we weren’t in a hurry then, we certainly are now.”
“In a hurry to do what? Take a nap while we wait for Bolas?”
“Screw Bolas.”
“You first.”
I’d brought no actual tools into the Glass Desert, but the fabric of my tunic and breeches could be cut and braided into a variety of useful types of rope, and the leather of my boots could be useful for strapping. But best of all were the steel of the toe caps and the strap that stiffened the sole, not to mention the grommets. As soon as I thought of this, however, I realized my feet were cold. Worse, I could feel the texture of the sangrite crystals with my toes.
Opening my eyes confirmed my analysis. “Naked? Really? You couldn’t have even left me my boots?”
“Complain to management,” Doc said. “I was designed as a fail-safe, not an ejector seat.”
I let it go; we had no time to bicker. “Twenty minutes,” I said grimly. Without tools.
“Twenty minutes till what?”
“Renn dialed us back along my subjective time line so he could get at me before I made the armor. He couldn’t have attacked Baltrice while I was standing there; I had turned away from her only a few seconds before you smelled the blood and smoke.”
“What happened to her, then? Why was she gone and Renn there?”
“It’s possible Renn was talking to us from our future. Did you notice how black the blood was? And the smoke odor was too faint. On his time line, he might be hours ahead of us-maybe days.”
“What, he was talking to us from after he takes out Baltrice? After he’s going to take out Baltrice? Something like that.”
“Yes. Me-us-too.”
“So in our time line, he hasn’t attacked her yet? Even though in his, he grabbed her days ago?”
“My best guess,” I said, “based on how long it seemed to take from when I began the armor to the moment that our eye-and-ear link went dead, he will attack her in just about twenty minutes.”
“Clockworkers give me a headache.”
“Yes.”
“So you think we can get there in time to warn her, or something?”
“Or something.”
“Hey-hey now, you’re not thinking about actually being there, are you? Tezz, come on, are you nuts? The guy just yanked us backward in time. You want to fight him?”
“No,” I said. “I want to beat him.”
“To save Baltrice?”
“And myself. And you.”
“I don’t get it. Seriously. We can just sit here. Bolas’ll show up to kick us out again, and he can broker a deal with Vess, and we’re in. Crap, Tezz, we might be able to get Bolas to step on Renn-that way we
don’t get the snot beat out of us. Or get killed.”
“Baltrice doesn’t have that much time.”
“So?”
That brought me to a full stop. So indeed. “Don’t you like her?”
“Do I need to remind you that she’s tried to kill us at least once already this week?”
“To protect Jace,” I said. “She can’t help it. I don’t hold it against her.”
“Well, I do. Let the fat cow die. Our business is Crucius.”
“We need Baltrice,” I insisted. “We need her.”
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Whether I like her doesn’t matter. You like her.”
I frowned. “Apparently I do,” I said slowly. “But that’s not the issue.”
“I don’t give a ten-pound bucket of rat poo what you think the issue is. Maybe I can’t stop you once crap starts-but I can stop you from starting it yourself.” He underlined his point with a vividly distinct sensation of having my testicles ripped away.
I took it with no more reaction than an involuntary tightening around my eyes. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Think I can’t?”
“Doc, listen to me. I don’t have time to explain. I need you on my side for this. It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
“This what? What’s gonna be worth risking both our lives?”
“It’s kind of a…” I took a deep breath. Might as well tell him the truth. “It’s a practical joke.”
“You’re pulling our leg.”
“On Bolas,” I said. “It’s a practical joke on Nicol Bolas. A good one.”
“How good?”
“Let’s put it this way: If rage doesn’t make his head explode on the spot, he’ll have to suck it up and pretend he likes it. He’ll have to thank us.”
“Wow.”
“Are you in?”
“You should have told me this in the first place,” he said. “Sorry about the nut sack thing.”
“No harm done.” Which was, after all, only the truth. “Can you keep time?”
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