Test of Metal p-4

by Mathew Stover

  All five of them went straight for her, and the blast of fire from five e-throats was so intense the dunes around us looked like the inside of a blast furnace. Embers spit into my hair and across my back even through Baltrice’s shield, and the flames slagged the dune to smoking slabs of glass for meters around. When the fire died away, Baltrice hadn’t moved. She just stood there, squinting up at them, fists on her hips as though she’d decided, in the spirit of fair play, she’d given them one free shot.

  Now she tilted her head to crack her neck, and rotated her shoulders to loosen the cramping around the wound in her back. “Well, all right, then.” She sounded cheerfully businesslike. “Damn me if you sad-ass bastards aren’t right in the middle of the last stupid thing you’re ever gonna do.”

  Watching Baltrice unleash her inferno of destruction, I decided she was living proof of the adage, “If you love your job, you never have to work for a living.”

  The etherium drake is one of the last surviving remnants of what is very possibly the worst idea in the history of Esper. Centuries ago, the earliest rudiments of what would become the Ethersworn decided that since etherium was supposed to “sanctify and morally elevate” whatever is joined with it, they should start enhancing even the beasts, to speed the world’s transformation into a paradise. Which was appallingly ignorant in itself, but they didn’t stop there.

  When these self-appointed saviors got together to figure out what species should be the first on which they’d try their Noble Work, they chose the Esper firedrake.

  The firedrake was, before these chucklebrains began to meddle with it, the single most dangerous predator on Esper. Smaller than true dragons, not significantly smarter than sewer rats, and lacking the broad-based magical prowess of their draconic relations, the firedrakes made up for their genetic deficits in sheer mindless ferocity.

  Sluice serpents can be avoided by staying away from the cesspits; kraken keep to the deep ocean; striges are more of a nuisance than a threat. Flocks of firedrakes, however, who have, on their good days, the temperament of rabid viashinos, might at any time take it upon themselves to flock together and wing off to some randomly unlucky spot, then attack and immolate everything for miles around. Everything. Ships. Caravans. Villages. Rocks. Each other. No one knows exactly why.

  Maybe they just like to watch things burn.

  The proto-Ethersworn spent a generation or two stalking firedrakes, tranquilizing them, and replacing various parts of their bodies with refined etherium. To the astonishment of no one other than themselves, the Noble Metal seemed to have no beneficial effect on the behavior of firedrakes. At all. So, in their typically clot-headed fashion, they concluded that this must be simply because the firedrakes hadn’t been enhanced enough, and they undertook to remedy this delusional problem by making a very real problem several orders of magnitude worse.

  Just as it does for any other living thing, etherium made firedrakes stronger.

  This was long before the days of the shortage, and so by the time any sane people realized what these moonbats were up to, there were several hundred firedrakes whose entire bodies had been replaced. They even replaced the creatures’ brains, which had no noticeable effect on their physiology beyond making them a great deal more difficult to kill, and making their moral character, if they could be said to have one, even worse.

  Where before they had been ridiculously dangerous, savagely unpredictable horrors, full-body replacement transformed them into mindless, near-indestructible engines of destruction.

  Sharuum, in her wisdom, commanded the moonbats to clean up their own mess, which made no appreciable dent in the numbers of e-drakes but in short order did an admirable job of thinning the moonbat population. Eventually the Grand Hegemon was forced to take a personal hand. She gathered the bulk of the land’s sphinxes and led them on a sequence of hunts over the course of a decade or two, until there were no more e-drakes to be found. Somehow, however, the creatures persist in reappearing at inconvenient moments.

  Informed opinions on the reason for this are split. Optimists tend to believe new e-drakes are being created by a radical splinter sect of the Ethersworn, still carrying on their Noble Nut Job in secret. Realists are of the opinion that the creatures have found a way to breed.

  Dangerous as they are, their most destructive power is the annihilating fire they can vomit at will-and to assault Baltrice with flame was worse than useless. The more flame they poured onto her, the stronger she got, and when a couple of them stooped like falcons to try their luck with fang and talon, she just opened her arms and invited them in with a truly happy grin.

  The closest e-drake was clearly astonished to discover that Baltrice could herself claw and bite with the best of them. She slipped the beast’s viperish fang strike, got one arm around the thing’s long, snaky neck, and grabbed its wing joint with her free hand. In a second or two, the joint ran from red to yellow to white as radioactive milk, and dripped down through the e-drake’s ribs while the wing flopped off, twitching into the dunes.

  I could happily have whiled away the whole afternoon watching Baltrice dismantle her new toys, except that this was the moment Silas Renn chose to hook his thumb into my left eye.

  “Uh, by the way,” Doc said, “did I mention he’s awake?”

  That was also the moment I discovered that the boiling had subsided from my blood, that the lightning crackle was gone from my skin, and that I was suddenly tired.

  Very, very tired.

  Not yet dead tired, though that state loomed in my immediate future.

  Exhaustion, however, was not enough to stop me from twisting my head, latching my teeth into the ball of his thumb, and biting down until he squealed like a tea kettle. He got his other hand up under my chin and dug his thumb into my parotid gland until I had to let go so I could turn my head away, after which he undertook to deliver a very efficient, thorough, and professional beating, focusing on my face, my lower abdominal wall, and my groin.

  This was a particularly inconvenient moment to discover that the education of scions of the House of Renn included comprehensive training in personal combat.

  This was particularly inconvenient because I hadn’t been in a fistfight since I was (approximately) eleven years old, and because my lack of expertise was compounded by having only one hand I could use to defend myself. If I let go of his collarbone, he’d throw me off and roast me in roughly a heartbeat and a half.

  Worse, it seemed that his etherium enhancements, in addition to being impervious to anything I could do with hands, feet, or head, also made him stronger than a rhox berserker. Each blow of his fists opened a cut on my face and shot stars across my vision, or ripped muscles and battered internal organs, or crushed my testicles until I had to vomit bile from my empty stomach, or inventive combinations thereof. “How’s it feel, scrapper boy?” he sneered in my face. “Bet you never thought I could beat you at this too, did you?”

  I could not have answered him if I’d wanted to. Soon he got bored with thrashing me, and decided to break my grip on his collarbone by pinching the muscle between my thumb and forefinger with his thumb and forefinger, which was so unexpectedly and unbelievably painful that I yelped and jerked as if I’d been stabbed. But despite his enhancements, his hands were still only flesh and bone. With my free hand, I grabbed his thumb and pried it off me.

  “Where I come from, this is foreplay,” I mumbled through smashed and bloody lips. “In a fight, we’re more like-” and I completed the sentence by yanking his thumb in a direction thumbs are not designed to be yanked.

  The joint snapped with a satisfyingly wet crunch.

  “Cesspit scum,” he snarled, his face white with killing rage. “After I beat you unconscious, I’m going to drown you in your own sewage.”

  “You don’t have the balls. Remember?” I let go of his thumb, reached behind his head, and grabbed a fistful of powdered glass that I pounded into the ruin of his nose. “This is how we do it in Tidehollow, you snotty upslope
bitch.”

  The powdered glass spread across his face. I encouraged the spreading by pounding him with the outside of my fist as if it were a hammer. I may not know much about fist-fighting, but I do know how to swing a hammer, and there are few humans who can truthfully say they do it better.

  Renn gasped from the impact, and when his mouth opened I hit him again, this time downward on his lower incisors, hyperextending his jaw with another wet crunch. He howled. In Tidehollow, that would be the moment to pound sand into his open mouth, so I did.

  A cave brat from my part of the slum would also twist his hand on Renn’s face, to grind the sand harder into his mouth and into the ruin of his nose, to force it into his eye sockets, thumb it under his eyelids, and pack it into his tear ducts.

  I did that, too.

  Then I hit him again. And once more for good measure.

  And one to grow on.

  He gagged, and choked, and tried to howl some more, acting generally helpless and beaten, which I didn’t believe for a second; I knew how tough he used to be, and I assumed that now he was likely tougher. The fight would be over when one of us was unconscious. Or dead.

  My suspicious nature paid off when I glimpsed a flash of blue sparks at the corners of his eyes, and so managed to avert my eyes before his Immaculate Form-a very minor magic, barely a cantrip, used for instantly cleansing oneself and one’s clothing-blew all that sand away from his face and straight at mine. Before I could get back to business, one of his arms snaked around the back of my neck and he caught his opposite forearm to lever his other arm across my face.

  I had been expecting him to throw me off. By the time I realized what he was doing, he had locked my head into the crook of his arm. His hold tightened with the mechanical progression of a bench vise. “Tidehollow’s nothing,” he whispered in my ear. “This is how men fight.”

  That built-in body regeneration of his seemed to be working entirely too well.

  “Uh, Tezz…?” Doc said worriedly. “It seems like we’re in trouble here. Are we in trouble? Tezz?”

  I couldn’t answer because my mouth was jammed full of etherium forearm. I managed to find his hands and clawed at them, trying for another fingerhold or a grip on his broken thumb, but of course he wouldn’t let me catch him that way again. “Oh, no no no,” he hummed. “You don’t want to do that, and here’s why.”

  His grip tightened. I heard an alarming crunching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the back of my skull. “Do you know how I practice this hold?” he murmured. “On granite boulders. Until they shatter.”

  Apparently my rhox-berserker metaphor had been something of an understatement.

  “Tezz? Tezz! Do something!” Doc was starting to panic-and he sounded calmer than I was. Sangrite exhaustion seemed to have drained every drop of my mana reserve as well. I tried to organize my mind into planeswalking configuration, thinking that maybe Doc could ‘port us back to the cavern-but all I got was a moan of dismay that indicated “It’ll be hours before I can do that again!”

  This, I thought, is a stupid way to die.

  “How should I kill you? Let me count the ways,” Renn mused happily. “Squashing your head like a rotten melon has a certain visceral appeal… but no, no, that will never do-it would be over all too quickly. How might I do it leisurely… as if I have all the time in the world. Because, after all, I do.”

  What could I have been thinking? Had I been thinking at all? I had never beaten him. Not once. But I had let my supercharged blood boil drag me into exactly what he was best at-single combat. Idiot.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Dying-again-would be bad enough. Dying because I was too stupid to live was more than I could take. If only I had stopped to think-because, after all, the only trait in which I had a real advantage over Renn was intellect, though one couldn’t prove it by anything that happened today. I had blindly thrown myself against him, my puny, all-too-mortal flesh against his unlimited power of etherium-

  Wait.

  The unlimited power of etherium…

  Manipulating etherium didn’t require mana. Not for me. The metal itself would furnish the power. Renn was half lost in his fantasies of torturing me to death. I was half lost in my blinding epiphany that there was one more thing I could do that Renn didn’t know I could do.

  Rhabdomancy.

  With only the slightest twist of will, I could perceive the etherium in the area. All of it. Renn’s body. The transit gate. The gravity sleds.

  The needle in my aorta.

  I chose the needle in my aorta for my first move. It withdrew from the blood vessel, leaving only a bead in place to seal the puncture. With no need for caution, I wrenched the needle back out through my ribs, my pectoral tendon, and my skin. I decided against a bravura line; why warn him? With my mind, I shaped the needle into a thin blade, then stabbed it through the iris of Renn’s right eye.

  He screamed, throwing me aside, clawing at his face, ripping bloody stripes with his fingernails. I counted myself lucky that the shock hadn’t made him reflexively rip my head off, but his incredible strength nearly killed me anyway: throwing me aside involved sending me spinning through the air, twisting helplessly until my spine crashed into the arch of the transit gate hard enough that it very nearly broke me in half. Gasping, I fell to the sand, my arms and legs twitching and flopping in partial seizure.

  If Renn pulled himself together before I could do the same, he was going to kill me anyway. I couldn’t even get up. Couldn’t stand and take it like a man. Maybe I could crawl. Maybe.

  Power had made me stupid. I had been strong, so I didn’t bother to be smart. A mistake I swore never to make again.

  Though the lesson would be wasted if learning it killed me.

  I had a chance. One chance, because all that power was gone now, and my intellect was again on the job. One chance.

  I reached out with my mind and activated the transit gate. A view of the zombie mob in the Netherglass opened above me, for I lay only a few feet from the gate’s threshold.

  Renn stopped screaming. Perhaps the twist of power had been enough to remind him that he hadn’t killed me yet. His left eye fixed upon me, and his bloody mouth stretched like a nightmare ogre. “Running?” he shrieked, hurling himself toward me. “Run then! Run! I’ll start by severing your legs! One festering joint at a time!”

  But when he got close to me, he skidded to a stop, staring down at me in open puzzlement, because I wasn’t trying to crawl through the gate. That was the moment he realized it was a trap. I saw it in his eyes.

  He knew he was about to die.

  His mouth opened like he was going to ask what in the hells I thought I was up to; he managed to say, “Tezzer-” before my gravity sled at full shrieking speed smashed into the small of his etherium back hard enough to cut an ordinary man in two. Renn was no ordinary man, and the gravity sled weighed less than thirty pounds, so the impact only knocked him forward, stumbling, trying to regain his balance.

  It was enough.

  Arms flailing, he actually would have made it-stopped himself short-had I not managed to make one twitching foot move at the last second, to hook his ankle and send him headlong into the transit gate.

  Not through the gate. Into the gate.

  Into the gate because I canceled the spell just as his head and shoulders broke the plane of transmission. About half his torso, his pelvis, both his legs, and one arm fell on me. Which hurt. But I really didn’t mind.

  The rest of him-head, shoulders, heart, and one arm-was lying on the sand of the Netherglass, fifteen miles away.

  Perhaps my prejudice against improvisation was unfair. My own, just now, had produced satisfactory results.

  Less than elegant, far from painless, and passingly humiliating, but satisfactory.

  I lay there for a second or two, trying to regain enough breath to tell myself I was still alive. When I found my insistence sufficiently convincing, I got up and triggered the transit gate again.r />
  On the far side, Renn’s remaining arm was scrabbling for purchase in the soft powder, trying to drag itself, his shoulders, and his head off toward some imaginary safety. He seemed to be in some kind of shock. When I stepped through the gate and moved around to head him off-so to speak-he didn’t seem capable of speech, producing only a thick gargle, a few lip smacks, and a pop or two.

  “Stop it, Renn. It’s over.”

  His eyes rolled, and his hand reversed course, and I sighed. Once the shock wore off, he’d be dangerous again; magic is a function of the mind, and his would, given the chance, come through this largely unharmed. His heart was still glowing in what was left of his chest, and the enchantments that served him in place of blood and lungs and other organs could keep his head alive indefinitely. The last thing I wanted to do was give him a chance to reassemble himself.

  I stepped over him and caught his wrist, lifting him from the ground. His eyes rolled, and his mouth worked, and now he was able to form intelligible words. “… kill me… Tezzeret… kill me…”

  “You’re too valuable to waste simply because I hate you,” I said. “I gave you a chance to cooperate by choice. I will not repeat that mistake.”

  “… Tidehollow scrapper bitch…”

  “Hush now. Try not to heckle me while I save your life.”

  The severed ends of his enhancements were leaking mana like blood. It was the work of a moment or two for me to make contact with his etherium and manipulate its function sufficiently to seal the severed strands of latticework. That accomplished, I mentally took hold of the tiny blade in his eye and stretched it into an ultrafine thread, about a third the diameter of a human hair. I sent that back through his retina and along his optic nerve, which must have been a bit uncomfortable, because it made him shudder and moan.

  Using the thread, I probed his brain matter until I found his sleep center. Hooking one end of the thread there, I sent the other directly into his pineal gland and worked the thread to feed its small mana current as a trickle charge. In about five seconds his eyes closed, and he relaxed into slumber.