I went to the indicated spot. So close to his shoulder, the warmth of his body was like an iron stove on a winter’s night… and all I wanted to do was lie down, let that warmth enfold me, and sleep. Forever.
But there’d be plenty of forever to sleep through if I didn’t pass the Gate.
“I am permitted to show you one thing you have never seen, and remind you of two things you already know.”
“All right,” I said. “Show me.”
“This is what awaits you beyond the Riddle Gate,” he said, and with no gesture nor slightest flicker of expression, where we stood transformed into paradise.
A land of etherium.
Of nothing but etherium. Trees. Stones. Grass. Sand. “Ah,” I said.
It was all I could say.
I found myself on my knees, for I had no strength to stand. Gasping. This was what waited for me beyond the Gate?
This?
“This…?” I whispered. “This is where I’ll find him? This?”
I had never dreamed…
It was all right here. In front of me. Around me. I was already there…
One step away.
I knelt, gazing upon the answer to every question I had ever had, and then I could wait no longer. I wrenched myself to my feet and lurched forward. Nothing stopped me. I recovered my balance and began to walk. Then I began to run.
I ran until I had no breath. Until my feet bled. Until exhaustion slammed me to the ground as if I’d been hit with a thunderbolt.
When at length I regained my senses, the ground on which I lay was not etherium.
I rolled over. Kemuel was three paces behind me. He hadn’t moved.
I hadn’t moved.
“If it were that easy,” he said, “no Seeker would fail.”
Yes. Of course. Painfully I sat up and nodded in resignation. “I was… overcome.”
“You always are.”
“But I’m not giving up. I’m hardly beaten.”
“Yet.”
Wait-I had it. Obvious. So obvious it might not have occurred to any other me. The Riddle Gate must be interplanar-I was looking at a different plane. Seeing it, I could walk there.
Just not with my feet.
I gathered power and ignited my Spark… but found no Spark to ignite, and no power to gather.
“In the Riddle Gate, there is no power save etherium.”
And there is no etherium save…
When I looked at him, he wore a sad smile that was also somehow fond. “Often, you die in the act of attacking me.”
Again: of course.
I sank back to my knees, scrubbing at my face with both hands as if I could erase exhaustion, and hope, and despair, and every other feeling and thought in the screaming whirl inside my head. Not for the first time, I was reminded what a burden it is to be human.
“All right,” I said. I held my eyes closed, my only hope of lessening the inexorable gravitation of the unimaginable etherium beyond the Gate. “So. This is… this could have been designed specifically for me. To torment me. Torture me. One step from more etherium than I have ever imagined could exist in the Multiverse. One step from Crucius. One step from the secret of creation itself. One step that I cannot take, for lack of etherium.”
I shook my head, helpless. “This is my personal hell.”
“Etherium only gets in your way,” Kemuel said gently.
“All right. The other things-the ones you say I already know. The reminders you are permitted to give. Please, tell me.”
“The first is one that I believe you are in the midst of experiencing,” he said. “When one is made of glass-”
“Everything looks like a stone. Yes.” I took a deep breath, nodded, and took another. Somehow, the aphorism helped me calm myself. I seemed to be regaining some of my ability to think.
“I understand. The situation does not have to be designed to torture me. It may be this way because there is no other way it can be; the bitter irony I face here may be an effect of who I am, rather than how it was made. Yes.”
I took another deep breath, and the rest of the whirl within my head slowed, and seemed to settle itself into a manageable progression. When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone-but…
I turned to meet the unfathomable gaze of the Hidden One. “On the other hand,” I said slowly, “sometimes what looks like a stone is a stone. And sometimes a stone has my name on it.”
Kemuel’s smile broadened. “You make me very proud.”
“I can’t imagine why. All right, I get it. I think. What’s the other reminder?”
“I am permitted to remind you of the one way you solved the first two lines of my father’s riddle.”
“How I-?” I put a hand to my head. The whirl seemed to be spinning up again. “The one way?”
It hadn’t been one way at all; the solutions were barely even related. The first two lines…
The first solution was the product of analysis. Logic. Intellect.
The second was the product of diligence. Thoroughness. The infinite capacity for taking pains.
The only thing the two had in common was me.
Fierce light inside my head burst to blinding life.
Me?
The fierce light burned my whirl of confusion away. “Me…” I heard myself saying. “It was me.”
The solutions had been mine. Mine personally. I hadn’t solved “Where do you look for what can’t be found?” and “What do you say without saying?”
My answers had been where I would look for what can’t be found, and what I could say without saying.
Analysis and diligence are two of the four defining traits of greatness in an artificer. The third was exactly what I was experiencing right now.
Inspiration.
The next line had been, “What is your sky when you’re tombed in the ground?”
Well, I was tombed enough, metaphorically. The Riddle Gate was an open grave, just waiting for me to lie down. Tombed… buried alive, or dead, and it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. Not in the tomb.
What was my sky? The answer to my prayer, and forever beyond my grasp? What tortured me every time I so much as thought about it? What did I long for more than life itself?
I opened my eyes and looked at my answer.
“Oh… god…” Tears gathered in my eyes. Why did I not have a god to whom I could appeal? Even a delusional dream of divine mercy would be better than this.
To die staring at the only thing I really want.
But… the sky, any sky, is a metaphor, too. It’s a mental construct, a boundary we imagine, to imaginatively divide infinite space. It’s not real-it’s not air, or clouds, moons, planets, or stars. It’s… what?
It’s always out of reach from wherever you are.
You can’t grab it. You can’t buy it or sell it. It can’t be broken, or stolen, chained, or freed. Because it can’t be owned, it belongs to everyone.
To everything.
My eyes drifted shut. I said softly, “You’re kidding, right? Please say you’re not serious.”
“But I’m not, and I am.”
“Etherium gets in my way.”
“Yes.”
“Because it’s as much an idea as it is a substance.”
“Yes.”
“And etherium can’t pass through the Riddle Gate.”
“Yes.”
“Even the dream of it. Even the hope for it. As long as etherium is something to me, I’m trapped here.”
“Yes.”
“The only way I can get to where I most want to be… is to not care if I ever make it.”
“Yes.”
“So.” I sighed, opened my eyes, and stared out from the Riddle Gate at my dream of paradise, forever out of my reach. In order for me to get there, it has to not be paradise anymore. Not for me. “I imagine this is when I usually take my own life.”
“I am sorry to say that it is.”
“At least now I understand why.”
I shook my head. “How am I supposed to do this?”
“I don’t know. None of you ever has,” he piped sadly. “This is why the Riddle Gate will be your end: succeed or fail, the man you are will die here. But the Riddle Gate will be the midpoint for the Seeker who finally passes through; for the rest of your days, your existence will be defined by that passage. Not by your birth, your death, nor your rebirth-no matter how many times you experience each of them. You will mark your days by what came before the Riddle Gate, and what came after.”
Swell.
“So let’s sum up. It looks to me kind of like this: I have spent my entire life turning myself into a man who can get here, because I have been, consciously or not, trying to get there,” I said, jabbing a finger out at the etherium land. “If I wasn’t trying to get there, I would never have gotten here. But in order to actually get there, I have to become somebody who never would have bothered to come here in the first place.”
“Yes, Tezzeret my friend. This next will be what we sphinxes sometimes call,” he said gravely, “the tricky part.”
In the fullness of time, I became that man.
I rose, gave my farewells to Kemuel-along with instructions for Sharuum, should she choose to follow me-and he said, “Meeting her will be interesting. Instructive. I will be born several hundred years from now, when she is younger and my father is king.”
The man I had been would be irritated with that; the man I had become only nodded and stepped forth from the Riddle Gate onto the Metal Island.
For an infinite span, I kneeled on the etherium sand, meditating upon the riddle of the Metal Sphinx. By the time eternity had passed, I had found my answer.
But if you want to know what that answer was, old worm, you’ll have to give up this silly mind-siphon trick of yours and ask me yourself.
Politely.
Don’t trouble to open my tomb; I let myself out. Oh, and by the way?
I’m right behind you.
THE METAL ISLAND
THE LAST RIDDLE
Nicol Bolas jerked as if he’d been hit by lightning. That insufferable little clot of ghoul turd! He should have killed Tezzeret years ago. The inarguable fact that he, himself, not only had not done anything so prudent as kill the artificer, compounded with the other inarguable fact that he, himself, had actually healed that festering pile of scrapings from a dung beetle’s butt, made at least one of his subminds wonder openly if perhaps Tezzeret had been right about him.
Maybe he was stupid.
But having been stupid in the past didn’t mean he had to be stupid now. The great dragon spun, a snarl on his face and a panoply of insanely lethal magics packed into each talon, his mouth, both eyes, both wings, and his tail.
Tezzeret sat calmly on the etherium plinth between the forepaws of the Metal Sphinx. He was smiling. This smile was not friendly, or reassuring, or even smug; it looked more like pity than anything else, and the sight of it spiked the dragon’s rage pressure until it superheated his blood and he cared not the slightest if he was killed right here on this stupid beach in front of this stupid sphinx while doing something stupid, if only he could die with Tezzeret’s blood on his fangs.
He spread wide his arms and wider still his great wings, and unleashed upon his enemy fell magics that could consume this entire universe.
Except he didn’t.
He hesitated, confusion knotting his scaly brow. Again, he summoned the power of entire stars and rained flaming destruction upon his-
Except he didn’t. Again.
“Do you know why not?” Tezzeret said.
Bolas flinched. Was that pestilent artificer reading his mind? Controlling his actions? Could the ramparts of his identity have been breached? His consciousness flashed through the countless chambers of his near-infinite mind, but he could find no sign of tampering.
“Predictable,” Tezzeret said. “To save my time and your effort, it’s not in your mind, Bolas. It’s in your head.”
“What?”
“You brought it on yourself, you know. We never had to be enemies.”
“Enemies? Don’t flatter yourself,” the dragon sneered. “I am a god. You are a cockroach.”
The artificer nodded amiably. “A reasonable metaphor, in a limited way. The cockroach is tiny, and weak, and can be crushed by a finger-yet still it can carry disease, befoul your food, and make your home generally disagreeable. And cockroaches are, as a group, very hard to kill.”
“What are you nattering about?” Bolas snapped. “What does this have to do with me?”
Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s your image, old worm. In those terms, what I’ve done to you is fairly simple. I’ve taken away your pesticide.”
“You are such a preposterous-”
“Kill me,” Tezzeret offered. “However you like. I have no shields and have summoned no magic. You can just step on me, if nothing else; it’s how one customarily destroys cockroaches.”
Bolas growled deep in his throat and lunged for him, talons poised to rip the artificer into bloody shreds.
But he didn’t.
“Because you can’t. Well, you can… but you won’t. Not for a while, at least.”
Tezzeret’s smile reminded Bolas of something unpleasant. With a lurch, Nicol Bolas realized that the smile looked like one he himself liked to show from time to time. Usually when someone he was about eat broke down and began to beg for their life.
But in Tezzeret’s smile there was no sadism. Not even malice.
That, somehow, made it worse.
Bolas began to wonder, for the first time he could remember in all twenty-five thousand long years of his life, if he might be out of his depth.
“I should think you know me as well as any creature in the Multiverse, excepting only Kemuel and Crucius,” Tezzeret said. “What’s my talent? Not superficial, magic and rhabdomancy and artificing. What am I best at? What is my specialty?”
Bolas opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but shut it again without speaking. Shut it with a snap like a dry branch breaking, because he realized he did know Tezzeret’s specialty.
Preparation.
“I want you to understand why I’m revealing what I’ve done to you in this particular way,” Tezzeret said. “There is a lesson I hope you will take from this, and the only way I can be sure you’ve learned it is if you see it yourself.”
“Games,” said Nicol Bolas sourly. “Aren’t I too stupid to understand the rules?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I hope you do, at least, understand the stakes,” said the artificer. “We’re playing for your life.”
Bolas sat, folding his wings about himself in what he hoped might look like nonchalance. He’d suddenly become very cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering.
“Do you remember what I said to Jace Beleren, right after my device settled into his brain?”
Bolas had no need to search his memories for that particular tidbit. “You said you were going to kill me.”
“Yes. And I did.”
“Are you mad?”
“I killed you dozens of times,” Tezzeret said. “Remember?”
Bolas thought of the corpse dragons he had pulled from parallel time lines, and he discovered he was getting colder rather than warmer.
“I kept on killing you,” Tezzeret said, “until finally I found a Nicol Bolas I didn’t have to kill. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand who you are and why you are this way?”
Bolas swallowed.
“You don’t have to answer. Only think. The device I put in Jace’s brain was there not because I feared he’d interfere with me. I put that device in there because I knew you would read his mind. Someday. Somewhere. And when you did, that device would flow into you right along with Jace’s memories. Once that was done, I could kill you…” He shrugged. “Whenever. Any time I happened to feel like it. Because that device is in your brain now.”
Tezzeret sighed apologetically. “The tricky part was programmi
ng it to reach the proper neural nexus in your brain. A bit of trial and error there, thus a few extra dead dragons on parallel beaches. I’m sorry for that, by the way.”
Bolas snorted. He’d felt not the faintest sting, let alone the shattering agony that Tezzeret’s device had inflicted upon Beleren. He opened his mouth to express just how pathetically contemptible Tezzeret’s little charade had become, but the artificer held up a hand.
“It’s not there to hurt you. It’s more of a short circuit than a punishment-and besides, I suspect your pain tolerance is beyond the capacity of any device to surpass.”
Bolas blinked. That had sounded almost like a compliment…
“Basically, it shuts down your motivation to kill me. Or any Planeswalker. I decided I could spare that much mercy for Jace… at least partially because I could so vividly imagine the look on your face when you discovered you couldn’t hurt him.”
Bolas could think already of a dozen ways to get that device out of his brain, and once he did-
Again, Tezzeret seemed to be reading his mind. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if it took you more than ten minutes to remove it. But it gives us the opportunity to have this chat.”
Bolas had a different chat in mind. With a very subtle, impenetrably camouflaged exertion of mana, he reached out for a time line where he had never used his mind siphon on Beleren. A quick temporal shift, and matters between him and Tezzeret would be different.
Lethally different.
But he couldn’t. The time lines simply weren’t there… or, worse, he couldn’t see them. The cold seemed to have penetrated his bones. He sent his perceptions forward and back along the time line he was already in… except he didn’t. He couldn’t.
He remembered being able to clockwork. He didn’t remember how.
Tezzeret nodded sympathetically. “You have to keep in mind that I had a long time to prepare for our meeting on this beach.”
“Apparently so.”
“I have come to believe that clockworking in general is a very bad idea. Even in the hands of a well-intentioned mage, it has the intrinsic potential to rend the fabric of the Multiverse-which makes it a particularly bad idea to let you, for example, use it. So you can’t. Possibly forever.”
Test of Metal p-4 Page 28