Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “It’s not possible …” He seemed to be having difficulty getting his breath. “I saw you die!”

  “You share that honor with a surprising variety of others.”

  Sharuum lingered beyond the Vault door, eyeing me with wholly understandable caution. “If this is your Hieresiarch,” she piped to Renn, “please convey my compliments to his doctor.”

  “Is she hitting on you?” Doc whispered in my left ear. “I think she’s hitting on you. Wow, that makes her like a, whaddayasay, zoophiliac, right?”

  I made as much of a shh-ing noise as I could manage without making Sharuum wonder if I might be impersonating a teapot.

  “The Hieresiarch—? Him? He—he—” Renn sputtered. “He’s the man who murdered the Hieresiarch!”

  “The latest previous, Your Wisdom, a decade ago,” I explained. “Nor was it murder.”

  “He was an old man!”

  “He was attempting to rob me. I defended myself and my property.”

  “Rob you?” Renn said wildly. “Rob you in his own study?”

  I sighed. “Baltrice?”

  “Yeah.” She put a hand to Renn’s etherium breastbone and shoved him into a chair. “Sit.”

  “The current Hieresiarch is elsewhere,” I said, “presumably mugging innocents for their etherium.”

  This comment turned Renn such an alarming shade of purple that I briefly wondered if his etherium heart might after all be vulnerable to spontaneous arrest.

  “Ah …” Sharuum came slowly over the threshold, watching me as if I might be some exotic, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous bug. “Tezzeret, isn’t it? Tezzeret the Renegade—I’ve encountered your legend.”

  “Your Wisdom is very kind. Though I would resist the epithet the Renegade, as it implies that I broke faith with the Order, when the truth is precisely opposite.”

  Sharuum did not appear interested in the distinction. “Is there an epithet you prefer?”

  This stopped me for a moment; I’d never actually thought about it. “I suppose,” I said finally, “the Seeker suits me as well as any I can imagine. Unlike these fraudulent Seekers of Carmot, my search is real.”

  I watched closely to see how she would take this characterization of the Seekers, but again my powers of observation were insufficient to penetrate her seemingly infinite opacity. “I have been given to understand that you are dead.”

  “He’s been dead for more than ten years—” Renn forced out in a strangled gasp, and his hands went under his surplice, no doubt seeking some sort of anti-zombie spell or some such silliness.

  Baltrice said, “Fwhoosh. Soft breeze.”

  Renn, with uncharacteristic insight, decided to shut the hell up.

  “Ten years?” Fully within the Vault now, Sharuum brought her own light with her, in the softly twinkling radiance of her fantastically intricate etherium filigree, as well as the miniature solar system of etherium droplets the size of strige eggs that orbited around the majestic sun that was her humaniform mask. “My information is younger than that—hardly dry, much less weaned.”

  I inclined my head. “Your Wisdom has excellent sources.”

  “Hey—hey, didn’t Jace rip up your brain in, like, a whole different universe?” Doc hissed. “You think she knows about us? Well, not me, but about, y’know, Planeswalkers and such?”

  “I have reason to believe she does,” I murmured.

  She inclined her head to take in a different view of my face. “To whom do you speak?”

  Hmmm. Distressingly good ears. I took a breath. “As do many tinkerers, artists, and others who spend too much time alone, I have developed an unfortunate habit of talking to myself, Your Wisdom. I humbly beg your pardon.”

  “For mumbling, or for lying?”

  I drew breath to protest, but the faintly sly smile that touched her humanlike lips was enough to stop me. “You spoke truth, not honesty,” she fluted, “and thought I wouldn’t know the difference.”

  Well.

  I took a second or two to try out my response in my head before I let it pass my lips.

  “I have spent entirely too much of my life around beings all too unfortunately resembling Master Renn, Your Wisdom,” I said. “It has left me ill-prepared for thoughtful conversation.”

  “A pretty answer,” she piped with a hint of amusement. “A thorny union of truth and honesty, birthing graceful flattery.”

  I inclined my head. Feeling myself flush, I did not trust my speech. It was unexpectedly gratifying to be appreciated by someone with real intellect.

  She went on. “Please assure your stealthy friend that he need not whisper, and then please introduce him.”

  “Hey—hey, is she talking about me? She can hear me? How can she hear me?”

  “The Grand Hegemon, Doc, was not born into her title, nor did she win it at dice,” I said. “Your Wisdom, I call my friend Doc, short for Doctor Jest. My friend is stealthy from necessity, not discourtesy. His body is, for good or ill, coextensive with my own. He speaks to me by manipulating the nerves of my left ear. He and I have been … joined … only recently, and we are still unsure of our relations to each other, much less the rest of the world.”

  “And now we have an answer of more honesty than truth—but truth is, after all, merely fact,” she piped.

  “Whoa, crap, she talks like you!” he hissed.

  “I have a more melodious voice.”

  “Um, yikes. Flinch. Cower.”

  “And Doc—if I may address you thus—would you care to share exactly where and how you learned the word zoophiliac?”

  “Ah … not really. That is, hmmm, if it please Your, uh, Wisdom, I respectfully answer, well, no. I would not care to. My thanks.” He tried once more to whisper. “How long do I have to keep this up?”

  “Until you are satisfied you have sufficiently embarrassed us,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay. I’m done then.”

  “In the future, child,” Sharuum piped, “it may serve you well to remember that one never knows who might be listening.”

  This was, I reflected, a useful admonition for me, too.

  “In the interest of sparing your valuable time, Your Wisdom, may I speak at some length? I hope to briefly outline my understanding of the parameters of our situation, in hopes that you may be able to correct where I am mistaken, and enlighten where I am ignorant.”

  She graciously inclined her head.

  “Wow, you do have nice manners.”

  “Shh.” I moved out from the lectern of the Codex and stood before the great sphinx, close enough that should she choose, she could crush me with her forepaw.

  “This is what I know,” I said. “I know that Esper is lately engaged in a pair of brushfire wars—one of aggression against Jund, and one in defense against Grixis. I know that both of these brushfire wars are escalating to full military conflicts of a sort our land has never known; the significance of today’s bombing raid against this city is not lost on me. I know that we of Esper are far, far fewer in number than our enemies, and that the survival of our land rests wholly upon our superior arcane weaponry and command of magic. I know that our superior weaponry is dependent upon etherium, as is the depth of power of our mages, and that numbered among our land’s enemies are powerful beings who have come to understand the power of etherium, and who seek to deny that power to us by taking it for themselves. I know that even the limited war so far has exhausted, or nearly so, our land’s etherium reserves, and I know that the publicly proffered rationale for Your Wisdom’s travels has been to seek among the vedalken, the Ethersworn, the Proctors of the Clean, the Architects of Will, and finally here, to the Vault of the Seekers of Carmot, for any surplus etherium, and to seek those who might create it anew. And I know that this publicly proffered rationale is an intentional deception.”

  This came out sounding a great deal more harsh in my ears than it had in my mind. For a moment I mentally stumbled, struggling for words to continue; for his part, Doc contributed a hoarse, “
Tezz, buddy, listen—don’t piss her off. Really. Oh, crap—I think she’s really mad!” which was, as usual, the opposite of helpful.

  But despite Doc’s alarm, Sharuum showed no reaction. She made no move of any variety. I was unable to determine that she was breathing. I swallowed, and took a deep breath of my own.

  “It is legendary among the Seekers that Your Wisdom was the closest confidant of Crucius the Mad himself. The Seekers of Carmot teach their adherents that it was Crucius who installed you as Grand Hegemon, and that you learned more of his secrets than any other being, living or dead. That all Esper’s recent advances in the exploitation of etherium flow, ultimately, from you.”

  I discovered I was sweating, though the Vault was dank and chill.

  “If all this you say is true,” she said with slow and careful precision, “what significance do you attach to it?”

  “That you know full well a truth known by only a few beings outside this very room: that the Seekers of Carmot have never had any secret of etherium’s creation. That you know full well the supposed Codex Etherium is blank. That no one other than Crucius himself has ever created etherium, and that carmot itself, the ‘missing ingredient’ of etherium, is entirely fictional. That there is no such thing as carmot. It has never existed and it never will.”

  I found myself gasping a bit for breath. Apparently that’s another thing I’m still angry about.

  Sharuum stared at me without moving for what felt like a very long time, then finally showed a hint of emotion by taking a deep breath and releasing a melancholy sigh.

  “I am very sorry for your loss,” she said, and turned as if to leave.

  “And I am very sorry for yours,” I answered sharply, “though my loss is real, and yours may be as fictional as carmot.”

  She stopped in the doorway.

  She stood very, very still.

  “I will ask that you explain yourself,” she said softly, as though speaking only to the downward spiral of the Great Stair. “Please do so with the clear understanding that I may decide I am angry enough to destroy all of you and raze this sickening mausoleum of fraud to the naked rock it stands on.”

  Baltrice gave me a look, brows raised over flames in her eyes, frankly asking my permission to commit regicide. I held up a hand, partly because I wished no harm to Sharuum … but mostly because Baltrice had no idea of the magnitude of power she faced. She’d be killed even sooner than I would, because—unlike me—she wouldn’t be running away.

  “At a certain point in my researches,” I said carefully, “I could no longer avoid the question: Why is the Grand Hegemon of Esper really visiting the etherium cults? Any salvageable metal can as easily—more easily—be collected by any number of official mages and wizardly functionaries who have more power than they know what to do with; and why is she seeking an answer she already knows does not exist?”

  “And you are certain of this?” she said, still facing away. “That the answer I seek does not exist?”

  “On the contrary, I’m certain that it does. The answer is fictional only because the question is likewise. The real question has an answer fully as real.”

  “Yet I have no answer at all.” Now she sounded only tired. “Sphinxes are creatures of questions. We leave answers to those naïve enough to seek them. I wish you joy of your answers, Tezzeret the Seeker; elsewise there will be none to be found.”

  She moved on out the door and very likely would have proceeded down the stairs and out of Vectis, back to her secluded island in the Sea of Unknowing, had I not said, “He’s alive, you know.”

  I heard her stop. I heard her start again, and stop again. And then I heard her turn around. “I hear both truth and honesty,” she said faintly, a bit breathlessly, as though not allowing herself to hope. “How are you certain?”

  “When I find him, shall I remember you to him?”

  “Little mage …” Slowly, slowly, she came back to the door, her face wholly blank but her stare as fiercely concentrated as that of a hungry dragon. “Little human mage, how do you hope to achieve this, where the great powers of our world have failed?”

  “I am little, and human, and a mage. But that is not all I am. You and I both know that our world is not the only world.”

  Renn made a choking sound; I indulged in a passing fantasy that he’d swallowed his tongue. “Um, Tezzeret? Hey,” Baltrice said uncertainly, “are you really sure you want to be having this conversation? Here? With her?”

  I moved toward Sharuum, slowly, reverently, to place myself once again between her forepaws. Laying my life at the mercy of her whim. Looking up into her ageless, beautiful face, I discovered that her eyes were damp with unshed tears.

  “This conversation,” I said, “is why I have hazarded my life to meet you, Your Wisdom. To bring you this news, and to ask a single question.”

  “I fear your question has no answer,” she said. “Crucius could not teach even me the creation of etherium. He said no Esperite could ever accomplish it, no matter how powerful. Nor did he share with me any slightest knowledge of carmot, of what it might be, or where it might be found.”

  “Then I suppose we’re both fortunate that we’re less interested in the creation of etherium than we are in finding its creator.”

  “I fear my beloved wanders beyond the walls of death,” she said solemnly. “For decades, the greatest of my servitors—and I myself—have sought him in every corner of creation, yet no trace of his passage has ever been discovered. I have even set clockworkers to shift in time back to when I know he was here … only to find that he is gone even from the past.”

  Really? Now, that was interesting.…

  “I have dreamed …” she went on. “Still I dream … that he is returned, that he has come again to set the world aright. This Conflux—this catastrophe that has crushed Esper together with Naya and Bant, with Jund and Grixis—this was to him a dream of peace. Of wholeness and sanity. He said that etherium itself was the key to restoring a sundered universe … but the wars, the Great Maelstrom, wild destruction unleashed upon every living thing … This is what I fear he foresaw. This is what I fear he fled, in hopes that his leaving might somehow stop, or even slow, this unimaginable cataclysm that has overtaken our world. I fear his flight was to escape this future. To end, in sorrow and despair, a life he had devoted to the hope of peace. Elsewise why would he not return to save what shreds of our land that remain?”

  “I can’t usefully speculate on why he hasn’t returned,” I said, “but you should know that he is alive indeed. My source is … uncommonly reliable.” An astonishing thing to find myself saying of Nicol Bolas, but I was done trying to lie to Sharuum. “Perhaps you simply don’t know how to look.”

  “Uh—” Renn coughed, trying to clear his throat while he leaned as far away from Baltrice as he could without falling off his chair. “You mean where to look, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, my gaze never wavering from the great sphinx’s. “Of course that’s what I mean.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Ah, little human mage, shall I give you the answer to a question you do not know to ask?”

  “Any answer you might offer, Your Wisdom, will be gratefully accepted.”

  “He told me once, centuries ago, that if he were to vanish wholly from the world, there would come, some years along, a mage in search of him. He said I would know this mage because he or she would be a created thing, not of this world, bearing not the slightest scrap of etherium. He said this mage would be a creature all of flesh while being only metal.”

  “Were those his words? The slightest scrap?”

  She nodded, and a wave of prickling climbed the back of my neck. “Go on.”

  She said, “I had taken this to mean a mage of extraordinary strength of character, and of power so great he had no need of etherium enhancement. In truth, his very words crossed my mind when you, Baltrice, introduced yourself.”

  “Me?” Baltrice managed to look flattered and profoundly skeptica
l at the same time. “Really?”

  Sharuum smiled sadly. “Should you again venture to impersonate a mage of Esper, you’d do well to get yourself an actual etherium arm, and better a leg or two, as part of your disguise. Illusion deceives only those who do not think to look for it.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure,” Baltrice said. “Uh, no thanks, okay?”

  “Crucius said that on that day, I should say two things to this unlikely mage,” Sharuum said. “I’m afraid they may be of little or no use in your search. Crucius, like any sphinx, was fond of riddles, wordplay, and obscure aphorisms—and he perhaps more than most. The first was an epigram that I ventured just outside this door, to judge your reaction,” she said to Baltrice. “He asked me to say, ‘When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.’ ”

  “Might even be true,” Baltrice said with a shrug. “If you’re enough of a coward.”

  “It’s not a commentary on courage,” I said. Something about it struck me strangely. More than strangely; the saying seemed to coil around my mind, slipping around knots and in through nooks and crannies as it searched for something solid to latch on to. Where it could grow. It was an unfamiliar sensation, and wholly unpleasant. I found myself dizzily holding on to my forehead as if doing so could brace me against toppling over.

  Partly in hopes of driving this effect away with a new thought, I asked, “And the second?”

  “A much more traditional riddle: simple questions that require a complex answer. Riddles welcome that sort of inversion; the more complex the riddle, the simpler the answer … and the reverse.”

  “All right,” I said unsteadily. “All right. I’m ready.”

  “I suspect you aren’t,” she said. “It’s very simple, and those are the hardest of all. Crucius suggested I should ask you, where do you search for what can’t be found, and what do you say without saying? What is your sky when you’re tombed in the ground, and whom do you rescue by slaying?”

  Baltrice snorted. “Oh, that’s deep. Be still my beating heart.”

  “It’s not …” I had my hand on my forehead again. “It’s … I don’t know. I think it’s deeper than it sounds.…”