Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “They’re after me!” I shouted with all of my considerable natural lung power. Amplification would have expended mana that I could not spare. “Stay out of their way and they will not harm you! They’re after me!”

  They must have gotten the message, as they scattered in all directions, leaving me with a very clear view—vividly illuminated by the great swathes of fire that roared up from everything they touched—of the two remaining monsters coming after me faster than ever.

  I turned and, excuse the expression, streaked away.

  “Oh, sure, when I want to warn people, the situation is self-explanatory—”

  “Shut up.”

  There was very little I could do to evade them here in Tidehollow, besides which they were almost certainly tracking the etherium that had triggered their summoning—etherium I had no intention of abandoning. Ever. My best remaining idea was to run tiny hair-thin wires out of the etherium on my back, and stab them into my hamstrings and buttocks, using the etherium’s innate energy to add strength to my failing muscles and send us along at a very brisk clip.

  “This is good. This is fast,” Doc said. “How come we didn’t do this before?”

  “Because you never stayed quiet long enough for me to think of it.”

  “Awww …”

  “If you shut up now, I might be able to gimmick a way to fly.”

  “Seriously? Because that’d be really—”

  “Shut up.”

  He actually did, for a brief interval, during which I did not endeavor to think up a way to fly; I was too busy trying to think of a way to kill him.

  All too shortly, I ran out of ground. A lightning detour during a second or two that I was out of their line of sight sent me skidding down a steep and slippery path that ended in a salt-caked bank of an utterly, utterly still pool. Only a few yards beyond the shore, the pool and the cavern overhead faded off into dank and impenetrable night. The bank around me was featureless save for the sculler’s cleat of worn-smooth moonstone, glowing with a soft pearlescent light that did nothing to hold back the gloom.

  “Awesome!” Doc said. “Now all we have to do is swim—”

  “No.” I clapped a hand to the back of my head, and as I had expected, the exertions of the chase had reopened the scalp wound with which Bolas had so considerately supplied me. I took the handful of my blood and smeared it into the slightly concave summoning dish on the top of the sculler’s cleat, hoping that the admixture of sewage wouldn’t interfere with the cleat’s magic.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait.

  “We’re not swimming? I can make you—”

  “Do you know what sluice serpents are?”

  “Are they as bad as magma scorpions?”

  “Not remotely. But they are entirely bad enough to kill me.”

  “You mean us.”

  “There are also three distinct species of kraken that use these tide caves as their spawning ground. Kraken are viviparous, and the young are born hungry.”

  “Uh. Yeah. I get it. We can wait.”

  The clatter of armored feet announced the approach of the magma scorpions even before the tunnel showed the light of the fires they left in their wake. I waded out into the tide pool as deep as I dared, salt water doing such unkind things to my varied array of cuts and scrapes that for a moment, the sting overwhelmed the itching.

  The magma scorpions moved toward me from the tunnel mouth with gratifying caution. One stayed on the bank, scuttling back and forth to cut off escape in that direction, while the other went to the cavern wall and began to climb.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “She.”

  “You can tell? How can you tell?”

  I glanced up to the erosion-pitted limestone of the cavern’s ceiling. “That’s where she’s going.”

  “What’s she think she’s gonna do from up there?”

  “Fall on us.”

  “Um …”

  “Summoned creatures usually accomplish their bound task or die in the attempt. Or—like this one—both.”

  “Uh … can you unbind them? Send them home?”

  “Not today.” To avoid more whining, I offered a scrap of hope. “But this kind of trigger-based summoning has a fixed amount of mana attached to it. Without a mage to maintain their presence, they’ll return to their own plane when the fixed mana is exhausted.”

  “Which will be when?”

  “No matter what everyone says about me,” I said, “I don’t actually know everything.”

  “Oh, ha ha. Ha. So what’s the plan?”

  “You need me to say it again?” A sudden stabbing crick in my neck forced my head back and turned my face toward the ceiling, where the magma scorpion was picking its way in our direction. “Stop that.”

  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 the 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 themselve
s 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.