Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  Why is it that nothing ever turns out to be easy?

  I gathered as many of the medium-to-large crystals as I could fit into both hands and began to stick them into the only place where, first, I wouldn’t lose them, and second, I wouldn’t run the risk of having my colon explode; that is, I stuck them into the long tangles of my hair. Time pressure made my hands tremble, ever so slightly. I carefully kept the crystals away from my scalp, especially those with sharp edges, as having my head blast open would be only slightly less traumatic than full rectal detonation, and that only because I would be too dead to suffer.

  And that was the easy part.

  I found one crystal that had shrunk to two and a half inches long and about a tenth of an inch in diameter. I held it in the palm of my right hand, along with my tiny bead of etherium.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Shh. We’re not going to get a second try at this.”

  I stared at the etherium bead. It rolled across my palm to the crystal of sangrite, then flowed over and around it, encasing the sangrite in metal. I then refined one end of the etherium to shape it into the sharpest, stiffest point that raw etherium could hold. That accomplished, I used the fingertips of my left hand to locate an intercostal space to the right of my sternum just above my heart, then brought my sangrite-filled needle there and put its point to my skin, the needle angling to aim behind my sternum.

  “Um, Tezz? You mind telling me what you’re doing?”

  “In a moment.”

  “Seriously. What are you doing?”

  “This.” With a sharp movement of my right thumb, I stabbed myself in the chest, driving the whole needle in as far as I could push.

  “Ow! Damn it!”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I gasped. The pain crushed my breath away—like being stabbed with a rusty gate latch. Must have inadvertently nicked a rib. “But … so far so good …”

  “You say that like it’s going to get worse.”

  “We met only days ago, yet it seems you’ve known me all your life.” I closed my eyes and wasted some few seconds settling my mind and summoning my concentration; a mistake in this part of the operation might kill us both.

  Even if I did it right, it might kill us both.

  I hate improvising.

  I found the needle with my mind, and I induced tiny projections of etherium to stick out from its front end, then slowly creep along it to the rear, while at the same time causing smooth etherium to flow forward from the rear to become new projections—like a conveyor belt in reverse, or the linked-chain treads of a heavily armored vehicle. In sum, the effect was not unlike the scales of a snake. The threads gave the needle purchase on my surrounding tissue, so that it could pull itself slowly—agonizingly slowly—toward my aortal arch.

  “Oh, crap,” Doc moaned. “Oh, you bastard. You do this to me on purpose—I apologized for your balls, didn’t I?”

  “This is not …” Speech was difficult through the clench of my jaw. The needle felt bigger than my thumb and as though it was using fishhooks to claw its way through my chest. “… punishment. If even a tiny gap opens in the casing … and blood touches the sangrite …”

  “I get it. Ka-boom. Splat. How in the hells did you talk me into this?”

  “By not … telling you about it …”

  “Y’know, real friends don’t keep secrets.”

  “How would … you know?”

  “Awww …”

  “Here’s a plan …” I gritted. The needle had reached the wall of my aortal arch. “Before we take our swing at Bolas … you tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “What secrets do I have?”

  “You’ll be surprised.” I closed my eyes, and with one spasm of will, I stabbed the needle through the wall of the aorta so that its tip entered the largest flow point in my entire bloodstream.

  Doc said, “Golghhg …”

  I agreed. The needle seemed to be impinging on a nerve cluster. I felt the stab again with every beat of my heart.

  “All right,” I said. Pain, yes. But: no shortness of breath, no faintness, no tachycardia—probably hadn’t torn the aortal wall, or not badly, at any rate. “All right. So far so good.”

  “I hate when you say that.”

  “Now comes the tricky part.”

  “Now?” Doc sounded appalled. “What was that last part, then?”

  “That was the ‘difficult but probably won’t kill us’ part.”

  “Oog. That means this part—”

  “Is really damned tricky. Yes.”

  I took a deep breath. “This is how it’s going to work. This sangrite seems to be the next best thing to solid mana. And concentrated. Activated by contact with blood. Instead of jamming a crystal straight through my skin and setting another part of me on fire, I believe that a very, very fine powder fed directly into my bloodstream might distribute the reaction throughout my body in a controlled fashion—so I can use its power without blowing myself apart.”

  “Come again? You want to mainline powdered dragon blood?”

  “More than mainline. I am equipping the etherium needle with very, very tiny grinding gears, that very, very slowly crush the sangrite as it’s fed into my aorta. If it works the way I’m hoping, the dust particles will spread through my whole body in a few seconds.”

  “This sounds like a really bad idea.”

  “It is.”

  “I am not okay with this.”

  “You don’t get a vote.”

  “Like hells—”

  “It’s already done,” I said. “I did it while I was describing it to you. Stop me now and you’ll burn us to death.”

  “Damn it, Tezz!” he shouted furiously, loud enough to make my ear buzz. “We just talked about this kind of crap!”

  “No. We were going to talk about it,” I said, extending my arms as each and every hair on my body stood on end, crackling with spits of energy discharge. “That conversation will take place in a future that’ll never happen.”

  “What’s that? Is it working, or are we dying?”

  “Both.” The hissing in my ears swelled to a full-on hurricane. Arcs of blinding white lightning writhed and sizzled from my hands to the floor, to the walls, to my head. More power than I’d ever felt. Far more than I knew what to do with—but to do nothing was not an option. If I tried to restrain this power, I’d detonate like that sculler.

  I felt my blood go fizzy. I felt my heart begin to boil. My brain would be next.

  I let the power lift me up from the cavern’s floor. I let it clothe me in searing light. Seeking the Glass Dune, where a transit gate would be standing near two etherium gravity sleds, I sent forth my mind …

  And I could say only, “Ohhh …”

  “What is it?” Doc said, shouting to make himself heard over the hurricane in my head. “What do you see?”

  Hanging in the air, bound to the cavern with chains of lightning, I breathed, “Everything … ” because that is exactly what I saw.

  Everything.

  I saw the mountains of Jund, the jungles of Naya, the golden plains of Bant, the endless oceans of Esper, and the smoking hellscape that was Grixis. I saw leotau-mounted lancers crashing through a formation of scourge devils while the skies above them were filled with shrieking death struggles between angels and kathari. I saw a hundred stormcallers on the Cliffs of Ot, chanting as they diverted the winds of the Eternal Storm to buffet back flight after flight of swooping dragons. I saw whole armies of elves and humans hurling storms of griffins, hydrae, and chimeras against massed formations of infantry whose armor blazed like the sun itself, while leonin shook flashing weaponry and roared their challenge to the champions of their enemies. I saw Sharuum in her chambers, Nicol Bolas brooding in Grixis, my father collapsed in his hovel.…

  And I saw the transit gate beside the gravity sleds in the Glass Dunes, where Silas Renn stretched out a hand, and the artifact he held blasted power at the back of an unsuspecting Baltrice.
/>
  “Hang on, Doc,” I said, my voice sounding very far away, half buried in the howling hurricane inside me. “It looks like we’re going to be a little late.”

  “ ‘Better late than never,’ ” Doc shrieked into the wind, “is just a bloody figure of speech!”

  The power blasting outward through my skin allowed no time for a conventional teleport, but I didn’t need to use one. Power was its own answer: with power such as this, I could reach out like Nicol Bolas himself and simply yank and rip and squeeze reality into the shape of my desire. I seized that part of Esper’s existence in the grip of my mind, then dragged it close so that I could pass from the cavern to the desert with a single step.

  My arrival cracked the sky.

  Through the rip I came, blazing in the air dozens of yards above them. The light from my body whited out the colors of the desert, Baltrice and the sleds, and the hand Renn had raised to shield his eyes.

  I spoke in thunderclaps.

  “I BELIEVE YOU’VE BEEN EXPECTING ME.”

  TEZZERET

  EVEN A BROKEN CLOCKWORKER

  The fight was short, by comparison to the hours of mock dueling Renn and I had inflicted upon each other at the Seeker Academy. This confrontation was over in less than a minute. However, when fighting a clockworker, less than a minute is not as brief as it sounds.

  He stood perhaps a dozen meters behind where Baltrice was still in the process of being blown off her sled. He had abandoned his usual melodramatically flouncing cape-and-tunic outfit in favor of a simple pair of breeches and heavy boots, leaving exposed his torso and arms, which were constructed of baroquely latticed cobalt-etherium alloy, and his etherium heart shone through his chest like a fist-size golden sun. Only his head, his hands, his groin, and his feet were still flesh. On any other day, his overwhelming etherium advantage would have rendered him functionally immune to the most potent attacks at my command.

  This was not, however, any other day.

  Her head thrown back and arms wide, her balance tipped far forward beyond the nose of the sled, Baltrice looked as if she might be posing for an action illustration. A motionless cloud of what I assumed to be droplets of her blood sprayed backward from a ragged hole in the back of her tunic, just between her shoulder blades. She hung in the air, frozen, in the middle of pitching onto her face.

  My best guess was that Renn had stream-shifted behind her and hit her with some kind of hypersonic ballistic projectile. Or a group of such. Hypersonic because she must have been hit before she heard it coming, ballistic because her automatic defenses would have layered her in impenetrable shields in the instant any magic had been directed against her.

  He’d shot her in the back.

  “Tezzeret?” Renn said, loud but casual, squinting against the blinding glare that crackled from my skin. “Is that you, old friend?”

  “Friend?” Doc sputtered in my ear.

  “I’ve got him. Check out Baltrice as best you can,” I muttered. “I need to know what exactly has her frozen there.”

  “This is not how I imagined us to meet again,” Renn called. “I was sure you’d have clothes on.”

  “WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT,” I thundered down at him.

  “Oh, I think we do.”

  “WE CAN COOPERATE. FIND CRUCIUS TOGETHER.”

  “Cooperate? Absolutely.” Renn raised his right hand and summoned a grayish, unwieldy artifact. If he was still as unimaginative as he used to be, this would be the same artifact he had used on Baltrice. “Cooperate by holding still.”

  He pointed the device at me, and in that instant I understood. He was not simply a psychopath, a bloodthirsty maniac attacking for sport. He was attacking because he thought he had no choice. He was fighting the man I used to be. In self-defense.

  When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.

  He narrowed his eyes, and from the end of the device came a flash like fire.

  His personal shields had to be down to permit physical projectiles’ passage, and so I thrust my hands forward, twisting them sideways to again open rips in reality between us, two of them, as this was an opportunity to experimentally verify a hypothesis I’d formulated some years ago. I’d proposed that there is no interdimensional conservation of vector. In plain language, when allowing a moving body to pass through a reality warp, its vector on re entry will be, effectively, any direction I feel like.

  One of my rips in reality gaped in the path of the hypersonic projectiles and swallowed them whole, while the other rip opened in front of Renn, but below his line of sight. Specifically, it opened less than two feet in front of his knees at a shallow angle. Even as the artifact’s sharp report reached my ears, the projectiles the device had fired blasted up through the second rip and hit Silas Renn square in the crotch.

  As Nicol Bolas would say: Now, that’s comedy!

  The impact lifted him up on his toes and tore a sizable hole in his breeches in exactly the most embarrassing possible place—which was not, however, actually embarrassing for Renn, because all that was displayed through the hole was a mess of raggedly bloody meat. This was not a serious wound for him; lacking anything resembling a working circulatory system, he was in no danger of bleeding out, and those etherium legs would go right on keeping him upright and mobile even if his pelvic bone was shattered.

  Still: it must have stung.

  His face went white, and an instant later it was red enough that even the glare of energy I cast upon the dunes could not bleach it away. And he wasn’t blushing. He made a fist with his free hand, and sheets of gauzy blue layered themselves around him as he cast the artifact aside.

  “That might have hurt,” Renn said scornfully, “if I were nothing but a meatbag like you—but the power to regenerate my flesh is built into my enhancements, scrapper boy. I barely even felt it. Now watch how a real mage fights.”

  Taunts. Just like the old days. Did he think we were in the Academy’s arena, showing off for the Masters? After all these years, he thought he could still get into my head with smack talk. Pathetic.

  Being pathetic, however, was no guarantee he wouldn’t kill me.

  He finished the gesture of casting the artifact aside by pointing toward it and shouting some sort of trigger word, while with a swift twist of his opposite hand—another school yard trick—he now unleashed a swelling torrent of blue fire that roiled up at me. I had no idea what it might be.

  I assumed it was some sort of temporal manipulation. I employed my best hypothetical defense against clockworking, which was to force another rip in the fabric of reality, and place this rip where it would intercept his spell and suck away his blue torrent as swiftly as he could pour it forth.

  It worked well enough—except he didn’t show any sign of canceling the spell, and I didn’t know how much energy that opening could channel before closing—or if adding energy might instead swell the rip until it swallowed us all. Or the whole desert, or Esper, even all of Alara. Possibly even the Multiverse itself.

  This is why I hate improvising.

  I was using a power I didn’t understand to fight other powers I also didn’t understand—which is decidedly not my game. On the other hand, I reflected, at least I wasn’t losing.

  Yet.

  “Doc. What do you have on Baltrice?”

  “Uh, you do remember that I can’t see her unless you can, right?”

  “Sorry.” I swooped around to another spot, where the frozen form of Baltrice was in my field of vision, a dozen meters beyond Renn. “A little busy here.”

  “I still hate that guy.”

  “I still agree.”

  Renn shot from his other hand rectangular sheets of azure fire, one after another, like playing cards or baffle curtains. They expanded as they came at me, and went from transparent to translucent, heading for opaque. My best guess: some kind of at-range shield, possibly an exotic flavor of telekinesis.

  I used my left hand to intercept the rectangles with a twisting chain of lightning.
The lightning seemed to stop their approach, chewing through their middles, again one after another, on its way toward Renn—though each rectangle held longer than the one before it had, which wasn’t promising. I had no way to know how long my sangrite-supercharged power would last, and Renn wasn’t even breathing hard. “Doc. Baltrice?”

  “Got it,” he said. “Nothing fancy—time’s running about a tenth of a percent of normal for a couple of yards on all sides of her. Each second for her is about seventeen minutes for us. Cold storage.”

  “This could be a problem,” I said through clenched teeth, opening every mana channel I had to pour power into my continuous writhe of lightning.

  Renn canceled his blue torrent—whatever in the hells it had been—and gestured with his right hand, drawing blue sigils that danced in the air like fey-charmed runes. My lightning hung transfixed on one of those blue rectangles—which didn’t look inclined to fail—and there were still at least two more of them between Renn and grievous bodily harm. “What are those damned shields, then?”

  “Same kind of thing,” Doc told me grimly. “Hypotemporal boundaries. Each one marks a downshift of about half. Between those last two … let’s see, a quarter, an eighth … yeah. One two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth of normal.”

  Damn. “How long can he keep them up?”

  “How should I know? You’re the one who said he could have spent subjective weeks or even months getting ready; best to assume he can do whatever he’s doing as long as he feels like doing it.”

  “Yes.” I tried to loop my lightning and hook it around the outside of the rectangles, but they moved instantly to intercept, seemingly without requiring any attention from Renn. Worse news. “What about those glowing runes in the air?”

  “Shrug. More clockworking?”

  The runes were still dancing, but as Renn added to them, they began to organize themselves into a curving band … bent into a broad half-circle arch. “A gate?”

  “Hey, that’s it! A temporal gate!” Doc chirped. “He’s going for another time line—we got him on the run!”