Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “Yes.”

  “I guess somebody took down the Vacancy sign.”

  “In so many words.”

  “Wow.”

  Doc said, “Zombies give me the willies.”

  “You don’t even have a willie.”

  Baltrice shot me a sidelong look. “Doc?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t like zombies.”

  She looked back down into the center of the Netherglass. “Well, somebody sure does.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Here, look.”

  I turned my hand downward, and the tiny forescout device lifted from the sand. Spreading my fingers thinned and expanded the device into a hoop of etherium as wide in diameter as my arm was long. A simple adjustment of the refractive index of the air within the hoop made a section of the Crystal Labyrinth spring into focus as though we were only yards away, instead of miles.

  The zombies all faced inward. They pressed against one another until they formed a solid writhing mass of flesh and bone, as though they were a crowd come to see some insanely huge undead entertainment, for which the Labyrinth was the ampitheater.

  “It looks like they’re trying to get inside.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, okay. Sure, there’s a lot of them,” Baltrice said, “but we don’t have to fight them all at once, right? Hells, we can fly right to the nearest door, clear them out and seal it behind us. Even if they’re already inside, so what? They’re just zombies. If we have to fight our way through shoulder-to-shoulder zombies in all fourteen thousand rooms, I don’t figure it’ll raise too much of a sweat. Take a long damn time, though.”

  “Yes. That’s not our problem.”

  She squinted through the etherium hoop, then leaned to the side to take in the full scene. “Oh. Oh, sorry, I get it,” she said with an apologetic shrug. “My first thing’s always the tactical situation. You know.”

  “And that’s why I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “Now for the strategic question.”

  “Yeah. Strategic. And the answer’s no: I’ve never even heard a story about a necromancer who could summon a million zombies all at once.”

  “Likely several million,” I said. “I am acquainted with several beings who are, or have been, worshiped as gods, and I’ve never seen any of them do anything that even approached this sort of scale. I don’t think Nicol Bolas himself could do this. Not all at once.”

  “That’s why I was wondering if they might have just marched here,” she said. “Doesn’t Esper share a border with Grixis these days?”

  “Yes,” I said with a sigh, “but that gets us nowhere—to march zombies all the way from Grixis through the winds of the Glass Desert? Keeping the flesh on their bones would take more power than summoning them directly.”

  “Oh, sure. Cheer me up.”

  “It only gets worse from here,” I said, massaging my forehead. I’d never been the sort of person who gets a headache from thinking too hard—until, apparently, now. “I have an idea—almost a conviction—that I really, really hope is mistaken. You and Doc are two of the smartest people I know; I’d like you both to listen, and point out holes or blunders in my analysis. All right?”

  Doc said, “Really for real? You want my opinion?”

  “Yes. Baltrice?”

  She shook her head, blinking as though I’d awakened her from a daydream. “Sorry, Tezzeret. Sorry—I guess I’m, like, hallucinating or something. Because I could have sworn I just heard you ask me to check your work.”

  “Ha,” I said, “and ha.”

  She blinked some more. “You mean I wasn’t hallucinating?”

  This gave me brief pause. It underlined once again the seeming difference in who I am from who I once was. I remember being disdainful of Baltrice’s intellect, just as I remember the starkly malicious hatred I’d nursed for Jace, and the erratic fits of temper from which I had suffered—I just can’t remember why I felt that way.

  Being me was proving to be unexpectedly interesting.

  I returned my attention to the task at hand. “It is a truism of both artificing and mechanistics that entities are not to be multiplied without reason,” I began.

  Baltrice held up her hand to stop me. “Skip the lecture, huh? ‘Multiplying entities’ is the flavor of crap I dropped out of school to avoid.”

  I nodded. “Simply put, you don’t design five parts to perform a function that can be performed by one, yes? The only time you design the five parts instead is if you want to build in extra features that require flexibility of function, or if one piece will be only adequate, while the five will become superb.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Baltrice said. “It’s the KISS thing, right?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what they call it where I come from. KISS. It stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ ”

  “An elegant phrasing, and proper advice,” I said. “However, simple comes in a variety of sizes and colors. We’re assuming, for example, that all those zombies are the work of one necromancer.”

  “What, you think it’s like an army of the bastards? Because those guys aren’t exactly team players, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s more probable to meet one spectacularly powerful necromancer than an organized band of several hundred ordinary ones. But where this framework breaks down is when you consider why this necromancer—no matter how insanely powerful—is spending so much of that power to solve the Crystal Labyrinth, and why it’s happening now.”

  “Solve it?” Baltrice and Doc said together.

  “Those zombies cannot be there for defense, nor to discourage intruders; anyone out here in the Glass Desert will have more than enough power to simply avoid them—fly over them, teleport or gate past them, or if we’re talking about someone like you, burn hundreds of thousands of them to ash and walk in before the survivors can reach you. No: I am fairly certain that what we’re looking at here is an attempt to reach the heart of the Labyrinth.”

  Baltrice frowned “How do you figure?”

  Doc said, “BFI, right?”

  “Exactly,” I said under my breath, then spoke up for Baltrice’s benefit. “We artificers and mechanists of Esper have a pet acronym of our own: BFI. It stands for Brute Force and Ignorance. Let’s say, to Keep It Simple, that we’re looking at one and a half million zombies. The Crystal Labyrinth is reputed to have fourteen thousand four hundred rooms, which means the necromancer has at his disposal more than one hundred and four zombies per room. Zombies don’t need to eat, drink, or sleep; in fairly short order, even working at random, they will have explored every possible path. Once every path is known, the necromancer can just bloody well teleport in.”

  “Hey, I can probably do that!” Doc chirped. “I can teleport, remember? It’s like the only actual thing I can actually do. Except hurt you. And there’s only one place I can teleport you to. But still.”

  “There is nothing about you that I have forgotten,” I reassured him.

  “Put like that, it sounds easy,” Baltrice said, grim. “Hells, the bastard could have done it already.”

  I shook my head. “If he has, why are all the zombies still here?”

  “Holiday decorations,” Baltrice said. “How in the hells should I know?”

  “And we still haven’t answered the main question: Why is our necromancer working so hard to reach the heart of the Crystal Labyrinth? And why now?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “There’s no treasure,” I explained. “There has never been even a legend of treasure. All that lies at the heart of the Crystal Labyrinth is a single ancient sphinx—who may or may not be alive, if he ever existed.”

  “Well, that sphinx and—if you’re right—some clue to lead you to Crucius.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Why tells us who.”

  “Yeah?” Her face cleared. “Oh, I get it. You’re thinking about that snotty little clockworker from the Seekers, right?”

&
nbsp; “Silas Renn,” I said. “Beyond the three of us and Sharuum, who knows that the path to Crucius might be found through the Crystal Labyrinth? Who’s rich enough to hire however many necromancers he might think he needs? Who would sacrifice his entire family’s fortune and all of his remaining body parts to discover the key to creating etherium?”

  “Huh. ‘Why tells us who.’ Huh.” Baltrice shook her head. “And all those years, you kept telling everybody with ears that why means nothing at all.”

  “Did I?” I said. “I can’t imagine what I must have been thinking.”

  “You should have let me kill him back in Vectis.”

  “Perhaps.” At the time, I had been unwilling to upset Sharuum, nor did I wish to spark an all-out brawl with the Seekers of Carmot—especially not when the city’s defenses included apport interdiction, so we couldn’t teleport out if things went bad. And if I’d tried to planeswalk, Doc would have dumped me back in that sangrite cave on—in—Jund. And I had discovered myself unwilling to destroy Silas Renn. Despite the danger he represented, he was not trash.

  He was something I had not yet found a use for.

  “So, it’s this Renn guy who’s got you all worked up? He’s not so much of all that.”

  “Renn is tremendously powerful. You caught him by surprise, distracted by the arrival of Sharuum and her retinue. Do you remember how powerful I was? Back when I had my arm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Renn and I studied together for three years. I fought him at least once every examination period—thirteen times, in fact. I never beat him.”

  Baltrice frowned. “Never?”

  “And he wasn’t even allowed to use clockworking,” I said. “At the Academy, clockworking is forbidden in sanctioned duels unless both participants agree to it beforehand.”

  “For real? How come? I mean, sure, chronomancy is kind of weird, but it’s hardly—”

  “Chronomancy is not even on a nearby plane to clockworking. A clockworker can actually control time. You understand teleportation. To a clockworker adept, time is simply another spatial dimension. They can jump forward and backward in time as easily as you or I might teleport across a room.”

  Her frown turned into a scowl. “So if I hit him with something that rocks his world, he can just, like, jump back to right before I hit him and deliver a preemptive smackdown?”

  “It’s more complicated than that—clockworking is fiendishly difficult and, no pun intended, time consuming—but essentially, yes. He can also control your own personal temporal flow in ways no magic at our command can counter. No shield will stop you from getting old. And that’s not all.”

  She winced. “It gets worse?”

  “A good clockworker—which Renn is—can, with proper preparation, move sideways in time.”

  “What in the hells is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’d have to ask a clockworker for the details,” I said. “I’ve never looked deeply into the theory, and so I have only a layman’s knowledge. The best I can understand is that time isn’t a single straight line—it’s more like a big rope, braided and rebraided out of an infinite number of different temporal strands. Every time you make a choice—turn right instead of left—you split off a new temporal strand. If the choice you make doesn’t affect other nearby main lines—if you arrive at your destination at the same moment you would have if you’d turned the other way—your strand gets braided back into the main cable and everything proceeds as usual. But a clockworker adept can sense the nearest strands of other main lines and decide which one he wants to be in. In other words, he can pick and choose the outcome he wants, and move himself into the time line where that’s what happens. And he can take you with him.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes. The only limitations of clockworking are the power of the adept and the dictates of probability—the more improbable the outcome the adept is looking for, the more power it takes to get himself into that alternate line. Even though it’s not something he can pull off on the spur of the moment, the only real defense against a good clockworker is another clockworker.”

  “And he got here first,” Baltrice said, “and brought all his friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he knows we’re coming, so he’s had time to prepare.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he might be inclined to be a little stern with both of us.”

  “That’s it. See any holes?”

  “Other than the bleeding ones that are about to start opening up all over both our bodies?” She stood for a long moment, staring grimly at the stark reality clustered at the bottom of the Netherglass. When finally she spoke again, her voice was hoarse and harsh. “This was what you were talking about, when you said you won’t survive.”

  “Not specifically.”

  “How about we walk away? Just pitch it. Because I’m looking down there, Tezzeret, and all I’m seeing is an assload of undead that you and I will probably be joining. I think we are way out of our league.”

  “I can’t walk away.”

  “That you talking, or Doc?”

  “Doc is silent on the subject,” I said. “He doesn’t want to die any more than I do—but he also can’t let me back off. You, on the other hand, are under no obligation to perish at our side.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in popping back to Vectis to pull your doohickey out of Beleren’s brain first, would you?”

  I only looked at her.

  “Sure, what did I expect?” she said. “You’re not the merciful type.”

  “More merciful than he was,” I said. “He’s alive. And he may yet be whole and hale.”

  “If we win.”

  “Yes. If we win.”

  She took a deep, deep breath as though about to take a plunge to black water, without knowing whether she’d ever breathe again. Finally she let it out in a gust, shook the kinks out of her shoulders, and said, “All right. Let’s do it.”

  “Baltrice—”

  “Shut up, Tezzeret. I mean it. Shut up because whatever you’re about to say, I really don’t want to hear.”

  I stood in silence.

  Eventually, she turned to me. “You have a plan, right? Tell me you have a plan.”

  I said, “I have a plan.”

  THE METAL ISLAND

  LIFE AND TIMES

  Still reclining upon the etherium sand, the ancient dragon snorted another gust of greasy, meat-scented smoke. “What a pathetic creature you are.”

  Tezzeret smiled. “Flatterer.”

  “You spew egomania like a sneeze sprays snot. Except snot tastes better,” Bolas said. “Maybe you should kill me now. Put me out of your misery.”

  “If death is what you’re looking for, you need only wait,” Tezzeret said. “Or, I suppose, ask me nicely.”

  The dragon rolled his eyes and took a deep breath in an apparent attempt to control exasperation. “Do you understand just how preposterously self-centered your whole theory of reality is, you demented little gutter monkey? ‘Oooh, Crucius did everything just for meeeee …’ ‘Oooh, Rennnn’s waiting there to spank me!’ Revolting.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You did understand, even back there, that for your theory to be accurate, Crucius would have had to anticipate not only your brains getting scrambled by Beleren—all right, to be fair, anyone who knows the two of you saw that one coming—but he would have had to somehow make me glue your pieces back together and strong-arm you into looking for him in the first place.”

  “When you put it that way, it does seem unlikely,” Tezzeret said mildly. “And yet, here I am.”

  “Not because Crucius planned it this way.”

  “As soon as the Grand Hegemon departs,” Tezzeret said with a casual wave toward the cloud of etherium-colored mist that still enveloped Sharuum and the Metal Sphinx together, “you are welcome to ask him.”

  “Like I actually believe any of this.”

  “I can say with considerabl
e certainty that at this moment, nothing in any universe depends upon whether you believe in it or not,” Tezzeret replied. “I knew an Ethersworn monk once, who made it a practice to believe six impossible things before breakfast; if he could manage only five, he stayed in bed.”

  “Baltrice was right,” Bolas muttered. “You’ve spent too much time around sphinxes.”

  “Disquieting, isn’t it?” Tezzeret smiled thoughtfully toward the great statue. “I may be coming to understand how they think.”

  “Tezzeret.” The musical harmonics of the Grand Hegemon’s voice wafted from the cloud like audible incense. “We are finished.”

  Tezzeret raised a hand, and the cloud faded. Sharuum backed way from the Metal Sphinx as though unwilling to take her eyes from its etherium face. “You have done all that was asked of you, and more. The word of a sphinx is not lightly given, nor can it be broken. As promised, all that I have is yours, to keep or to abandon, to build or to destroy.”

  Tezzeret said gravely, “Thank you.”

  “Is this a joke?” The dragon’s scaly jaw dropped toward the sand while the rest of him was in the process of rising. “Did she just give you the plane?”

  “Part of one.”

  “It’s a pretty nice thank-you gift.”

  “Yes.” He looked up at Bolas, who now towered over him. “Sit.”

  The dragon glowered down at him, but sat.

  “Stay.” Tezzeret walked toward Sharuum. “I will return you now to our land.”

  “Must you? I had … hoped … I might abide here. For … company.”

  “You cannot,” Tezzeret said. “You have given yourself to me, per our bargain, and this is my will: that you return to Esper and rule as you always have, that you place your great wisdom in service to our land and all who call it home, and that you treat all of my possessions as your own.”

  The great sphinx stared down at him, uncomprehending, silent with astonishment.

  “If I should chance to change my mind,” he said through his thin smile, “I’ll let you know.”