Test of Metal
Page 31
“So it’s you,” Nicol Bolas said, a bit breathlessly. “You are the carmot.…”
“As I just told you.”
“You’ll forgive me for being surprised.” A Planeswalker who can create etherium? Exactly why he’d been after Crucius in the first place. Power. Unlimited power. It was only a question of stuffing Tezzeret someplace he couldn’t get out of, and his problems would be more than half solved. “I have underestimated you, indeed,” he murmured appreciatively. Now it was only a matter of finding a workaround for this blasted device in his head, and—
“That will be all for now,” Tezzeret said. “I’ll be back in a day or two. Just to check on you. Make sure everything’s all right.”
“As if I’ll still be here? I’m leaving now.”
“No. You’re not.” He sounded disturbingly certain.
“How do you mean?”
“This place is, in one crucial respect, very like the Riddle Gate. You can’t take etherium out of here.”
“Very well.” Bolas cast the eye aside without hesitation—after all, he had a line on an unlimited supply—and he reached out to rip his way into the Blind Eternities.
But reality did not rip.
He tried again, disbelieving, and once more in desperation, and then he wheeled, staring in horror at the artificer, who spread his hands and shrugged apologetically.
“You must not have been paying very close attention to my problem in the Riddle Gate,” he said. “For beings such as yourself—such as I once was—leaving here is … difficult. But I’ll give you this hint for free: the metal is easy to discard. Discarding your desire for it is a much more difficult operation.”
“You’re making this up!” Bolas breathed, hating the edge of desperation he heard in his own voice.
“Funny how people keep saying that to me.”
“This is another of your stupid jokes! It has to be!”
“Compliments on the humor of the situation should be directed to Crucius—but under the circumstances, I am happy to accept them in his place.” He turned and began to walk away along the beach.
“Wait! You can’t just leave me here!”
“Of course I can.” Tezzeret stopped, and now looked over his shoulder at the dragon. “In fact, I have to. Away from this place, my powers are as limited as they have ever been. It wouldn’t be a heartbeat before you’d have me shackled and stuffed in your deepest dungeon. Which I would prefer to avoid. And as I said, I’ll be back in a day or two. Then we can start work on your problem. Together.”
“Where could you possibly be going that is remotely as important as getting me out of here?”
“I’m going to spend some time with my father,” he said, and with a single step passed beyond the bounds of the universe.
THE METAL ISLAND
ENTER LEVIATHAN
Nicol Bolas settled himself onto the etherium sand. At last he could begin to excise the artificer’s annoying little gimmicks and get himself out of here. “Damn, I thought he’d never leave.”
“You and me both, brother.”
Bolas lurched upright. The voice had been impossibly deep, impossibly dark, and most of all, impossibly close.
Behind him was a rip in the fabric of the universe, held open by some impressively sizable talons. Bolas gathered himself into a crouch—talons like those usually belonged to dragons, and from their dimensions, it wasn’t impossible that this new planeswalking dragon, whoever it was, might be even larger than Bolas himself. “Take it easy, pal,” the new dragon said. “I’m not here to fight.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not,” Bolas growled, “because you have no idea who you’re about to—”
“It’s more the other way around,” the new dragon said as he shouldered his way into the world. He stopped, stretched, and gaped his great fanged mouth wide in a jaw-cracking yawn.
Nicol Bolas stared in uncomprehending astonishment. “You—you look just like me!”
“That’s more the other way around, too.” The dragon grinned down at him, and Bolas realized that despite the resemblance, this dragon was vastly larger than he was, and younger, and possessed of a staggering magnitude of power that Bolas could only faintly glimpse. All his senses, magical as well as physical, told him that this dragon was so powerful he shouldn’t be able to even exist.…
Nothing in his twenty-five thousand years of life had prepared him to face a being like this. “You—are you—who—I mean, what? What’s going on? It’s as if you’re me.”
“I am you,” the new dragon said with a vast and gleaming fang-filled grin. “You’re the one who’s not you.”
“What?”
“Nice job with Tezzeret, by the way. You learn a lot about someone by how he treats you when he’s got nothing to fear. And now we’ve got him working for us willingly. Enthusiastically. Hells, he thinks he’s doing us a favor.”
Bolas still couldn’t quite get his mind around what was happening, though a terrible dread had begun to curdle in his gut. “Us? What do you mean, us?”
“Oh, well, there’s that, I suppose.” The dragon waved a talon in languid dismissal. “By us, you should understand that I mean me. There is no you. Not really.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know, you’re having a hard time with this,” the other dragon said sympathetically. “There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that constructs like you have a pretty limited useful life span. You start to break down only a day or two after you’re created. You must have noticed how it’s gotten harder and harder to think.”
“Constructs? Like me?” Bolas shook his head wildly, as though he could jerk himself awake from this terrible nightmare. “You’re saying I’m … that I’ve always been …”
“Don’t take it too hard,” the other dragon said. “It’s a fail-safe, really. Otherwise, every time I put one like you together, I’d have to chase you down and kill you myself, just to keep you from screwing around in my business.”
“Your business? I still don’t understand.…”
“Of course you don’t. In addition to that construct thing I told you about, I also had to make you pretty stupid.”
“What?”
“If you were a tenth as smart as I am, you would have been ten times too smart to fall into Tezzeret’s trap. As it is, you’ll be dead a few hours from now, and your corpse will evaporate. If I want Tezzeret to find a Nicol Bolas here when he gets back, I’ll have to make another of you. Maybe even several more.”
“You’re saying—you’re saying that you—?”
“Damn, you really are stupid,” the larger dragon said. “Well, I guess Tezzeret can’t be wrong about everything, can he?”
The vast, unimaginably powerful dragon looked down upon the pale, dying simulacrum he had created, and sighed.
“Yes, idiot. I am the real Nicol Bolas,” he said. “And I did not reach my exceedingly advanced age by being stupid enough to do my dirty work in person.”
“No?” The simulacrum coughed weakly, and after a moment the real Nicol Bolas realized his creation was laughing. At him. “Doing it right now, aren’t you?”
The real Nicol Bolas scowled and made no reply.
“Maybe that’s the real lesson,” the simulacrum said. “You should make a note of it, so you don’t forget.
“Because when you come right down to it, none of us is as smart as we think we are.”
THE BLIND ETERNITIES
WHO LAUGHS LAST
In the raging hurricane of chaos that was the Blind Eternities, Tezzeret severed the link of consciousness he had maintained with the etherium device in the head of the fake Bolas and allowed himself a small tight smile.
None of us is as smart as we think we are? he thought. If you only knew.
It would be difficult to seriously imagine a more successful operation. Yes, if he could have somehow effectively neutered the real Bolas, that would have been wonderful—but Tezzeret had never been so vain as to think the great drag
on would be so easily taken. Or taken at all.
Still, the next best thing to controlling an enemy is controlling what they believe, and in that, Tezzeret reflected with what he considered to be justifiable pride, he had been exceptionally successful.
The real Nicol Bolas thought the artificer to be not only too dim to penetrate the deception of the simulacrum, but that he sincerely would exert himself to aid the dragon’s plans. This would buy Tezzeret several days’ head start at the very least. He briefly considered returning to the Metal Island exactly as he’d promised. After all, if Bolas actually went to the trouble of creating a new simulacrum, it would be an instructive measure of just how thoroughly duped the dragon was.…
He decided against it. There was such a thing as outsmarting yourself. Showing up somewhere the dragon expected him to be would be even more foolish than doing so with Renn had been. Better to just run. Take his head start and bury himself somewhere beyond the dragon’s reach, and begin preparations for their next encounter.
Because there would be a next encounter, and he intended to survive it.
Whether the dragon did or not.
“Ravnica,” he muttered to himself. To really lose oneself, there was no better plane than Ravnica. While he was there, he could look in on Baltrice. And make sure Jace Beleren was still adequately terrorized. “Ravnica it is, then.”
“Sure, Ravnica’s nice.” A familiar wiseass voice buzzed in his left ear. “Let’s just make one stop along the way, huh?”
Tezzeret froze. “Doc?”
“No, Giant Brain, I’m the Voice of festering God.”
“How—? I mean, I thought you were—”
“I was. But I’m all better now. Bolas has this errand for us. On Mirrodin. It’ll be fun. Like a vacation.”
“This isn’t possible—”
“You’re not exactly makin’ me feel welcome, buddy. We don’t need to have another little chat about who’s actually in charge here, do we?”
“You were gone,” Tezzeret growled. “Completely gone—how did you get back inside my head?”
“Come on, Giant Brain. Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. Really.” Doc’s voice carried a note of sarcastic pity that made the artificer want to stab himself in the ear. “All the places Bolas has been, all the stuff he’s done—I mean, seriously. You just had a mindlink going to that etherium doohickey. Did you honestly think he just wouldn’t notice?”
He put a palm to his face. “Kill me. Please, just kill me now.”
“Aww, don’t take it hard, Tezz! The team’s back together, and we’re hitt in’ the road. It’ll be just like old times!”
“Now what’s the good news?”
“Aww …”
“Tell me one thing, Doc,” Tezzeret said. “Do you think Nicol Bolas knows the old saying about ‘he who laughs last’?”
“How should I know?”
“I hope he doesn’t. I hope he doesn’t because one day soon,” the artificer said through his teeth, “I’m going to teach him.”
THE END
Mathew Stover is The New York Times best-selling author of many Star Wars novels, as well as the Acts of Caine series, which includes Heroes Die, The Blade of Tyshalle, Caine Black Knife, and the forthcoming His Father’s Fist. He is a practitioner of several varieties of personal combat, and an aficionado of many more. He lives outside of Chicago, Illinois with artist and writer Robyn Fielder.