Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “Ah.” Tezzeret nodded. “The contract didn’t specify how you’d rebuild him.”

  “Why would I waste all that etherium on someone who isn’t me?”

  “A question he should have considered before making the deal.”

  “He was a little agitated at the time. Emotional. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say he was foaming at the mouth with uncontrollable rage.” The dragon cocked his head an inch or two. “You have that effect on people.”

  “Do I? Well, well. At any rate, thank you.”

  “What?”

  Tezzeret gave as much of a shrug as would fit between the dragon’s talons. “I said thank you. It’s an expression civil people sometimes use. It means I’m grateful for your help.”

  “I know what it—” The dragon’s jaw clamped shut, and the weight on Tezzeret’s chest suddenly doubled. “Is this really the time to be mocking me?”

  “I hadn’t decided whether or not I should kill him; you have thoughtfully removed one horn of my potential moral dilemma. Not to mention that finding him at all might have been a challenge. I appreciate the favor. I’d say I owe you one, but under the circumwaurggh”—his voice thinned as the weight on his chest suddenly doubled—“it might be … guhh … redundant.…” His voice faded to a gurgle as the dragon leaned on his chest hard enough to spring a couple of his ribs.

  “Banter,” said Nicol Bolas, “gets on my nerves.”

  The drool that spooled down from his jaws toward Tezzeret’s head was tinged strawberry with blood, smelled like offal, and had the consistency of half-melted gelatin. “Have you been here all along? Is this your hiding place?”

  Tezzeret shook his head. “Wasn’t … hiding,” he wheezed. “Was waiting … for you.”

  “Flatterer.” The dragon increased the weight on the man’s chest. “You were given a task.”

  Tezzeret only rolled his head, nodding toward the Metal Sphinx.

  “Please,” Bolas rumbled. “You think you can buy me off with mere treasure?”

  Tezzeret only blinked mutely up at the dragon, who presently realized the man’s face was turning black. “Oh, fine.” He eased up on the pressure until Tezzeret could breathe.

  “It’s not … treasure …” Tezzeret coughed. “It’s just how this place is. And how it will always be. More or less. Ever hear the expression ‘You can’t take it with you’?”

  “Really?” Bolas lifted his head, frowning at the etherium gigafortune all around. If Tezzeret could have taken even an armload or two of etherium back across the Blind Eternities to Esper, Bolas would hardly have found him naked on this beach.

  He probably wouldn’t have found Tezzeret at all.

  “So …” Bolas again bent his neck to bring his jaws within biting distance of Tezzeret’s face. “You know where he is.”

  “I know everywhere he isn’t.”

  “Close enough. Tell me.”

  “That’s a long story, even for you.”

  “What, is he dead?”

  Tezzeret cocked his head as though this question had only now occurred to him. “It would be most accurate to say that he’s not yet alive.”

  “Oh, I love when you do that. I do. Really. Tell me another.” Dragon drool began to puddle near Tezzeret’s ears, and the dragon’s voice went deep as a mine shaft and twice as dark. “I can take the secret from your mind.”

  “There is no secret.”

  “I can peel your brain like an onion.”

  “What do you know about onions, carnivore?”

  “A fair point,” Bolas conceded. “How about instead, I peel your brain like the skull of an obnoxious artificer who has about a minute to live?”

  “Is this multiple choice? None of the above.”

  “You haven’t heard all the choices.”

  Tezzeret smiled. “With you, it’s always none of the above.”

  “You think you can play sphinx with me, you filthy little scut?” Those yellow eyes darkened toward red. “You don’t have the power. You don’t have a millionth of the power.”

  “Power’s irrelevant,” Tezzeret said apologetically. “And I’m not playing sphinx, nor any other game; why would I? You’re too stupid to understand the rules.”

  “Stupid?” Bolas snatched Tezzeret into the air, shaking him like a doll. “Will I be stupid while I skin you and gut you and roast you alive? Will I still be stupid after the last of your bones digests in my third stomach?”

  “Yes. You will. You,” said Tezzeret, wheezing a bit from the shaking, “are not what you eat.”

  The dragon made a sound as if boulders might be grinding together in his crop. “I was master of the Blind Eternities when your pathetic species didn’t yet know how to make fire. I have not survived twenty-five thousand years by being stupid.”

  “That’s true,” Tezzeret allowed. “You survived in spite of being stupid.”

  “What do you gain by insulting me?” The dragon seemed honestly puzzled. “Are you so tired of living?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Tezzeret said. “Telling you that you’re stupid is not an insult. It’s an explanation.”

  He spoke very slowly, and very clearly, as though speaking to a dim-witted child. “It’s not your fault, Bolas. You can’t help it. You are probably the most powerful being in the Multiverse—”

  “Probably?” the dragon sneered. “Another insult.”

  “And that’s why. That right there. Power makes you stupid, Bolas. Power makes everyone stupid. You don’t have to be smart when you can be strong. When was the last time you had to, say, outwit someone? Why bother, when you can destroy them—destroy anyone—with a shrug?”

  “Which you should keep in mind.”

  “That’s the difference between us. I have to be smart; my intellect is my only useful weapon. That man you just killed—Silas Renn? He had the power to squash me like a bug. He used to do exactly that, regularly, back when we both studied with the Seekers of Carmot. He was ten times the mage I’ll ever be … yet what’s left of his corpse is drifting with the tides in a universe he could never have imagined. And I …?” Tezzeret smiled. “I am about to teach the most powerful being in the Multiverse a lesson in weakness.”

  “We’ll see who teaches whom.” He opened his claws to hold Tezzeret cupped in his palm. One wickedly hooked talon, as long as Tezzeret was tall and sharp as a stiletto, traced a complex design in the air around the human’s form. Where the talon passed, lines of actinic white fire ignited, becoming a spherical lattice around Tezzeret, anchoring his wrists and ankles and stretching them to full extension—and then a bit more.

  Nicol Bolas hummed to himself as he wove the restraints. “Comfortable? No? Good.”

  Gap-spark blue energy crackled between the dragon’s horns like lightning leaping from mountain to mountain. “This, by the way, is going to hurt. A lot.”

  “Everything … hurts.…” His body locked outstretched within the globe of white, Tezzeret could only barely force the words past his clenched teeth. “Whenever you’re … ready …”

  “You can spare yourself this pain.”

  “No … I can’t.…”

  “Share your secrets willingly, and I’ll leave your mind intact.”

  “The only secret … is that there is no secret.…”

  “Have it your way. You were warned.”

  The gap spark between Bolas’s horns intensified, gathering itself until it became a seething blue-tinged sun, too bright to look at. This blue sun grew horns of its own, two writhing jets of energy, one from above and the other from below. These jets spidered out, paused for a heartbeat or two in the air between the dragon and the man, then lanced through the Web of Restraint and stabbed into Tezzeret’s head.

  Bolas grimaced, fanning the air with one wing as he peeled Tezzeret’s mind. Burning hair was one odor he’d never enjoyed—and burning bone wasn’t much better. He sighed for a moment, thinking of Jace Beleren. If he’d still had a tether on that grubby little m
ind ripper, he could have farmed out this business. He decided that when this was over, he would take himself off to, oh, say, Esper’s Glass Dunes for a good sand bath—something nice and abrasive, to really scour this stink off his scales.

  The dragon’s memory siphon was very reliable and very thorough. As long as the spell was active, Bolas could replay Tezzeret’s memories, as vivid as a nightmare. It was very much like being Tezzeret as he endured the original experiences.

  “Really, the things I put myself through …” Nicol Bolas said with a melancholy sigh. On the other hand, it would give him one more reason to punish Tezzeret. Not that he needed another reason.

  Or any reason at all.

  “Let’s see what’s inside this head of yours, shall we?” he murmured to himself. “Right from the moment I woke you up …”

  The memories began to flow, slowly at first, then with increasing speed and force: the sensation of being rudely awakened, naked and alone, in the crystal cavern … then Tezzeret’s fuzzy, almost incoherent thoughts, before the artificer had even opened his eyes.…

  TEZZERET

  A MAN OF PARTS

  Being alive meant I was in trouble.

  I remembered dying. Your own murder is not something that slips your mind.

  That vicious little gutter-monkey Jace Beleren had reached inside my skull with the invisible fingers of his mind and scrambled my brain into … what? An omelet didn’t seem right—too orderly. Too intentional. A chopped salad? Not meaty enough. My brain felt like something sliced, or scooped, fried in bacon grease … yes.

  Head cheese.

  But having a brainpan filled with head cheese would leave me incapable of iterating concepts such as brainpan and head cheese, and likely lacking the mental resources to recall my death and formulate a metaphor to describe it. This recursive self-realization developed slowly, because having a functioning brain, which I did, didn’t mean it was functioning very well, which it wasn’t.

  I passed some indeterminate interval speculating that perhaps I was not in fact alive, but that my corpse had been reanimated by some ambitious mage—perhaps that tasty little necromancer Jace Beleren had been so fond of … Vess. Something Vess. Lolita? Lilith? Something like that.

  I also, for thoroughness’ sake, considered the possibility that my undead essence had been conjured by an embattled wizard on some nearby plane, either to win a duel or to prepare for his next one. But despite my diminished intellectual capacity, I knew that either of these possibilities was unlikely to result in a seemingly interminable span with nothing to do but chew my mental cud.

  Further: I was mostly sure that being dead wouldn’t hurt this much.

  I seemed to be lying on a pile of jagged rocks. Apparently, I had been lying on these jagged rocks for some significant amount of time—long enough for every single edge and point to work as deeply into my flesh as was possible short of drawing blood. I lay there experiencing the discomfort without attempting to ease it; I was not yet ready to move.

  As an artificer by inclination as well as vocation, I have always known that anything worth doing is best accomplished in a deliberate, structured, and meticulous fashion. Feelings and dreams are useless, and imagination is worse. Reality doesn’t care how you think it ought to be, or what you fantasize it might be. Effective action is achieved only by the intelligent application of what is.

  An unsentimental perspective on the ‘what is’ of my current situation offered no good news. To have healed and reconstructed my brain, after Beleren puréed it, was itself a feat of impressive power; to have done so after (or in the process of) raising me from the dead expanded the power requirement from impressive to astonishing. This premise led to a grim two-horned conclusion. I’d been returned to life and placed here by a being of astonishing capability who was either unconcerned with my personal welfare, or actively my enemy.

  There was no third possibility. I don’t have friends.

  Worse: my right arm hurt.

  It ached as though it might be nothing more than simple flesh over simple bone. This was overwhelmingly wrong. So powerfully wrong that when I opened my eyes, I looked only to my left.

  Not because I was kidding myself; I did not waste mental energy fantasizing that my good right arm—my precious arm, the only feature of my existence in which I can truly take pride—might be intact. Instead, my refusal to look at it arose from a similarly unsentimental understanding of my own psychology. There is a difference between knowing the abstract and seeing the specific.

  There was a difference between knowing my mother was dead, and finding her battered corpse trampled and crushed into the muck of a Lower Vectis by-lane.

  By looking only to my left, I kept the comprehension of my maiming safely abstract.

  My prison appeared to be a natural cavern cloaked in a dull, bloody gloom, as though the light came from hot iron. The jagged rock on which I lay, the floor, the walls, and the ceiling were all some sort of crystalline mineral I did not recognize, darker than ruby quartz, shading toward carnelian—and the light in the cavern was apparently the product of a crimson glow from the deeper deposits of this crystal. From somewhere nearby came the liquid patter of what I hoped might be water.

  There was neither sight nor smell of anything to eat, nor of any bedding, clothing, or fabric of any kind with which I might cover myself. The strongest odor in the cavern was of unwashed human armpit, likely my own. I found no indication of anything that might be fashioned into tools, only ever-deeper deposits of glowing red crystal.

  This did not mean I was helpless. Fastening my mind upon the gray waves that crash against the cliffs below Vectis, I began to pull mana. At the very least I might fashion temporary covering for my body and protection for my feet, both of which would be useful while exploring the further extents of the cavern.

  I discovered, however, that my effort to gather mana resulted only in a barely perceptible brightening of one large crystal in my immediate line of vision. This was not in itself dismaying, as I had not expected to succeed. A number of constructs and magics can deny mana to even the most powerful mage—I’ve designed several myself—but the attempt had to be made.

  Everything at which I’ve ever succeeded has been accomplished by exacting attention to detail; a full commitment to exhaustive investigation. To have left a possibility unexplored would be like, well …

  Like cutting off my own hand.

  And so then, finally, I had to look.

  My reaction was largely what I had anticipated it might be: a rush of rage and denial so intense I could only lie there and scream, followed by a flood of nauseous horror so overpowering that I vomited blood-laced saliva and green bile, and then passed out cold.

  I began constructing my right arm when I was roughly nine years of age. Though my arm’s completion would require more than a decade, and I would continue to refine it for some years after, the process of acquisition, design, and construction actually began when I finally found myself clever enough to steal from my father, which was, approximately, age nine.

  My age has always been approximate.

  My birth had been no occasion to celebrate, and so neither were my birthdays; my parents never bothered to share with me the date, if they even remembered. I calculated my approximate age by my size and development relative to the other Tidehollow cave brats.

  My parents were scrappers. Scrappers sift the garbage, runoff, and sewage of the city of Vectis, hoping that with careful and patient work they might gather bits of copper, silver, gold, or even the occasional sliver of mislaid etherium. Scrapping is, in Vectis, a less honorable profession than is begging, and it is ranked far, far below whoring. This I understood despite my age; my mother had once been a whore, as she often bitterly reminded my father whenever money ran short, or when the hearth fire sputtered, or the sun rose, or the moon set. When the winds blew, or when they fell silent.

  Before her health and looks failed and she was forced to stoop so low as to share a hovel
with my father, she would not even have spit on a scrapper in the street; to do so would have meant acknowledging the scrapper’s miserable existence.

  I was seven years old when she was killed.

  Approximately.

  The news of her death arrived in the company of taunting and jeering from the ragged pack of cave brats with whom I commonly associated—children in Tidehollow being not only unsentimental, but largely incapable of understanding the concept of empathy, much less exhibiting any. One of their fathers, who had been begging on the same street in Lower Vectis as had my mother, had seen the incident. By his report, she had pressed too close to a passing guildsmaster’s carriage while supplicating alms. The blow of a whip from the carriage driver had knocked her down, and she had fallen under the wheels. The merchant lord had rolled on without so much as pausing to determine what he had crushed.

  My father’s face at first had flushed, and angry color rose toward his eyes—but after only an instant all color drained away. I never saw it return. He became expressionless as a statue, and when he spoke to me, his voice had no more life or emotion than the sound of gravel rolling off a slate roof.

  “Boy. Come folla. We has to git yer mother.”

  He always called me boy. I am uncertain whether he and my mother had given me a name. Tezzeret is how I was called among the cave brats; a tezzeret is, in Tidehollow cant, the word for any small, improvised or homemade weapon kept concealed on one’s body—knives made from beach glass wrapped in packing twine; slings and garrotes woven of one’s own hair, a carriage spring bent to protect the knuckles of one’s fist. The cave brats had dubbed me Tezzeret after I had used one to butt shank an older boy who had pushed me down into a muck puddle.

  My father gathered three or four potato sacks, told me to bring the sheets off his bed, and we went to get my mother.

  My father and I did not speak on the long trudge upslope from Tidehollow to Lower Vectis. We didn’t speak while we threaded through the murky lanes and alleys. The sum total of our conversation took place beside my mother’s broken corpse, just before we dug her body out of the greasy muck in the middle of the lane.