Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  “We should be running away, right?” Doc said. “Why aren’t we running?”

  “Fire is not Jace’s strength,” I said. “He’s a mind ripper.”

  “That’s good news, right?”

  “No.”

  Where the stone burned away, the hole in the wall didn’t open onto the brewery. Through the hole I could see black clouds on fire, burning above a volcanic cone that spilled white-hot lava.

  I was about to find out just how worried Jace had been about my possible return.

  First through the fire gate came a glossy, jet-black lobsterish pincer bigger than I am, which latched on to the unburned stone, followed by another that did the same.… Where they touched, the stone went red and soft, and from the joints of the pincers glared flesh that burned white as the sun. Because these claws did not belong to any variety of lobster, and I no longer needed to see the rows of compound eyes that were to follow, I intended to actively avoid seeing the upcurving jointed metasoma with a white-hot barb the size of a greatsword.

  I am not, as a rule, given to either profanity or vulgarity, but when confronted at close range by hippopotamus-size scorpions whose very flesh is white-hot rock, I might be forgiven for indulging in both.

  “Holy shit …”

  Apparently Jace had been very worried indeed. Worried enough to have signed up at least one very, very serious pyromancer.

  “That’s bad, isn’t it? I can tell it’s bad. What are we going to do?”

  “We? Nothing. You’re going to shut up,” I said, “and I am going to run like hell.”

  TEZZERET

  THE HOME FIRES, BURNING

  Being about to die did not strike me as sufficient reason to abandon either of my treasures. So it was that I undertook to flee with my etherium trap in one hand and my hunk of sangrite in the other. Even without having replenished my mana reserve, I can do surprising things with etherium by using its innate energy to power its action. Reasoning that the least flammable thing in the entire neighborhood was the neck-deep trub in the midden where I stood, I decided to put as much of it as I possibly could between myself and the magma scorpion.

  I took a deep breath and went in headfirst. As I clawed my way blindly downward, my fingers found the grating of the sewer drain—a grillwork of chrome steel, set in cement. Encouraged not only by Doc yammering in my ear—“What are you doing? Are you crazy? It’s right up there! Why aren’t you running?”—but also by the sudden impact of something large and heavy landing on the surface of the trub above me, I engaged the etherium device with my mind.

  Chrome steel is hard, but even the hardest metal can be overcome by the proper application of force. Working by feel, I brought out from the etherium an assemblage of gears, ratchets, and levers. Jamming levers through the holes in the grating, I then turned the device’s innate mana wholly to working those gears and ratchets and levers to pry apart the bars of the grating as swiftly as possible … because the trub was becoming unpleasantly warm, and I could hear, through the slimy mass itself, a series of minor detonations, which I took to be the steam blasts generated as the scorpion struck blindly downward with its tail barb—a stinger made out of white-hot rock. Again and again and again.

  I managed to avoid picturing what that stinger would do to my flesh.

  With a squeal that came only dully to my ears, the bars gave way. Well-lubricated by the rotting, yeasty mass around me, I managed to slide through headfirst, and tumbled ten or twelve feet until I hit the sewage stream, which was only a few inches deep. It did nothing to improve the stench.

  Entirely the opposite, in fact.

  I pulled myself up from the muck and took a quick look around. Witchlight globes were strung every few dozen yards, enabling me to see a lot of straight tunnel to either side, and very little else.

  “Hey, not bad,” Doc said brightly. “Now we run.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Yes yet,” he said, and punctuated his reply with a sensation that felt as I imagine it might if someone were to rip off my testicles. Slowly.

  The pain dropped me to my knees. “If I pass out, we both die.”

  The scorpion’s blazing stinger jabbed downward through the drain, unleashing a burst of steam and greasy smoke. “And dying is different from what’s about to happen exactly how?”

  “You have to trust me.”

  “Trust you? Never kid a kidder, chum.”

  And somehow when he said it, chum sounded less like the word for pal than it did the word for the rotting fish guts one uses to attract sharks. “This is my hometown. I know every inch of it. That knowledge is the only chance we have.”

  The pain vanished. “So what are we waiting for?”

  The stinger struck again and again, and the sewer began to fill with smoke. I extended a hand—my right, from reflex, even though I couldn’t help flinching when it entered my field of view—and down through the drain and out of the smoke came my device, sprinting along on spider legs. I had it leap up and wrap itself around my arm, and then I passed the chunk of sangrite over to it. From there it was a simple matter of encasing the sangrite in etherium, and arranging the whole thing to make a sort of yoke, or a harness, holding the sangrite at my back and leaving my hands free.

  This took barely a second, but in that time the cement around the drain burned away, and the top curve of the sewer collapsed, dropping a very large, very hot arthropod into the sewage, which did nothing at all to improve its temper; nor did the instant blast of superheated steam that very nearly blew it back up to street level. Catching itself at the rim, it started toward me along the ceiling, leaving a trail of burning footprints.

  This was when two more of the creatures clambered down through the hole and clattered along after the first.

  “Three?” I said. “Really?”

  I could just imagine Jace whipping up this little trick with his pyromancer, whistling cheerfully as they worked, thinking You know, one indestructible monster just isn’t enough. Better double the order.

  And one to grow on.

  “Um, hey there, Native Son?” Doc chirped in my ear. “Are we running yet?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “Yes, we are.”

  And we did.

  Pelting along the sewer tunnel as fast as my legs could carry me, I very soon discovered a piece of compelling evidence in favor of Bolas’s story that I had not, in fact, been raised from the dead: I found myself gasping and stumbling with fatigue in under a minute—very like how I might if I’d spent a span of time getting no exercise more strenuous than breathing. I was forced to funnel mana into my legs, which burned my limited reserve even faster.

  And behind me clattered the magma scorpions. They were gaining.

  “How much do you know about these things?” Doc hissed in my ear.

  “Not … a lot.” I took a sharp turn into a side tunnel that sloped more sharply downward. Running downhill was vastly easier, and I picked up speed. “They’re not … local.”

  “Really? There’s something you don’t know everything about? Stop a second—I gotta mark my calendar.” Doc, having no need to breathe, kept up a running commentary that made thinking even more difficult than being chased by indestructible monsters.

  “Magma scorpions,” I said between gasps of breath. “Shells … unbreakable. And hot … set afire … anything they touch. The barb … venom … magma … temperature of a planetary core …”

  “Oh, awesome. So if they don’t grab us and burn us to death, we get spiked with planetary core gunk in the back? That’ll leave a mark.”

  “No,” I wheezed. “Steam burst … blow me to pieces. Nothing left … to mark.”

  “That’s comforting. Um, hey, it sounds like they’re gaining. Are they gaining?”

  The growing heat on my backside told me all I needed to know. “Want me to … stop and look?”

  “Never mind.”

  It seemed, however, that our impending mutual demise was not enough to make him be quiet. “They’re s
till coming. They’re still gaining. Don’t they get tired? I mean, they’re really just giant bugs, right?”

  I did not have the breath to explain to Doc that while ordinary bugs—arthropods in general—are cold-blooded, and thus tire quickly when they overheat, magma scorpions are exactly the opposite; the heat generated by exertion makes them stronger. They tire only when they stop, which they weren’t going to do until I was on the well-done side of dead. Not to mention that they are an apex predator in their ecosystem, fearless, that their brains are larger than mine, and that they are, generally speaking, as intelligent as a medium-size dragon. And nearly as tough; there are only six ways to kill them, of which five would remain out of reach for too long to be useful.

  “Um, hey,” Doc said. “They sound different.”

  “What?” I was too busy running to waste time listening.

  “Still gaining—but down a third.” Doc, it seemed, could use my nervous system more precisely than I could. File the data.

  I stifled a curse that I didn’t have breath for anyway. “That means … there’re only two … there.”

  “That’s good news, right?”

  “They’re not … bugs,” I rasped. “The other … gone ahead to cut us off …”

  “Oh. That’s bad.”

  I declined to comment on his penchant for stating the obvious, because to do so would make me guilty of exactly that.

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’m open … to suggestions.…”

  “Ohhh, sure, now he wants my advice. Yeah, let’s ask the guy who’s been alive for, like, three hours to come up with a plan. Great idea!”

  Two hundred yards ahead, the roof of the sewer burst into flame, burning so hot and fast that molten gobbets of burning cement cascaded into the sewer, blasting a wall of superheated steam toward us.

  “Can’t you fight them?”

  “I can,” I panted grimly. “Just not today.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Same … as before. You … shut up and I … run.”

  If there are guardian spirits of fortune somewhere in creation, they must have been smiling upon me then; just ahead was a dump valve.

  When hurricanes blow in across the Sea of Unknowing, the huge surge in rainfall can overfill the standard sluice pits around Tidehollow in less than an hour. The sewers are designed with dump valves that can be triggered from the city service center above to divert some of the billions of gallons of water and sewage that otherwise might drown the slums altogether. This was not from any concern for the residents, but only to avoid poisoning the fisheries that are Vectis’s main source of protein.

  “What? You’re stopping? Why are you stopping?”

  “Shut up.”

  I reached up to the gearing of the valve control and sent a shining thread of etherium up along my arm and gave it half a second to spread through the mechanism. I yield to none in my skill with devices; what another being can design, I can subvert, which I proved by causing an earsplitting screech of half-rusted metal as the valve into the dump shaft ground itself open. The etherium was warm to the touch as it trailed back up my arm, almost as though pleased with a job well done.

  “Great work!” But when I looked down, Doc discovered why it was called a dump shaft as opposed to, say, a dump tunnel—it is, in fact, vertical. “Um … really? Isn’t that kinda steep?”

  “Yes,” I said, and dived headfirst into darkness.

  Doc’s reply, “YeeeaaaAAAHHHH!” screeched in my ear as we hurtled downward, free-falling for some seconds. This was enough time for me to recover a bit of my breath, which would become vital, according to my best estimate, in a minute or so. Give or take ten seconds.

  “Hey …” he said uncertainly when he finally gave up screaming. “There aren’t any witchlight globes in here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then where is that light coming from?” He was referring to the rosy glow that now began to catch highlights on the shaft walls.

  I said, “Where do you think?”

  “Oh, come on! Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m starting to see why nobody likes you.”

  “Not now,” I said, tucking my knees while I reached out and brushed the shaft wall with my fingertips, just enough to flip myself feet-downward. “This is going to hurt.”

  “See, that’s exactly what I’m—”

  This was as much as he managed to get out before we hit the slant at the bottom of the vertical shaft. I was wrong about it hurting; the impact was a shattering blast that whited out my vision for a second or two. It would hurt later. After I came out of shock.

  If I lived that long.

  The slant was wet and covered with thick oilmoss, which meant that we slid along it not much more slowly than we had fallen. I had plenty of time to peer backward and see the following magma scorpion hit the slant—and set the oil moss instantly ablaze.

  Flames licked down toward us even faster than we could slide “What, fire?” Doc said. “You knew it was gonna catch fire?”

  “No.” I chalked it up to the exigencies of planning a clever escape while running for one’s life. “Take it as a lesson to shut up when I need to think.”

  “It’s not much of a lesson if learning it kills me!”

  “We’re not dead yet,” I said. “Chum.”

  At which point we burst down from the shaft through a cavern ceiling to the terminal chute of the spillway, whose semi-radical angle was shallow enough to send us skipping across the surface of the semicoagulated goo of the collection pool instead of burying us in it.

  “Hey, not bad,” Doc said as our spinning slowed. “Maybe you are a Giant Brain after all.”

  “I believe the appropriate phrase is, under the circumstances,” I said, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  I turned so that I could start sculling us toward the shore, just as several tons of burning magma scorpion hurtled out of the terminal chute. Straight for us.

  “This was your plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are completely—”

  The rest of his assessment was lost as the magma scorpion splashed down into the collection pool; instead of skipping across the surface as we had, the magma scorpion detonated with the titanic BOOM of a catastrophic volcanic event. White-hot stone went everywhere, and entire segments of scorpion armor flew shrieking like a lobster in the pot through the dank Tidehollow gloom. A huge swelling shock wave picked us up and hurled us onto the bank. I scuttled back from the muck, which had now caught fire with an odor very much like one would expect from well-fermented burning sewage.

  “Did you do that?” Doc sounded awed. “Sweet mother of petrified dingleberries …! How did you do that?”

  “That steam-burst effect,” I said with what I felt was, under the circumstances, entirely justified satisfaction, “works both ways.”

  “Wow. I mean, wow. Good plan!”

  “Thank you.” I jogged away from the collection pool even as people from the surrounding hovels began to stream out to see what the noise had been.

  “Where we going now?”

  “Tide caves.”

  “Tide caves?”

  “They lead to open sea.”

  “You’re saying—”

  “I’m not saying. Here, watch.” I stopped and looked back. In the uplight from the burning collection pool, I could clearly see one magma scorpion scuttling sideways across the cavern wall below the dump shaft. Even as I looked, the other one came out and went the other direction.

  “I believe what they’re going for is called, excuse the expression,” I said, “a pincers maneuver.”

  “Ah, I, ah …” Doc stammered. “Um, all right. We can run now.”

  “Thank you.” But when I started to run, the battering I’d taken these past few minutes finally announced its presence. Vigorously. Though it didn’t hurt nearly as much as a shot from Doctor Jest, it was enough to slash my foot speed to a limping s
tumble. “Can you do anything about the pain?”

  “Without doing permanent damage? Only this,” he said, and my whole back from neck to heels burst into flame. Metaphorically, but nonetheless vividly.

  This cleared up my running problem admirably. Not that I was in any way grateful for Doc’s assistance.

  “The human pain system,” he said conversationally, “is an interesting place. Ever notice that when you break your toe, you forget all about your headache?”

  I did not reply, as I needed all my breath for screaming.

  “Huh, wait—how’s this?” Instead of being on fire, I felt as though a colony of soldier ants had taken up residence inside my spine and was currently exploring its new territory. Thousands of ants marching along under my skin, along my veins, burrowing into my muscles, crawling around the inside of my ears.…

  “Tolerable,” I said through clenched teeth. At least it didn’t hurt.

  “Itching uses the same nerves as touch/pain—that’s why scratching works, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “And thank you so much for mentioning scratching.”

  But at least we were mobile, which was fortunate, given that the magma scorpions had already rounded the collection pool and were nearing flat ground behind us. I ran with not only every ounce of my own energy, but with all the mana I had left. There was no point saving it for later until I found some indication that I would have anything resembling a “later.”

  The curious residents of the neighborhood gave back as I ran toward them. It seemed no one was interested in stopping, or even getting significantly in the way of, a large naked running man covered in fermented shit.

  “Aren’t you gonna warn people?”

  “Of what?”

  “Uh, giant, killer rock-bug monsters that set everything on fire?”

  “I believe,” I said, “the situation is self-explanatory.”

  This was amply demonstrated as people around us began to not press away from us so much as run after us, presumably on the assumption that having survived one of the beasts, I might actually know where I was going. This was a development of which I thoroughly approved, as a large mob of people at my back might slow the magma scorpions enough to let me reach a sculler skiff before they could overtake me—which was why I was astonished and no little amount dismayed to find myself stopping and turning back to the swelling crowd that followed.