Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “What are you nattering about?” Bolas snapped. “What does this have to do with me?”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s your image, old worm. In those terms, what I’ve done to you is fairly simple. I’ve taken away your pesticide.”

  “You are such a preposterous—”

  “Kill me,” Tezzeret offered. “However you like. I have no shields and have summoned no magic. You can just step on me, if nothing else; it’s how one customarily destroys cockroaches.”

  Bolas growled deep in his throat and lunged for him, talons poised to rip the artificer into bloody shreds.

  But he didn’t.

  “Because you can’t. Well, you can … but you won’t. Not for a while, at least.”

  Tezzeret’s smile reminded Bolas of something unpleasant. With a lurch, Nicol Bolas realized that the smile looked like one he himself liked to show from time to time. Usually when someone he was about eat broke down and began to beg for their life.

  But in Tezzeret’s smile there was no sadism. Not even malice.

  That, somehow, made it worse.

  Bolas began to wonder, for the first time he could remember in all twenty-five thousand long years of his life, if he might be out of his depth.

  “I should think you know me as well as any creature in the Multiverse, excepting only Kemuel and Crucius,” Tezzeret said. “What’s my talent? Not superficial, magic and rhabdomancy and artificing. What am I best at? What is my specialty?”

  Bolas opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but shut it again without speaking. Shut it with a snap like a dry branch breaking, because he realized he did know Tezzeret’s specialty.

  Preparation.

  “I want you to understand why I’m revealing what I’ve done to you in this particular way,” Tezzeret said. “There is a lesson I hope you will take from this, and the only way I can be sure you’ve learned it is if you see it yourself.”

  “Games,” said Nicol Bolas sourly. “Aren’t I too stupid to understand the rules?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I hope you do, at least, understand the stakes,” said the artificer. “We’re playing for your life.”

  Bolas sat, folding his wings about himself in what he hoped might look like nonchalance. He’d suddenly become very cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering.

  “Do you remember what I said to Jace Beleren, right after my device settled into his brain?”

  Bolas had no need to search his memories for that particular tidbit. “You said you were going to kill me.”

  “Yes. And I did.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I killed you dozens of times,” Tezzeret said. “Remember?”

  Bolas thought of the corpse dragons he had pulled from parallel time lines, and he discovered he was getting colder rather than warmer.

  “I kept on killing you,” Tezzeret said, “until finally I found a Nicol Bolas I didn’t have to kill. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand who you are and why you are this way?”

  Bolas swallowed.

  “You don’t have to answer. Only think. The device I put in Jace’s brain was there not because I feared he’d interfere with me. I put that device in there because I knew you would read his mind. Someday. Somewhere. And when you did, that device would flow into you right along with Jace’s memories. Once that was done, I could kill you …” He shrugged. “Whenever. Any time I happened to feel like it. Because that device is in your brain now.”

  Tezzeret sighed apologetically. “The tricky part was programming it to reach the proper neural nexus in your brain. A bit of trial and error there, thus a few extra dead dragons on parallel beaches. I’m sorry for that, by the way.”

  Bolas snorted. He’d felt not the faintest sting, let alone the shattering agony that Tezzeret’s device had inflicted upon Beleren. He opened his mouth to express just how pathetically contemptible Tezzeret’s little charade had become, but the artificer held up a hand.

  “It’s not there to hurt you. It’s more of a short circuit than a punishment—and besides, I suspect your pain tolerance is beyond the capacity of any device to surpass.”

  Bolas blinked. That had sounded almost like a compliment.…

  “Basically, it shuts down your motivation to kill me. Or any Planeswalker. I decided I could spare that much mercy for Jace … at least partially because I could so vividly imagine the look on your face when you discovered you couldn’t hurt him.”

  Bolas could think already of a dozen ways to get that device out of his brain, and once he did—

  Again, Tezzeret seemed to be reading his mind. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if it took you more than ten minutes to remove it. But it gives us the opportunity to have this chat.”

  Bolas had a different chat in mind. With a very subtle, impenetrably camouflaged exertion of mana, he reached out for a time line where he had never used his mind siphon on Beleren. A quick temporal shift, and matters between him and Tezzeret would be different.

  Lethally different.

  But he couldn’t. The time lines simply weren’t there … or, worse, he couldn’t see them. The cold seemed to have penetrated his bones. He sent his perceptions forward and back along the time line he was already in … except he didn’t. He couldn’t.

  He remembered being able to clockwork. He didn’t remember how.

  Tezzeret nodded sympathetically. “You have to keep in mind that I had a long time to prepare for our meeting on this beach.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “I have come to believe that clockworking in general is a very bad idea. Even in the hands of a well-intentioned mage, it has the intrinsic potential to rend the fabric of the Multiverse—which makes it a particularly bad idea to let you, for example, use it. So you can’t. Possibly forever.”

  Bolas could no longer contain his disbelief. “That’s impossible—you can’t just take a power away from me!”

  “Yes. The only person who can do that to you is, well … you.”

  “What?”

  “Jace Beleren wasn’t the only one with a trap in his mind,” Tezzeret said. “This one was a little subtler. I’ve given your clockworking powers into the care of a subpersonality of yours. I based my design on your work. This subpersonality actually understands how dangerous clockworking is, and so he’ll make sure you never do it again. I have given you something more valuable than all the etherium that has ever existed.”

  He smiled, and now Bolas did see a trace of that malice that had been formerly absent. Tezzeret said, “I’ve given you a friend.”

  “What?” Bolas thought for a moment that his eyes might bulge right out of his skull. “You didn’t—you couldn’t possibly—”

  “Doc,” said Tezzeret, “say hello.”

  And Nicol Bolas heard a thinly wiseass human voice buzzing in his left ear. “Hiya! Hey, it’s nice in here! Damn, Nicky, we shoulda got together years ago!”

  Tezzeret looked unconscionably pleased with himself.

  For one horrible second, Bolas was afraid that for the first time in twenty-five millennia, he might actually burst into tears.

  “Aww, come on, Nicky. It won’t be that bad. Well, not that bad. Okay, it’ll be pretty bad. But look on the bright side: as long as you don’t try to pull your clockworking crap, I won’t have any reason to talk to you.”

  Bolas could understand already how that would become a substantial inducement. “What have you done?” He was almost moaning. “How have you—you could not possibly—”

  “I know you haven’t spent much time in Esper, and certainly not in the slums,” the artificer said casually, “and so there is no reason you would know our word for a small, improvised weapon, kept concealed on one’s body until its stroke can kill.”

  Incomprehension piled upon humiliation on top of dread, Bolas could only stare.

  The artificer leaned toward him and lowered his voice as though imparting a secret. “In Tidehollow,” he said, “we
call it a tezzeret.”

  Sometime later, after giving him an opportunity to recover his composure, Tezzeret approached the dragon in a gentle, almost companionable way. “I know you’re angry. Embarrassed. Even humiliated. Please understand that it is not my intention to make you feel that way. Please believe that all this has not been arranged to do you any harm at all.”

  “Oh, and I would believe this why?”

  “If it had been my goal to humiliate you,” Tezzeret said, “we would have had this conversation in front of an audience.”

  And before Nicol Bolas’s astonished eyes, Tezzeret the Seeker reached outside the universe, and when his hand returned, it held the wrist of Jace Beleren.

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Not here.”

  “But how—?”

  “I can think of no reason why I should tell you.”

  “His mind’s dead,” Bolas said. “As dead as yours used to be.”

  “Yes.” Tezzeret smiled. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of poetic justice.”

  “That spell, during the fight—it was you!”

  “Of course it was me. He might have spoiled my surprise.” The artificer shrugged. “A properly partitioned consciousness can, as you know all too well, do several things at once.”

  “But killing him that way, all at once, painlessly—” Bolas cocked his head, squinting sidelong. “Uncharacteristically merciful.”

  “My friend Kemuel would say that mercy is the greatest of the virtues.”

  “Yeah? And what do you say?”

  Tezzeret’s smile spread, but his eyes went cold and hard as chips of obsidian. “Virtue,” he said, “is for good guys. You and I have other priorities.”

  “Ah. He’s not actually dead.”

  A blue haze seemed to leak from the pores of Tezzeret’s right arm. He opened his hand toward Beleren, and the haze became a crackling gap spark that spit itself into the mind ripper’s face. “Not anymore.”

  Bolas arched an eyebrow. “He doesn’t seem too lively.”

  “He’s still suspended. I will leave him like that while I retrieve Baltrice and Liliana Vess. I have a bit of business with them that must be taken care of, and it might interest you to watch, if you wouldn’t mind. I can ensure that they will not be aware of your presence. Please?”

  “You’re asking me? You’re asking for permission to preserve whatever is left of my dignity?”

  “Yes,” Tezzeret said. “It’s only polite.”

  Nicol Bolas sat on the etherium beach and watched Tezzeret revive the other three planewalkers. With a curiously private smile, he had kneeled beside each of them, placed his hand on each of their heads, and murmured, “Awaken. You are free. Arise and walk.”

  And they did.

  Bolas couldn’t even tell how Tezzeret had done it.

  There was a predictable amount of commotion—especially between Baltrice and Vess, where Beleren had to get between them to prevent bloodshed—but Tezzeret got them settled down in an impressively swift fashion. He answered their most pressing question—“Where’s that damned dragon?”—in a way that Bolas found obscurely tickling.

  “It is always safest to assume,” Tezzeret told them gravely, his deadpan unbreakable, “that Nicol Bolas is closer than you think.”

  “And what in the hells is up with you?” Beleren demanded. “What is this place? How did you get us away from Bolas? What’s going on?”

  Tezzeret favored him with the same smile Bolas had found so infuriating. Beleren didn’t seem to like it any better. “Each of you has been of exceptional assistance to me in recent days. I hope to thank you, and to give each of you a gift. This place is … me. Or I am it. Or I will be, eventually. I did not take you from Bolas. He cast all three of you into the Blind Eternities. I have retrieved you; that’s all. You are, I suppose, salvage. What’s going on is our taking leave of one another. Is that clear enough?”

  “Not even close,” Jace said, starting toward him, only to be stopped by Baltrice’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Boss. Don’t do it.”

  “I’m just saying hello to an old friend,” he growled through his teeth.

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is.”

  “Looks familiar enough to me.” Beleren shook off her hand and raised his arms to begin a casting, and Baltrice gave his shoulder a hard shove that sent him stumbling sideways into the plinth.

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is. He can do things you can’t even imagine.”

  Nicol Bolas reflected that he wouldn’t have minded getting that particular warning himself.

  “Are we done?” Tezzeret said evenly. “This is a bad time to fight among ourselves. There is still a very angry dragon nearby, who might wish to vent that anger on whatever people he can catch. You don’t want to be those people.”

  He looked from one to another until they each subsided.

  “Liliana Vess,” he said, stepping to her side and taking her hand. “Your help was inadvertent, but valuable nonetheless. The gift I have for you is freedom.”

  She frowned at him. “Freedom?”

  “Many of you—alternate Liliana Vesses from parallel time lines—had bound themselves to Bolas’s service by blood pact. Are you one of them?”

  “Well …” She flushed and looked ashamed of herself, providing what appeared to be answer enough.

  “Listen to me now, Liliana Vess,” he said, placing his hand on her head, “there are also many of you who have never bound yourselves wholly to the dragon. Close your eyes.”

  “I don’t care what you think you can do, but there’s no breaking that compact. I’ve tried. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve tried.”

  “Please. Indulge me.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes.

  “You, Liliana Vess, are one of the unbound. In your life, you have learned too well the perils of contracts.”

  “Of course I am,” she said, shaking Tezzeret’s hand off her head. “What? That’s it? You tell me something I already know? Thanks for nothing. Literally.”

  “And you are welcome for something. Also literally.”

  “You think Bolas needs a signed contract to keep his hold on me?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “I’m out of this place,” she said. “Jace, it’s been real. Baltrice, kiss my ass.”

  She stalked off along the beach, gathering the power to shift out.

  Tezzeret turned to the pyromancer. “Baltrice.”

  She waved him off. “No presents. All I want is for you to take your doohickey out of Jace’s head.”

  “That’s already done.”

  “It is?”

  Jace said, “It is?”

  “Before you woke up.”

  Bolas noted that Tezzeret did not bother to specify which time.

  Baltrice spread her hands. “That’s all I need.”

  “It’s all you want,” Tezzeret said. “Not the same thing.”

  “Seriously. Looks like things are working out okay for you, and I’m glad for that. Really. Even though you served me up to Nicol Bolas like a snack tray; I figure there’s no way you could have known.”

  “And I thank you for that generous estimation.” Tezzeret stepped around her and reached for something on the plinth—a necklace. Its chain was pure etherium and its pendant a carefully shaped red gemstone that glowed with a light of its own.

  Sangrite, Bolas realized. Why would the artificer give sangrite to his pet pyromancer?

  “More jewelry?” she said with a lopsided smile. “Come on, Tezzeret—people are starting to talk.”

  “Baltrice, do you remember the conversation we had in the Glass Dunes, when I was working on my armor? About who I’ve become, and who you’ve become, and why?”

  “Not really. Something’s screwy with my memory about all that stuff. Probably something to do with Renn. Hey, did you ever settle that bastard?”

  “
Not personally.” Tezzeret wasn’t smiling anymore. “This necklace is, like the locator ring and the navigator, more about what it does than what it is, and again it’s a simple device. Slip it on over your head, and you become invulnerable to all forms of mental domination.”

  “Yeah?”

  Jace Beleren said, “What?”

  She hefted it appreciatively, then shrugged her thanks. “Nice. Much appreciated.”

  Jace said, an undertone of urgency in his voice, “Baltrice, don’t put it on.”

  “Why not?”

  Nicol Bolas had occasionally produced, in his alchemical research laboratories, temperatures extreme enough to liquefy helium. He had never seen anything remotely as cold as the look Tezzeret then turned upon Jace Beleren. “Yes, Jace. Tell her why not.”

  “It’s a trick,” Beleren said. He was starting to sweat. “Baltrice, you trust me, right?”

  “Sure, Jace.” She looked puzzled. “Of course.”

  “Do you want to tell her why?” Tezzeret said. “Or shall I?”

  “I don’t get it.” Baltrice seemed to be having difficulty processing what was happening, and her confusion was shading toward anger. “Why what? What are you two talking about?”

  “Baltrice, you have to believe me—!”

  Flames kindled in her hair. “Why what?” she barked.

  “Why you trust him,” Tezzeret replied, flat and cold as an etherium knife. “Put on the necklace, and you’ll find out.”

  “Jace …? Did you … do something to me?” She turned slowly, her eyes wide, and even though her voice was small and girlish, Beleren took a step back. “What did you do?”

  Bolas didn’t know what Beleren saw in her eyes. To the dragon, it looked like death by hellfire.

  “Baltrice, come on! You know me better than that—you can’t … don’t let him do this to you!” Beleren pleaded, lifting his hands as though to shield himself.

  “Cast that spell,” Tezzeret said, “and die where you stand.”

  Beleren froze.

  Shortly he must have decided Tezzeret wasn’t bluffing, because he let his hands fall. “Baltrice, please—”