Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  This was a subject on which he would have an opinion.

  It occurred to me that he’d been silent for some while. Since I’d said good-bye to Baltrice, perhaps. I wasn’t sure exactly what this signified, but I found myself gripped by a sudden and astonishingly bleak apprehension. The idea that he might not be there congealed in my throat like frozen snot. “Doc?”

  There came no reply.

  “Quit kidding around. You’re not exactly the strong silent type,” I said, but I knew the truth already. I could feel it.

  The truth felt like a knife. Lodged somewhere between my stomach and my heart, where it stabbed me with every breath.

  The Hidden One regarded me impassively. “Talking to the voice in your head?”

  Anger ignited within me as if my bones had caught fire. “He’s not a voice!” I snapped. “He’s not some damned delusion, he’s a—”

  I choked on the word. This was ridiculous. More than implausible. It was impossible.

  Should have been impossible.

  But I had to say it. I owed him that much.

  “He was a friend,” I said. My eyes felt hot, and my vision blurred; I shook my head and looked away. I didn’t know why I felt what I felt, but I have never been a man to deny the truth. “The only friend I had.”

  Reality is not what we want. It’s what is.

  “I did not mean that you are mad, Tezzeret. A few of you have spoken of a voice that drives you onward—usually bitterly. Sometimes with open hatred. You are the first to name the voice a friend.”

  “It’s not that I like him,” I said. “But … he’s not bad. He wasn’t the rotten bastard he could have been. He actually helped me. More than once; I wouldn’t have made it here without him. And he was always there. I got used to him. It’s … hard to describe. Of everyone who has ever had power over me, he’s the only one who treated me better than he had to.”

  “Mercy is the greatest virtue.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You agree more than you think you do.”

  To me, that meant nothing at all. I shook my head. “I didn’t even say good-bye.”

  “Why would you? You and he did not part. Precisely the opposite.”

  I looked up at the ancient sphinx. He looked down at me.

  “None of you hears voices in this place other than mine and your own. The Seeker faces the Riddle Gate alone.”

  I barely heard him. I was still thinking about Precisely the opposite.

  Was is possible?

  He certainly did seem to understand me better than anyone I’ve ever known. Including my family. He had my sense of humor—at least, down in the guilty-pleasure slush that I usually make a point of not saying aloud. He reminded me of the sort of individual I sometimes thought I might have grown up to be, had I been born into a life less dire than that of scrappers in Tidehollow.

  Yes: I had hated Doc instinctively. At first. He’d tormented me with the merciless malice of a demon child. At first. But even at the very start we had, for example, shared a profound hatred of Nicol Bolas. In fact, the only times we’d really disagreed were when he got angry because I was risking our lives.

  My life.

  Some long-lived creatures have the ability to establish subsidiary selves—subordinate personalities, more or less—to help keep their ever-increasing store of memory organized; dragons are one of these creatures. Anything Bolas could do to himself, I was certain he could do to me. Not to mention it would tickle Bolas right down to the toe-jam between his talons to have set me against myself.

  And if it were true, what did that say about what I want? Had Doc been driving me toward Bolas’s goal, or toward my own? What if they were the same?

  And if they weren’t, what was the difference?

  At some point, I sat down. After an unknown interval, I realized I had been staring past Kemuel, silently thinking about nothing at all. It felt as though I had been doing so for a very, very long time. The sort of interval that is usually measured in decades.

  The Hidden One hadn’t moved. Patience is not a virtue to a sphinx. Patience is his nature.

  “I know what I’m looking for,” I said eventually. “For now, anyway. I’m looking for the way through the Riddle Gate. If I don’t have that, nothing else matters.”

  “Very good, my friend! And how do you propose to find a path where every Seeker fails?”

  “That’s the easy part,” I said. “I’ll ask you to show me.”

  Kemuel’s eyes widened, then closed to slanted slits. The ancient sphinx drew himself up, the size of a dragon and twice as dire. His voice boomed like thunder among high mountains. “And what do you expect me to do when you ask, you tiny clot of impudence?”

  “That’s what I want to find out,” I said. “You’ve mentioned the task your father gave you. I’ll be surprised if it’s to warm the ground with your butt while you wait for a Seeker to show up and keep you company. And I am rarely surprised.”

  The Hidden One glared down upon me as though lightning from his eyes might strike me dead.

  Having been trapped in a cavern at the mercy of Nicol Bolas, however, had surgically excised any tendency I might have had to be intimidated by a stern look. “Kemuel the Ancient, called the Hidden One, I conjure you in the name of your father Crucius, in the name of the Search, and in the name of every friendship we have ever shared: Describe your task,” I said, and added, “Please.”

  The stark threat in his glare might as well have been chiseled into a mask of stone. Until one eyelid drooped and reopened, and those erosion scars began etching themselves into his face all over again.

  Blinking, I said, “Was that actually, just now—I mean, did you just wink at me?”

  “Your manners have improved,” he said with an indulgent chuckle that sounded a bit like wind chimes the size of a boat. “Come, my friend. Stand at my side, and we will speak of my task.”

  I went to the indicated spot. So close to his shoulder, the warmth of his body was like an iron stove on a winter’s night … and all I wanted to do was lie down, let that warmth enfold me, and sleep. Forever.

  But there’d be plenty of forever to sleep through if I didn’t pass the Gate.

  “I am permitted to show you one thing you have never seen, and remind you of two things you already know.”

  “All right,” I said. “Show me.”

  “This is what awaits you beyond the Riddle Gate,” he said, and with no gesture nor slightest flicker of expression, where we stood transformed into paradise.

  A land of etherium.

  Of nothing but etherium. Trees. Stones. Grass. Sand. “Ah,” I said.

  It was all I could say.

  I found myself on my knees, for I had no strength to stand. Gasping. This was what waited for me beyond the Gate?

  This?

  “This …?” I whispered. “This is where I’ll find him? This?”

  I had never dreamed …

  It was all right here. In front of me. Around me. I was already there …

  One step away.

  I knelt, gazing upon the answer to every question I had ever had, and then I could wait no longer. I wrenched myself to my feet and lurched forward. Nothing stopped me. I recovered my balance and began to walk. Then I began to run.

  I ran until I had no breath. Until my feet bled. Until exhaustion slammed me to the ground as if I’d been hit with a thunderbolt.

  When at length I regained my senses, the ground on which I lay was not etherium.

  I rolled over. Kemuel was three paces behind me. He hadn’t moved.

  I hadn’t moved.

  “If it were that easy,” he said, “no Seeker would fail.”

  Yes. Of course. Painfully I sat up and nodded in resignation. “I was … overcome.”

  “You always are.”

  “But I’m not giving up. I’m hardly beaten.”

  “Yet.”

  Wait—I had it. Obvious. So obvious it might not have occurred to any other me.
The Riddle Gate must be interplanar—I was looking at a different plane. Seeing it, I could walk there.

  Just not with my feet.

  I gathered power and ignited my Spark … but found no Spark to ignite, and no power to gather.

  “In the Riddle Gate, there is no power save etherium.”

  And there is no etherium save …

  When I looked at him, he wore a sad smile that was also somehow fond. “Often, you die in the act of attacking me.”

  Again: of course.

  I sank back to my knees, scrubbing at my face with both hands as if I could erase exhaustion, and hope, and despair, and every other feeling and thought in the screaming whirl inside my head. Not for the first time, I was reminded what a burden it is to be human.

  “All right,” I said. I held my eyes closed, my only hope of lessening the inexorable gravitation of the unimaginable etherium beyond the Gate. “So. This is … this could have been designed specifically for me. To torment me. Torture me. One step from more etherium than I have ever imagined could exist in the Multiverse. One step from Crucius. One step from the secret of creation itself. One step that I cannot take, for lack of etherium.”

  I shook my head, helpless. “This is my personal hell.”

  “Etherium only gets in your way,” Kemuel said gently.

  “All right. The other things—the ones you say I already know. The reminders you are permitted to give. Please, tell me.”

  “The first is one that I believe you are in the midst of experiencing,” he said. “When one is made of glass—”

  “Everything looks like a stone. Yes.” I took a deep breath, nodded, and took another. Somehow, the aphorism helped me calm myself. I seemed to be regaining some of my ability to think.

  “I understand. The situation does not have to be designed to torture me. It may be this way because there is no other way it can be; the bitter irony I face here may be an effect of who I am, rather than how it was made. Yes.”

  I took another deep breath, and the rest of the whirl within my head slowed, and seemed to settle itself into a manageable progression. When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone—but …

  I turned to meet the unfathomable gaze of the Hidden One. “On the other hand,” I said slowly, “sometimes what looks like a stone is a stone. And sometimes a stone has my name on it.”

  Kemuel’s smile broadened. “You make me very proud.”

  “I can’t imagine why. All right, I get it. I think. What’s the other reminder?”

  “I am permitted to remind you of the one way you solved the first two lines of my father’s riddle.”

  “How I—?” I put a hand to my head. The whirl seemed to be spinning up again. “The one way?”

  It hadn’t been one way at all; the solutions were barely even related. The first two lines …

  The first solution was the product of analysis. Logic. Intellect.

  The second was the product of diligence. Thoroughness. The infinite capacity for taking pains.

  The only thing the two had in common was me.

  Fierce light inside my head burst to blinding life.

  Me?

  The fierce light burned my whirl of confusion away. “Me …” I heard myself saying. “It was me.”

  The solutions had been mine. Mine personally. I hadn’t solved “Where do you look for what can’t be found?” and “What do you say without saying?”

  My answers had been where I would look for what can’t be found, and what I could say without saying.

  Analysis and diligence are two of the four defining traits of greatness in an artificer. The third was exactly what I was experiencing right now.

  Inspiration.

  The next line had been, “What is your sky when you’re tombed in the ground?”

  Well, I was tombed enough, metaphorically. The Riddle Gate was an open grave, just waiting for me to lie down. Tombed … buried alive, or dead, and it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. Not in the tomb.

  What was my sky? The answer to my prayer, and forever beyond my grasp? What tortured me every time I so much as thought about it? What did I long for more than life itself?

  I opened my eyes and looked at my answer.

  “Oh … god …” Tears gathered in my eyes. Why did I not have a god to whom I could appeal? Even a delusional dream of divine mercy would be better than this.

  To die staring at the only thing I really want.

  But … the sky, any sky, is a metaphor, too. It’s a mental construct, a boundary we imagine, to imaginatively divide infinite space. It’s not real—it’s not air, or clouds, moons, planets, or stars. It’s … what?

  It’s always out of reach from wherever you are.

  You can’t grab it. You can’t buy it or sell it. It can’t be broken, or stolen, chained, or freed. Because it can’t be owned, it belongs to everyone.

  To everything.

  My eyes drifted shut. I said softly, “You’re kidding, right? Please say you’re not serious.”

  “But I’m not, and I am.”

  “Etherium gets in my way.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because it’s as much an idea as it is a substance.”

  “Yes.”

  “And etherium can’t pass through the Riddle Gate.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even the dream of it. Even the hope for it. As long as etherium is something to me, I’m trapped here.”

  “Yes.”

  “The only way I can get to where I most want to be … is to not care if I ever make it.”

  “Yes.”

  “So.” I sighed, opened my eyes, and stared out from the Riddle Gate at my dream of paradise, forever out of my reach. In order for me to get there, it has to not be paradise anymore. Not for me. “I imagine this is when I usually take my own life.”

  “I am sorry to say that it is.”

  “At least now I understand why.” I shook my head. “How am I supposed to do this?”

  “I don’t know. None of you ever has,” he piped sadly. “This is why the Riddle Gate will be your end: succeed or fail, the man you are will die here. But the Riddle Gate will be the midpoint for the Seeker who finally passes through; for the rest of your days, your existence will be defined by that passage. Not by your birth, your death, nor your rebirth—no matter how many times you experience each of them. You will mark your days by what came before the Riddle Gate, and what came after.”

  Swell.

  “So let’s sum up. It looks to me kind of like this: I have spent my entire life turning myself into a man who can get here, because I have been, consciously or not, trying to get there,” I said, jabbing a finger out at the etherium land. “If I wasn’t trying to get there, I would never have gotten here. But in order to actually get there, I have to become somebody who never would have bothered to come here in the first place.”

  “Yes, Tezzeret my friend. This next will be what we sphinxes sometimes call,” he said gravely, “the tricky part.”

  In the fullness of time, I became that man.

  I rose, gave my farewells to Kemuel—along with instructions for Sharuum, should she choose to follow me—and he said, “Meeting her will be interesting. Instructive. I will be born several hundred years from now, when she is younger and my father is king.”

  The man I had been would be irritated with that; the man I had become only nodded and stepped forth from the Riddle Gate onto the Metal Island.

  For an infinite span, I kneeled on the etherium sand, meditating upon the riddle of the Metal Sphinx. By the time eternity had passed, I had found my answer.

  But if you want to know what that answer was, old worm, you’ll have to give up this silly mind-siphon trick of yours and ask me yourself.

  Politely.

  Don’t trouble to open my tomb; I let myself out. Oh, and by the way?

  I’m right behind you.

  THE METAL ISLAND

  THE LAST RIDDLE

  Nicol Bolas jerked
as if he’d been hit by lightning. That insufferable little clot of ghoul turd! He should have killed Tezzeret years ago. The inarguable fact that he, himself, not only had not done anything so prudent as kill the artificer, compounded with the other inarguable fact that he, himself, had actually healed that festering pile of scrapings from a dung beetle’s butt, made at least one of his subminds wonder openly if perhaps Tezzeret had been right about him.

  Maybe he was stupid.

  But having been stupid in the past didn’t mean he had to be stupid now. The great dragon spun, a snarl on his face and a panoply of insanely lethal magics packed into each talon, his mouth, both eyes, both wings, and his tail.

  Tezzeret sat calmly on the etherium plinth between the forepaws of the Metal Sphinx. He was smiling. This smile was not friendly, or reassuring, or even smug; it looked more like pity than anything else, and the sight of it spiked the dragon’s rage pressure until it superheated his blood and he cared not the slightest if he was killed right here on this stupid beach in front of this stupid sphinx while doing something stupid, if only he could die with Tezzeret’s blood on his fangs.

  He spread wide his arms and wider still his great wings, and unleashed upon his enemy fell magics that could consume this entire universe.

  Except he didn’t.

  He hesitated, confusion knotting his scaly brow. Again, he summoned the power of entire stars and rained flaming destruction upon his—

  Except he didn’t. Again.

  “Do you know why not?” Tezzeret said.

  Bolas flinched. Was that pestilent artificer reading his mind? Controlling his actions? Could the ramparts of his identity have been breached? His consciousness flashed through the countless chambers of his near-infinite mind, but he could find no sign of tampering.

  “Predictable,” Tezzeret said. “To save my time and your effort, it’s not in your mind, Bolas. It’s in your head.”

  “What?”

  “You brought it on yourself, you know. We never had to be enemies.”

  “Enemies? Don’t flatter yourself,” the dragon sneered. “I am a god. You are a cockroach.”

  The artificer nodded amiably. “A reasonable metaphor, in a limited way. The cockroach is tiny, and weak, and can be crushed by a finger—yet still it can carry disease, befoul your food, and make your home generally disagreeable. And cockroaches are, as a group, very hard to kill.”