Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “I don’t think so.” Flee? From me? Not Silas Renn.

  He stepped into the gate and vanished.

  “The gate’s still open—go get him!”

  “I don’t think so,” I repeated. The only plausible reason for the gate to still be there is that he wanted me to go after him. I’m just not that gullible.

  Those time shields were still between me and the gate—but I had a work-around. I did my new reality-rip trick in front of my chest, and opened another one at the mouth of the gate—sighting through the warp showed me Renn crouching on the far side, so he wouldn’t get caught in the kill zone of the five (!) etherium drakes he had waiting for me, who would have made very short work of me indeed, supercharged or not.

  I extended my power through the reality warp—into the one in front of me and out of the one fronting the gate—like a hand of lightning, and just grabbed the smug prick and hauled him back here where I could uncork another swing or two. Or five. Or eight.

  However many it took until the bastard stopped moving.

  My lightning hand couldn’t breach his personal shields, and I couldn’t seem to drag him into the warp itself—but that was no reason to just let him go. I’d never get a better chance to test his personal shields against the altered physics of an area where time was passing, say for example, at roughly one tenth of one percent of normal. It was worth the experiment.

  I threw him at Baltrice.

  He flailed wildly in the air, magic flashing and blasting out of him in all directions, seemingly at random, but some of them must have accomplished something, because suddenly everything was happening very … very … slowly … the crackles and blasts of battle deepening to a grinding, almost subsonic rumble.

  Renn inched through the air toward Baltrice, and I got it: he’d thrown some sort of temporal distortion to give himself time to figure out what to do—but in his panic he’d accidentally caught me in the spell’s fringe, for which I was grateful, because I was about to be in a great deal of trouble. Those damned etherium drakes were heading into Renn’s gate.

  Coming for me.

  Four of them unfurled their wings with the majestic grace of schooners raising sail. The fifth, showing either better reflexes or more initiative than his comrades, had turned his wide-gaped mouth toward the reality warp and now belched forth a roiling burst of flame. I canceled the warp instantly, but my reflexes, no matter how enhanced by Renn’s spell, couldn’t force the warp to close all at once. As the ragged edges of reality gradually sewed themselves back together, I was treated to the unusual view of dragon-fire boiling slowly toward me, creeping through the warp, and unfolding like a thunderhead until it pillowed into me and blasted me backward and up into the sky.

  Slowly.

  The lightning from my skin protected me from anything worse than sunburn, but matters would be different when they all ganged up on me. And I was in no mood to waste my limited powers fighting e-drakes. I had a better idea.

  Renn, meanwhile, stretched a hand toward Baltrice, and he must have canceled the hypotemporal field that restrained her to avoid catching himself in it like a fly in magical amber. She lurched into motion, though still (subjectively) very slowly, pitching forward over the nose of her sled, heading for the dunes face-first. Renn came tumbling glacially after her.

  This looked to me like a chance to get up close and personal.

  I grabbed reality between them and yanked it to within one step, arriving directly in the path of Renn’s cold-molasses tumble, which I intercepted by leaping forward to grab the back of his neck, yank his head toward me, and smash his face into my knee.

  The slow-motion squash of Silas Renn’s nose was possibly the most exquisitely satisfying sensation I will ever experience.

  Suddenly—though not unexpectedly—time around us regained its normal flow when my knee broke Renn’s concentration along with his nose. Back in full speed with no time to react, he and I crashed together with stunning force. His greater momentum carried us backward, and we hit the sand in a heap. Renn somehow had gotten his head into the pit of my stomach, and the impact drove all hope of breath from my lungs and made ragged patches of black skate across the cloudless sky above.

  I rolled over on top of him and hooked his etherium collarbone with my left hand, which was all I could manage before I had to simply lie across him and try to force air back down my throat. Fortunately, Renn was in no better shape; he lay with only whites showing through his slitted eyelids, and his open mouth bubbled with blood from his nose.

  “Tezzeret …?” Baltrice rolled over with a grunt and sat up. I was passingly pleased to note that her face, unlike the rest of her body, had no powdered glass on it—because her ear-and-eye device was still working. “What happened to me? What’s wrong with my back? What the hell’s going on?”

  I tried to tell her, but could manage only a strangled croak. I gestured weakly at Renn with my free hand.

  She stood up. “Well, all right, then. Get off him and I’ll take it from here.”

  I shook my head emphatically and waved her gaze toward the blossoming formation of e-drakes converging on us. “Bigger … problem …”

  Her brows drew together. “Yeah. I think they’re playing my song.”

  Fire licked along her arms and legs and whooshed skyward from the top of her brush cut. “My back feels funny—weak. Numb,” she said, eyes on the e-drakes to gauge their approach. “And wet. How bad am I hurt?”

  “Not … badly,” I managed to gasp. “I’ve got … Renn. Stop … the drakes …”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” She clenched both fists, and a flaming dome of shield flared to life, sheltering Renn and me, but not her. She stepped between us and the diving drakes, and she didn’t bother with a personal shield.

  All five of them went straight for her, and the blast of fire from five e-throats was so intense the dunes around us looked like the inside of a blast furnace. Embers spit into my hair and across my back even through Baltrice’s shield, and the flames slagged the dune to smoking slabs of glass for meters around. When the fire died away, Baltrice hadn’t moved. She just stood there, squinting up at them, fists on her hips as though she’d decided, in the spirit of fair play, she’d given them one free shot.

  Now she tilted her head to crack her neck, and rotated her shoulders to loosen the cramping around the wound in her back. “Well, all right, then.” She sounded cheerfully businesslike. “Damn me if you sad-ass bastards aren’t right in the middle of the last stupid thing you’re ever gonna do.”

  Watching Baltrice unleash her inferno of destruction, I decided she was living proof of the adage, “If you love your job, you never have to work for a living.”

  The etherium drake is one of the last surviving remnants of what is very possibly the worst idea in the history of Esper. Centuries ago, the earliest rudiments of what would become the Ethersworn decided that since etherium was supposed to “sanctify and morally elevate” whatever is joined with it, they should start enhancing even the beasts, to speed the world’s transformation into a paradise. Which was appallingly ignorant in itself, but they didn’t stop there.

  When these self-appointed saviors got together to figure out what species should be the first on which they’d try their Noble Work, they chose the Esper firedrake.

  The firedrake was, before these chucklebrains began to meddle with it, the single most dangerous predator on Esper. Smaller than true dragons, not significantly smarter than sewer rats, and lacking the broad-based magical prowess of their draconic relations, the firedrakes made up for their genetic deficits in sheer mindless ferocity.

  Sluice serpents can be avoided by staying away from the cesspits; kraken keep to the deep ocean; striges are more of a nuisance than a threat. Flocks of firedrakes, however, who have, on their good days, the temperament of rabid viashinos, might at any time take it upon themselves to flock together and wing off to some randomly unlucky spot, then attack and immolate everything for miles around. Everything
. Ships. Caravans. Villages. Rocks. Each other. No one knows exactly why.

  Maybe they just like to watch things burn.

  The proto-Ethersworn spent a generation or two stalking firedrakes, tranquilizing them, and replacing various parts of their bodies with refined etherium. To the astonishment of no one other than themselves, the Noble Metal seemed to have no beneficial effect on the behavior of firedrakes. At all. So, in their typically clot-headed fashion, they concluded that this must be simply because the firedrakes hadn’t been enhanced enough, and they undertook to remedy this delusional problem by making a very real problem several orders of magnitude worse.

  Just as it does for any other living thing, etherium made firedrakes stronger.

  This was long before the days of the shortage, and so by the time any sane people realized what these moonbats were up to, there were several hundred firedrakes whose entire bodies had been replaced. They even replaced the creatures’ brains, which had no noticeable effect on their physiology beyond making them a great deal more difficult to kill, and making their moral character, if they could be said to have one, even worse.

  Where before they had been ridiculously dangerous, savagely unpredictable horrors, full-body replacement transformed them into mindless, near-indestructible engines of destruction.

  Sharuum, in her wisdom, commanded the moonbats to clean up their own mess, which made no appreciable dent in the numbers of e-drakes but in short order did an admirable job of thinning the moonbat population. Eventually the Grand Hegemon was forced to take a personal hand. She gathered the bulk of the land’s sphinxes and led them on a sequence of hunts over the course of a decade or two, until there were no more e-drakes to be found. Somehow, however, the creatures persist in reappearing at inconvenient moments.

  Informed opinions on the reason for this are split. Optimists tend to believe new e-drakes are being created by a radical splinter sect of the Ethersworn, still carrying on their Noble Nut Job in secret. Realists are of the opinion that the creatures have found a way to breed.

  Dangerous as they are, their most destructive power is the annihilating fire they can vomit at will—and to assault Baltrice with flame was worse than useless. The more flame they poured onto her, the stronger she got, and when a couple of them stooped like falcons to try their luck with fang and talon, she just opened her arms and invited them in with a truly happy grin.

  The closest e-drake was clearly astonished to discover that Baltrice could herself claw and bite with the best of them. She slipped the beast’s viperish fang strike, got one arm around the thing’s long, snaky neck, and grabbed its wing joint with her free hand. In a second or two, the joint ran from red to yellow to white as radioactive milk, and dripped down through the e-drake’s ribs while the wing flopped off, twitching into the dunes.

  I could happily have whiled away the whole afternoon watching Baltrice dismantle her new toys, except that this was the moment Silas Renn chose to hook his thumb into my left eye.

  “Uh, by the way,” Doc said, “did I mention he’s awake?”

  That was also the moment I discovered that the boiling had subsided from my blood, that the lightning crackle was gone from my skin, and that I was suddenly tired.

  Very, very tired.

  Not yet dead tired, though that state loomed in my immediate future.

  Exhaustion, however, was not enough to stop me from twisting my head, latching my teeth into the ball of his thumb, and biting down until he squealed like a tea kettle. He got his other hand up under my chin and dug his thumb into my parotid gland until I had to let go so I could turn my head away, after which he undertook to deliver a very efficient, thorough, and professional beating, focusing on my face, my lower abdominal wall, and my groin.

  This was a particularly inconvenient moment to discover that the education of scions of the House of Renn included comprehensive training in personal combat.

  This was particularly inconvenient because I hadn’t been in a fistfight since I was (approximately) eleven years old, and because my lack of expertise was compounded by having only one hand I could use to defend myself. If I let go of his collarbone, he’d throw me off and roast me in roughly a heartbeat and a half.

  Worse, it seemed that his etherium enhancements, in addition to being impervious to anything I could do with hands, feet, or head, also made him stronger than a rhox berserker. Each blow of his fists opened a cut on my face and shot stars across my vision, or ripped muscles and battered internal organs, or crushed my testicles until I had to vomit bile from my empty stomach, or inventive combinations thereof. “How’s it feel, scrapper boy?” he sneered in my face. “Bet you never thought I could beat you at this too, did you?”

  I could not have answered him if I’d wanted to. Soon he got bored with thrashing me, and decided to break my grip on his collarbone by pinching the muscle between my thumb and forefinger with his thumb and forefinger, which was so unexpectedly and unbelievably painful that I yelped and jerked as if I’d been stabbed. But despite his enhancements, his hands were still only flesh and bone. With my free hand, I grabbed his thumb and pried it off me.

  “Where I come from, this is foreplay,” I mumbled through smashed and bloody lips. “In a fight, we’re more like—” and I completed the sentence by yanking his thumb in a direction thumbs are not designed to be yanked.

  The joint snapped with a satisfyingly wet crunch.

  “Cesspit scum,” he snarled, his face white with killing rage. “After I beat you unconscious, I’m going to drown you in your own sewage.”

  “You don’t have the balls. Remember?” I let go of his thumb, reached behind his head, and grabbed a fistful of powdered glass that I pounded into the ruin of his nose. “This is how we do it in Tidehollow, you snotty upslope bitch.”

  The powdered glass spread across his face. I encouraged the spreading by pounding him with the outside of my fist as if it were a hammer. I may not know much about fist-fighting, but I do know how to swing a hammer, and there are few humans who can truthfully say they do it better.

  Renn gasped from the impact, and when his mouth opened I hit him again, this time downward on his lower incisors, hyperextending his jaw with another wet crunch. He howled. In Tidehollow, that would be the moment to pound sand into his open mouth, so I did.

  A cave brat from my part of the slum would also twist his hand on Renn’s face, to grind the sand harder into his mouth and into the ruin of his nose, to force it into his eye sockets, thumb it under his eyelids, and pack it into his tear ducts.

  I did that, too.

  Then I hit him again. And once more for good measure.

  And one to grow on.

  He gagged, and choked, and tried to howl some more, acting generally helpless and beaten, which I didn’t believe for a second; I knew how tough he used to be, and I assumed that now he was likely tougher. The fight would be over when one of us was unconscious. Or dead.

  My suspicious nature paid off when I glimpsed a flash of blue sparks at the corners of his eyes, and so managed to avert my eyes before his Immaculate Form—a very minor magic, barely a cantrip, used for instantly cleansing oneself and one’s clothing—blew all that sand away from his face and straight at mine. Before I could get back to business, one of his arms snaked around the back of my neck and he caught his opposite forearm to lever his other arm across my face.

  I had been expecting him to throw me off. By the time I realized what he was doing, he had locked my head into the crook of his arm. His hold tightened with the mechanical progression of a bench vise. “Tidehollow’s nothing,” he whispered in my ear. “This is how men fight.”

  That built-in body regeneration of his seemed to be working entirely too well.

  “Uh, Tezz …?” Doc said worriedly. “It seems like we’re in trouble here. Are we in trouble? Tezz?”

  I couldn’t answer because my mouth was jammed full of etherium forearm. I managed to find his hands and clawed at them, trying for another fingerhold or a gri
p on his broken thumb, but of course he wouldn’t let me catch him that way again. “Oh, no no no,” he hummed. “You don’t want to do that, and here’s why.”

  His grip tightened. I heard an alarming crunching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the back of my skull. “Do you know how I practice this hold?” he murmured. “On granite boulders. Until they shatter.”

  Apparently my rhox-berserker metaphor had been something of an understatement.

  “Tezz? Tezz! Do something!” Doc was starting to panic—and he sounded calmer than I was. Sangrite exhaustion seemed to have drained every drop of my mana reserve as well. I tried to organize my mind into planeswalking configuration, thinking that maybe Doc could ‘port us back to the cavern—but all I got was a moan of dismay that indicated “It’ll be hours before I can do that again!”

  This, I thought, is a stupid way to die.

  “How should I kill you? Let me count the ways,” Renn mused happily. “Squashing your head like a rotten melon has a certain visceral appeal … but no, no, that will never do—it would be over all too quickly. How might I do it leisurely … as if I have all the time in the world. Because, after all, I do.”

  What could I have been thinking? Had I been thinking at all? I had never beaten him. Not once. But I had let my supercharged blood boil drag me into exactly what he was best at—single combat. Idiot.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Dying—again—would be bad enough. Dying because I was too stupid to live was more than I could take. If only I had stopped to think—because, after all, the only trait in which I had a real advantage over Renn was intellect, though one couldn’t prove it by anything that happened today. I had blindly thrown myself against him, my puny, all-too-mortal flesh against his unlimited power of etherium—

  Wait.

  The unlimited power of etherium …

  Manipulating etherium didn’t require mana. Not for me. The metal itself would furnish the power. Renn was half lost in his fantasies of torturing me to death. I was half lost in my blinding epiphany that there was one more thing I could do that Renn didn’t know I could do.