Test of Metal Read online

  “Even this,” my father had said softly, in a bitterly sullen murmur as though reminding himself how angry he should be. “Even this, theyz tooken from me.”

  When I asked whom he meant, he sullenly nodded upslope. “Bankers ‘n’ merchants. Guildsfolk. Them as lives up the city.”

  I could not imagine why anyone rich enough to live upslope would want anything of ours, and I said so.

  “Futter want. They don’ has to want for them to take. Take is what they do. Take is their whole life. Us downslopers myz well be butt rags. One swipe ‘crost some arsehole and down the shitter.”

  When I told him I felt this wasn’t right, he cuffed me on the side of the head hard enough to send me staggering. “Right, nothin’,” he said. “Ain’ right I whap ye on the ear, but I do. Cuz I can. Cuz ye ain’ big enow to stop me.”

  I didn’t care about the smack; his heart hadn’t been in it, and so I’d barely noticed. I cared only for discovering who might be big enough to stop them. When I asked, my father only shook his head.

  “Nobody,” he said. “They owns the whole world, boy.”

  Even at seven, my political instincts were already developing; I pointed out that somebody had to be in charge, or nothing would ever get done.

  “Dunno ’bout bein’ in charge. Only folks as scares guildsfolk ’ud be mages. When them mages talk, best believe them guildsbuggers chew their tongues ’cept for yessir.”

  “Mages?” I’m fairly certain that this was the first time in my life I’d heard that word. It’s certainly the first I remember. “What’s mages?”

  “Sumpin as ye need not know, boy. You’ll never see one.”

  This was the longest conversation my father and I ever had.

  So this was my lesson: The strong—the wealthy, the powerful, the influential—take. The weak are taken from. The strong do to the weak whatever the weak can’t stop them from doing. The strong could run my mother down in the street without even thinking about it.

  This did not strike me as injustice. I’m from Tidehollow; I didn’t know what injustice meant until years later, when I came across the word in the course of my self-education. The concepts of justice and injustice struck me at that time as inherently suspect, and nothing in my life has since moved me to alter that opinion. To complain of injustice seems as useful as complaining that the sun shines or that the winds blow.

  No: the casual destruction of my mother’s life struck me instead as a reason to make myself strong. She was taken from me because I could not stop them from taking her. I understood that if I remained as I was—a scrapper’s boy in Tidehollow—anything in my life could be taken from me … and everything that could be taken would be taken.

  The most reasonable solution, to my young mind, was to make of myself a stronger man. But even if I did, I could be robbed by folk stronger still. How could I stop them?

  The answer seemed obvious. The experience that had earned me my nickname left me with an enduring appreciation for the power of precisely applied violence. By the second or third time some other people’s mothers were found dead in the street—the mothers of, say, individuals who had attempted to take from me—I was confident that the warning would be generally understood.

  The power to revenge injury a thousandfold was my fondest boyhood dream. No one would dare take what is mine. Ever.

  And the word my father taught me that evening, the word meaning “the strongest,” was mage.

  I undertook my own investigation into the nature of mages, and how one achieves that title. To ask anyone in Tidehollow would have been futile; I would have gotten more useful answers from my reflection in a mud puddle.

  Over the course of some weeks, my investigation took me on surreptitious scouting expeditions into Upper Vectis. There, I discovered for the first time what the slivers and oddments of pale metal that my father gathered were actually used for. I came to understand why a week’s food could be purchased with an amount of etherium that might barely equal the weight of my fingernail parings.

  I learned that an individual’s wealth could be calculated to a nicety by observing how much etherium that individual exhibited in jewelry, articles of clothing, slaves, and vehicles. The wealthiest had etherium magically melded to their flesh, and mages—whether human or vedalken or even the great sphinxes of the distant islands—shared one distinguishing feature: a limb, or a body part or several, wholly replaced by a structure of etherium, enchanted to duplicate (and often exceed) the function of the part it replaced.

  I also learned I could work as a scrapper for my entire life and never save enough to buy so much as an etherium nose ring.

  I was very taken with the esthetics of the etherium enhancements, as well. The indestructible metal for structure and magic for muscles and nerves, clean lines and curves, and elegant purity of operation made them irresistible. Having spent some hours on that street in Lower Vectis, gathering up the filthy shreds of meat and bone that had been my mother, I was—I am—entirely too familiar with the muck restrained by human skin.

  I know the color of raw human liver. I know the texture of ripped-open human lung. I saw gobbets of my mother’s brain, and the undigested remnants of a breakfast we had shared in a stew of blood and bile within her torn stomach. And I knew even then that the organs I helped my father scoop back into my mother’s abdominal cavity were no different than what lurked in my own guts, and that the foul stench of corruption lived inside me, too. To this day, I see and smell them again, fully as vivid as they were to my seven-year-old self, in the nightmares that overtake me when I must sleep.

  Someone more interested in human psychology than I am might find something ironic in this; I do not think in such literary terms. I am what I am. The key to successful artificing has nothing to do with why; what is the relevant issue. Combined with a properly structured how, one can unlock the universe.

  Relevant facts change as circumstances develop, but still …

  I’ve known what I am since the night my mother died. I knew what I intended to make of myself, and how to achieve it.

  The next day, I entered the family business at my father’s side. I undertook to learn every detail of how one finds and gathers cast-off shreds of etherium. The activity is surprisingly technical, requiring considerable expertise, as the value of the metal makes it very much sought after. One must learn to search where others won’t and learn to retrieve where others can’t.

  I very shortly discovered that I surpassed my father in this work, though he’d been a scrapper since he was my age. For a time, I arrogantly assumed it was due to some innate superiority of intellect or character; there were untapped caches of a gram or less of etherium in any number of places, and I assumed my success in finding them—where my father could not—meant I was smarter than he was. I discovered I was wrong when my father decided he no longer needed to work at all, beyond assessing what I had found, calculating a price, and trekking upslope to Vectis to sell it.

  He knew as well as I did that I was a better scrapper than he was, and—unlike my ignorant self—he knew why. I chance to have a talent that the vedalken call rhabdomancy. In plain terms, when I have a sample of a particular material, I have a sort of intuition that leads me to wherever I can find more. As rhabdomants go, I was not—nor am I now—especially gifted. My talent enabled me to find etherium because it’s an intense substance, one that casts a vivid shadow upon reality.

  One might say that it’s loud.

  If gold, for example, were to be counted equivalent to the sound of a man snapping his fingers across the street, etherium would be the sound of an angry sphinx hammering upon a gong larger than a rich man’s house.

  My skill had nothing to do with superiority. It was simply an artifact of heredity, like my height or the color of my eyes—or, for that matter, my intellect.

  Where I did find myself superior was in the diligence I was willing to exercise in the pursuit of my goal. My father watched me every second; he had learned all too we
ll to read my face—over which I, not yet nine, had little control. If he even suspected I might have located a piece and had not told him, I would endure a memorable beating and would spend the next night, or several, chained to the main ceiling post in the room that served us as both kitchen and bedroom. I never gave over trying, and eventually I hit upon a workable tactic.

  Working as a scrapper kept the skin of my hands and feet in a state of continual disrepair. My work involved wading through sewage-drenched cesspools and piles of rotting garbage, pulling out any item that might have come in contact with any etherium—even a smudge of the metal was valuable in its own right. I had no shoes or boots, and my hands were always scratched and torn, and usually infected. Every so often, I would discover slivers of etherium, almost like splinters of glass. The smallest—rarely more than a tenth of a gram—I could conceal by sticking them under the skin of my hands or my feet. Later, after my father was safely snoring in his drug-addled stupor, I could cut these splinters from my flesh and hide them away again.

  At that age, I was already an experienced contingency planner. I had secreted four cover stashes in our hovel, each more difficult to uncover than the last. These were used when my father actually caught me stealing—which I took pains that he did, every few months; it made him confident in his vigilance and enabled me to steal all the more. On these occasions, after the customary beating, he would force me to “reveal” the location of my treasure. After absorbing enough physical abuse to make it believable, I would tearfully direct him to the next cover stash.

  What my father never caught on to was that my real stash was on—in—my own body. The rank tangles of my hair helped conceal the forty-five grams of etherium splinters I had shoved under my scalp; another thirty grams was in my upper groin, at the tops of and between my thighs. By the time I was ready to leave Tidehollow forever, my permanently grimy flesh concealed two hundred grams of etherium—a princely sum, which, with judicious trading up the sloping streets of Lower Vectis, was enough to purchase clothing, bathing, and adequate food, as well as what I desired most in the world: an apprenticeship in an artificer’s workshop. There I began to learn the ways that metal, glass, and stone can be worked, manipulated, and bent to the tasks my will might require of them.

  To this day there are slivers and tiny fragments of etherium lodged in a number of variously private places upon my body. To remove these fragments would be laborious and time-consuming—and, after all, they are my last remaining link to my father, to my childhood, and to the harsh realities of life in Tidehollow.

  Keeping them is a symptom of an unfortunate sentimentality. I admit to being sentimental, though perhaps less so than most. Because I acknowledge this, I am able to compensate for the influence this flaw might have on my judgment. I don’t conceal this particular trait—it’s more useful on display, as it often leads others to misread my intentions and to underestimate my capabilities.

  I left Tidehollow without saying good-bye. I did look back, but only to ensure that my father was not in pursuit. I was, approximately, eleven years old.

  My apprenticeship to the artificer was to span the standard term of seven years; after three, when I had determined to my satisfaction that I had learned all my master could teach, I departed his service in the late hours of a moonless night. Fear of my father’s vengeance had driven me to enter my apprenticeship under an assumed name, which meant that deciding on a new name was no burden and carried no risk of exposure, even by vedalken truth-sayers or suspicious sphinxes. Since I had been given none of my own, whatever word I might choose to call myself in any given moment is my real name.

  I have known since a very young age that I am not like other people, be they human, vedalken, viashino, or elf. I have sometimes wondered if the root of that difference might lie in my concept of self, which seems distinctly at variance with the concept others have of themselves. Ask a man who he is, and he will tell you his name. Ask me who I am … and if I wish to give an honest answer, it will come only after a certain amount of detailed self-reflection. I am not a name, and no word truly names me. Who I am is a fluid concept.

  It can make social encounters awkward.

  I immediately went in search of a new situation—a particular position for which a great deal of wealth would be required. The position I sought was far removed from the humble workshop I had fled; it was beyond the means of all but scions of the wealthiest families of Vectis. Being largely insolvent save for my few remaining grams of etherium, I undertook to supplement my personal financial resources with some judicious prospecting.

  There is a particular type of individual—again, species is irrelevant—who is constitutionally incapable of trusting others. (Some say I am one such, but they are mistaken. Unfortunately. The expanding roster of catastrophic betrayals inflicted upon me speaks all too clearly of my trusting nature.)

  In Vectis, the inability to trust can lead to some unfortunate behavior; for example, distrusting the reliability of counting houses ends with concealing one’s wealth on one’s person, or on one’s property. When one seeks to conceal wealth, it’s often done by converting said wealth into the most valuable material available, thus lowering the volume and sturdiness required of the hiding place. In Vectis—on the whole of Esper—the most valuable material is etherium, so a rhabdomant might find it in unlikely places.

  Buried in someone’s garden, for example.

  It was possible to find caches so old that the people who had stashed them away had either forgotten them or had perished without leaving a record of their locations. These were ideal, as one was far less likely to encounter outraged misers who might be armed with any given variety of lethal weapon. Bandits—and worse, rippers—were an issue, especially beyond the city limits, but my time at the artificer’s shop had provided me with the materials for, and the means of, constructing several varieties of lethal weapons of my own. More than one overly optimistic ripper ended up decomposing in the sluice pools of Tidehollow.

  It amused me to think of my father investing hours or days in the painstaking dissection of these rotting carcasses, especially because by the time I was through with them, none of these corpses had so much as a microgram of etherium among them.

  My unfortunate sentimentality is balanced, I believe, against an elegantly precise capacity for maintaining a grudge.

  When I had accumulated five pounds of etherium, I was finally ready to begin my new life. Two pounds was the fee for a year’s study in the Right Ancient Order of Mystic Constructionist Masters—the Mechanists’ Guild.

  A mechanist is as far beyond an artificer as a dragon is beyond a goose. At the artificer’s workshop, I had learned how ordinary metal, glass, and stone can be shaped to useful ends. In the Mechanists’ Guild, a student is taught the working of magical materials—and how magic can be used to work one’s materials—as well as how devices, machinery, and automata can be imbued with mana, to give them wholly extraordinary capabilities. After one achieves elevation to journeyman of the Guild, one begins to learn the working of etherium. Then, eventually, as a master, one undertakes the construction of etherium devices—devices with, literally, life of their own.

  Mana is, functionally, only power. That is, energy—the capacity to accomplish work. A device of etherium does not require mana to operate; etherium is, itself, a source of mana—and, as I learned in my tenure at the Guild, it is a conduit that channels power from outside the universe.

  In the service of the artificer, I had been taught that energy and matter are fundamentally one and the same, regardless of the form of either, and that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The only change we can force is to alter its form. Even mana is a finite resource. Etherium, on the other hand …

  Well, etherium itself is a finite resource—but the power it channels is not.

  The Mechanists’ Guild teaches that etherium is the stuff of reality itself, and that by working etherium, one can touch directly the mind of god. It is, however, exce
edingly bad manners to inquire “Which god?” They prefer to keep the nature of their purported deity carefully abstract. He sometimes is said to reside in etherium, sometimes in ourselves; sometimes he is said to actually be etherium itself … and sometimes etherium is said to be a channel for his grace.

  The being who supposedly introduced etherium to Esper—who was reputed to have personally created, in fact, all the etherium that exists—is known there as Crucius the Mad Sphinx. Crucius is a figure of some renown and of considerable dispute. He is considered by the Mechanists to be not a sphinx at all, for example, but rather an incarnation of the will of their abstract god. This peculiar conviction was certainly sparked by the vast list of the Mad Sphinx’s gnomic utterances about “atonement with the æther,” and by his dramatic disappearance some decades past.

  Matters certainly aren’t helped by the fact that no one actually saw Crucius, with the possible exception of the Hegemon of Esper; he’s a figure one learns of only by repute, and tales grow in the telling. This bizarre cult of the Vanished Mad Sphinx is maintained and evangelized to this day by a vast and increasingly influential rabble of insufferable fanatics who name themselves the Ethersworn.

  These demented pebbleheads decided—based on no actual evidence whatsoever—that the key to the “redemption” of the entire plane of Esper is to infuse every living creature with etherium. They have never been able to explicitly define what it is Esper needs to be redeemed from; again, pointing this out to them is excruciatingly bad manners. Given that the supply of etherium is finite and already fully exploited—its supposed creator may have been mad, but it seemed he was not mad enough to scatter deposits of etherium underground or at the bottom of the Sea of Unknowing—the activities of these simpletons have actually accomplished nothing other than driving the price of etherium to preposterous heights.