Test of Metal Read online

  “Shut up! Shut your festering mouth!” She wheeled on Tezzeret. “What is this? Why are you doing this to us?”

  “Because I like you,” he said. “And I don’t like him.”

  “But … but …” She looked as if something was breaking inside her.

  “When he was my prisoner, he was tortured. For months. Tortured almost exclusively by you,” Tezzeret said. “Have you forgotten that? Do you think he has?”

  She looked stunned.

  “Yes: find out why you trust him,” Tezzeret said. “At the same time you’ll find out why he trusts you.”

  She clutched the necklace to her chest as though it were the only solid thing left in her world. “I don’t … I don’t want to know.…”

  “My gift to you is truth,” Tezzeret said. “I never expected you to thank me for it.”

  Tears began to well in her eyes. “Jace …? What did you do to me?”

  Beleren lowered his head. “I saved your life.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about—”

  “Yes, it is. You just don’t remember.” Jace looked at her, and his eyes brimmed like hers. “Liliana—what she did to you—how she beat you …”

  He shook his head. “She hit you with ghosts, Baltrice. Shades. She infected you with the shades of every living thing that had ever died at Tezzeret’s tower. Even after we healed your body, the memory alone was killing you. Driving you insane.”

  “That’s not—” Her fists clenched, and flames sprouted across her shoulders. “You had no right—it’s not your call, Jace!”

  “It wasn’t,” he said softly. “It was yours. Baltrice, I didn’t want to. You begged me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I … just couldn’t think of any other way to save your life.”

  “How can I believe you?”

  Tezzeret said, “There’s one way to find out.”

  “Baltrice, don’t—!” Jace said desperately. “The shades, the memories, all that stuff—it’s not gone, Baltrice. I buried it, that’s all. Putting on that necklace could kill you.”

  “Of course he would say that.”

  Baltrice looked wildly from one of them to the other, and then back again, baring her teeth like a cornered animal. “How can I … How am I supposed to know?”

  Tezzeret stood impassive as stone. “The truth is in your hand.”

  Tears spilled over and rolled down her cheeks, and with a strangled sob she turned and stumbled away in the direction opposite the necromancer’s.

  Jace watched her go. His face was empty. Without even loss. “You bastard …” he said hoarsely. Quietly. Without inflection. “You evil, murdering son of a bitch. She was happy. Happy. Do you even know what happy feels like?”

  “I suspect it very much resembles how I feel right now.”

  Beleren turned his empty face toward the artificer. “And what’s for me? Do you kill me now?”

  “I can be persuaded.”

  He looked down. “Then can I go?”

  “I strongly recommend that you do.”

  His head came up warily. Frowning, he began slowly to back away.

  “I don’t want to kill you, Jace. You’re too useful; I may need your talents someday. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason I should let a vicious little gutter monkey like you walk off without a scratch.”

  “What are you going to do?” Jace was slowly lowering himself toward a crouch. To Bolas, he looked like a herd animal trying to be inconspicuous to a predator.

  “Right now? I’m going to let you go.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For now. Your gift,” Tezzeret said, “is fear.”

  He stopped. “I don’t get it.”

  “You will. You never were a brave man. I have decided to remove from you the burden of courage. Take Baltrice, for example. Once she tries on that necklace, I would not want to be you. Not to grind too fine an edge on it, I would rather not be on the same plane as you. Because I would not be at all surprised to learn that Baltrice had incinerated an entire planet just because you were on it.”

  “Yeah, okay, whatever. I can handle Baltrice. She’s a better person than you think.”

  “She was. Circumstances may change. And you have others to fear—me, for instance. Should I ever look in on you and decide you are insufficiently frightened, I will hurt you. I will hurt your family, if you have such. I will hurt your friends. Every person you have ever met will die screaming curses upon your name.”

  Beleren’s jaw clenched. “Then maybe I should take you out right now.”

  “Too late,” Tezzeret said. “You also have a little bit of a Nicol Bolas problem.”

  The mentalist went still.

  “Do you remember that device in your brain? I should hardly think you’ve forgotten already. Would you be interested in what happened to that device?”

  Beleren’s only reply was a guarded stare.

  “You gave it to Nicol Bolas. Against his will.”

  Jace went pale. “You—you couldn’t have! It’s not possible!”

  “That’s exactly what Bolas said. Another thing you two have in common.”

  “But—but I didn’t have anything to do with it!” Beleren said, going even whiter. “You did it to me—and you did it to him—”

  “And you helped.”

  “But I didn’t!” he whined. “There was nothing I could have done about it!”

  “Tragic, isn’t it?” He sighed. “I suspect Bolas is not interested in subtle distinctions.”

  “But—what about you? You’re the one who actually did it!”

  “I’m touched by your concern,” Tezzeret said. “You’ll be comforted to learn that Nicol Bolas and I have reached an understanding. A truce. You might even call it a partnership.”

  “That’s—that’s not—I mean, you and Bolas? You’re just making that up!”

  “You think so?” Tezzeret said, opening his hand in a gesture of invitation. “You can ask him.”

  From the goggle-eyed whiter-than-foam countenance Jace Beleren turned up in his direction, Nicol Bolas assumed he was now visible. And since there was nothing, at the moment, he could do to harm either one of them, he settled for a fang-filled grin.

  “Jace. Lovely to see you again. Lovely to …” He sniffed the air, broadened his grin, and sniffed again. “Is that fear? Delicious. If I were to, say, lunge at you suddenly, do you think you might wet your pants?”

  Why not? It was funny. To Bolas, anyway. Beleren didn’t seem amused, but there was no way to know for sure, as the mentalist’s response was a gurgle like a dragon choking on a griffin bone, followed hard upon by a magically enhanced sprint for the tree line.

  Bolas watched him go, and then he sighed. Diverting as this tiny episode had been, nothing had changed in his intolerable situation. He sighed again and looked down upon his tormentor. He said, “Partnership?”

  Tezzeret said, “Yes.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “It’s possible,” the artificer allowed. “A wasted question.”

  “Then a pertinent one. Why would I make a deal with you, much less keep it?”

  “Because you need me.”

  “Do I?”

  “No more games, Bolas. That’s over for us. I know you’re failing. Your faculties are degrading. You’ve aged more in the last ten years than in the last ten thousand. That’s the only reason I was able to do what I’ve done to you.”

  The dragon frowned down at the artificer. He had to admit the scrawny little scut worm had a point.

  “Listen to me: I don’t know what you’ve planned, but I know it’s big, and I suspect it is intended to repair your mind and rebuild your power. I also believe that your plan is going to involve a great deal of destruction, not to mention the deaths of many planeswalkers, including myself. This is where you and I have a problem. I’m not certain that you even know how destructive whatever you’re doing will be. As far as I can see, you might have passed your mental tipping point, and millions or bill
ions may die for nothing at all. So I’m going to help you.”

  Bolas stared. “You may need to say that again.”

  “Think about what you’ve seen here, since you came. Think about what happened on the beach, and what you took from my mind. Bolas, I know it’s hard. Especially now. But think. What do you know?”

  The dragon lowered his head. “I know that you beat me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have killed me at any time since I arrived here. I have been completely at your mercy the entire time.”

  “Mercy,” he said, “is the greatest virtue.”

  “But you haven’t killed me. You expect to get some use out of me.”

  “Expect is too strong a word. But I am allowing for the possibility.”

  “Because … there is no such thing as trash—only materials you haven’t yet found a use for. Including me.”

  “Yes.”

  “This whole thing hasn’t been about you at all. It’s—you did all this—everything you have shown me, everything you have done to me, and everything you haven’t done to me … you …”

  Bolas felt the dawn of a sensation he could not identify. He wondered if it might be awe. “It was about me all along.…”

  “Yes,” Tezzeret said. “Also all about me. At the same time. Curious, isn’t it?”

  “To prove that I can trust you … and find out if you can trust me …”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Trust is too much to hope for between beings like us, Bolas. But you can believe I will not harm you unless you leave me no other choice. You can believe that I do not want you to kill billions, for good reason or otherwise, and I certainly don’t want you to kill me. I believe that you want so badly to be restored to your former glory that you will accept help. Even from me.”

  “So this …” Bolas began to understand the feeling of the metal whirl that had plagued Tezzeret in the Riddle Gate. “So this is about the fourth line.”

  “The last riddle,” Tezzeret said seriously. “The most important one; the one that requires the fourth trait of greatness in an artificer.”

  Bolas looked at him in silent query.

  “Insight,” Tezzeret said.

  “Whom do you rescue by slaying …”

  “Exactly. Whom do I rescue by slaying.” The artificer offered his hand. “I don’t want the answer to be you.”

  Bolas stared.

  He had never, in all his vast life, felt so wholly at a loss.

  “I suppose …” Bolas murmured. “I suppose … I don’t, either.” And to his own astonishment, he lowered one great talon and shook Tezzeret’s hand. “Though I’ll probably kill you anyway.”

  “But not today.”

  “Yes,” Bolas said. “Not today.”

  A moment later, he discovered something still troubled him. “But Crucius,” he said, waving a talon up at the Metal Sphinx. “That’s really him? The Mad Sphinx?”

  “Not really.”

  “Where is he, then?”

  Tezzeret said gravely, “Speaking.”

  Nicol Bolas felt as though all the air had turned to stone and all the stone was piled upon his chest. “You …?” he gasped. “You …?”

  “Of course not,” Tezzeret said, grinning at him. “But the look on your face? I will treasure that for the rest of my life. It will keep me warm through the long winter nights.”

  After a moment, Bolas discovered himself smiling as well. “All right, all right. Very well. But still—tell me.”

  “Say please.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Manners cost nothing, though their value is beyond gold. Or even etherium,” Tezzeret said. “If you like, Doc can teach you.”

  Bolas shook his head, and some fist in his chest, so old and tight and layered with scars that he had forgotten it had ever been there, now loosed and let him laugh outright.

  “Please, then,” he said, still chuckling, “tell me of finding Crucius.”

  “You’re standing on him. More or less.”

  “Really? This isn’t another joke?”

  “It’s not a joke, but it’s not really him, either. It used to be him, and if the Multiverse is lucky, it might be him again. Remember how I said that here, it’s always now? He was a clockworker. Will be a clockworker. Potentially. Probably the only clockworker I would actually trust to do clockworking.”

  “Was? Will be? Potentially what?”

  “It’s complicated. Things become other things. Seeds become plants. Drops become rivers. Eggs become dragons. But those transformations are a great deal more certain than anything that happens to, around, or concerning a clockworker. The same for me.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That Speaking bit was a joke before—but it’s also true. Sort of. Potentially true. Someday I may be him, or he may have been me. Formerly. Or both of us might be you. And vice versa. Or I’m what he turned into. And so forth. Like I said before …” Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “It’s true that there is no secret. It’s just that language is insufficient to express truth clearly. That’s why I decided it would be better to show you.”

  “But—” The dragon waved up toward the Metal Sphinx, and at the riddle engraved into the plinth. “What is all that, then? What’s with the statue?”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “I, ah, well …”

  “The dynamic balance of intersecting arcs that makes it seem as though at any instant it might wake up, yawn, stretch, and take wing for any place—any time—in the Multiverse. The simple purity of it—he has taken the ugly necessities of blood and bone, of eating, shitting, screwing and decay, and transformed them into clean, spare lines of perfect elegance.”

  “Hmp,” the dragon said. To Bolas, the only thing more boring than art was listening to someone talk about art. “You sound as though you envy him.”

  “To become as he has become,” Tezzeret said seriously, “is my heart’s fondest dream.”

  “Why don’t you, then?” The great dragon gave a shrug that encompassed the whole world that was ocean. “In this place, you are master of all you survey. Literally. There is nothing in this entire universe that does not answer to your will. Not even me. If that’s what you want to be, you can just … be.”

  Tezzeret nodded. “I can.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “To be master of this place,” the artificer said precisely, “is not what I’m for.”

  “What, some kind of higher-calling crap? Really? You expect me to believe that?”

  “You can believe that I believe it.” Tezzeret scooped up a handful of the etherium sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “You’ve heard of finding God in a grain of sand? Here, it’s the literal truth. This place is its own master. There is nothing here that is not part of its own creator. Including me.”

  “But I made you.”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Who made you?”

  “Let’s not go there, can we?”

  “I don’t expect you to really understand this. I’m not sure I really understand it. Crucius thought he had an answer to existence—he thought he understood himself, the Multiverse, and his place in it. This place is what he became after he found out he was wrong.”

  Tezzeret looked up into the face of the Metal Sphinx as though it were looking back at him. “I don’t know if he decided there was no answer, or if he simply realized that whatever answer there was, he wasn’t the one who could find it. So he set out to design and build someone who was.”

  Bolas snorted. “You?”

  “Not me personally. Someone who can do what I have done. Who can become what I’ve become. Someone who can reach this place, understand what it is, and realize that the real Search is only now beginning.”

  The dragon sighed and let his heavy lids droop across his vast yellow eyes. The only thing duller than talking about art was mystical claptrap and gnostic flummery. “What abo
ut that riddle, though? Where did Crucius learn Classical Draconic—and how in any flavor of hell did you learn to read it?”

  “Oh, it’s not. It’s whatever language you know best. As for the riddle, I wrote it.” He shrugged and gave a tired sigh. “That is, I’m going to write it. The Seeker will. Someday. Currently, I presume that Seeker will be me. Of course, I didn’t know I wrote it—will write it, whatever—until after I solved it. Inconvenient. But probably better that way.”

  “So? What’s the answer?”

  Tezzeret smiled. “I am the carmot.”

  “Really? That’s it? That’s the thunderbolt of enlightenment that turned you into … whatever in the hells you are? ‘I am the carmot’?”

  “Not at all. I am the carmot; you are an ill-mannered dragon with an unfortunate impulse control problem.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Tezzeret shrugged. “Watch.”

  He reached into the tangles of his hair and brought out a needle of sangrite about one-fourth the size of his little finger. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said, and stabbed the sangrite into his left eye.

  His face burst into flame. The fire swiftly spread to the rest of his body, and his head … vanished.

  Bolas scowled. The stump of Tezzeret’s neck showed a clean, smooth surface, exactly the color of etherium. A moment later, Tezzeret’s head wiped itself back into existence.

  His left eye, along with its lid, its socket, and a diagonal band that extended across his face from his hairline above his right eye to his jaw at the left corner of his mouth, was now metal, metal the color of burnished pewter.…

  He batted away what was left of the smoke. “Sorry about the odor.”

  “Not at all,” Bolas said. “You forget whom you’re talking to.”

  “Of course. Well, here,” Tezzeret said, then stuck his thumb into the corner of his etherium eye socket and gouged out his etherium eye. He flinched, just a bit, as it came free. “Damn, that smarts. Here. This is my gift to you.”

  He tossed his eyeball to an astonished Nicol Bolas, who bobbled it for a second or two before getting a solid grip. He held it up to inspect it.

  Solid etherium. Pure. And indescribably precious, not in money, but in power. “Impressive.”

  By the time he looked back at Tezzeret, the artificer had an eye of flesh in his etherium socket to match the one on the opposite side of his nose. He winked his brand-new eye at the dragon. “This is my body, broken for you. More or less.”