Test of Metal Page 4

  The normal progress through the Mechanists’ Guild from student to master is seventeen years; seven years as a student—essentially an apprentice, save that one must pay for the privilege—and ten years as a journeyman.

  I was a master in five.

  My rapid ascension was due, in part, to the same obsessive diligence that enabled me to escape my father and the slums of my birth, but it was also due to my experience as both scrapper and artificer. Sons and daughters of the rich cannot comprehend the actual value of an object. Nothing real is useless to a scrapper, and the limits of available finance and material are, to an artificer, absolute. If you can’t afford steel gears, you make your own, of whatever happens to be available in your shop—or if you are possessed of a mind like mine, you design your device to work without gears at all.

  The pampered children of privilege who were my schoolmates had no concept of the tension between waste and elegance. Assigned to design and build a particular style of chronometer, for example, my supposed peers amassed truly baffling arrays of springs and chains, wires, gears, pendulums, ratchets, precious woods, and baroquely filigreed decorative elements. Many of their designs encompassed several hundred parts; the most efficiently elegant of their designs had no less than seventy-three.

  Mine had nine.

  On nearly every assignment, I completed my work far ahead of my fellows. To amuse myself while waiting for them to finish, I would gather their debris and cast-off materials from the shop’s dustbin and use them to create oddments—children’s toys, tiny automata, the sorts of fanciful devices that have no actual purpose other than to delight by their design and action—which I then sold in the Lower Vectis Grand Bazaar, for what eventually became a tidy sum, to help finance my education.

  It was not long until my schoolmates lost the habit of throwing away anything at all; they would, however, sell their leftover materials and discarded parts to me for pocket change, and so for a time I ran a thriving little trade. This lasted until our supervising master noted that every dustbin was as clean after our shop hours as it had been before them. The explanation—that they were selling their scraps to me, and I was peddling devices I made from them—earned me a visit from the three Governing Masters.

  The masters looked over my impeccably organized work space—I had built a variety of storage devices to keep my materials clean, separate, and easy to locate at need—and one of them asked me why my bench was stuffed with trash.

  “What trash?” said I. He indicated my multitudinous cabinets and arrays of drawers, which were stocked with everything from crumpled scraps of gold foil to tailings of badly tanned sluice serpent hide.

  “With apologies for daring to disagree with my betters, Masters,” I said, “none of these contain trash; their contents are simply materials I have not yet found a use for.”

  They elevated me to journeyman on the spot.

  The position of journeyman was the only reason I’d come to the Guild in the first place. I did not plan to spend my life flattering the vanity of the wealthy and powerful by providing them with self-powered trinkets and enhanced body parts. I was there to learn to work etherium, and nothing else.

  I was ready to build my right arm.

  I had known what I was to build—I had dreamed it a decade before, and spent every intervening day of my life refining its design until I knew it would make of me the man I had decided to be. My right arm was why I taught myself the art of scrapping for etherium, why I had trained myself to steal from my father, why I’d apprenticed as an artificer, and why I had become a sneak thief and a killer of bandits and rippers. My right arm was the reason I had devoted my life to the study of all conceivable elements of design and construction.

  When my father had been in one of his occasional expansive moods—merely intoxicated by the drugs he craved, rather than unconscious and prostrate—he liked to say that there were only two things in all creation he knew would never fail him: death and his right arm. Fool that he was.

  His right arm was nothing. Flesh and bone. As corrupt and rotten as his filthy heart.

  My right arm is none of these things.

  There are some who have spoken of my arm, and claimed it to be psychological compensation for my lowly birth. Others have called it the badge of my self-creation. Still others have named it a symbol of power, a fetish, a talisman against self-doubt. All these people have one defining trait in common.

  They’re idiots.

  The circumstances of my birth are irrelevant. I have no need for a “badge” of any kind; I am the proof of my self-creation. And my arm is not, nor has it ever been, a symbol of power, nor of anything else. It’s not a symbol.

  It is power.

  Most “etherium enhancements” barely warrant the name. Etherium in its unworked state is a soft metal and almost infinitely ductile. Even the richest mages use baser metals that are stronger, and a great deal easier to come by, such as titanium or cobalt. They build their enhancements of these, merely threading the structure through with infinitesimal strands of etherium—only enough to power the enchantments that enable the prosthesis to mimic the function of the part it replaces.

  I delved deeply into the mysteries of mana quenching and ætheric tempering, and I invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana-sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles. It is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures—but not for long.

  I went days at a time without sleep, learning to use mana to keep myself alert and focused, for my nights were passed risking my life against bandits and my freedom against thief-takers to search out new and ever-larger caches of etherium.

  I learned to make my new arm do not only all the work of my old one, but everything else my imagination could devise. Though I am no more gifted a mage than I am a rhabdomant, I again found ways to exploit my minimal talents to accomplish maximal results. When my arm was completed, it comprised more than ten pounds of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip. Merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage—and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.

  One black midnight, I alone, without witness, assistant, or aid, performed the ritual that severed my arm of useless flesh and permanently attached the arm that would make a scruffy, ill-fed scrapper’s boy into a man to be reckoned with. A man with the power to revenge injury a thousandfold.

  A mage.

  When morning came and the Masters saw what I had achieved, they elected to elevate me to Mastery and immediately began preparations for the weeklong ceremony. I thanked them, and walked out from the Guild Hall that same morning, never to return. This time, I did not look back.

  I had what I’d wanted from them. Master is just a name. Names are nothing.

  Power is everything.

  I had not been out of the Mechanists’ Guild a week before I was approached by the Seekers of Carmot.

  It seemed the Seekers had been aware of me for some considerable time, as early as the first year of my apprenticeship to the artificer. I later learned that several of the rippers I had killed had been aspiring Seekers. The Anointed Fellows of the Seekers of Carmot had been most impressed, as these aspirants had been possessed of talent for magery in proportion to their avarice … yet they had fallen before a Tidehollow boy whose talent was limited to a knack with gadgets.

  When that knack had produced an arm of tempered etherium, the Seekers decided I might be useful, and so allowed me to study at their Academy.

  The Seekers of Carmot styled themselves a noble order, committed to the service of all Esper. The carmot from which they’d taken their name was an arcane substance necessary to the production
of etherium, some sort of catalyst that allowed the Anointed Fellows to create etherium by infusing æther into sangrite.

  They created etherium.

  Supposedly.

  And they would teach me the secret. Supposedly.

  And they were committed to giving etherium away until it became as common as dirt.

  Supposedly.

  The Seekers of Carmot had been the last thing I’d ever believed in.

  When I discovered the truth, I demonstrated to them that my talent wasn’t so much a knack with gadgets as it was a knack for using gadgets to kill people.

  In the end, I had come to appreciate my father’s lesson. Only two things would never fail me: death and my right arm.

  My arm was everything I had. It was everything I would ever have.

  When I awoke in that red crystal cave to find attached to my right shoulder an arm of mere flesh, already corrupt and rotting, that was exactly what had been taken from me.

  Everything.

  When I regained consciousness, I undertook to examine my new appendage. It appeared, in every functional sense, identical to the one I had severed some years before. Missing were only an array of minor scars across my knuckles and into the palm of my hand—souvenirs of a particularly tricky midnight etherium retrieval—and a much larger scar along my biceps, a knife wound. This scar, while I had still used my flesh arm, had been a useful reminder to never assume I had killed the last bandit.

  So: the limb very likely had been regenerated. Another extravagance of power—and an astonishingly potent personal affront. There is literally nothing else that could be done to me that would hurt as much, as deeply, and on so many levels.

  Without my real arm, the one I had created, I was nothing more than a Tidehollow scrapper. I had been made into my father.

  Except with a better vocabulary.

  I tallied up the facts of my situation, relevant to whose prisoner I was most likely to be: life, sanity, nudity, maiming, and the bitterest psychic wound I could even imagine.

  Framed in those terms, the conclusion was obvious.

  “Bolas.” I said it aloud, but not loudly. I knew I didn’t have to. “I know you’re here.”

  As a demon is said to be conjured by the sound of its name, after only a single heartbeat he materialized out of the rose-tinged gloom, all sixty-some-odd feet of twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon.

  “You always were clever,” he said, and casually backhanded me with one wall-size fist so hard that I flew across the cavern, slammed into a jagged wall, and sank to the floor, stunned into immobility.

  “Hello, Tezzeret,” said Nicol Bolas. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

  TEZZERET

  THE DRAGON’S JEST

  The hand I brought to my mouth came back bloody. Hot oil trickled down the back of my head: scalp wound. No concern there: my great mass of thick hair would both absorb blood and trigger coagulation. If any bones were broken, they didn’t yet hurt, though I anticipated that once the shock wore off, I would be in considerable pain.

  Bolas paced toward me across the cavern, smiling, which on a dragon indicates neither amusement nor friendliness. It’s a display of how many large and pretty teeth he has, and how sharp they are. “Tezzeret, Tezzeret,” he murmured, insufferably pleased with himself. “Tezzie—may I call you Tezzie?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  Almost too fast to be seen, his foreleg lashed out, and he seized me in his talons. “The list of what you can’t stop me from doing is, I’m pretty sure, infinite.”

  To demonstrate the truth of this, he tossed me sharply upward, as a child might a ball. I bounced off the ceiling, got a mouthful of fresh blood when my teeth clacked together and ripped open my cheek, and then tumbled helplessly back into his grasp.

  It occurred to me that Bolas might possibly have done all this simply for the pleasure of killing me personally.

  “I admit and confess that you are larger than I am,” I said, a bit thickly due to the blood and ragged scraps of the inside of my cheek. “You are stronger than I am. You can snuff my life with a thought. Can we skip the rest of your Intimidate the Naked Prisoner game and jump straight to what you want from me?”

  His talons closed around me so tightly that black splotches bloomed in my vision. “But I like this game,” he said. “What I like best about it is that it’s not over until I get bored. By then you’ll be free …” He smiled again. “Or lunch.”

  He let up on the pressure, as I’d known he would; if he aspired to mutilate an unconscious body, he had no need to use mine. “How long have you been here?”

  “Before just now?”

  This answer meant either that he thought me stupid, or that he was playing stupid.

  Stupider.

  I decided to explain. “You didn’t arrive by teleport—no air displacement. Nor did you shift in from the Blind Eternities—even you can’t planeswalk swiftly or accurately enough to make that sophomorically dramatic entrance. Finally, I could smell you.”

  “Smell me?” One scaly brow ridge took on a deeper arch. “Really?”

  “At first, I thought it was my armpits. I have two words for you, old worm.” I held up a finger. “Dental.” I folded that finger and lifted the next. “Floss.”

  I fully expected him to crush me until I passed out; or, alternatively, that he would start bouncing me off the walls again. Instead, he did what I was least expecting: he chuckled and set me down. He then lowered himself into what might have been, for a dragon, a comfortable position, looking for all the Multiverse as though he’d just stopped by for a friendly chat.

  Bouncing off walls seemed to be a more attractive option.

  I waited for him to speak. He seemed content to simply recline on the crystal floor, wrap his tail around his neck, and chuckle. A dragon’s chuckle is very like rubbing two bricks together. Against your teeth. I didn’t wait very long; if I wished to play patience games, I would have chosen an opponent younger than, for example, human civilization. “You need me for something.”

  “Need you? Don’t insult me. It amuses me to employ you in a particular task. If you fail?” Bolas rather absently began to clean out his nose with the tip of his tail. “That will amuse me, too. If you succeed, you may be rewarded … with other tasks.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “The opportunity,” Bolas said, “to obey me by choice.”

  “I’ve had better offers.”

  “It’s not an offer,” the dragon said. “It’s a description of reality. Do you understand the difference?”

  “Let’s not start on what we do and do not understand,” I said. “What specifically do you want of me?”

  “Not yet. There is one feature of our new working relationship that I’ve really been looking forward to showing you.”

  “Are we back to Intimidate the Naked Prisoner already?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, we are, but with a new rule. As much as I enjoy bashing you into the rocks, the scent of your blood is making me peckish. And I can’t be wasting my life showing up to slap you around every time you need it. I’d hardly have time for anything else. So I’ve brought a friend for you.”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “You do now,” he assured me, in a cheerfully evil tone, like a demonic used-carriage salesman. “But don’t worry, he won’t hurt your reputation. And he doesn’t have a reputation to worry about. I call him Mr. Chuckles.”

  “I’m bored already.”

  “I can fix that,” the dragon said. “Though I suppose you’re right—Mr. Chuckles is an undignified name. Let’s call him Jest, shall we? And make him a doctor. Doctor Jest. Do you like it? Doesn’t matter.” This seemed to tickle the dragon in some private way, as though it referenced a joke only he knew. “Doctor Jest, be polite. Introduce yourself to Tezzeret.”

  This introduction took the form of a shattering blast of agony so overwhelming that I instantly collapsed. It felt like being hit by lightning while I was roa
sted alive in wasp venom. Over and over and over. I spasmed into convulsions, which did me the favor of banging my head into the floor hard enough to knock me unconscious.

  Briefly.

  “I know you’re awake, Tezzie. Sit up.”

  My hand found yet another scalp wound. “Do I have to?”

  “Unless you’d rather get the invitation from Doctor Jest.”

  “All right. All right, don’t,” I said, my voice husky. I had probably been screaming. I didn’t remember. “Doctor Jest?”

  “You don’t think he’s funny? I just about laughed my tail off.”

  “What is it?”

  “He.”

  “He. Whatever. What is he?”

  “You don’t need to know,” Bolas said. “All you need to know about your new best friend is that he has only two purposes in life. The first, as you’ve discovered, is to cause you pain. Unsupportable agony, in fact.”

  “Anytime I do something you don’t like.”

  “Almost. I don’t ask Doctor Jest to read my mind. So he has some leeway; he’ll hurt you anytime he thinks you might be doing something I won’t like—or that you might be about to. Get it?”

  “So that ‘obey me by choice’ business was a joke.”

  “You never did appreciate my sense of humor.”

  “I get it,” I said. “You don’t have to show me again.”

  “The other thing Doctor Jest lives for is to make sure you don’t do anything foolish, like try to run away from me. At your first inkling of attempting to planeswalk without my express permission, he will put you right back here. And I think you understand that here is a place you can’t get out of on your own. Still with me?”

  “I told you: I get it.” I held up my right arm of meat. “Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it better if I’m not crippled. If this task is something you prefer I succeed at, give me back my arm.”

  “Well …” The dragon shrugged. “Can’t really help you. Sorry. Best I can do is cut off the new one.”

  “Give me my real arm and I’ll do it myself. I have before. Is watching me suffer your petty revenge more important than this task you raised me from the dead for?”