Agents of Artifice

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The laboratory was neither a room nor a complex of rooms, but a multilevel network of pipes and tubes that, at various points throughout, formed floors and hollows in which people might work. Smoke and arcs of raw mana, in a variety of peculiar colors and pungent scents, wafted between pillars and spheres that emitted strange, multihued auras. The entire chamber smelled strongly of ozone, and when entering one of its many doors, or climbing up from level to level, one had to be careful where one put one's hands, lest one find them violently shocked.

Tezzeret himself, of course, simply willed the various protrusions to lift and carry him wherever he needed to go. Now he stood within one of those hollow "workrooms," Baltrice at his side, as he turned his creation over and over in his hands, inspecting it for impurities.

"There, if you would," he said, indicating a rough seam. She nodded, tensed in brief concentration, and sparks flew as the metal welded itself together.

"Enough. I think that's as done as it's getting."

Baltrice frowned at the pronouncement. "Really?" She reached out and tapped the many thin protrusions, then the glass reservoir filled with a viscous green fluid. "It doesn't look all that sturdy to me, boss."

"I wouldn't take it into battle," he agreed, "but it'll do until I can devise a more portable version. We'll need a brain to test it on first, of course, but barring any unforeseen flaws, I think Beleren's about to find himself moving to slightly smaller quarters."

Baltrice snickered, a sound that transformed abruptly to a shout of pain as the reservoir bulb shattered, spraying glass shards and its caustic contents across her skin. She struggled to clear her eyes with a sleeve as Tezzeret, utterly bewildered, gawped at the ruins of his creation.

And his gaze grew wider still, jaw dropping in slack amazement, as the manablade detached itself from Baltrice's belt. Carried aloft by a rat-sized drake, it soared upward between the preponderance of tubes. He watched the creature rise, watched until it dropped the weapon gently into the hands of a man who could not be there!

"I believe this is mine," Jace called from the level above. Clad in boots and leathers stolen from one of Tezzeret's guards, and his own tattered blue cloak, he loomed over them like a vengeful ghost-and for long seconds, the artificer could only assume that's indeed what he was. He couldn't possibly have escaped that cell alive! He couldn't!

But no, he saw the lingering burns on Beleren's neck, on the arm that had reached to snatch the dagger from the air; saw the mind-reader wince as he moved.

Tezzeret's disbelief burned away beneath the heat of a terrible, volcanic anger. His entire body shook, and he felt as though he couldn't even draw a breath.

And then the little bastard waved at him and produced a damned Infinity Globe from somewhere up his sleeve. It pulsed once, twice, attuning itself to the beating of its wielder's heart. Then Beleren was simply gone, nothing but a few wisps of mana-vapor to show that he'd been present at all.

Tezzeret's cry of rage was bestial, unintelligible. He shoved Baltrice aside, slamming her into the nearest wall as he lunged across the room for his belt of pouches, which he had removed during the course of his work. "Follow when you can!" he snarled at her, yanking another globe from a pouch, almost crushing it in his prosthetic fist.

Baltrice cursed foully as he vanished, struggling to her feet and blinking away the last of the gunk. It would take her longer to reach the arsenal and grab one of the last Globes than it would just to walk under her own power; hopefully, she'd still be able to follow by the time she reached the Eternities.

She had barely begun her concentrations, however, when something black emerged from the wall and passed through her body. Its touch rotted flesh, shriveled away the edges of her soul. Baltrice dropped to one knee, screaming until she thought her throat would bleed.

"Just where do you think you're going?" Liliana asked from above, standing where Jace had disappeared.

Baltrice gaped at her, fire leaking from her eyes and between the fingers of her clenched fist. "You traitor!"

"You have no idea," the necromancer whispered.

Baltrice launched herself upward, carried aloft on wings and jets of flame. Surrounded in an aura of blackest magics, propelled by the touch of a dozen phantoms, Liliana rose to meet her.

Tezzeret appeared in the Blind Eternities, colors and probabilities eddying around his feet, mixing to form liquid dreams. He knelt in the unreal substance, glowing with restrained power, as he searched for his quarry's trail. Beleren couldn't have gotten far, not even allowing for the strange stuttering and skipping of time here in the void; the trail of his Spark should be visible still, if he could only find its end.

And there it was, a wake of aether slowly dissolving into the surrounding essence, a flickering ribbon of liquid fire.

Tezzeret blinked. It didn't lead off into the vastness of the Eternities, as he'd expected, but rather curved, almost as if…

His scream unheard in the pounding of the Eternal winds, Jace Beleren slammed into Tezzeret from behind, his entire body alight with magics. Instantly they left behind them the sheet of light that marked the edge of the world, propelled by Jace's will alone through vast impossibilities where even direction and gravity were matters of mere desire. They hammered at one another, with bursts of unfocused power that might, within the bounds of conventional reality, have taken the form of spells but here were little more than primordial energies burning flesh and mind and soul. They hammered at one another with sheer malevolent intent, their very notions warping the streams of chance around them into stabbing blades and poisonous thorns. And they hammered at one another with fists and knees and elbows, a pair of brawlers rolling among the planes.

Where blood and eldritch essence spilled from their wounds, impossible forms of life arose, creatures that did not and could not exist in any sane world, and died as swiftly, torn apart by the currents of the Blind Eternities.

And in time that was not time, they were there.

Colors flashed past as they plunged through the outer boundaries of another world, appearing high in the air over a thick copse of trees. Still pounding away with fists and what minor spells they could focus enough to throw, the struggling pair plummeted earthward, crashing through a dozen feet of moss and branches. They finally slammed to a bruising halt in the shallow marsh beneath the boughs, hurled apart by the impact.

Both men scrambled to their feet, struggling to catch their breaths, spitting the stagnant water from their mouths, dripping it from their limbs. Jace was covered with cuts and tears, his stolen garb tattered; Tezzeret's tougher leathers had protected him somewhat better, though much of his hair was burned away, and the flesh of his left arm had been seared a deep red by the kiss of Jace's magics.

Jace glanced side to side, trying to determine precisely where they'd landed. Farther away than he'd planned, but thought-he hoped-close enough. His eyes narrowed in concentration and Tezzeret threw up his hands, crossed at the wrists, to repel whatever attack he was conjuring-but nothing happened, save for a faint glow in those eyes that faded as swiftly as it had flared.

The artificer grinned at his foe's obvious weakness. Both were hideously battered by their rough passage through the void, and yes, Jace had landed the first attack, but even a man as blind as the Eternities could have seen that Tezzeret remained the stronger. Jace's flesh was still pale, his eyes sunken and ringed in exhausted circles, the burns on his skin still livid and bright. What mana he hadn't expended in his escape from the cell had been largely drained by his assault on his foe. Clearly he had little resilience left to him, and even less in the way of magic.

"How did you do that, Beleren?" Tezzeret asked him, his voice ripe with curiosity. "You shouldn't have been able to touch me in the Eternities."

Panting, Jace held up the Infinity Globe, now a tarnished lump of slag. "I knew you'd use one to follow me, you bastard. I attuned myself to it as soon as I stepped from the world-and therefore to you."

Tezzeret's grin grew wider still, lips curling like a beast bearing its fangs. Mockingly, he shook his head. "Brilliant, Beleren, absolutely brilliant. It's a shame you're going to make me-"

He never did get to tell Jace what he was making him do, for at that moment the younger mage hit the artificer square in the face- not with a spell, not with a hidden weapon, but with a clod of heavy muck he'd scooped from beneath the water as he stood.

Grunting, struggling to wipe the sludge from his face and spitting it from between his teeth, Tezzeret staggered. He sensed the attack coming, heard Jace's splashing footsteps, and blinked his vision clear just in time to parry the deadly thrust. Etherium grated on etherium, mechanical hand on razor-edged manablade. Each glared at the other as metal screeched and bright sparks flashed, showering to the earth around them.

One entire wall of the laboratory was gone, melted into slag by a blast of heat far greater than it was ever meant to endure. Bits of rod and pipe protruded into the yawning hole, bones around a gaping wound, and the air was choked with acrid smoke.

In the hall beyond, on a meshwork floor that bent and warped beneath their weight, a great serpent of living flame struggled to crush the life from a black-winged angel, curling over and around its foe, searing where it touched. Though unable to fly, the angel battled furiously, sinking the prongs of a jagged trident again and again into the serpent's hide. Each wound was a burst of fire that burned her further still. At the base of the writhing tail, a trio of specters darted about, trying to drive their deadly hands through the flame that singed even their dead and blackened souls with its touch.

Halfway down the hall, on a broad stair that reached high into the levels above, Liliana crouched upon the steps, peering upward through a haze of smoke. Soot and ash coated her face, the vest that had once covered her tunic was nothing but cinders, and she held her burned right arm close to her chest. Black energy flowed and crackled around her, the lingering remnants of what had been a potent necromantic aura. Above, Baltrice sneered down from behind a shield of crystalline, rock-hard fire.

Liliana was quite certain her power exceeded Baltrice's, yet the fight was going poorly. Though she lacked Tezzeret's ability to command and control the machines that made up the great artifact, Baltrice knew its ins and outs well enough. At her whim, pipes overheated, sending bursts of steam or flying shrapnel to tear the flesh from her foe. Worse still, she knew which conduits carried the mana-infused gasses that Tezzeret used to replenish his own powers, knew how to tap into them with a simple spell. Liliana, who could only struggle to leach the ambient energies directly through the walls, found herself growing steadily weaker, while her enemy, though wounded deeply by the touch of dead and deathless things, remained strong.

But neither was Liliana finished. As she peered through the smoke, watching Baltrice's fire-shield crack and split in preparation for blasting another lance of flame her way, she whispered a litany of names, twisted her fingers in impossible patterns. She thought back to what she had seen of the mechanical monstrosity that Baltrice and Tezzeret called home.

With a final cry and a burst of unimaginably dark mana, Liliana slammed her arm down on a twisted hole in the metal wall, gashing her flesh horribly and spilling a torrent of blood upon the steps. And speaking through that blood as it coated the gleaming metal, she called upon the ghosts of every man and woman whose essence had been bound to empower the Consortium sanctum, and set them loose upon her foe.

Kallist would have been proud.

Channeling the last of his magics into keeping his exhaustion at bay, manablade clutched in a competent if not expert knife-fighter's grip, Jace pummeled the artificer with a sequence of lightning-swift strikes. Tezzeret retreated before him, parrying frantically with his mechanical hand, lacking even the split second he needed to cast his spells or draw upon a more effective weapon.

The blade darted in and out, a striking viper of etherium and enchantment. A slash at the face, a stab at the chest, cross-step to keep pace with Tezzeret's retreat; slash again, feint with the left fist, kick to the gut, another step; a twist and sudden spin, a backhand strike against the artificer's temple, an underhand stab at the ribs, cross-step. For these few moments, Jace drew on everything Kallist had taught him, everything he could recall from several months of being Kallist, and allowed all his anger and all his guilt to flow through him. For those moments, he was a mage no longer, but a dervish of deadly edges and pummeling limbs, forcing Tezzeret ever farther back until the trees thinned and they found themselves slowed by the deepening swamp.

It was a punishing pace, however, one he couldn't possibly maintain, and both combatants knew it. His face and tunic were soaked with sweat, and his breathing came in labored rasps. Tezzeret's desperate parries grew smoother and more certain, his retreat more controlled, as it dawned on the artificer that all he had to do was hold Beleren off a bit longer, let him wear himself down, and he'd have the little bastard utterly at his mercy.

And indeed, mere heartbeats later, Jace's attacks faltered. His arm swung wide, a strike took just an instant too long. With a primal cry, Tezzeret slammed an open palm into Jace's chest, his own strength augmented by the magics and the mechanisms of his hand. A pair of ribs cracked as the blow lifted Jace from his feet and sent him hurtling backward to land with a splash in the marsh. The manablade flew from nerveless fingers; even had Jace possessed the breath to stand, he'd have had to scramble to reach it.

"Pathetic, Beleren." Tezzeret strode casually toward him, content now to take his time.

"I thought it was… pretty impressive, myself," Jace gasped between coughs of pain.

"Oh, your blade-work was surprising, I'll give you that." Tezzeret crouched to meet Jace's gaze and raised his hand to show the marring and scoring along the metal. "It'll take me a good long while to repair the damage. But really, to what end? You should have known the moment your psychic attack failed even to materialize that it was over for you, that you were just delaying the inevitable."

And Jace-Jace smiled through the pain, an eager gleam in his eye. "I wasn't attacking, Tezzeret. I was negotiating."

With a shaking, unsteady finger, he pointed over Tezzeret's shoulder. A sudden chill running down his spine, the artificer couldn't help but turn his head to look.

Barely visible in the shadowed depths of the cypress trees, the treehouses of the nezumi ratmen rose like grasping fingers from the marsh.

"They're really not happy with you just now, Tezzeret," Jace taunted.

The artificer screamed, shooting swiftly to his feet. His entire body tensed in indecision as he struggled to choose between ending his enemy's life while he had the chance, and fleeing before he was overwhelmed.

He had time for neither.

Beneath his feet, black roots and dead vines erupted from the shallow waters. From the many trees of the swamp they stretched through the muddy earth, only to rise and wrap tight about Tezzeret's legs. They held him fast, squeezing until the flesh tingled and the blood ceased to flow. Poisons fell from passing clouds and sprayed upward from writhing fungi, drenching him in toxic effluvia that burned the skin and seared the lungs. Any spell he might have cast was stolen from his throat as he coughed up tiny gobbets of flesh and blood, his whole body spasming in agony.

Ignoring his cracked ribs as best he could, Jace rolled to his feet, stooping to dig for his fallen weapon. The artificer watched with rage-filled eyes, struggling even now to break loose of his blood-soaked bonds. Jace held that gaze for two long breaths, then slammed the point of the manablade into Tezzeret's arm, severing flesh and tendon, cracking bone. Tezzeret screamed as Jace worked the blade back and forth, pressing on it like a prybar. A loud crack, a flash of broken magics, and Tezzeret's etherium limb fell to the earth, an inch of bloody bone protruding obscenely from the metal. Wincing in pain, Jace leaned down to retrieve his trophy, leaving Tezzeret to howl wordlessly in his bonds.

The shaman of the Nezumi-Katsuro emerged from the trees, hunched more sharply and scarred more ornately than the last time Jace had seen him. Fanned out behind came a quartet of lesser spirit-talkers and a dozen nezumi warriors, naked blades glittering in their hands, their tiny eyes glinting in the midday sun. As they passed, the branches curled from their path and the fungi bowed in reverence. The shaman gestured, spoke in the voice of leaves rustling in the wind, and Tezzeret could only scream again as half a dozen branches shot from the trees, stretching impossibly long, to puncture the flesh of his arm and shoulders.

"Greetings, Metal-Armed Emperor of the Infinite

Consortium," the ratman hissed as he neared. Only Jace's spell of translation-which he'd cast even as he made mental contact with the shaman-allowed him to comprehend. "I have waited long to meet you in person."

Tezzeret might not have understood the words, but there was no mistaking either the tone or the intent. "Go to hell, ratman!" The artificer ripped his remaining arm free, leaving chunks of flesh behind, and hurled a handful of metal shavings to the earth. Instantly they rose into a towering golem of steel skin and iron gears-and just as swiftly an elemental of swamp-water and cypress trees like the one that had eaten Baltrice's soldier of fire so long ago appeared once more, bursting from the thickest copse. It fell furiously upon Tezzeret's construct, crushing it like a cheap toy before it could take a second step.

Watching every moment of Tezzeret's struggles, Jace staggered to the shaman's side, clutching his ribs as he walked. "Thanks," he wheezed.

The nezumi bared his dirty, jagged fangs. "We do not do this for you, mind-reader," he said with a distasteful glance at the artificial limb in the mage's hands. "You have delivered our true enemy unto us, and for that we excuse you your own part in what was done to us. But we do not forget it. This is justice for the Nezumi-Katsuro, not for you."

"Works for me, either way," Jace told him.

"Go then, mind-reader. None of us will stop you. Should you disturb us again, though…"

"Yeah, yeah. Get in line, shaman."

Jace cocked his head, turning his attention as the artificer was lifted bodily off the ground by the wooden shafts. They ground against Tezzeret's bones and began to drag him back toward whatever final fate awaited him at the hands of the nezumi.

"Beleren!" Tezzeret screamed through the pain, each word bringing another bubble of crimson-flecked foam to his lips. "I swear to you, I'll survive this! I'll find you, and when I do-"

"You'll do nothing." Jace allowed the lingering mana in the etherium arm to flow through him, and thrust his mind into Tezzeret's own. Exhausted, wounded almost unto death, and without the stores of magic in his artificial arm, the artificer might, just might, be vulnerable to…

Yes!

For long moments, Jace found himself in the agonized, infuriated hell that was Tezzeret's mind. He winced at the images that assailed him, recoiled from sensations he never wanted to know, as he sifted through the artificer's thoughts. And there it was, finally, the knowledge he would need, the knowledge that would allow Jace Beleren to rule the Infinite Consortium as thoroughly as Tezzeret ever had. Names, locations, artifacts, all of it.

And Jace… Jace sighed once and let it go, leaving that knowledge to fade with the man that held it. Taking an unwholesome glee in every mental scream, allowing Tezzeret a full awareness of what he was doing, Jace reached out and crushed the artificer's mind.

Jace felt a great weight lift from his soul-not his only burden, nor even his heaviest, but a palpable respite all the same. He sighed in relief, drawing a puzzled glower from the shaman.

Jace ignored it. He turned and strode into the trees, leaving the beady-eyed ratmen and the drooling, babbling artificer behind him.