Test of Metal

by Matthew Stover

  She flushed and looked away. “Tezzeret … come on. What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing. I just want you to know. And I want you to believe that I mean you no harm.”

  “That sounds like trouble.”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  She heaved herself to her feet and turned to face me. “I guess this is so long, then. Shame I can’t take the sled. Handy little gadget.”

  “I need the etherium.”

  “Yeah, I know. Look, Tezzeret, I’m not so good with the whole farewell thing. It’ll just take me a minute or two to shift off-plane—”

  “I have two more gifts for you.” I pulled the navigator out of the same pocket. “It has a concealed catch—just here, do you see? Press it like this and the device opens.”

  “It’s a locket.”

  “It’s a navigator. Very much like your ring, actually. Single use, I’m afraid, but I think you’ll appreciate having it. If there is someone you need to find, for any reason, all you have to do is take something of them and secure it inside. Any sort of tissue sample will do—a drop of blood, a hair, even a fingernail paring. The navigator will show you where that person is and help you chart a path to him. Or her. It’s very effective, as long as your target is not using some rather advanced types of magical concealment. It works best on someone who doesn’t know you’re after them.”

  “Target?” she said warily. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s about my third gift, part of which will be a transit gate to what I believe is an apartment in Bant. I think you might be interested in going there because, as recently as this morning, our necromancer was there.”

  “Necromancer? One?” She looked suspicious and appalled at the same time. She threw her arms wide, to encompass the soot and smoke and ash throughout the Netherglass. “This was all from one guy?”

  “Not a guy,” I said. “If you had the chance to scour the entire Multiverse for one particular necromancer’s ass to slow roast in the deepest furnace in Grixis, who would that necromancer be?”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you kidding?” Her teeth came out, and in her eyes was only flame. “Are you festering kidding me?”

  “Not about this,” I said. “I’m no fan of hers myself.”

  “Your gift is a shot at her?”

  “Yes. Do you like it?”

  “Oh, man, if I had any way to tell you …” She shrugged herself into full blaze. I had to raise a hand to shield my face from her heat. “Get to work on that gate, bud. I need to pick up my ride.”

  She stuck two fingers in her mouth and unleashed an ear-stabbing shriek of a whistle that would have done credit to a Vectis dragon-raid siren. Up over the white monolith of a Labyrinth hall soared the wickedly gleaming sinuous body of an etherium drake. A few powerful wing beats sent it toward us in a steep dive.

  The choking noise I made was the sound of my trying not to swallow my tongue.

  Baltrice grinned at me. “They’re not all bad. Some of ’em are just, y’know, misunderstood.”

  Realizing my mouth was hanging open, I shut it with a clack that sent a white jolt of pain through my loosened teeth.

  The e-drake landed a few meters away. Baltrice ambled over to it, spreading her arms, and I found myself in the preposterous position of witnessing something I could never even hint about without being named a liar or a madman. The etherium drake settled down onto the sand, folded its wings, and laid its head on Baltrice’s shoulder.

  “Good boy.” She patted the back of its skull, and I heard a low, metallic grinding sound that might actually have been the creature purring.

  “I call him Mr. Shinypants,” she said, happy and fierce at once. “That gate, huh?”

  Night falls suddenly in most deserts, but the Netherglass now had twilight of a sort: the light of the setting sun reflecting downward by the dark cloud of zombie smoke, casting a dully bloody glow upon the Crystal Labyrinth.

  And upon me.

  The color was essentially identical to the sangrite glow in the cavern; a simple fact, noted without consideration of coincidence or teleology. If it turned out to be relevant, I’d think about it then. I had no interest in noon or midnight, day, night, or anything in between. I did not feel the weather, and my vision had nothing to do with light.

  I sat on the sand of powdered glass in the center of the Labyrinth, my legs folded beneath me, and on my knees the head of Silas Renn.

  I cannot say how long I sat there. Days, at least. Months? Years? There is no way to know. At some point, my injuries healed. I didn’t notice. The power I drew from the vast wealth of etherium at my command relieved me of any need to eat, drink, or eliminate, and it did so without requiring the intervention of my attention or any fraction of my consciousness at all. I needed all my consciousness for something else.

  I was watching myself solve the Labyrinth.

  By tapping into Renn’s temporal perception, I could trace the probability-ghosts of myself entering the Labyrinth, and once inside, my own knack for rhabdomancy enabled me to track them by the etherium they—I—carried. Will carry. Potentially. Every twist, every turn, every ascent, descent, or jump.

  While I did so, I used a knack from my days at the Mechanists’ Guild to make my hands automatically pull from the etherium around me a series of thin wires, bending, twisting, and occasionally breaking each as I worked them into precise three-dimensional representations—models—of every path I saw myselves take. My long, long experience with precision ensured that these models would depict each path exactly. I had no need to model the Labyrinth itself; the paths were all that mattered.

  I had built around myself a pair of rings, constructed so that the lower served as a base in the sand, while the upper could rotate freely along it. At twelve precise intervals around the movable ring, I had affixed a tall cross of etherium wire. The crux of each one marked the entryway of one of the great halls of the Labyrinth. The cross piece marked ground level. Each pin became the anchor for a worked-wire chart of all possible pathways branching from that entrance. By rotating the ring, I could bring any given hall before me without having to shift my own position.

  For a maze, that would have sufficed; a three-dimensional solution for a three-dimensional problem. This, however, was a four-dimensional problem.

  At least.

  Because, after all, it only looked like a maze. It was a Labyrinth. It became a maze—a deadly one—for any who entered unprepared. I would not be one of these.

  Preparation is my specialty.

  As I worked, I discovered paths that could join two or more others that had seemed to lead to dead ends. Using a slightly thinner, shinier wire to connect magical transit points—where a path might leap from the top of one hall to the bottom of another—I began to join every hall to every other in multiply iterated pathways, nearly identical … but each and every one unique.…

  The space around me was almost half full of the etherium web work when I discovered the pattern.

  I could see it: a mathematical purity that words cannot describe, an elegance that transcended language.… I could predict, now, the shape and length of the next wire, and what points it would join. More than predict. See.

  Know.

  Soon I could see two wires ahead, then five, then a dozen.…

  Then all of it.

  I saw what my model would become. This wasn’t Renn’s power. It had nothing to do with time; this was form and function, stripped to the deep structure of matter itself. I saw the future not with prescience, but with experience. I knew where each strand must be placed and what each wire must connect, for the model to make sense.

  “To make sense” is actually an expression for how I experience natural law.

  That is: truth.

  This experience—this knowing—flowed out from me, directing my hands to assemble the half-dreamed vision in my heart. The impossibly perfect structure of the etherium matrix enfolded me, enwrapped me, joined around and above me like
the vault of a cathedral.

  I had trained my entire life simply to see this. To do this. To make this.

  To be this.

  My hands stopped. My eyes froze open. I could not dream of moving. Could not dream of breathing. Could not imagine being anywhere but here.

  Ever.

  I saw without sight, heard without sound, smelled without scent, felt without touch. Kneeling within this heartbreakingly perfect sanctum that was the only possible answer to the question of my existence, I thought: What do you say without saying? And discovered the answer was obvious.

  The joining of mechanics and time … is a clock.

  Crucius …

  The interpenetrating structure I had built around myself—the etherium model of the relational matrix of the twelve Halls around me—was perfect. Was inevitable. Was impossible.

  Was context.

  What makes a clock work is the engineering of its mechanics. What makes it beautiful is the elegance of its construction. What makes it perfect is the precision of its heart.

  There is no heart more precise than mine. I had no need to find the center of the Crystal Labyrinth. I was the center.

  I had become the hands of the clock.

  What I said without saying was I am here.

  And I was.

  Forever.

  TEZZERET

  MIDPOINT, FULL STOP

  My first clue that forever might not be actually permanent came in the mournful contrabasso chords of a very, very old sphinx. “Greetings, Tezzeret. Welcome back, my old friend.”

  I found myself naked (predictably; I had come to take the loss of my clothing as a routine feature of my postdeath journey) and entirely lacking the rest of my equipment, not to mention resources. There was no sign of my etherium model, nor of the Labyrinth, nor of the telemin halo and Renn’s head. I was, in fact, kneeling on a strangely colorless grassy sward among a stand of similarly colorless tropical trees, and was staring up into the melancholy, etheriumcrusted face of Kemuel the Ancient. The Hidden One.

  Though I had never seen even a depiction of him, I knew he was Kemuel. Knew it. As if I’d known him since the day I was born.

  Since the day he was born.

  I’d made it.

  I really had.

  The sensation was remarkably similar to how I’d felt after beating Renn.

  Eventually, I registered what Kemuel had said. I got up, trying to swallow a bolus of apprehension that had suddenly decided to claw its way up my throat. “What in the hells do you mean, welcome back?”

  Creases appeared on his immense face like erosion scars on a granite cliff. “The Seeker’s Path has brought you here several times, my friend. The question is: What will take you the rest of the way?”

  “The rest of what way?” An incalculable weight of exhaustion gathered upon my shoulders, threatening to crush me altogether. I still wasn’t done? “Several times?” I said weakly. “Please tell me you’re not saying what I’m afraid you’re saying.”

  The creases continued to deepen around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes, and I realized he was slowly—incrementally, glacially—working himself toward a smile. The old sphinx wore so much etherium, he was practically made of metal. “I can answer any question that won’t help you, Tezzeret. ‘The rest of the way’ means beyond where we are. The several times … well, you reach the Riddle Gate two or three times out of each ten thousand lives. On average.”

  I rubbed my face. Ten thousand lives? Reincarnation? The thought of having to live out my current life was nearly more than I could bear. Ten thousand? And then I registered he’d told me that was an average.…

  Two or three times out of each ten thousand lives.

  I was so tired that I wanted to die. But something in my brain heedlessly refuses to stop working, no matter the circumstance, and at that moment it offered a tiny spark of hope. “Wait,” I said. “Not sequential lives. Parallel lives. Different time lines.”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at him. He was utterly alien but at the same time as familiar as my father’s hovel. “You’re a clockworker.”

  “I have the gift, on my father’s side. I don’t use it.”

  “Why not?”

  Those creases got even deeper, and some looked as if they might start to curve a little, too. “Why would I?”

  I looked at him. He looked at me. After a long time looking at each other, I realized I had no answer. I couldn’t even imagine that there might exist an answer that would make sense to him.

  Sphinxes and riddles. I was heartily sick of both. “What is this place?”

  “You stand in the Riddle Gate, my friend. The end of your journey, or its midpoint; the distinction is yours to make.”

  The midpoint. The Riddle Gate. If I’d believed in any gods, I would have been calling upon them to curse him. And me. And themselves, too, while they were at it. “What’s next? Where do I go now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is as far as you’ve ever come.”

  For some reason, I found this encouraging. “So what happens?”

  “The way back is closed, Tezzeret. If you do not pass the Riddle Gate, here you will live. Here you will die.”

  I looked around. No graves. No bones. No loitering Tezzerets. “What do I usually do?”

  “Your reaction to failure varies. Often you take your own life. Sometimes you attack me with such fury that I must kill you. On occasion, you have spent days or weeks—sometimes months—in conversation with me … and then you take your own life, or spend it in futile violence. This is how we have become friends.”

  “Would you be offended if I say I don’t want to know you that well?”

  “Reality is not what we want, Tezzeret. It’s what is.”

  I winced. When that truism had come up before, it had usually been me saying it to someone else; to be on the receiving end was unexpectedly bitter.

  “It is not my task to lecture you, Tezzeret. I am not here to puzzle you, nor to impede your Search. I am on your side—even if only to avoid the unpleasantness of disposing of your body.”

  “What about my possessions? If you want to help me succeed—”

  “I will not help you succeed. I cannot help you succeed. I hope that success will find you, and that you will find it. To aid you is beyond my power.”

  “Can you give me my etherium back?”

  “It is not your etherium.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” I said. “The Grand Hegemon’s etherium, loaned to me.”

  “It is not hers to loan. All etherium is my father’s. By his grace, some are allowed to borrow its use.”

  “Your father’s …” I repeated numbly. That answered one question—but if Crucius was even older than the Hidden One, finding him alive seemed unlikely. “All right. It’s his. But being allowed to, ah, borrow it for a while longer would be—”

  “Etherium cannot enter the Riddle Gate.”

  “Really? Again, without meaning to give offense,” I said, gesturing at his baroquely layered encrustations, “one must wonder—”

  “I did not enter. My father built it around me, when he constructed the Labyrinth.”

  “Built it around you,” I repeated, more numb than before. “And you’ve been here, all these centuries? Millennia?”

  “It is the task he has given me.”

  That crusted mass of etherium must be all that was keeping him alive. On the other hand, if he were to unexpectedly expire …

  As if he could read my mind, he piped, “Etherium cannot leave, either. It is as my father has made it: the stricture of the Riddle Gate.”

  “So you’re trapped too.”

  “No: I linger until the Seeker passes the Gate. It is my task.”

  Two or three out of every ten thousand lives. On average. “I hope you’ll forgive me for saying it sounds like a boring job.”

  “Boredom is an affliction from which sphinxes do not suffer.”<
br />
  “Of course.” I would have thought of this before I opened my stupid mouth, if I hadn’t been too tired to worry about playing smart. “Still, you must spend a lot of time alone.”

  “I pass my days in learning. I am a sphinx; a creature of questions. The Riddle Gate is a device of answers.” The ancient sphinx lifted a paw, and we were no longer on the grassy sward but instead upon the Cliffs of Ot, looking down upon a sea crowded with refugee ships fleeing Vectis. “Or Cloudheath? Would you enjoy watching Tiln construct the Rampart of Thunder? Perhaps Bant, if you have a particular favorite among their perpetual wars. Or Jund’s Dragonstorm Aeon: dramatic and spectacular together. All of time and space are before us here. The Riddle Gate can show us every answer except the one you’ll need to pass through it.”

  I had no interest in sightseeing, nor in history. All of time and space, though … “Can you show me where I can Crucius?” find Kemuel the Ancient fixed me with a remarkably sharp gimlet stare. “You can find my father anywhere you can find yourself.”

  “How about this: show me where I will find Crucius,” I said. “Where, as you say, I can find myself.”

  The smile stretched until his cracked leather face became an alarmingly hideous leer. “Of course, my friend. But know that every Seeker sees this—yet the vision will become truth for only one. Which is not likely to be you. Any of you.”

  I frowned. “There are other Seekers? Beyond multiples of me?”

  “There is only one Seeker. But the Seeker is not always you. Nor is their Search identical to yours.”

  I rubbed my eyes. Discovering that I mostly understood what he was talking about was profoundly disturbing. The implications were worse. “We’re not looking for the same thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Kemuel said impassively. “What are you looking for?”

  I stared at him. I didn’t answer.

  Because I didn’t know. Not really.

  I hadn’t even thought about it. There was the job Bolas had inflicted on me, and I had Doc to crack the dragon’s whip … didn’t I? He hadn’t said a word.