Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  He tucked away the pyromancer and the mind ripper’s empty body into an alternate time line, one in which Tezzeret had never reached the Metal Island. With the aid of a minor binding to preserve them in suspended animation, he could be confident that they would be there whenever he wanted them.

  “I really should have learned this stuff a long time ago,” he said to himself. He decided not to think about Tezzeret’s suggestion that he’d learned clockworking centuries or even millennia before, and had simply forgotten. He remembered well enough being a functionally omnipotent master of time and space, back before the Final Mending, but those powers were far beyond him now. Clockworking was a different approach to almost the same thing, and was gratifyingly easy, for a being of his intellect and power.

  If he ever figured out how, he might just slide over to a temporal main line where the Final Mending never happened. If he could find one, anyway. When first he’d searched for a main line where his power was undiminished, he’d discovered there weren’t any—which might indicate that the rabble of meddling Planeswalkers who’d forced the Final Mending down Dominia’s throat had been right all along. Bolas was gracious enough to grant them the possibility. It was easy to be generous, considering their Final Mending had killed them all.

  A resounding detonation and its attendant spray of putrefying dragon blood and meat jerked him back to the present. He snarled at himself. Woolgathering again—and this time in the middle of a fight. An ugly trend, underlining the urgency of his project. No more daydreaming, he told himself. No more. Focus.

  Tezzeret had said Bolas wasn’t the dragon he used to be, and Nicol Bolas had no intention of allowing the mechanist to discover how right he was. But even the tiniest sliver of a Bolas was worth a billion Tezzerets, and it was just about time to make that clear.

  Just about time—Bolas chuckled to himself. Even after twenty-five thousand years, he was still his own best audience.

  He moved out from the matrix of spars to give himself a little room to work; not that he actually needed room for what he was going to do. Clockworking as Bolas practiced it was primarily a mental activity, where all the interesting bits clustered around the intersection of perception and will, but nonetheless moving a little farther from the Metal Sphinx made everything roll along a bit more smoothly. Something about that vast mass of concentrated etherium fogged him up, somehow. He couldn’t actually lay a talon on what it was, except that the more etherium was around, the more difficulty he seemed to have keeping his mind on the business in front of him.

  He reflected that once his business with Tezzeret was complete, he might want to destroy this entire universe. Removing all this etherium from creation would be doing himself a favor—but it would also more or less defeat the purpose of this whole endeavor. If only the damned stuff weren’t so bloody useful.

  He sighed. Life would be better if he’d killed Crucius a thousand years ago … but on the other claw, he hadn’t yet fully explored the limits of this clockworking power. Perhaps that thousand-year-ago moment wasn’t entirely out of his reach—though some of the temporal stranding involved would be tricky. He might just be jumping himself into a different preexisting main line, or creating a new one, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he would know the difference—or if there even was a difference. And he wasn’t really sure whether or not jumping back to waste Crucius might be a good idea, or if he’d be correcting a mistake he already hadn’t made … and then the specter of the Final Mending hung over his past, too.

  Though he no longer could entirely recall, he had a sense that the catastrophic damage to Dominia had something to do with time and paradoxes and, well … something. He couldn’t quite bring it to mind.

  It was damnably difficult to navigate five dimensions with a four-dimensional mind. He supposed it would improve with practice; after all, he hadn’t met any of his future selves showing up to warn him he was making mistakes. Of course, if his future selves were anything like him, they wouldn’t give a hot squirt about anyone except themselves, including who they used to be, which was him. After all, he wasn’t in any hurry to jump back to deliver warnings to his own previous selves. Self. Whatever.

  His attention was again rudely yanked back to the present by the broken, smoking corpse of a Liliana, which had sailed through the air in a high enough trajectory that she smacked squarely into his face, very nearly going up his nose.

  He snapped his head side to side, snarling. What in any flavor of damnation was happening to him? With fierce concentration, he cast his perceptions sideways through time, searching the improbability-frayed temporal strands nearby. There were only two or three more time lines where he lay dead on the beach. He reached out to summon those corpses to his own strand, where they might be put to good use by any among his multiplicity of Lilianas.… Wait.

  His multiplicity of Lilianas had become surprisingly less multiple.

  Unless one added to the count the dead Lilianas who lay scattered about the etherium beach in various states of catastrophic disrepair.

  He nodded to himself; he should have expected this. Tezzeret had identified the root of his immediate problem and now was concentrating his counterstrikes on the Lilianas, who were considerably less durable than reanimated undead dragons—not to mention that those undead dragons wouldn’t be reanimated for very long without her power to direct them. Bolas searched nearby temporal strands, but he’d already raided them for their incarnations of Liliana. If he went farther afield, he could find only temporal strands in which the treacherous little necromancer had never bound herself to obey him in the first place, which made yanking any more of her into the middle of this brawl definitely inadvisable.

  Tezzeret always had been clever.

  But it was exactly his cleverness—the primary feature of which was his ability to focus profoundly on whatever immediate problem he faced—that here would destroy him. No matter how smart Tezzeret might be, no matter how incalculable the power he could wield in this place, he was still only human, with a human brain inside his human skull. He could truly focus only on one thing at a time.

  Dragons, however …

  Due to their saurian ancestry, most dragons retained great knots of neural ganglia between their wings and at the base of their tails, so large and complex that they were essentially subsidiary brains; the evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to coordinate their subbrains gave many dragons a multitasking capability far beyond any human’s imagination. And Nicol Bolas’s capabilities were beyond the imaginations of dragons.

  His mind was a vast and cluttered place, stuffed with twenty-five thousand years of memories, half-forgotten spells, and disordered remnants of dreams and aspirations. Millennia before, he had begun a process of compartmentalizing his mind, setting up an organized mental structure that allowed him to access information he wanted without having to sift through metaphorical mountains of irrelevancies. In the process, he’d split off functions of cognitive processing, virtual minds whose responsibility was the management of each of their particular sectors of knowledge, experience, and skill.

  While it was true that this strategy wasn’t currently working as well as it once had—a serious degradation of function that he was certain was wholly due to the destructive effect of the bloody Final Mending—it was more than sufficient for his current needs.

  He assigned one submind to keeping track of Baltrice, and of Jace’s body, while investigating the source of the blue mana spell that had killed his mind while leaving his body intact. Another submind was occupied with examining his recent interactions with Tezzeret, especially with regard to Sharuum and the Metal Sphinx who may or may not be Crucius in whole or in part. A third submind managed the fight on the Metal Island—mostly a function of feeding bits of mana to bolster the defenses of whichever of his dead selves was currently being dismantled, and of monitoring his remaining Lilianas. He wanted to finish the fight with at least one left, because she was both valuable and amusing, and while he valued
her as an asset, he didn’t want to go to the trouble that might be required to ensnare another version of her. This left his primary consciousness with nothing to worry about except subduing Tezzeret.

  As he set about doing so, he found himself considerably amused by the occasional boasts that Tezzeret liked to make, about being the Multiverse’s greatest master of etherium. Apparently Tezzeret’s enormous intellect had managed to slide right past the fact that Bolas himself had created the Seekers of Carmot, and that there was nothing known by any of the Seekers that would not be known to the dragon as well. Not to mention that there were a number of features of etherium that Bolas was reasonably certain only he knew (and possibly Crucius, if the elusive sphinx ever turned up again). One of these was that due to etherium’s peculiar nature—existing simultaneously in reality and in the Blind Eternities—there were certain vulnerabilities that someone with the right sort of power might exploit.

  The right sort of power, in this case, was a combination of planeswalking and clockworking.

  Nicol Bolas subdivided his primary consciousness into three parts. One part undertook the mystical focusing of will that was the beginning of planeswalking. The second undertook to summon a specific subset of the dragon’s memories dealing with a certain type of magic. The third phased its attention into the near future, scanning the probability smears for hints of coalescence. When the first part completed its task, a hole in reality began to rip itself open … but instead of stepping into it, Bolas used the second part of his primary consciousness to reach into the Blind Eternities with an intention to doing one or more of a list of magics at his command, while the third kept focused on the future, seeking one that would end with Tezzeret in his hand.

  The submind that had been processing his interactions with Tezzeret warned Bolas sternly not to kill him; there was still too much to be learned.

  “I’m not going to kill him,” Bolas muttered to himself. “But this is going to hurt.”

  He could judge the potential effect of each magic on his second part’s list by scanning the probable futures that shifted and developed as the second part considered this or that spell, power, or combination of such. Neither the first nor third part of his mind was actually aware of what spell he ended up using, but they didn’t have to be; the second part had that issue fully under control, as it was able to use the ætheric dimension of Tezzeret’s armor to channel a combination of telekinesis and minor shaping that transformed, in the current reality, the inside of the mechanist’s etherium breastplate into a blade that shattered his breastbone, slashed open his heart, and severed his spine just between the shoulder blades.

  “How’s that for power?” several of his subminds said in unison, as at least three of them saw—and one felt—the mechanist’s heart spew most of his blood out through the joints in his armor.

  The Tezzeret-tasked submind, though, reacted with enough alarm to give Nicol Bolas actual pain.

  “I already said I’m not going to kill him!” Bolas snarled. “Shut the hell up.”

  As Tezzeret fell dying to the blood-caked sand, Bolas’s fourth submind released the power that held all but one of the Lilianas in this temporal strand. The last Liliana simply blinked in astonishment at her inexplicable victory until that same submind reached into her brain and said, Sleep, whereupon she collapsed into unconsciousness.

  This freed up that submind to rejoin his primary consciousness, and—as the assigned tasks of two of the three divisions of his primary mind were complete—he reassembled an uncharacteristically large fraction of his mental resources to attend to the dying mechanist.

  He stretched forth a talon, and Tezzeret’s limp body rose into the air and floated into his grasp, dripping liquid etherium as though the armor were ice instead of metal. When Tezzeret was once again naked, Bolas—who had a somewhat more detailed understanding of human anatomy than did nearly any human alive—worked a simple charm that placed the mechanist in a state of suspended animation similar to that of Baltrice and Jace. Bolas estimated that if he ever chose to reanimate Tezzeret, he’d be able to repair the physical damage with very little permanent loss of function.

  He looked down with a contemptuous sneer upon the human lying broken and bloody in his grip. “As though I could ever be in any danger from you, you pathetic worm. I am Nicol Bolas! What have I to fear from any mortal mage?”

  His second submind—that troublesome Tezzeret-tasked one again—inquired silently that if Bolas had never been in danger, why were all those nearby temporal strands loaded with his corpses? Which was a wholly disquieting question, and one he had no intention of pondering.

  His primary consciousness reflected that his condition might be more grave than he’d allowed himself to believe. How far must you have deteriorated to have begun to heckle yourself?

  He paused for a moment to assess his situation. His Tezzeret issue seemed to be well in hand—literally—and the lightly snoring form of Liliana could be easily enough shifted into suspended animation, and both of them could without much difficulty be stored next to Jace and Baltrice on the Metal Island in that nearby temporal strand … so this was exactly what he did.

  “I suppose that means I win,” he said. “Whoopee.”

  It was impossible to be much elated by victory over such pathetic opponents; celebrating this triumph would be like doing a victory dance after stepping on an anthill.

  Still: not bad. And accomplished by very little cost or exertion on his part. He supposed he could give himself points for style—for what Tezzeret would call elegance. Poor little Tezzeret … just another of the ants.

  He could not quite make himself believe it, though. It didn’t seem real. Had he really snared not only Tezzeret, but Liliana, and Jace and Baltrice, after all this time?

  Apparently so. He could not find a temporal strand anywhere in which they were not his prisoners. So that, in so many words, was that. Period.

  He glanced up at the expressionless face of the Metal Sphinx. “And I’m pretty sure you’re not going anywhere.”

  The sphinx—after the custom of his kind—did not reply.

  Bolas stepped close to the sphinx’s cleanly abstracted semblance of a forepaw, and he laid his own talons upon it, marveling in the thought that this, right here, might be all there was left of Crucius. All there would ever be.

  “What were you thinking, though? What brought you here? Why is this place what it is?”

  He supposed he would find these questions a great deal more compelling if he actually cared about their answers. He had not only five more Planeswalkers to add to the considerable assortment under his absolute control, but also now this unimaginably vast trove of etherium. He discounted Tezzeret’s assertion that it could not be taken from this plane. The sets of What Tezzeret Can’t Do and of What Bolas Can’t Do did not intersect in any meaningful way. Discovering how he could take the etherium—all the etherium—with him was simply a question of evaluating powers that Tezzeret did not have, lore that Tezzeret did not know, and magics that Tezzeret could not work.

  All this etherium, and all the many Planeswalkers in his hands, and now that he thought about it, he realized that what he had right now might actually, finally, unexpectedly, be enough.

  “Maybe I really have won. Won it all. Hmp. Whoopee again.” He sighed. “My Crowning Moment of Triumph should really have been more dramatic.”

  He passed some considerable interval wandering a bit aimlessly around the island, admiring the etherium trees and the etherium grass and the etherium outcroppings of bedrock that shouldered into the light. And speaking of light … He frowned down at the shadow he cast upon the etherium underbrush. Something about his shadow was troubling him, and for a long moment he couldn’t seem to work out what it was.

  Ah, that was it. His shadow hadn’t moved.

  Well, it did move when he did—it was after all his shadow—but its angle was exactly the same as it had been when he’d first arrived here. Hours ago. Did this planet not r
otate? What in the hells was going on here?

  Where we are is all one place. Here, it’s always now.

  He moved around to the front of the vast etherium plinth, kicking aside heedlessly the ragged remnants of both his own corpses and Liliana’s. He was not sentimental, and pity was alien to his nature. Even self-pity. Something was going or had gone or will go terribly wrong, and his clockworking ability seemed to make it or had made it or will make it worse instead of better.

  He had to know or he had to go. Probably both.

  He spared the infantile doggerel on the plinth’s east face only enough of a glance to register that it was written in a long-vanished dialect of Classical Draconic.… Wait, that was the language his parents had spoken … a language no living creature had heard or spoken in the twenty-four thousand years since his birthplace had been destroyed and all his close relatives slaughtered (to be precise, since his birthplace had been destroyed and all his close relatives slaughtered by him). He then indulged a passing wonderment at how Tezzeret could possibly have even recognized the glyphs for what they were, much less deciphered what they stood for.

  He actually turned to ask before he remembered that he’d sequestered Tezzeret in a different temporal strand, and that awakening him to inquire would not only require a considerable expenditure of mana to heal his wounds, but it would also force Bolas to endure more of the artificer’s unspeakably irritating conversation.

  Bolas shook his head, disgusted with himself again. Really, this advancing senility or whatever it was had gotten entirely out of control. Good thing he had all this etherium, and all his captive Planeswalkers, because he really needed to get his whole personal recovery and reconstruction business fully under way before he forgot what it was he needed to … what?

  He couldn’t remember why he had to remember anything, much less what it might be. How was he supposed to think around here? An unanswerable question, which led him inexorably toward an even less pleasant contemplation.