Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  Wasn’t he breaking down a great deal faster than he should?

  Had to have something to do with the etherium. Or with this particular plane, as etherium had never had any noticeable effect on him anywhere else. Or with Crucius or the Metal Sphinx or whoever was supposed to be either one of them, whenever they might be each other, or not. Or something.

  More damned riddles.

  He shook his head again, but somehow instead of clearing, the shaking only thickened the fog inside his various minds. How had Tezzeret deciphered the glyphs? How could he know Classical Draconic at all, much less the dialect of Bolas’s native mountains? Bolas decided that maybe it was worth both spending the mana and enduring the aggravation in exchange for some answers … if he could just recollect where he’d stashed the deanimated mechanist.…

  Oh, yes. Of course. Over in that temporal strand with Jace and Baltrice and his last-remaining Liliana—the time line where Tezzeret had never made it to the Metal Island.

  He stopped, scowling. “Wait … wait, there’s something wrong.…”

  Tezzeret had made it to the Metal Island in that time line. That’s what was wrong. Bolas had just put him there. But that didn’t make any difference. It couldn’t. Could it?

  Somehow, he couldn’t escape the feeling that it had been a bad idea.

  Either way, the whole business worried him. It was as though when he’d done it, he hadn’t even been paying attention.…

  Nicol Bolas discovered that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t certain about anything. And he didn’t like it. Not one little bit.

  “Fine,” he muttered. “This, at least, is something I can fix.”

  He cast his perception once more sideways in time; all he had to do was find a temporal strand where he had decided not to stick Tezzeret over there, but to keep him close, here on the beach. Simple.

  In concept, anyway.

  In execution, however, it was not only unexpectedly complicated but thoroughly disquieting. He discovered there was no time line, anywhere, in which he’d made the choice he was looking for. In fact, he could not find one where he’d made any other choice at all. Did that mean he’d never really had a choice? That it was some kind of preposterously predestinated fate or something?

  He was beginning to favor the or something, as he found to his dismay that in fact no temporal strand—not a single one within the considerable range of his perception—showed any sign of Tezzeret at all, save only the strand where the artificer lay on the etherium beach, suspended animation holding him minutes from death. And now Bolas recalled that earlier, when at Tezzeret’s invitation he had scanned their future—when he had found so many of his own corpses on so many versions of the beach—he had seen nothing of Tezzeret at all. Nothing. Alive or dead or anywhere in between.

  How could there be only one of him?

  Bolas had a feeling he’d be able to work it all out easily if he were only somewhere else, far away from the Metal Sphinx, the Metal Island, the world that was ocean itself—far from whatever it was that was pumping pea soup into his brain. He gathered mana as easily as he might take a deep breath, then ripped open the surface of the universe so that he might step through into the Blind Eternities.

  But how could there be only one Tezzeret? And how could Tezzeret read Classical Draconic? And what was up with the whole sun-not-moving business? And if it was etherium messing with his brain, shouldn’t he figure out how and why? Wouldn’t leaving all these mysteries behind him be tantamount to driving stakes through his own hearts?

  The rumblings and mumblings of his various subminds as they mulled over these and other troubling questions were so diverting that when he came back to himself, he found his rip in reality had closed without him ever having taken so much as a step toward it.

  This, he realized, might be a problem.

  With great determination and preternaturally focused intention, he again exerted mana and ripped open a portal to the Blind Eternities.

  And some indeterminate interval later, he again found himself standing on the beach with unanswerable questions chasing one another’s tails through the various and sundry compartments of his mind, the rip having closed while he was woolgathering.

  “All right, I’m done. That is exactly as much as I am going to take,” he muttered to himself. “Time to fix it, or to burn down this whole bloody universe. Or both. Extra bonus points for whoever guesses which.”

  His face contorted into an involuntary snarl as he fixed his intention upon the temporal strand where the four Planeswalkers lay side by side. With a needlessly violent wrench of will, he thrust himself into their time line.

  He stood over Tezzeret’s body, which might as well have been a statue. When he noted that his angle of shadow here was subtly different from that of the time line he’d just left, his snarl deepened to a rictus of rage. He snatched up Tezzeret’s body in one hand and with the other gouged a ton or so of etherium from the plinth. Then he jammed Tezzeret’s body fully into the now-viscous metal, let the metal reharden around him, and then simply hurled it with all the strength he could muster—physical and magical—out over the infinite ocean. He didn’t even bother to mark where it would hit the water, some hundreds of miles from the island, but turned instead to the other three deanimated Planeswalkers.

  He took just a moment to fasten each of them with his power so that he could summon them from anywhere across the Multiverse. Then, one at a time, he picked them up, ripped open reality, and shoved each at random into the Blind Eternities. There was no way to predict where any of them might end up, or if any would ever reappear into ordinary reality. While this might be disastrous for unprotected Planeswalkers, the power of Nicol Bolas would preserve them intact until the end of time, and a considerable while beyond it. All Bolas knew for sure—all he needed to know—was that he could bring them to his hand at will. The magic that held them in suspended animation and bound them to him could be broken only by a mage more powerful than its caster. Bolas felt justified in his confidence that the existence of said “more powerful mage” would remain safely hypothetical.

  That being accomplished, he turned his attention once more to Tezzeret. Being in the same universe—especially this one, which seemed to be otherwise uninhabited—relieved Bolas of any need for physical proximity. Tezzeret’s deanimated form was still sinking, far out in the ocean, plunging ever deeper into mile upon mile of crushing lightless depths, but for Bolas it was a simple matter to spear the mechanist’s frozen brain with a tendril of power, and delve again into Tezzeret’s memories.

  He hesitated for one final moment, as one of his subminds—probably the same one that had been heckling him earlier—quietly observed that going back into the artificer’s memories was exactly what Tezzeret had invited him to do, which really turned his stomach for a moment. The sensation resembled dread.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been actually frightened.

  And he couldn’t imagine why he would be frightened now.

  He bared his fangs, silently but sternly instructing that mouthy submind to shut the hell up before he permanently reassigned it to bowel-management duty, and pushed his mind for the last time—really the last time, he promised himself, really really—into Tezzeret’s past.

  TEZZERET

  SOMETHING STUPID

  This is a stupid plan,” Baltrice said. “And that’s coming from a girl who knows something about stupid plans. I’ve come up with some doozies. But never this stupid. Seriously, Tezzeret, you’re begging him to kill you.”

  “Not quite,” I said, a bit abstractedly because most of my attention was focused on fashioning greaves and sabatons out of my sled’s remaining etherium, while reserving enough for rerebraces, vambraces, and gauntlets. “I’m allowing him to choose whether or not to do so, which is not the same thing.”

  “Might as well be,” she said. “What in the hells are you gonna do when he makes you start to age like a year per second or something?”
r />   “In that eventuality,” I said, “I’ll depend on you to rescue me.”

  “Yeah. And hope that I can get to you—or him—before he kills you.”

  I returned my full attention to my work; the obvious needed no validation.

  “I’m just worried, that’s all,” she said. “Waiting gets to me. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “You’re waiting,” I said. “I’m working.”

  The sabatons seemed to be coming together nicely. Creating my armor from the untempered etherium of my gravity sled obviated the need for tools or workshop. The metal was more than malleable enough to shape with my will alone. It meant as well that the armor would not prove to be much of a defense against spear, sword, arrow, or javelin—but those were not the sorts of threat that concerned me.

  I manipulated the several joints of the sabaton’s instep, to ensure that its flexibility sufficed to allow me to walk normally without being so loose that it might expose my tender flesh to Silas Renn’s untender attentions. Finding it suitable, I created its mate without difficulty, donned them both, and moved on to my greaves.

  “You’re betting a hell of a lot that he’s a reasonable man,” Baltrice said.

  “I am gratified by your concern.”

  “I’m not worried for you,” she said. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “It’s—well, you’re tossing my boss’s life in the pot, too. That’s who I’m worried about.”

  “Of course you are.” The greaves were actually quite simple, and fitting them to my calves was the work of a moment. I moved on to the gauntlets.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I glanced up at her. “The nature of your working relationship is not a mystery to me.”

  She squinted at me suspiciously. I went back to work on my gauntlets.

  “I still don’t see how doing something stupid isn’t actually stupid.”

  “I won’t pretend it’s not stupid,” I said, “but I believe that of all the varieties of stupid at our disposal, this is the safest.”

  “The safest way to go in would be to find the bastard in one of your scrying bowls, then open this gate of yours right behind his neck and boil his brain till his skull explodes.”

  “I have explained the issues with direct assault,” I said, again a bit distantly, as the gauntlets proved a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. To make them glovelike, with individually jointed fingers, might consume enough etherium that I’d need to cannibalize some of Baltrice’s sled to complete my bascinet. “Renn may have been here for weeks, subjectively—even months. He knows your abilities, and mine, and he has had more than sufficient time to prepare a defense against any attack we can devise. Which is why we’re not going to attack.”

  “Yeah, I follow the logic. It’s just not exactly my style, you know?”

  “Yes.” I looked up from the gauntlet, a frown curdling upon my brow. “Nor mine, in fact. The old me—the angry man with the etherium arm—would no doubt use this etherium to devise several Tezzeret doppelgangers of some sort, thinking to use them to confuse Renn’s foresight, as cover for a lightning sally of overwhelming destructive force.”

  “Hey, I like that one!” Doc chirped.

  Baltrice said, “Sounds un-stupid to me.”

  “Doc agrees with you,” I said, “which is reason enough to abandon it.”

  “Aww, Tezz, that hurts.”

  “I wonder if you even know what it is to hurt,” I muttered in reply. “Do you understand suffering at all?”

  “Have to listen to you, don’t I?”

  That was, I reflected, a fair point. “Baltrice, there is no form of attack that Renn can’t anticipate. Given enough subjective time, he can scan very nearly all his possible futures. The attack I just described is no doubt among them. And this is why I have no intention of attacking him—why I can’t intend to attack him, or so much as plan a contingency assault. Any tactic I can devise, no matter how subtle or arcane, will be obvious to him in the very instant he first sees me.”

  She shook her head skeptically, watching me sidelong. “You are different,” she said.

  I shrugged and went back to work on the gauntlet. “So are you.”

  “Do you ever wonder who you really are?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” The solution for the gauntlet was clear—a succession of five overlapping bands to cover the backs of my hands and fingers, so that making a fist would protect my entire hand, though my palms would remain bare.

  That being accomplished, I focused my will to once again draw from the plates threads of etherium finer than hairs. The hand being relatively more sensitive than the chest and back or the legs, worming those threads in through my skin for the direct connection to my motor neurons was exceptionally uncomfortable, rather like dipping my hand in boiling water. But the direct connection would allow me to use the armor much in the same way as I had used my erstwhile right arm: as an extension of myself.

  “You know Bolas did something to you, right?” Baltrice was still giving me that sidelong squint. “That he made you different from who you used to be?”

  “It seems the simplest explanation. Otherwise, the difference in my behavior would have to be ascribed to some conjectural experience in a hypothetical afterlife—an afterlife I can neither recall nor seriously imagine.”

  The only problem with the vambraces and rerebraces was how to properly joint the elbow. It would have been easier if plate armor had ever been the fashion on Esper, as opposed to our defensive magics. All I had to work from were some none-too-detailed memories of Bantian crusaders and my own ingenuity.

  “Doesn’t it bother you? I mean, it’s like he turned you into one of those golems you used to make all the time, except you’re self-aware. You’re so calm all the time, it’s festering creepy. Don’t you ever feel like you should, you know, act like the real you? Do things how you know the real Tezzeret would?”

  I set the vambrace on her gravity sled, and for a long moment I stared at the sand beneath my feet. I had no idea how to express an honest answer to her question.

  At length, I could say only, “Baltrice, I am the real Tezzeret.”

  “Yeah?” She squinted at me. “How do you know?’

  I spread my hands. “How do you know you’re the real Baltrice?”

  “Well, I—I mean, you know, what do you want me to say? I just am.”

  “Yes. I, too, just am.”

  “Except you’re not,” she said. “Look, I spent a lot of time with you back before—you know. And I’ve spent time with you here. You are not the same guy.”

  “Did you like my previous self better?”

  “Oh, Hells no,” she said. “You were a dead plumb rat bastard.”

  “Then what are you complaining about?”

  “I’m not complaining. I’m wondering. I’m wondering what goes on inside your head. Because, you know, there were a lot of things the old Tezzeret could be called, but hard to read sure as hell isn’t one of them.”

  “Perhaps you find me hard to read because you’re looking for depth where there is none to be found. I am what you see. Neither more nor less.”

  “Depth, nothing. You’re completely festering screwed in the head, and you act like you’re glad about it.”

  “Baltrice, let me turn this around,” I said slowly, and with great care, as this was a subject to broach with her gently. “I, too, remember you as being different from who you are now. The Baltrice I knew was … Well, let’s just say you seemed unhappy. Viciously unhappy. And you seemed to be interested primarily in inflicting unhappiness upon as many other beings as possible, often in the form of burn scars.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t very nice.” She shrugged. “Still not.”

  “But you are,” I said. “You smile now. You laugh. You occasionally make a joke that doesn’t involve harming or humiliating someone. You think about things other than how to hurt people.”

  “Yeah, well, I foun
d a better job.” She waved a hand. “Again no offense.”

  “Again none taken.” I smiled at her, as openly and innocently as all my craft could conspire to display. “But suppose, for just a moment, that your happiness had a foundation more concrete than simply enjoying your work. Suppose someone had made you happy—say, for the sake of argument, with a secret wish like what you’d find in children’s adventure stories. If some mysterious benefactor had cast a spell to transform you from the bitter, angry, aggressive woman you once were into the confident, cheerful woman you’ve become, wouldn’t you be grateful?”

  “Are you kidding?” She stared at me incredulously. “If some bastard put magic on me to screw with my life? You think I’d thank him?”

  “I would.”

  “I’d jam both hands in his ass and rip him in half from the bottom up.” She looked as though even considering the possibility had brought anger to a rolling boil. “People who screw with me get third-degree thank-yous.”

  I maintained my smile, to show her I’d not intended to make her angry. “I suppose you haven’t changed so much after all.”

  “Festering right I haven’t.” She was still tilting her head, though, and giving me those sidelong looks. “You’re really saying you’re okay with it? Knowing that Nicol Bolas stuck his talons into your brain and stirred it like soup?”

  “That was Jace,” I reminded her.

  She flushed. “He had reason.”

  “Granted,” I said easily. Jace Beleren was a subject about which I could not expect her to be rational. “But Bolas was the one who, to extend your metaphor, un-stirred my brain. With his own real-life version of that spell from the adventure stories. Hypothetically. I’m confident it’s within the range of his powers to alter my brain to make me less volatile, less avaricious, more focused, possibly even more intelligent. More capable in every way. If this is so, I owe him more thanks than I do hatred.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Yes, I have lost my precious arm—but Beleren did that, not Bolas. What Bolas has done is restore me to life and health, and to set me forth upon exactly the fantastical quest I had painfully outgrown, and was forced to abandon decades ago—and because of who I’ve become, I may actually have a chance to achieve what has always been my heart’s most cherished desire. How can I not be grateful? Should I hate Bolas for making me a better man?”