Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “It is well, then. There is a human, a mage, called Tezzeret the Seeker. Do you know this man?”

  “A little,” Nicol Bolas said. “He’s right behind you.”

  “Indeed?” The sphinx began the slow and apparently painful process of turning herself about. “Tezzeret?”

  “I’m here, Your Wisdom.” Tezzeret vaulted down from the plinth, landing catlike on the etherium sand. “I am honored by this meeting, and gratified that you have achieved the transit.”

  “As am I. When Kemuel revealed the stricture of the Riddle Gate, I very nearly despaired.”

  “But only nearly,” Tezzeret said fondly, “for here you are: a living testament to your own greatness of spirit.”

  “You flatter like a vedalken, child.”

  “I only attempt to emulate their gift of conversation. Flattery it may be, but truth it is.”

  She tilted her face up toward the hundred-times-larger face of the Metal Sphinx. “And so,” she said, her rasp going even hoarser with awe, “this is the place, and the hour, you prescribed?”

  “It is, Your Wisdom.”

  “And so this …” She shook her head helplessly, in the face of wealth enough to buy her whole planet dozens of times over. “This … extravagance of etherium … I can feel him. I can feel him near.”

  “He is, Your Wisdom.”

  “Yet I see nothing but blur.” Her great face shone with tears. “And so I have crossed entire universes to see him, this once and final time, stripped away every scrap of my power … only to have my eyes fail me at the last. The final bitter jest in my mockery of a life.”

  Tezzeret bent down and took a handful of the etherium sand. “Your Wisdom, if you’ll permit me—?”

  She slowly, painfully, lowered herself to lie in the sand like a great winged cat. Tezzeret reached up and laid his free hand gently upon her face, and the etherium sand in his other hand spilled upward, as though the local gravity had somehow been reversed. It gathered into the filigree scars across her face, and then without heat, fused itself there.

  She blinked, and blinked again, and when she looked up into the majestic face of the Metal Sphinx, she gasped.

  Tezzeret said, “I did not invite you here to see you disappointed.”

  “Oh, Tezzeret …” she breathed. Tears like liquid diamonds caught the brilliant sun in points of fire. “Oh, my child …”

  “Shall I give you privacy?”

  “Please.”

  He backed solemnly away from her, then turned to walk over to Bolas. Behind him, an etherium-colored mist gathered in the air around the Metal Sphinx and the sphinx of flesh.

  “I am, I think,” the dragon said, shaking his head in wonder, “as close to speechless as I have ever come. The way the old beast carried on, you’d think that bloody statue was Crucius himself!”

  “When I said there is no secret,” Tezzeret said through another of his slim smiles, “that’s what I was talking about.”

  “That—? That?” The dragon’s great yellow eyes widened, and for a long second his huge lower jaw swung loose. “That’s him?” he wheezed as though he couldn’t quite get his breath. “That—that statue right there—that’s Crucius …?”

  “Some of him. It’s more accurate to say that the Metal Sphinx is an expression of him. Everything in this place is an expression of Crucius and of his not-so-mortal remains. He is what he made, and what he made is him.”

  “All this time—ever since—you were standing right there, when you said you know everywhere he isn’t. You were standing between his paws!”

  “Yes,” Tezzeret said. “Interested in more of the story?”

  TEZZERET

  RIDDLE ME THIS

  So, Tezz,” Doc said thoughtfully inside my head, “this Silas Renn character—you know what I like about him?” Watching in the scrying dish as Renn strode about as though he were actually doing something useful in the Academy’s defense, shouting orders at the top of a voice I had hoped to never hear again, I could say only, “No.”

  “Me neither. What a tool, huh?”

  “I agree. And as a master mechanist, I am a recognized authority on the subject.”

  “Tezz—wow. Was that a pun? Is it my birthday?”

  “Hush now, Doc. He’s moving.”

  “What, somebody’s gonna hear me?”

  “No, but I have to pay attention. The only reason he does not know he is being observed is that our surveillance is not focused on him personally, but generally, on the chamber. If I lose him, he will be difficult to reacquire without giving myself away.”

  “So? You’re still afraid of him?”

  “No. I despised him,” I muttered as I adjusted the point-of-view angle in the scrying dish to follow Renn out into the corridor. “I was never afraid of him.”

  “Even when he was handing your ass to you with a complimentary swirly on the side?”

  “Like most weak men, he is dangerous only when frightened,” I said.

  “If he’s so weak, how come he kicked your butt up and down that courtyard all the time?”

  “Weak in character, not in ability.”

  Renn paused at an intersection long enough to berate a couple of the Order’s chairwomen. I left the vision silent—I have heard enough of Renn’s self-righteous upsloper ranting to last me several lifetimes—but I took the opportunity to adjust the scry view to where it could cover the intersecting corridors in any direction.

  “His natural magical ability outstrips mine by an order of magnitude. And his family is obscenely wealthy—they bought enough etherium for him to replace most of his body. In three years of trying, I never defeated him.”

  “You don’t sound too worried about losing again.”

  Several nearby detonations rocked the building enough to shake not only dust from the ceiling but flakes of stone from the buttresses.

  “I didn’t come here to fight, Doc.”

  “Good thing, too,” he said. “Save your fighting for sometime when screwing up won’t get me killed along with you.”

  “If we have to fight, I’ve already screwed up,” I muttered. The shrieking discharge of the city’s anti-dragon artillery set my teeth on edge.

  A string of detonations laddered rising thunder as though coming straight for me; the final blast seemed to be just next door. The room pitched and bucked like a maddened gargoyle. Dust and razor-edged stone chips filled the air. Statues that had stood for centuries tumbled from their pedestals and shattered on the floor.

  “I hate that—that explosion thing!” Doc whined in my ear. “What in the hells are those?”

  “I’m not sure.” Renn was moving again. I turned the scry-view angle to follow. “Magical, mundane, whatever—I hope never to be close enough to one to find out. Don’t worry too much; the Academy’s defensive screens will deflect any that might hit us directly.”

  “Which isn’t gonna do us a hell of a lot of good if the concussion knocks down the building and thirty bajillion tons of stone falls on our head,” Doc said. “I still think we could have done this from a little bit farther away. Like, say, Bant.”

  Further blasts, however, sounded only in the distance, and shortly they too faded. No more than a few moments passed before the sirens outside wailed the all clear. The etherium chime on the desk by my left hand gave out a musical ping. “All right. Apport interdiction’s suspended while they evacuate the wounded, which means that right about now …”

  There came a deep, resonant thump, more like distant thunder than nearby explosives, which was, to my educated ear, exactly the sound I’d been expecting—the air displacement created by something very, very large teleporting into the Academy’s courtyard. In the scrying dish, Renn jumped as if stung and ran for a window.

  “Do you get tired of being right all the time?”

  “If I were right all the time,” I muttered, “you and I would have never met.”

  Reaching out with my mind, I found the tiny device Baltrice wore in her ear. He’s
heading for the courtyard along the west colonnade. It would be best if you were there first.

  Her muttered response was conveyed through the same link. Really? Boy, it’s a good thing I’ve got you around to remind me about crap we already planned.

  The upside of this method of communication was that I didn’t have to endure running commentary from Doc. I pulled the scry view to the colonnade and briefly angled it into the courtyard to confirm my expectation: the immense, elegant majesty of the Grand Hegemon of Esper, flanked by two young adult male sphinxes near enough to her size to have been her sons, all three shimmering with a fortune in etherium filigree that shone even through the residual smoke of the raid. The balance of her retinue was more or less as expected, human and vedalken mages, homunculi, a pair of juvenile firedrakes, none of any concern or consequence to me.

  Renn shortly entered view, striding briskly toward a small clot of maids and porters who stood gaping just short of the colonnade, as a personal visit by the Grand Hegemon was a once-in-a-generation event. He snarled at them with his characteristic flap of the hands, and I touched the control on the rim of the scrying dish to pick up audio, as this was about to become amusing.

  The maids and porters scattered like a flock of startled geese, except for one huge and hulking porter who didn’t seem to hear. The porter just stood there without reaction, leaning casually on the long handle of a push sweep. “Boy! Porter!” Renn snapped, stomping forward. “Are you deaf, boy? I said get out of sight!”

  The porter still did not react. Renn’s face was nearly as red as his crushed-velvet surplice by the time he got close enough to the porter’s shoulder to yank a sleeve. “I will count to three, boy, and when—”

  The porter responded with a casual backhanded pimp slap that smacked Renn off his feet and sent him skidding along the corridor, out of sight from the courtyard. “Who are you calling boy, bitch?”

  “You know,” Doc said as we watched the semiconscious Renn try to fumble out some kind of defensive magic, “you gotta give her points for style.”

  “She does make a vivid first impression.”

  Before Renn could remember what plane they were on, Baltrice pounced like a feral viashino, hooked an enormous hand around one of Renn’s etherium ribs, then picked him up like a suitcase and gave him a good shaking. Once she had satisfied herself that she had shaken him well before using, she turned him rightway up and slammed him into the wall. “Shh, now, sweetcake. Don’t make a fuss.”

  “You, ah, you, ah—” Renn still seemed to be having trouble understanding exactly what was happening to him. “This isn’t—do you know who I am?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know.” She lifted her free hand, which now sprouted flame hot enough to melt steel. “I know etherium won’t burn,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure your balls will.”

  “You can’t do this!”

  “You don’t know what I can do,” she said. “Screw with me and you’ll find out.”

  “What—what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to take me to the dance, sweetcake.” She set him down and stripped off her porter’s coveralls, revealing a very credible—if I do say so myself—surplice-and-cloak outfit such as those worn by the Anointed Fellows of the Arcane Council of the Order of the Seekers of Carmot. “I know you can’t see it without a mirror, but that fancy glowy hunk of etherium you’re using for a heart? Now it’s a little extra glowy. What that means is that any time I start to worry you might be trying to get smooth with me, every part of your body that isn’t etherium will burn to the kind of ash that blows away in a soft breeze. With me so far? Good.”

  She got rid of the coveralls, then paused a moment to raise her arms, admiring what was—again, if I say so myself—a spectacularly detailed illusion that they were both constructed of etherium.

  “The other thing you should absorb here,” she went on, “is that you’re not on fire right now because I’m stopping the little extra glowy business from igniting, get me? You savvy what’ll happen to you if anything happens to me? Here’s a clue: it’s the same as what’ll happen if you so much as sneak up a hint of a shield to interfere with my control. Or if a sudden move breaks my concentration. Fwhoosh. Soft breeze. Got me? No? Give me a sign here, Renn. Wave a flag. Send up a flare.”

  “You can’t—” Renn swallowed and started again. “It’s impossible—no such spell exists!”

  She smiled. “He told me you’d say that.”

  “He? There are others? How many?”

  “Depends on how you count,” she said through a predatory grin. “There’s at least one of them who’s gonna give you a pretty nasty shock.”

  I found myself with a bit of a predatory smile of my own as I pushed the scrying dish aside. “If only I could have been there to do it myself,” I murmured.

  Through the device in Baltrice’s ear I could pick up their voices as Renn made introductions. “Arcane Fellow Silas Renn, and—”

  “Baltrice,” she said. “Just Baltrice. It’s a, y’ know, an honor and all that.”

  “You are called by a single name, then?” The voice of a sphinx is different from that of other creatures, for their vast hollow bones can function also as organ pipes, and so every phrase from a sphinx is a motif, and a speech can be a symphony. “That is uncommon for a human, is it not?”

  “Yeah, well,” she said through a crooked grin, “a last name’s just for people who want you to be impressed by their parents.”

  I made a mental note to give her a bonus.

  There followed a bit of hastily stammered conversation, as Renn haltingly attempted to explain why the rest of the Arcane Fellowship was not on hand to greet her. He couldn’t exactly admit the truth, which was that every Arcane Fellow and even many of the lesser masters were out desperately scavenging etherium. Etherium, as the basis of most weapons and an adjunct to every combat mage’s power, was central to Esper’s war effort … and the Seekers of Carmot, who had been pretending for many years to know how to make the stuff, now were faced with either providing for the whole land’s needs, or publicly confessing their decades-long conspiracy to defraud the public.

  Sangrite had been discovered in the mountains of Jund (with whom, inconveniently, we were currently at war), but carmot, the last essential ingredient—in an irony that warmed me every time I thought about it—remained so elusive that the masters couldn’t even agree on what it was, much less where to find any. This meant that for the first time in the entire history of the Order, the Seekers of Carmot were out in the world, and—not to grind too fine an edge on it—they were actually, well …

  Seeking carmot.

  I doubt I’ll ever stop finding that funny.

  While it probably would have been even more amusing to leave Renn twisting in the wind of his own lies with his underclothes hanging out, Baltrice moved the plan in its intended direction with her customary bluntness. “I believe Master Fellow Renn might be unaware that the Exalted Hieresiarch of the Order has unexpectedly returned, and awaits the Grand Hegemon in the Vault of the Codex.”

  Renn was unquestionably unaware of this, as it was a bald-faced lie—but as I had anticipated, he was too concerned with protecting his own anatomy to do anything other than play along.

  “He awaits me?” Sharuum fluted somberly. “Then go we shall. There might we slake our thirst for knowledge at the original spring.”

  They proceeded on through the Academy’s innards without delay—due to protocols that were rigidly enforced at the Academy’s construction, all public areas were easily accessible to sphinxes, most well-mannered dragons, and all but the very largest gargoyles—while Renn kept trying to summon some plausible excuse for preventing the Grand Hegemon from entering the Vault and discovering that the legendary mystical Codex Etherium to be wholly legendary and not mystical at all.

  Sharuum shed members of her retinue at every juncture. By the time they reached the Tower of the Vault, only the two young male sphinxes remained, and she s
et them to guard the doors behind her.

  Sharuum, Baltrice, and Renn wound their way up the great spiral stair to the spire-top Vault of the Codex. At the last, Renn was reduced to simple pleading. “Please, Your Wisdom—the Vault is not intended for any but the Fellowship!”

  “I suppose that when one is made of glass,” Sharuum replied solemnly, “everything looks like a stone.”

  At the door, he gave it one last shot. “But—but—but—”

  “That’s already two more than most folks have any use for,” Baltrice put in, bless her snide little heart. “How full of crap do you have to be to need three butts?”

  “Your Wisdom—Your Wisdom, please!” he stammered, pretending he hadn’t heard. “In the entire history of the Order of the Seekers of Carmot, no being who is not a Fellow of the Arcane Council has ever been inside the Vault!”

  This moment was, because I share with Nicol Bolas a regrettable fondness for the dramatic, when I reached out with my mind from where I stood—on the far side of the Vault, leaning on the lectern that held the Codex Etherium—and opened the door.

  Carefully framed so that the swirling dust motes in the single shaft of sunlight from the roof portal above shimmered around me in a golden halo, making me shine in the gloom-shrouded chamber like a fugitive angel, I spread my hands with an apologetic shrug.

  “I’ve never been a fellow of anything,” I said, “and I’ve been here twice.”

  There was very little commotion. Sharuum was even more inscrutable than is common for her opaque kind; Baltrice, of course, had known I would be there; and Renn was gob-smacked beyond speech.

  “Your Wisdom.” I stood up straight, of course, in the presence of my queen. “Please come in, and make yourself as comfortable as may be possible. Baltrice, if you could please see to Master Renn. He may need assistance in finding a seat.”

  Renn finally found his voice. “You …”

  “Surprise.”