Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “Raised you from the dead? Don’t flatter yourself. I undid some of Beleren’s damage to your brain, that’s all.”

  “Ah.” At the time, that was all I could think to say.

  “It’s kind of complicated. You were dead enough for me; I’m not a philosopher. He just didn’t bother to finish the job on your body. Probably thought you’re not worth the trouble.”

  Not worth the trouble. “I’ll have to thank him. Personally.”

  “If you find him, I wouldn’t mind thanking him a bit myself. He’d make a better agent than you ever will.”

  “And my arm?”

  “It was gone when I found you,” he said. “Probably a lovely parting gift from Jace. Lying in some swamp on Kamigawa, I’d guess—if he’d tried to take it with him, I’d have known. I did arrange for the new one. Don’t you like it?”

  “I’m not that attached to it.”

  The dragon gave me a cough’s worth of courtesy laugh. “So … wait, Tezzie. Really? You thought I raised you from the dead? You thought I took off your arm? Really?”

  “I was reasoning from available evidence.” And, I realized, my conclusion was accurate even though both of my premises were flawed; a curious phenomenon, and one that might bear further investigation.

  Bolas shook his head pityingly. “I know you have an irrationally high opinion of yourself, but seriously, Tezzeret, get a clue. You’re not remotely that important.”

  “Important enough for you to arrange all this.”

  “Tezzie, it’s not about you. Really. You’re here because I have spent a very long time setting up an exceedingly elaborate prank, and you’re the only person I know who’ll really appreciate it. You’re audience. Nothing more. Well—let’s say, you’re an educated audience.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “You’ll be impressed.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Satisfaction guaranteed or double your money back. Do you remember,” Bolas said, mock coy, “when we first met?”

  “Sure I remember. You wore red. The demons wore black.” Even the threat of agony wasn’t enough to make Bolas interesting. “Ah, the romance of Grixis when the corpse fungus blooms …”

  Bolas started scraping those bricks together again. “The question’s relevant, Tezzie. We met not long after you murdered the Hieresiarch of the Seekers of Carmot.”

  My jaw locked; playtime was over. “I murdered no one.”

  “You ripped a sick old man’s head off his shoulders and left it on the desk in his study,” Bolas said. “What should I call it? Self-defense?”

  “Call it a better death than he deserved,” I said through my teeth. “Amalex Pannet was just another bandit.”

  “A bandit? That wheezy old fart? What did he ever steal from you?”

  “Three years of service.” Even now, well beyond a decade on, the wound was raw. “Three years of devotion. Three years I spent doing their scut work. Enduring their petty humiliations. Three years studying their useless pretend wisdom to show them I was worthy of learning their made-up fraud of a mystery. Three years of belief in their horseshit.”

  “You sound like you’re angry all over again.”

  “Not again,” I said. “Still.”

  “After all these years? Whatever happened to forgive and forget?”

  “I don’t forget, and I don’t trade in forgiveness; I give none and I don’t expect to get any. There are consequences,” I said as evenly as I could manage, “for abusing my good nature.”

  Bolas snorted. “What good nature?”

  I sought to replicate his too-many-teeth smile. “The good may be rhetorical. The consequences aren’t.”

  “Oh, Tezzie, I’m flattered,” Bolas said, splaying one taloned foot against his chest like a blushing debutante. “A threat? Just for me? You shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s not a threat, Bolas. It’s a reminder.” I could play his redefinition game, too—better than he could.

  He pretended to find something interesting on the ceiling. “And what was your original disagreement with the Seekers of Carmot? You killed what, four of them? A respectable body count, especially against an order of mages. Why so angry?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know.” My jaw ached with strain. “The Seekers were your damned hand puppets in the first place! You invented the whole festering Order!”

  “Humor me.” The dragon turned his eyes on me, and the fake insouciance evaporated, leaving only bleak malice. “I’m about to spring the punch line, Tezzie. This little prank that I’ve been setting up for years. Decades. Play along.”

  This did not sound like a friendly request.

  “All right,” I said. I managed a deep breath, and another, and got a better grip on my temper. “All right. I joined the Seekers of Carmot for only one reason: to learn the secret of etherium creation. I had considerable hope invested in them and their secret. I had spent more than ten years, with great effort and at considerable personal risk, to amass the etherium for my right arm.”

  I held up my meat arm and wriggled its fingers. ‘My erstwhile right arm,’ I corrected myself. The Seekers said they could create etherium. They had supposedly uncovered the secret during intensive study of the legacy of this imaginary Mad Sphinx of theirs, something to do with a mythological mineral called sangrite that can be infused with æther by using another mythological substance called carmot. Presto change-o, new etherium. If they’d been telling the truth, it would have revolutionized life on Esper.”

  “If,” Bolas said, getting those bricks scraping again. “Go on.”

  “Only the Fellowship—the Fellows of the Arcane Council, the most advanced and holy adepts of the entire Order—were allowed to read and care for the book they called the Codex Etherium, where they had recorded everything they’d learned about Crucius, about his life and wisdom, his disappearance, his techniques of working etherium … and the secrets of carmot and sangrite. With the ancient sphinxian wisdom in the Codex, the Fellowship—alone among all the mages of Esper—could create etherium. So I joined them. I studied with them, trained with them, took their orders—I even mucked out their damned toilets—for three years. Because I believed. I did. I thought we were going to transform Esper into paradise. I even told—”

  I bit down hard enough to draw fresh blood from my injured cheek. There was no reason to tell Bolas about my last visit to my father’s hovel in Tidehollow—about how I had been practically babbling with enthusiasm, and what my father had said.…

  Bolas didn’t need to know.

  “So?” the dragon said, his upper lip peeling back. “Tell me about this paradise, Tezzie.”

  I shrugged with a great deal more nonchalance than I felt. “There’s nothing to tell. It was all lies. As you know. Every scrap and every shred. Lies.”

  The curve of his upper lip twisted toward a definite sneer. “Are you sure?”

  “I was there, Bolas. I broke into the Sanctum. I read the Codex—no. I opened the Codex. There was nothing to read. Nothing. The whole rectum-blistering book was blank.”

  Bolas unwrapped his tail from his neck and stood, folding his wings and looking so happy that I knew whatever came next would be bad.

  “So, Tezzie, nice story,” he said. “Entertaining, and enlightening! You deserve a special surprise, and here it is—the task you will perform for me. You’re going to find Crucius.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I could not restrain a snort. “Brilliant. Is that your genius punch line? Where should I start looking? Up your ass?”

  He laughed. “That’s what I like best about you, Tezzie. Repartee, gold-plated vocabulary, culture and education and refinement … Scratch that cultured Esper mage with one fingernail, and all you find underneath is just another filthy scrapper’s spawnling.… What did they call you? Cave brats? You can take the boy out of Tidehollow, but …”

  “Who I am—what I was—has never been a secret. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.”
r />   “But you are anyway.” Bolas had his too-many-teeth smile going again. “Now: Crucius.”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s not real—that whole Mad Sphinx business is just more of the Seekers’ lies.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “As sure as I—” The dragon’s hideously smug grin stopped me in mid-reply. “I don’t … I mean, what are you saying?”

  “There. See? That’s the punch line.”

  I could only stare in dumb incomprehension.

  “You don’t get it? Joke’s on you, cave brat. Crucius is real. He is a sphinx, and he did create etherium. He’s a Planeswalker, just like us. Come on, Tezzie—did you really think everything the Seekers taught was a lie?”

  “I …” I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say. “I suppose I did.”

  “Now, that’s comedy—but wait, there’s more!” The dragon shrugged open his wings and spread them as if to say, Look around, dumbass. “Where do you think we are?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This.” He reached over, and with a casual yank he broke loose a chunk of the rose-glowing crystal bigger than my two doubled fists. He tossed it to me.

  The chunk of crystal was heavy, far denser than it looked … and in its depths, I could see little flaws, like tiny cracks spidering through the rock … and it was from these flaws that the glow came.…

  A sort of existential horror began to squeeze my throat. “I don’t understand.…” I looked up at Bolas. “I don’t … What is this stuff?”

  “Blood.”

  I blinked. “Blood?”

  “Petrified dragon blood,” Bolas said with a sort of savage satisfaction, as if he really had spent fifteen years putting together a prank just for me, and he was enjoying the payoff more than he’d ever dared hope. “This particular blood belonged to … Well, you don’t need to know, do you? There was a serious dragon-war thing going on here some few years back, as you can probably guess.”

  “Jund,” I said. “We’re on Jund.…”

  “These days, we say we’re in Jund.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll find out. The important thing, here, is that dragon blood spilled in battle is different from what you’d get if, oh, you were somehow foolish enough to actually cut me, for example. It’s a stress hormone thing, as well as all manner of esoteric metabolites left over from powering our various magical abilities. And here in Jund—in the high mountains, in fact, probably something relating to some unique quality of mana here—dragon blood leaves this interesting residue. That you are holding in your hand. Right now.”

  I could feel some of what made this crystal interesting—mana leaked from it, giving it the warmth and the light, but it was also absorbing mana from some unknown source.… It was gaining power, not losing it …

  I couldn’t raise my voice above a whisper. “What in the hells is it?”

  “You’re the Giant Brain, aren’t you? So proud of your self-education. So tell me: what’s the etymology of the word sangrite?”

  “It’s vedalken for bloodstone,” I said reflexively.… Then, when I heard the words that had come from my lips, I found I could no longer breathe.

  “You must be joking …” I managed.

  “Oh, I certainly am. But I’m not lying. It’s all true. Those lies that you murdered all these people over? All true. Every single one. That’s what makes it funny.”

  I had to sit down. “All … true …?”

  “Except for the part about them actually having the stuff. Other than that …? Yes. All true. Every rectum-blistering word. How’s that for a prank?”

  I could only stare.

  Nicol Bolas, twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon, Planeswalker, sometime god, destroyer of worlds, winked at me like a demented carnival barker. “How do you like me now?”

  Before I could answer, he produced a globe of milky glass and cast it at my feet. It exploded with a binding flash … and when I could see again, I was in Tidehollow.

  TEZZERET

  EXCHANGING UNPLEASANTRIES

  I knew it was Tidehollow. I cannot mistake my birthplace for anywhere else in the Multiverse; the cavern slums below Vectis have a unique odor, compounded of mildew, rotten fish, feces, poverty, and despair. The air feels as if it’s been breathed already—as if the distinctive odor is actually the product of someone’s breath.

  Everyone’s breath.

  I stood exactly as I had in the crystal cave: two flesh arms, one large chunk of sangrite, and no clothing at all.

  And it was raining.

  There was no wind—there almost never was—and the permanent drizzle of condensate that is Tidehollow’s rain felt icy and tasted of mold. Thank Bolas for small favors; he’d put me in deep shadow on one of the twisty beast paths that serve for streets down here. He could just as easily have dropped me in the Grand Bazaar at noon. Or the Hegemon’s bedchamber. I took my reasonably surreptitious arrival as a sign that Bolas, so far, actually wanted me to pursue his preposterous mission.

  Probably.

  Dragons as a species tend to be of uncertain temper, and Bolas in particular is uniquely opaque. Guessing his intention in any given sphere is a hazardous undertaking. Even his practical jokes can blossom into deadly serious schemes, and what appear to be substantive projects can, as I had just learned, turn out to be elaborate pranks.

  Though, I reminded myself, the fact that Bolas claimed the Seekers of Carmot had been a prank didn’t mean anything. With Bolas, nothing is ever wholly one thing or another.

  He was playing some deeper game. He always plays some deeper game.

  I suppose I am not entirely different. It struck me then, for example, that I should pay a visit to the Seekers, as I was in town anyway—which could be read as a flaw of sentiment, and perhaps it was. But that’s not all it was.

  First: clothing.

  It should have been a small matter to summon mana sufficient for an illusion of clothing. In previous days, when I’d had my arm, I routinely wore illusory clothing of such sophistication that it was, for all intents and purposes, real. It was solid to the touch and interacted normally with sun, wind, and weather. I could carry small items in my pockets, hang pouches from my belt, and I could fine-tune it to provide warmth in cold climates, keep me cool in warm climes, or even function as armor against physical attack.

  But that had been when I’d had my arm.

  Now to gather the mana alone was time-consuming and difficult, despite my proximity to the deep mana wells of the Sea of Unknowing. Binding myself to them to replenish my reserves actually fatigued me instead of reviving me. Clearly, my newly reduced capacity would take some getting used to. The chill drizzle intensified, as it often did through the evening, and I was already shivering.

  Not far away, however, a line of seastone topped with sharp slate served someone as a fence … and it seemed this someone had been overly optimistic about the weather here, as several large tunics and one pair of breeches had been hung over the fence to dry.

  The actual caverns of Tidehollow—about three-quarters of the slum’s total extent—afford considerable protection from the weather on the Sea of Unknowing, but in exchange one must live in a state of perpetual gloom and permanent damp. The exhalations of each cavern’s inhabitants inevitably condense on the stone, forming much of the drizzle that falls through every night. The owner of these articles had either forgotten them, or simply did not care enough to take them in from the rain. In either case, I had more need of them than did their owner.

  But I could not make my hand close upon them.

  I stood at that fence for an indeterminable interval; it seemed a very long time. I needed clothing, and here this was, laid out before me like an offering to honor my homecoming. There was not one reason in the Multiverse I should stand naked in the rain while in front of me lay perfectly appropriate clothing that had been forgotten or discarded here. Or abandoned. One might argue that I’d be doing these people a favor
by helping them dispose of what they clearly considered to be trash.

  It wasn’t as though I haven’t done worse. I’ve done much, much worse. Without hesitation. Many times. In my roster of criminal activity, this oh-so-petty theft would not merit even a glancing reference.

  But still I could not make myself do it.

  There at the improvised fence in the dark Tidehollow drizzle, I kept hearing my father’s voice. “They don’ has to want for them to take. Take is what they do. Take is their whole life.”

  To take these pitifully ragged, nearly valueless scraps of clothing would somehow break a vow I didn’t remember swearing—a vow I’d made with all my heart. An oath sworn to my seven-year-old self.

  Yes: I am sentimental, and sentiment is a flaw, and despite knowing full well how irrational it was, I found myself up against a wall of unexpected principle. I have never hesitated to steal from the wealthy, from the powerful, from beings who might crush me with a thought. Even my thefts from my own father happened only while he had absolute power over my life and my death. To pit my skill and wit against the greats of the worlds, with my life as the stake, is what gives my existence meaning.

  To take from people who already have nothing is too vile, even for me.

  I am not known for honesty, nor for fidelity. I don’t think I’ve ever made a promise I haven’t broken. Except, apparently, this one.

  It seems that filthy little scrapper’s brat is the only person I’ve ever met whom I am unwilling to betray.

  I may very well have stood there all night but for a woman’s voice, a harsh whisper in the darkness, that came from the dimly lamp-lit window of the stone hovel on the other side of the fence. “Hsst! Chammie! Theyz sumpin over th’ fence! Chammie, look!”

  An infant began to bawl, and a large shadow filled the tiny window. “Hoy!” The shout was a man’s, hoarse and sudden and Tidehollow swampy. “Git out from there, sluice sucker! Garn! Fore I git out to shoo yer!”

  For an instant I lingered, snared by memory. There had been a boy named Chammie among my gang of cave brats.… Small, ginger hair, a cast in one eye, he’d fight anyone, anytime, any odds.…