Test of Metal

TEZZERET

The only good news in my forescout mirror was that we had finally reached our destination. The rest of the news was that our destination was surrounded by zombies.

A lot of zombies.

Someone had gotten here first.

A simple exertion of will twisted the levitation fields of our gravity sleds and dropped them both to the white sand. The gravity sleds had proven to be almost ridiculously useful up till now. Having designed and constructed them myself, I could take a certain pride in how well they had performed. Both were virtually pure etherium, representing the entire contribution of the Grand Hegemon to this expedition-her personal reserve of etherium, almost seventy pounds. The variable levitation magics-to provide motive power in addition to keeping them aloft-were quite standard, even pedestrian; the particular elegance on which I prided myself lay in the shimmering blue variable energy screens that had not only protected us from wind and sun, but also shielded the sleds themselves from the incredibly abrasive winds of the Glass Dunes, not to mention that the sleds themselves had only two moving parts.

I had hoped to ride them right up to the entrance of the Labyrinth, but clearly that was not to be. It would be a shame to disassemble them, but there was no help for it. Given this new development, I knew I’d need the etherium.

We might have to fight.

“What’s wrong?” Baltrice’s voice came to my mind just slightly muffled by the anti-grit screen I had tweaked into her earpiece-a smaller and lower-powered version of the screens that protected the gravity sleds. Channeling the extra magics had forced me to almost quadruple the size of the earpiece and to build in a support band that Baltrice wore around her head. Not fashionable, perhaps, but it would keep her alive.

I would have preferred to reserve that etherium for other uses, but she was unwilling to use direct mind-to-mind communication, and considering for whom she worked, I couldn’t blame her. “There a problem?”

Zombies ahead, I sent, to keep Doc out of it, but he’d already seen what I had in the mirror. “Zombies?” Doc said. “Are you kiddin’ me? You’re worried about zombies?”

“Can you count?”

“Sure-two, four, eighteen, carry the twelve-urk. Hot festering crap! There’s like a million-uh, a million six, give or take a couple thousand.”

“My estimate was a million two, but you have better eyes-eye-for this sort of thing, even though you’re using mine. We both could be off by as much as a million, or even several,” I said, “because there’s no way to tell how many are already inside.”

Baltrice dismounted her sled and walked over. She reached up to pull the earpiece. I said, “Leave it.”

“What in the hells for?” she said with a skeptical squint. “I hear you fine.”

“Feel that breeze? Remember what I told you about the sand?”

“Tezzeret, I fart harder than this breeze.”

“Well, don’t do it in my direction, then. If you remove the earpiece, it will deactivate your anti-grit screen. The glass powder on that breeze will instantly begin to abrade your corneas, which will not only progressively blind you, but it will hurt. A lot. And there is a very long vedalken word that I’m not going to inflict on you, which is the specific term for the permanently disabling lung damage caused by breathing the powdered glass in the desert. The powdered glass is why we call it the Glass Desert.”

“Aw, hells, Tezzeret, I know. You already told me eight times. It’s only-well, you know. Where I’m from, the stuff that’ll kill you is big and scary and makes loud noises and crap. This dying-from-just-how-the-place-is gunk just seems all wrong.”

“It may be. But there’s nothing you or I can do to make it right. Are you with me?”

“If I weren’t, I’d be blind and coughing, right?” She nodded toward the progressively higher rides of the dunes ahead. “What’s the deal on your zombies out there?”

“They don’t have to breathe, and they don’t need eyes. And there’re a lot of them.”

She shrugged. “Zombies burn.”

“Indeed they do, but that’s not the real issue. What matters is-well, to talk about it is pointless. I can show you from the top of that dune.”

“All right, juice up the sleds and-”

“No more sleds. We brought them too close to the Labyrinth as it is. We may have alerted those ahead.”

“And so we rode them this far why?”

I shook my head. “In the Glass Desert, accurate navigation is impossible. There are no maps, and there is no reliable measure of distance. A two-mile hike may take you ten miles from your starting point, or one, or leave you farther from your destination than when you began.”

“That’s why your scout thingies, right?”

“Exactly. And that scout thingie,” I said, nodding toward a metallic sunflash at the top of the farther dune, “is the last of them. We won’t need more.”

She frowned. “Don’t much like the sound of that.”

“Yeah, me too,” Doc chimed in.

“You won’t like the look of it, either.”

The Crystal Labyrinth stands at the center of a vast, deep bowl of sand known as the Netherglass, some 20 miles across. Today, that is; the dimensions of the Netherglass are as variable as any other distance in the Glass Desert. I am given to understand that the Netherglass never shrinks below a fixed minimum of four miles across-but only because to do so would make it impinge upon the Labyrinth itself.

Even from almost 13 miles away, the Crystal Labyrinth is of a wholly astonishing appearance. Its walls and roofs are white as milk quartz, with no stain or sully to be seen, perhaps because constant abrasion by the scouring winds of the desert erode and erase all substances that might otherwise darken it. The Labyrinth proper is a structure of twelve immense rectangular buildings, set precisely in a great ring about three miles across.

It is said the dimensions of the Crystal Labyrinth are the only constants in all the Glass Desert.

Each of the great structures is in fact a vast hall of twelve stories, each story containing one hundred rooms, with each room having from two to twelve doors. Six of the stories of each great hall are above ground, and six are subterranean, directly below the upper. The connections between the buildings are said to exist beyond normal space. There are thresholds within the Labyrinth that might connect the lowest corner of one hall with the uppermost of one at the opposite end-and if you turn back, often you will not return to the same chamber you left.

All I could uncover that described the interior of the Crystal Labyrinth was recorded by one Faltus Mack, the sole survivor of a quite large and well-funded expeditionary party some thirteen years before. His account speaks of walls, floors, and ceilings of glass, some transparent as air, some opaque as stone; of blazons and guide paths disappearing behind him as soon as he would quit a chamber; of walls that seemed to shift when he was not looking-though he never saw one move-leaving him unable to determine whether any room was in fact one his party had visited before, or a room of similar configuration wholly elsewhere. He also speaks of encountering other seekers, unfamiliar pilgrims, some of races unknown to Esper, speaking languages that cannot be transcribed in our alphabet. He speaks of meeting members of his own party, who were alive though he knew them to be dead, and on one occasion actually encountering himself, or some phantasmic doppelganger that claimed to be he, filthy, wild of hair, clothed in rotting rags, and speaking only disordered fragments of sentences. By the time Faltus Mack finally escaped, he was entirely mad, of course, but mere madness is not sufficient to impeach his account.

When I shared this information with Baltrice before our departure from Vectis, she became a bit dubious about our propects. “This is your idea of a vacation spot?”

“Think about the riddles,” I said. “ ‘When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone,’ and ‘Where do you seek what cannot be found?’ The Labyrinth is literally the only place on all of Esper that Sharuum and her agents can never search; no one has ever reached the center and returned to the outside world. And, not to grind too fine an edge on it, it’s made of glass.”

“Oh, this just keeps getting better. You are one literal-minded sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “and we must operate under the assumption that Crucius knew this when he laid the trail.”

“How do you know it’s not just a practical joke? Or, like, demented rambling? I mean, come on, we’re talking about a sphinx, right? A crazy sphinx. Did you ever hear the joke about the sphinx who was so crazy that other sphinxes noticed?”

“According to Sharuum herself,” I said, “there is a sphinx of unimaginable power at the heart of the Labyrinth. She named him Kemuel the Hidden One, and she believes he is the oldest living creature on Esper. She is uncertain if this Kemuel reached the center by navigating the Labyrinth, or if it might have been originally built around him.”

“How nutty does this crap have to get before you just give up?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure I have any idea what nutty is anymore.”

“Got a mirror?”

I conceded the point. “You don’t have to go.”

“Yeah, sure. Then I’d have nothing to do but hang out and watch my boss’s hideous doom and crap. Include me out on that one, huh?”

“You are unexpectedly tender of heart.”

“Yeah, well, don’t tell anybody.”

“There is also this: the Crystal Labyrinth is by far the oldest structure on all of Esper. Descriptions of its exterior are among the earliest writings of the vedalken culture, which is vastly more ancient than the human. If Faltus Mack is to be believed, however, the Labyrinth behaves like a machine.”

“A machine to do what?”

I shook my head. “I can’t say. Kill people who get lost, certainly-but there’s no way to know if that is a designed function or if it is merely ancillary, like a side effect. This, however, is certain: If one wishes to deter intruders, one does not hide at the center of a maze. One does not build a maze at all.”

“What, now you’re thinking Crucius built the Labyrinth?”

“I am reserving judgment on that; I can only say that it is not impossible. I am certain that whoever did build it is a mechanist whose boots I am not fit to wipe.” I shook my head helplessly. “I don’t even have the words for how far beyond me-beyond anyone-the Labyrinth is. Crucius is the only being I can think of who’d even come up with the concept.”

“Woo. Crap. Damn, Tezzeret,” she said, “all these years I’ve been dead-bang positive that the stars’d burn out before I ever caught you being humble.”

“It’s not an attitude I cultivate.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Myself as well. It’s Crucius. He’s like… staring into an infinite abyss. Anything you can imagine might be in there, and what’s actually in there you probably can’t imagine.”

“How powerful is he?”

I shrugged. “How bright is the sun?”

“Oh, sure. Sure. One hour with a nice-lookin’ sphinx and you’re all up in their gnomic utterance crap. Do you even know how old he is?”

“I cannot venture a guess that would have meaning.”

“Aw, come on, for crap’s sake, Tezzeret, you know how old Nicol festering Bolas is!”

“Time and age are not the same for a clockworker as for others. Even Planeswalkers. It’s at least conceivable that when Crucius decided he needed a Labyrinth, he clockworked his way back to pre-vedalken days. That way he could build it without fear of interruption.”

“Wait,” Baltrice said, massaging her forehead with one hand. “You’re saying-wait, seriously? Okay. So twenty-thirty years ago, whatever, Crucius decides to disappear, so he figures to go back to like the beginning of time to build himself a place to hide? So that it’ll already be there when he needs it in ten thousand years or whatever?”

“Possibly. It’s also possible that he built it because he knew that he would one day disappear, and he wished to leave a trail to lead someone-we’re assuming me, or someone like me-to wherever it is he has disappeared to.”

“So, now wait again-now you’re saying that the Labyrinth isn’t intended to keep people out?”

“Labyrinth is not a fancy word for maze. They are two different things. A maze is a puzzle path, a set of cognitive traps intended, for entertainment or some darker purpose, to trick or baffle those who try to navigate it, and prevent their success. A labyrinth is supposed to be solved. Many classical labyrinths have only a single path, and many have no walls at all. Treading a labyrinth from entrance to center is intended to affect those who do so in specific ways-usually to produce some variety of meditative or contemplative state, but sometimes for other uses. There is a whole subspecialty of magic devoted to the effects of following esoteric pathways.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of them. Whackos. All whackos. You can only follow so many multidimensional loops before your brain goes loopy too.”

“Becoming loopy, as you say, is actually the point,” I said. “The key to understanding a labyrinth is to recognize that who you will be when you reach the center is not who you were when you set out. In other words, the Crystal Labyrinth is not intended to keep anyone out, but in order to reach the center, you must transform yourself into the person the designer wants you to be.”

“What, like a giant self-help book? Building a Better You in Only Fourteen Thousand Rooms?”

“I prefer to think of it as an entry code, or an elaborate lock. To reach the center, instead of merely knowing a password, you must be the password. The Labyrinth itself machines you into a key to turn its own particular lock.”

“You know, there’s a point where piling on more education just makes you soft in the head.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am living proof of it.”

Once we had labored up the long slope of soft powdered sand to the top of the dune, she could see what I meant-for perhaps a mile around the Crystal Labyrinth, the desert could not be seen through the solid press of zombies. She signified her understanding with a low whistle and a breathy, “Damn…”

“Yes.”

“I guess somebody took down the Vacancy sign.”

“In so many words.”

“Wow.”

Doc said, “Zombies give me the willies.”

“You don’t even have a willie.”

Baltrice shot me a sidelong look. “Doc?”

“Yes. He doesn’t like zombies.”

She looked back down into the center of the Netherglass. “Well, somebody sure does.”

“Yes,” I said. “Here, look.”

I turned my hand downward, and the tiny forescout device lifted from the sand. Spreading my fingers thinned and expanded the device into a hoop of etherium as wide in diameter as my arm was long. A simple adjustment of the refractive index of the air within the hoop made a section of the Crystal Labyrinth spring into focus as though we were only yards away, instead of miles.

The zombies all faced inward. They pressed against one another until they formed a solid writhing mass of flesh and bone, as though they were a crowd come to see some insanely huge undead entertainment, for which the Labyrinth was the ampitheater.

“It looks like they’re trying to get inside.”

“Yes.”

“Well, okay. Sure, there’s a lot of them,” Baltrice said, “but we don’t have to fight them all at once, right? Hells, we can fly right to the nearest door, clear them out and seal it behind us. Even if they’re already inside, so what? They’re just zombies. If we have to fight our way through shoulder-to-shoulder zombies in all fourteen thousand rooms, I don’t figure it’ll raise too much of a sweat. Take a long damn time, though.”

“Yes. That’s not our problem.”

She squinted through the etherium hoop, then leaned to the side to take in the full scene. “Oh. Oh, sorry, I get it,” she said with an apologetic shrug. “My first thing’s always the tactical situation. You know.”

“And that’s why I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “Now for the strategic question.”

“Yeah. Strategic. And the answer’s no: I’ve never even heard a story about a necromancer who could summon a million zombies all at once.”

“Likely several million,” I said. “I am acquainted with several beings who are, or have been, worshiped as gods, and I’ve never seen any of them do anything that even approached this sort of scale. I don’t think Nicol Bolas himself could do this. Not all at once.”

“That’s why I was wondering if they might have just marched here,” she said. “Doesn’t Esper share a border with Grixis these days?”

“Yes,” I said with a sigh, “but that gets us nowhere-to march zombies all the way from Grixis through the winds of the Glass Desert? Keeping the flesh on their bones would take more power than summoning them directly.”

“Oh, sure. Cheer me up.”

“It only gets worse from here,” I said, massaging my forehead. I’d never been the sort of person who gets a headache from thinking too hard-until, apparently, now. “I have an idea-almost a conviction-that I really, really hope is mistaken. You and Doc are two of the smartest people I know; I’d like you both to listen, and point out holes or blunders in my analysis. All right?”

Doc said, “Really for real? You want my opinion?”

“Yes. Baltrice?”

She shook her head, blinking as though I’d awakened her from a daydream. “Sorry, Tezzeret. Sorry-I guess I’m, like, hallucinating or something. Because I could have sworn I just heard you ask me to check your work.”

“Ha,” I said, “and ha.”

She blinked some more. “You mean I wasn’t hallucinating?”

This gave me brief pause. It underlined once again the seeming difference in who I am from who I once was. I remember being disdainful of Baltrice’s intellect, just as I remember the starkly malicious hatred I’d nursed for Jace, and the erratic fits of temper from which I had suffered-I just can’t remember why I felt that way.

Being me was proving to be unexpectedly interesting.

I returned my attention to the task at hand. “It is a truism of both artificing and mechanistics that entities are not to be multiplied without reason,” I began.

Baltrice held up her hand to stop me. “Skip the lecture, huh? ‘Multiplying entities’ is the flavor of crap I dropped out of school to avoid.”

I nodded. “Simply put, you don’t design five parts to perform a function that can be performed by one, yes? The only time you design the five parts instead is if you want to build in extra features that require flexibility of function, or if one piece will be only adequate, while the five will become superb.”

“Yeah, okay,” Baltrice said. “It’s the KISS thing, right?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She shrugged. “That’s what they call it where I come from. KISS. It stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ ”

“An elegant phrasing, and proper advice,” I said. “However, simple comes in a variety of sizes and colors. We’re assuming, for example, that all those zombies are the work of one necromancer.”

“What, you think it’s like an army of the bastards? Because those guys aren’t exactly team players, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s more probable to meet one spectacularly powerful necromancer than an organized band of several hundred ordinary ones. But where this framework breaks down is when you consider why this necromancer-no matter how insanely powerful-is spending so much of that power to solve the Crystal Labyrinth, and why it’s happening now.”

“Solve it?” Baltrice and Doc said together.

“Those zombies cannot be there for defense, nor to discourage intruders; anyone out here in the Glass Desert will have more than enough power to simply avoid them-fly over them, teleport or gate past them, or if we’re talking about someone like you, burn hundreds of thousands of them to ash and walk in before the survivors can reach you. No: I am fairly certain that what we’re looking at here is an attempt to reach the heart of the Labyrinth.”

Baltrice frowned “How do you figure?”

Doc said, “BFI, right?”

“Exactly,” I said under my breath, then spoke up for Baltrice’s benefit. “We artificers and mechanists of Esper have a pet acronym of our own: BFI. It stands for Brute Force and Ignorance. Let’s say, to Keep It Simple, that we’re looking at one and a half million zombies. The Crystal Labyrinth is reputed to have fourteen thousand four hundred rooms, which means the necromancer has at his disposal more than one hundred and four zombies per room. Zombies don’t need to eat, drink, or sleep; in fairly short order, even working at random, they will have explored every possible path. Once every path is known, the necromancer can just bloody well teleport in.”

“Hey, I can probably do that!” Doc chirped. “I can teleport, remember? It’s like the only actual thing I can actually do. Except hurt you. And there’s only one place I can teleport you to. But still.”

“There is nothing about you that I have forgotten,” I reassured him.

“Put like that, it sounds easy,” Baltrice said, grim. “Hells, the bastard could have done it already.”

I shook my head. “If he has, why are all the zombies still here?”

“Holiday decorations,” Baltrice said. “How in the hells should I know?”

“And we still haven’t answered the main question: Why is our necromancer working so hard to reach the heart of the Crystal Labyrinth? And why now?”

“I don’t get you.”

“There’s no treasure,” I explained. “There has never been even a legend of treasure. All that lies at the heart of the Crystal Labyrinth is a single ancient sphinx-who may or may not be alive, if he ever existed.”

“Well, that sphinx and-if you’re right-some clue to lead you to Crucius.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Why tells us who.”

“Yeah?” Her face cleared. “Oh, I get it. You’re thinking about that snotty little clockworker from the Seekers, right?”

“Silas Renn,” I said. “Beyond the three of us and Sharuum, who knows that the path to Crucius might be found through the Crystal Labyrinth? Who’s rich enough to hire however many necromancers he might think he needs? Who would sacrifice his entire family’s fortune and all of his remaining body parts to discover the key to creating etherium?”

“Huh. ‘Why tells us who.’ Huh.” Baltrice shook her head. “And all those years, you kept telling everybody with ears that why means nothing at all.”

“Did I?” I said. “I can’t imagine what I must have been thinking.”

“You should have let me kill him back in Vectis.”

“Perhaps.” At the time, I had been unwilling to upset Sharuum, nor did I wish to spark an all-out brawl with the Seekers of Carmot-especially not when the city’s defenses included apport interdiction, so we couldn’t teleport out if things went bad. And if I’d tried to planeswalk, Doc would have dumped me back in that sangrite cave on-in-Jund. And I had discovered myself unwilling to destroy Silas Renn. Despite the danger he represented, he was not trash.

He was something I had not yet found a use for.

“So, it’s this Renn guy who’s got you all worked up? He’s not so much of all that.”

“Renn is tremendously powerful. You caught him by surprise, distracted by the arrival of Sharuum and her retinue. Do you remember how powerful I was? Back when I had my arm?”

“Yeah.”

“Renn and I studied together for three years. I fought him at least once every examination period-thirteen times, in fact. I never beat him.”

Baltrice frowned. “Never?”

“And he wasn’t even allowed to use clockworking,” I said. “At the Academy, clockworking is forbidden in sanctioned duels unless both participants agree to it beforehand.”

“For real? How come? I mean, sure, chronomancy is kind of weird, but it’s hardly-”

“Chronomancy is not even on a nearby plane to clockworking. A clockworker can actually control time. You understand teleportation. To a clockworker adept, time is simply another spatial dimension. They can jump forward and backward in time as easily as you or I might teleport across a room.”

Her frown turned into a scowl. “So if I hit him with something that rocks his world, he can just, like, jump back to right before I hit him and deliver a preemptive smackdown?”

“It’s more complicated than that-clockworking is fiendishly difficult and, no pun intended, time consuming-but essentially, yes. He can also control your own personal temporal flow in ways no magic at our command can counter. No shield will stop you from getting old. And that’s not all.”

She winced. “It gets worse?”

“A good clockworker-which Renn is-can, with proper preparation, move sideways in time.”

“What in the hells is that supposed to mean?”

“You’d have to ask a clockworker for the details,” I said. “I’ve never looked deeply into the theory, and so I have only a layman’s knowledge. The best I can understand is that time isn’t a single straight line-it’s more like a big rope, braided and rebraided out of an infinite number of different temporal strands. Every time you make a choice-turn right instead of left-you split off a new temporal strand. If the choice you make doesn’t affect other nearby main lines-if you arrive at your destination at the same moment you would have if you’d turned the other way-your strand gets braided back into the main cable and everything proceeds as usual. But a clockworker adept can sense the nearest strands of other main lines and decide which one he wants to be in. In other words, he can pick and choose the outcome he wants, and move himself into the time line where that’s what happens. And he can take you with him.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. The only limitations of clockworking are the power of the adept and the dictates of probability-the more improbable the outcome the adept is looking for, the more power it takes to get himself into that alternate line. Even though it’s not something he can pull off on the spur of the moment, the only real defense against a good clockworker is another clockworker.”

“And he got here first,” Baltrice said, “and brought all his friends.”

“Yes.”

“And he knows we’re coming, so he’s had time to prepare.”

“Yes.”

“And he might be inclined to be a little stern with both of us.”

“That’s it. See any holes?”

“Other than the bleeding ones that are about to start opening up all over both our bodies?” She stood for a long moment, staring grimly at the stark reality clustered at the bottom of the Netherglass. When finally she spoke again, her voice was hoarse and harsh. “This was what you were talking about, when you said you won’t survive.”

“Not specifically.”

“How about we walk away? Just pitch it. Because I’m looking down there, Tezzeret, and all I’m seeing is an assload of undead that you and I will probably be joining. I think we are way out of our league.”

“I can’t walk away.”

“That you talking, or Doc?”

“Doc is silent on the subject,” I said. “He doesn’t want to die any more than I do-but he also can’t let me back off. You, on the other hand, are under no obligation to perish at our side.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in popping back to Vectis to pull your doohickey out of Beleren’s brain first, would you?”

I only looked at her.

“Sure, what did I expect?” she said. “You’re not the merciful type.”

“More merciful than he was,” I said. “He’s alive. And he may yet be whole and hale.”

“If we win.”

“Yes. If we win.”

She took a deep, deep breath as though about to take a plunge to black water, without knowing whether she’d ever breathe again. Finally she let it out in a gust, shook the kinks out of her shoulders, and said, “All right. Let’s do it.”

“Baltrice-”

“Shut up, Tezzeret. I mean it. Shut up because whatever you’re about to say, I really don’t want to hear.”

I stood in silence.

Eventually, she turned to me. “You have a plan, right? Tell me you have a plan.”

I said, “I have a plan.”