Test of Metal

THE METAL ISLAND

Still reclining upon the etherium sand, the ancient dragon snorted another gust of greasy, meat-scented smoke. “What a pathetic creature you are.”

Tezzeret smiled. “Flatterer.”

“You spew egomania like a sneeze sprays snot. Except snot tastes better,” Bolas said. “Maybe you should kill me now. Put me out of your misery.”

“If death is what you’re looking for, you need only wait,” Tezzeret said. “Or, I suppose, ask me nicely.”

The dragon rolled his eyes and took a deep breath in an apparent attempt to control exasperation. “Do you understand just how preposterously self-centered your whole theory of reality is, you demented little gutter monkey? ‘Oooh, Crucius did everything just for meeeee…’ ‘Oooh, Rennnn’s waiting there to spank me!’ Revolting.”

“Thank you.”

“You did understand, even back there, that for your theory to be accurate, Crucius would have had to anticipate not only your brains getting scrambled by Beleren-all right, to be fair, anyone who knows the two of you saw that one coming-but he would have had to somehow make me glue your pieces back together and strong-arm you into looking for him in the first place.”

“When you put it that way, it does seem unlikely,” Tezzeret said mildly. “And yet, here I am.”

“Not because Crucius planned it this way.”

“As soon as the Grand Hegemon departs,” Tezzeret said with a casual wave toward the cloud of etherium-colored mist that still enveloped Sharuum and the Metal Sphinx together, “you are welcome to ask him.”

“Like I actually believe any of this.”

“I can say with considerable certainty that at this moment, nothing in any universe depends upon whether you believe in it or not,” Tezzeret replied. “I knew an Ethersworn monk once, who made it a practice to believe six impossible things before breakfast; if he could manage only five, he stayed in bed.”

“Baltrice was right,” Bolas muttered. “You’ve spent too much time around sphinxes.”

“Disquieting, isn’t it?” Tezzeret smiled thoughtfully toward the great statue. “I may be coming to understand how they think.”

“Tezzeret.” The musical harmonics of the Grand Hegemon’s voice wafted from the cloud like audible incense. “We are finished.”

Tezzeret raised a hand, and the cloud faded. Sharuum backed way from the Metal Sphinx as though unwilling to take her eyes from its etherium face. “You have done all that was asked of you, and more. The word of a sphinx is not lightly given, nor can it be broken. As promised, all that I have is yours, to keep or to abandon, to build or to destroy.”

Tezzeret said gravely, “Thank you.”

“Is this a joke?” The dragon’s scaly jaw dropped toward the sand while the rest of him was in the process of rising. “Did she just give you the plane?”

“Part of one.”

“It’s a pretty nice thank-you gift.”

“Yes.” He looked up at Bolas, who now towered over him. “Sit.”

The dragon glowered down at him, but sat.

“Stay.” Tezzeret walked toward Sharuum. “I will return you now to our land.”

“Must you? I had… hoped… I might abide here. For… company.”

“You cannot,” Tezzeret said. “You have given yourself to me, per our bargain, and this is my will: that you return to Esper and rule as you always have, that you place your great wisdom in service to our land and all who call it home, and that you treat all of my possessions as your own.”

The great sphinx stared down at him, uncomprehending, silent with astonishment.

“If I should chance to change my mind,” he said through his thin smile, “I’ll let you know.”

Her eyes drifted shut, and she lowered her head until Tezzeret might have touched her mask-shield with his hand. “Your gracious nature confounds me, Tezzeret,” she piped solemnly. “I do not know how to address you with proper honor, as the master of my life and all I possess.”

“If you choose to address me by any word other than my name,” he said, “I would be honored to be called your friend.”

Behind him the dragon grunted disgustedly, “Since when do you have friends?”

“Bolas.” Tezzeret did not turn around, and his voice was mild as the ocean around them: a gentle surface beneath which lurked unimaginable threat. “Manners.”

The dragon growled low in his throat, but subsided.

“Then my friend you shall be,” piped Sharuum, “unto the end of my days, and beyond. It will be written upon my tomb, first among my titles: ‘Friend to Tezzeret the Seeker.’ ”

“Thank you,” he said, and reached up to touch the edge of her mask-shield with one hand.

The etherium that had filled her scars turned once more to liquid, draining down her face like silvery tears. “The etherium strands-the tears of my beloved-bring light to my eyes and strength to my limbs. They cannot remain?”

“From this place, one can take only what is brought from beyond,” Tezzeret said. “And memories.”

“Then let it be so. Memories are more than I’d hoped to gain.”

Tezzeret gestured, and the rippling plane of etherium-colored interplanar gate reappeared. “Give my regards to your son.”

Sharuum, Grand Hegemon of Esper, looked back at him with a smile and, astonishingly, a wink. “It will be done, my friend,” she said, then entered the gate and passed beyond the universe.

Tezzeret turned toward where Nicol Bolas sat upon the etherium sand like an obedient puppy-a sixty-foot-long, fire-breathing, horned, scaled, and impressively fanged puppy, but obedient nonetheless.

“As I promised, you are free to depart as well, Bolas,” Tezzeret said, “but my tale nears its end. I hope you might be interested enough to stay yet awhile.”

“Your tale is closer to its end than you think.” The dragon’s eyes went sleepy, and a hint of sneer curled one corner of his upper lip. “You’ve gotten so good at riddles, try this one: What’s at each end of a tale?”

“Our business doesn’t have to take very long, but if you choose to be difficult,” Tezzeret said, “it can take the rest of your life.”

“Aw, Tezzie, come on! Play along.”

“Don’t call me Tezzie,” he said. “Before you answer, recall that here and now, I can stop you. And I can promise you won’t like it.”

“Tezzeret, then. Humor me.” The dragon’s sneer spread toward a mocking grin. “What’s at each end of a tale?”

With a tiny irritated shake of his head, Tezzeret said, “Fine. I give. What’s at each end of a tale?”

“At one end, nothing at all,” the dragon said. “At the other, an asshole.”

Tezzeret made a face. “Up to your usual standard of wit.”

“You just don’t get why it’s funny. It’s a double pun,” said Nicol Bolas. “Come on, Tezzie-you called me an asshole…”

“I called you a doltish thug.”

“You’re missing the point.” Bolas dropped the playful mockery in favor of a darkly infinite certainty. “I am the end of your tale.”

Tezzeret frowned, and clouds gathered overhead, spitting jagged lightning.

He cleared his throat, and the Metal Island trembled with earthquake.

He lifted his hands, and the eldritch energies of the etherium around him supercharged his layered shields until he blazed with power, brighter than the sun itself. “Do we need to have this conversation all over again?”

The dragon bared his fangs. “Want to see a trick?”

“No.”

“One little trick. You’ll love it. I promise.”

“Watch mine instead.” Tezzeret made a fist, and from the sand shot upward girders of etherium thicker than a man’s chest that in an instant had curled around the dragon and braided themselves into an impenetrable cage that flared with every color of power. “Don’t try to draw mana, and don’t touch the bars. I tell you this for your own protection.”

The dragon shrugged carelessly. “You showed me yours. Let me show you mine.”

“Save it.”

“But it’s a really good trick. Here, watch,” Bolas said, and vanished.

Utterly and completely, as though he had never been there at all.

Instantly Tezzeret slapped his hands together in front of him, interlacing his fingers. The bars of the etherium cage became razor-sharp blades and crushed themselves into a jaggedly solid mass.

But among them he found no bloody chunks of dragon.

The dragon’s footprints were gone from the etherium sand, and no trace of even his previous presence could be detected by any magic Tezzeret could command.

He looked over his shoulder at Baltrice and Jace. The Webs of Restraint that had bound them were gone, and both of them were stirring from their magically enforced unconsciousness. Rubbing her eyes, Baltrice pushed herself dizzily up to a sitting position. “What’s going on?”

“Something bad.”

“Where’s the dragon?”

“I don’t know. That’s why it’s bad,” Tezzeret said. “Get ready to fight.”

“I’d rather not,” she said, even as she climbed to her feet and shook her shoulders loose. Flames kindled in her hair and licked down along her arms. “This is not exactly a big red-mana kind of place.”

“You’re welcome to go find one.” Tezzeret extended his arms, and the sand beneath his feet poured upward along his legs, trunk, arms, and head until he was fully encased in shining etherium armor.

Baltrice made a face. “That stuff again. Think it’s gonna work this time?”

“We’ll find out. Meanwhile, you’ll want to protect Jace.”

“Jace?” Her eyes clouded over. “Yeah, I better. Hey, boss, you awake?”

Jace groaned and rolled onto his side. “What happened?” he said faintly. “Did we make it? I was having the weirdest dream…”

Baltrice looked at Tezzeret. “This would be a really good time for you to take your doohickey out of his brain.”

“I disagree,” the mechanist replied, as Nicol Bolas flickered back into existence right in front of him.

The dragon reared, forelimbs and wings spreading wide, and brutally intense flame rained down upon the artificer. Baltrice barely managed to raise shields around her and Jace. From what she could see, Tezzeret’s armor seemed to be working just fine. He didn’t appear to notice the hellfire raging around him. He made a quick motion of his right fist, as though delivering a punch to an invisible opponent.

And the dragon exploded.

Even without flame or blast, the detonation was spectacular. Enormous chunks of dragon flesh trailing black blood sailed through the air. One great wing whirled out over the sea like a thrown dinner plate and splashed into the water. His hind legs gouged long divergent furrows through the etherium sand; his tail crashed into the trees far along the beach. His head got caught in a high juncture of the etherium spars that made up the Metal Sphinx and dangled there, his eyes still glaring balefully down upon the humans below.

“Hot festering crap!” A flash of fire burned away the thick gobbets of dragon blood that had smeared across Baltrice’s shields. “Did you really just do that?”

“Yes.”

“You just killed Nicol festering Bolas!”

“No.”

Right atop the steaming pile of internal organs, Nicol Bolas flashed back into existence. He stretched forth his talon and annihilating energy poured forth, setting the air itself on fire. The power blasted Tezzeret backward and down, sliding into a deep, steep-sided pit of white-hot etherium sand. The fringes of the back blast alone chewed into Baltrice’s shields so fast that she had to grab Jace and dodge back along the plinth to keep them both from being roasted alive.

The dragon kept pouring the blazing torrent of power into the pit as though he couldn’t be bothered with trivial things such as conserving mana. He blasted Tezzeret with levels of energy that should have killed him along with the artificer, as power of this magnitude could be maintained only by pouring his life into the assault along with every scrap of mana he could gather. The intensity of the attack liquefied the sand, turning the pit into a cauldron filled with molten etherium, into which Tezzeret sank like a sounding stone.

And out from which he arose once more, lifting smoothly into the air as though borne aloft by the power that should have destroyed him.

His armor didn’t even look hot.

He clasped his hands in front of his face, and the dragon’s blast was instantly extinguished. He pushed his doubled fists straight downward like a man hoisting himself out of a pool, and the great dragon himself pitched helplessly headfirst into the molten etherium.

A volcanic eruption of flame and burning metal from below blasted upward around Tezzeret without noticeable effect. The effect on the dragon was more spectacular, as his entire head instantly flash-burned to ash, and his neck roared with flame and burned all the way down to his breastbone.

“Wait…” Baltrice said, scowling. “What in the hells?” How does plain old white-molten metal burn his whole head to ash when a few minutes ago her best shot couldn’t even make the bastard blink?

Tezzeret again displayed no sign of jubilation. He drifted sideways over the huge smoking corpse of the dragon and took up a position on the left forepaw of the Metal Sphinx.

And waited.

Behind him on the plinth, Jace clutched at Baltrice’s arm. “Something’s wrong…”

“Oh, you think? What was your first festering clue?”

“No…” His other hand went to his forehead. “No, it’s the dragon. The dragons.”

“Yeah, that’s what gave it away to me too,” she said, yanking Jace with her to take cover behind the Metal Sphinx’s elbow.

This time two Nicol Bolases appeared simultaneously, on either side of Tezzeret. One simply lashed out and grabbed the artificer, while the other bent his neck to bite the mage in half.

“I’m telling you,” Jace insisted fiercely. “These dragons-these Bolases-they aren’t really Bolas.”

“So what? They’re nothing we want to tangle with.”

“Baltrice, listen-I’ve touched his mind before. And these dragons-they look like him, they might even wield some of his power, but they don’t even have minds. At all.”

“You can read them? Or, y’know, not read them or whatever? What about Tezzeret’s doohickey?”

Jace shook his head. “Maybe it doesn’t work here or something, but that’s not important-”

“Hells it isn’t-that’s what we came here for, which means it’s time to go.” She peered around the vast etherium elbow for a quick look at how Tezzeret was doing.

Both dragons who had restrained him had been reduced to redly glistening skeletal remains, their flesh having melted and dripped away, puddling beneath their bones in huge pools of meat syrup. But now four dragons came at him, two with magic and two with claws and teeth, and to Baltrice’s experienced eye, it looked like Tezzeret was starting to feel the pressure. More and more he seemed to be focusing on defense, and his counterstrikes were no longer instantly lethal.

Not that it would have mattered if they were, as eight more Nicol Bolases came wading through the gore of their predecessors, waiting their turn to attack.

“Jace, we gotta get gone,” she hissed. “Tezz can’t hold ’em off forever, and after they get him chewed and swallowed, they’re still gonna be hungry. Your magic’s working and who in the hells cares why or why Tezzeret’s getting killed by mindless whatevers or why any damn thing else because I think I hear my festering mother calling and she’s been dead twenty years so come on, let’s go!”

A blue haze of power crackled around Jace’s head. “Wait-they’re not fake,” he said, his brow furrowed in concentration. “And they’re not illusions… It’s like they’re dead. Like… like-”

“Like zombies,” Baltrice said through her teeth. “Son of a bitch. Now my day is festering complete. Vess.”

“What?”

“I said Vess. As in that little zombie-sucking slut bag you used to like so much.”

“Liliana? What would she be doing here?”

“If I were a little faster, she wouldn’t be doing anything anywhere,” Baltrice growled. “Find her.”

“But she wouldn’t-wait. Oh, hells,” he said. He reached out with his right hand, and a flash of white shot from his fingertips and whipped around another of the Metal Sphinx’s spars.

Out from where the white mana had vanished stepped Liliana Vess, her lustrous raven hair falling in curls around her flawless face. Her dancer’s lithe grace was not in evidence, however; she moved jerkily, resisting every step, a broken marionette dragged forward by white fire that wreathed her arms and legs and chest.

“Jace…” she said softly, her eyes glistening with welling tears. “Jace, I didn’t know it’d be you. You have to believe me. I’m sorry-I’m so sorry!”

“I’m not,” Baltrice said, and blasted her with a flame bolt so powerful that the beautiful necromancer was instantly burned down to her bones. “Go zombie that, bitch.”

“Baltrice!” Jace gasped. “Baltrice, what have you done?”

“No more screwing around, Jace,” Baltrice growled. “Are we leaving, or am I going alone?”

Liliana’s charred bones were still skidding across the plinth when Jace and Baltrice heard her voice again. “Well, that wasn’t very nice.”

They whirled. She stepped out from behind a different spar, alive and whole and not even singed, the air around her grayed with layered shields.

Baltrice’s lips peeled back from her teeth, and another flame bolt gathered in her right hand-but before she could attack, she was blasted with glistening obsidian ooze from a third Vess, who was perched atop a curve of an overhead beam. The smothering goo knocked Baltrice sideways, and it clung to her shields, chewing down through them even as it caught fire from the shield and began to burn away.

“What in the hells?” As he sprang to Baltrice’s side, Jace raised his own defenses and pushed them thicker and deeper until everything he saw was some shade of blue. The roaring and blasting from Tezzeret’s battle against the conflagration of undead dragons rocked the world around him, and by the time he reached Baltrice, two more Lilianas had appeared, rising over the rim of the plinth, carried in the arms of spirits like black smoke with embers for eyes.

“You should give up, Jace,” one of them said.

He could no longer tell which Liliana was speaking.

“There will be as many of me as we need, Jace. You can’t win. Fighting will only get you hurt.”

“Baltrice, what’s going on?” he said, low, poised for combat. “How can she do this?”

“She can’t,” Baltrice snarled. “The only way she could pull this off is if she’s with a sonofabitching-”

“Clockworker,” Nicol Bolas supplied cheerfully from behind them, just as his huge talons closed around them both. “Right you are. Congratulations. Now don’t struggle, and this doesn’t have to hurt.”

Jace went boneless in his grip; he knew better than to fight Bolas. Baltrice, who also knew better than to fight Bolas, fought anyway, unleashing the full fury of her power, which could not even singe his talons.

This’d be the real Nicol Bolas, she figured. She still couldn’t make the bastard blink.

“Sad little girl,” the dragon said. “Did you think I wouldn’t be ready for you? Sleep now.”

A curl of power coiled in front of her face, then stabbed in through her shields almost without resistance. She collapsed into unconsciousness.

Jace took advantage of this brief distraction to slide a tendril of thought into the great dragon’s mind. Having become a great deal more proficient a mind ripper since their last encounter, he nursed a half-formed hope that he might be able to erase himself and Baltrice from Bolas’s mind, at least for long enough that they might be able to slip away. But in the instant he had within the dragon’s brain, he found something so astonishing that he gasped, “What in the hells is that doing there?”

Nicol Bolas turned his mind and gaze to Jace. “What in the hells is what doing where?”

Before Jace could reply, a flash of blue snaked under the dragon’s wing and speared into Beleren’s face-and Jace’s mind vanished. Simply disappeared.

It was gone as though his body had never been more than a mannequin. His body still breathed and his heart still beat, but the young mentalist was mind-dead.

As dead as Tezzeret had been.

Bolas snarled and twisted around-but Tezzeret was still battling the corpse dragons. Someone else must have done this. Or was doing it. Or was going to do it shortly. Or something. Even when he could do it himself, clockworking didn’t actually get easier to think logically about.

“Lilianas!” he said. Most of them were out in front of the Metal Sphinx, controlling the zombie Bolases that Tezzeret was so studiously dismantling, but a few were still lingering back here within the sound of his voice.

“Yes, Great and Mighty Bolas?” all eight of her replied in unison. She always called him that, and he didn’t even mind the bitter edge of sarcasm in her voice; he liked the title well enough that he might make it official. It would be particularly amusing to make Tezzeret use it. “Get up there and help your other selves stomp Tezzeret.” Bolas stopped for a moment, frowning. He was suddenly dizzy and decidedly queasy. A side effect of so much clockworking all at once? Or the effect of whatever it had been that Beleren saw? Whatever it was, he decided the time had come to bring this charade to a close.

He shook his head clear and said, “Don’t kill him. Just beat him until he can’t fight back. I need his mind intact.”

“As you command, Great and-”

“Save it. Just do as you’re told,” Bolas growled around his clenched teeth. Suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore.

He tucked away the pyromancer and the mind ripper’s empty body into an alternate time line, one in which Tezzeret had never reached the Metal Island. With the aid of a minor binding to preserve them in suspended animation, he could be confident that they would be there whenever he wanted them.

“I really should have learned this stuff a long time ago,” he said to himself. He decided not to think about Tezzeret’s suggestion that he’d learned clockworking centuries or even millennia before, and had simply forgotten. He remembered well enough being a functionally omnipotent master of time and space, back before the Final Mending, but those powers were far beyond him now. Clockworking was a different approach to almost the same thing, and was gratifyingly easy, for a being of his intellect and power.

If he ever figured out how, he might just slide over to a temporal main line where the Final Mending never happened. If he could find one, anyway. When first he’d searched for a main line where his power was undiminished, he’d discovered there weren’t any-which might indicate that the rabble of meddling Planeswalkers who’d forced the Final Mending down Dominia’s throat had been right all along. Bolas was gracious enough to grant them the possibility. It was easy to be generous, considering their Final Mending had killed them all.

A resounding detonation and its attendant spray of putrefying dragon blood and meat jerked him back to the present. He snarled at himself. Woolgathering again-and this time in the middle of a fight. An ugly trend, underlining the urgency of his project. No more daydreaming, he told himself. No more. Focus.

Tezzeret had said Bolas wasn’t the dragon he used to be, and Nicol Bolas had no intention of allowing the mechanist to discover how right he was. But even the tiniest sliver of a Bolas was worth a billion Tezzerets, and it was just about time to make that clear.

Just about time-Bolas chuckled to himself. Even after twenty-five thousand years, he was still his own best audience.

He moved out from the matrix of spars to give himself a little room to work; not that he actually needed room for what he was going to do. Clockworking as Bolas practiced it was primarily a mental activity, where all the interesting bits clustered around the intersection of perception and will, but nonetheless moving a little farther from the Metal Sphinx made everything roll along a bit more smoothly. Something about that vast mass of concentrated etherium fogged him up, somehow. He couldn’t actually lay a talon on what it was, except that the more etherium was around, the more difficulty he seemed to have keeping his mind on the business in front of him.

He reflected that once his business with Tezzeret was complete, he might want to destroy this entire universe. Removing all this etherium from creation would be doing himself a favor-but it would also more or less defeat the purpose of this whole endeavor. If only the damned stuff weren’t so bloody useful.

He sighed. Life would be better if he’d killed Crucius a thousand years ago… but on the other claw, he hadn’t yet fully explored the limits of this clockworking power. Perhaps that thousand-year-ago moment wasn’t entirely out of his reach-though some of the temporal stranding involved would be tricky. He might just be jumping himself into a different preexisting main line, or creating a new one, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he would know the difference-or if there even was a difference. And he wasn’t really sure whether or not jumping back to waste Crucius might be a good idea, or if he’d be correcting a mistake he already hadn’t made… and then the specter of the Final Mending hung over his past, too.

Though he no longer could entirely recall, he had a sense that the catastrophic damage to Dominia had something to do with time and paradoxes and, well… something. He couldn’t quite bring it to mind.

It was damnably difficult to navigate five dimensions with a four-dimensional mind. He supposed it would improve with practice; after all, he hadn’t met any of his future selves showing up to warn him he was making mistakes. Of course, if his future selves were anything like him, they wouldn’t give a hot squirt about anyone except themselves, including who they used to be, which was him. After all, he wasn’t in any hurry to jump back to deliver warnings to his own previous selves. Self. Whatever.

His attention was again rudely yanked back to the present by the broken, smoking corpse of a Liliana, which had sailed through the air in a high enough trajectory that she smacked squarely into his face, very nearly going up his nose.

He snapped his head side to side, snarling. What in any flavor of damnation was happening to him? With fierce concentration, he cast his perceptions sideways through time, searching the improbability-frayed temporal strands nearby. There were only two or three more time lines where he lay dead on the beach. He reached out to summon those corpses to his own strand, where they might be put to good use by any among his multiplicity of Lilianas… Wait.

His multiplicity of Lilianas had become surprisingly less multiple.

Unless one added to the count the dead Lilianas who lay scattered about the etherium beach in various states of catastrophic disrepair.

He nodded to himself; he should have expected this. Tezzeret had identified the root of his immediate problem and now was concentrating his counterstrikes on the Lilianas, who were considerably less durable than reanimated undead dragons-not to mention that those undead dragons wouldn’t be reanimated for very long without her power to direct them. Bolas searched nearby temporal strands, but he’d already raided them for their incarnations of Liliana. If he went farther afield, he could find only temporal strands in which the treacherous little necromancer had never bound herself to obey him in the first place, which made yanking any more of her into the middle of this brawl definitely inadvisable.

Tezzeret always had been clever.

But it was exactly his cleverness-the primary feature of which was his ability to focus profoundly on whatever immediate problem he faced-that here would destroy him. No matter how smart Tezzeret might be, no matter how incalculable the power he could wield in this place, he was still only human, with a human brain inside his human skull. He could truly focus only on one thing at a time.

Dragons, however…

Due to their saurian ancestry, most dragons retained great knots of neural ganglia between their wings and at the base of their tails, so large and complex that they were essentially subsidiary brains; the evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to coordinate their subbrains gave many dragons a multitasking capability far beyond any human’s imagination. And Nicol Bolas’s capabilities were beyond the imaginations of dragons.

His mind was a vast and cluttered place, stuffed with twenty-five thousand years of memories, half-forgotten spells, and disordered remnants of dreams and aspirations. Millennia before, he had begun a process of compartmentalizing his mind, setting up an organized mental structure that allowed him to access information he wanted without having to sift through metaphorical mountains of irrelevancies. In the process, he’d split off functions of cognitive processing, virtual minds whose responsibility was the management of each of their particular sectors of knowledge, experience, and skill.

While it was true that this strategy wasn’t currently working as well as it once had-a serious degradation of function that he was certain was wholly due to the destructive effect of the bloody Final Mending-it was more than sufficient for his current needs.

He assigned one submind to keeping track of Baltrice, and of Jace’s body, while investigating the source of the blue mana spell that had killed his mind while leaving his body intact. Another submind was occupied with examining his recent interactions with Tezzeret, especially with regard to Sharuum and the Metal Sphinx who may or may not be Crucius in whole or in part. A third submind managed the fight on the Metal Island-mostly a function of feeding bits of mana to bolster the defenses of whichever of his dead selves was currently being dismantled, and of monitoring his remaining Lilianas. He wanted to finish the fight with at least one left, because she was both valuable and amusing, and while he valued her as an asset, he didn’t want to go to the trouble that might be required to ensnare another version of her. This left his primary consciousness with nothing to worry about except subduing Tezzeret.

As he set about doing so, he found himself considerably amused by the occasional boasts that Tezzeret liked to make, about being the Multiverse’s greatest master of etherium. Apparently Tezzeret’s enormous intellect had managed to slide right past the fact that Bolas himself had created the Seekers of Carmot, and that there was nothing known by any of the Seekers that would not be known to the dragon as well. Not to mention that there were a number of features of etherium that Bolas was reasonably certain only he knew (and possibly Crucius, if the elusive sphinx ever turned up again). One of these was that due to etherium’s peculiar nature-existing simultaneously in reality and in the Blind Eternities-there were certain vulnerabilities that someone with the right sort of power might exploit.

The right sort of power, in this case, was a combination of planeswalking and clockworking.

Nicol Bolas subdivided his primary consciousness into three parts. One part undertook the mystical focusing of will that was the beginning of planeswalking. The second undertook to summon a specific subset of the dragon’s memories dealing with a certain type of magic. The third phased its attention into the near future, scanning the probability smears for hints of coalescence. When the first part completed its task, a hole in reality began to rip itself open… but instead of stepping into it, Bolas used the second part of his primary consciousness to reach into the Blind Eternities with an intention to doing one or more of a list of magics at his command, while the third kept focused on the future, seeking one that would end with Tezzeret in his hand.

The submind that had been processing his interactions with Tezzeret warned Bolas sternly not to kill him; there was still too much to be learned.

“I’m not going to kill him,” Bolas muttered to himself. “But this is going to hurt.”

He could judge the potential effect of each magic on his second part’s list by scanning the probable futures that shifted and developed as the second part considered this or that spell, power, or combination of such. Neither the first nor third part of his mind was actually aware of what spell he ended up using, but they didn’t have to be; the second part had that issue fully under control, as it was able to use the?theric dimension of Tezzeret’s armor to channel a combination of telekinesis and minor shaping that transformed, in the current reality, the inside of the mechanist’s etherium breastplate into a blade that shattered his breastbone, slashed open his heart, and severed his spine just between the shoulder blades.

“How’s that for power?” several of his subminds said in unison, as at least three of them saw-and one felt-the mechanist’s heart spew most of his blood out through the joints in his armor.

The Tezzeret-tasked submind, though, reacted with enough alarm to give Nicol Bolas actual pain.

“I already said I’m not going to kill him!” Bolas snarled. “Shut the hell up.”

As Tezzeret fell dying to the blood-caked sand, Bolas’s fourth submind released the power that held all but one of the Lilianas in this temporal strand. The last Liliana simply blinked in astonishment at her inexplicable victory until that same submind reached into her brain and said, Sleep, whereupon she collapsed into unconsciousness.

This freed up that submind to rejoin his primary consciousness, and-as the assigned tasks of two of the three divisions of his primary mind were complete-he reassembled an uncharacteristically large fraction of his mental resources to attend to the dying mechanist.

He stretched forth a talon, and Tezzeret’s limp body rose into the air and floated into his grasp, dripping liquid etherium as though the armor were ice instead of metal. When Tezzeret was once again naked, Bolas-who had a somewhat more detailed understanding of human anatomy than did nearly any human alive-worked a simple charm that placed the mechanist in a state of suspended animation similar to that of Baltrice and Jace. Bolas estimated that if he ever chose to reanimate Tezzeret, he’d be able to repair the physical damage with very little permanent loss of function.

He looked down with a contemptuous sneer upon the human lying broken and bloody in his grip. “As though I could ever be in any danger from you, you pathetic worm. I am Nicol Bolas! What have I to fear from any mortal mage?”

His second submind-that troublesome Tezzeret-tasked one again-inquired silently that if Bolas had never been in danger, why were all those nearby temporal strands loaded with his corpses? Which was a wholly disquieting question, and one he had no intention of pondering.

His primary consciousness reflected that his condition might be more grave than he’d allowed himself to believe. How far must you have deteriorated to have begun to heckle yourself?

He paused for a moment to assess his situation. His Tezzeret issue seemed to be well in hand-literally-and the lightly snoring form of Liliana could be easily enough shifted into suspended animation, and both of them could without much difficulty be stored next to Jace and Baltrice on the Metal Island in that nearby temporal strand… so this was exactly what he did.

“I suppose that means I win,” he said. “Whoopee.”

It was impossible to be much elated by victory over such pathetic opponents; celebrating this triumph would be like doing a victory dance after stepping on an anthill.

Still: not bad. And accomplished by very little cost or exertion on his part. He supposed he could give himself points for style-for what Tezzeret would call elegance. Poor little Tezzeret… just another of the ants.

He could not quite make himself believe it, though. It didn’t seem real. Had he really snared not only Tezzeret, but Liliana, and Jace and Baltrice, after all this time?

Apparently so. He could not find a temporal strand anywhere in which they were not his prisoners. So that, in so many words, was that. Period.

He glanced up at the expressionless face of the Metal Sphinx. “And I’m pretty sure you’re not going anywhere.”

The sphinx-after the custom of his kind-did not reply.

Bolas stepped close to the sphinx’s cleanly abstracted semblance of a forepaw, and he laid his own talons upon it, marveling in the thought that this, right here, might be all there was left of Crucius. All there would ever be.

“What were you thinking, though? What brought you here? Why is this place what it is?”

He supposed he would find these questions a great deal more compelling if he actually cared about their answers. He had not only five more Planeswalkers to add to the considerable assortment under his absolute control, but also now this unimaginably vast trove of etherium. He discounted Tezzeret’s assertion that it could not be taken from this plane. The sets of What Tezzeret Can’t Do and of What Bolas Can’t Do did not intersect in any meaningful way. Discovering how he could take the etherium-all the etherium-with him was simply a question of evaluating powers that Tezzeret did not have, lore that Tezzeret did not know, and magics that Tezzeret could not work.

All this etherium, and all the many Planeswalkers in his hands, and now that he thought about it, he realized that what he had right now might actually, finally, unexpectedly, be enough.

“Maybe I really have won. Won it all. Hmp. Whoopee again.” He sighed. “My Crowning Moment of Triumph should really have been more dramatic.”

He passed some considerable interval wandering a bit aimlessly around the island, admiring the etherium trees and the etherium grass and the etherium outcroppings of bedrock that shouldered into the light. And speaking of light… He frowned down at the shadow he cast upon the etherium underbrush. Something about his shadow was troubling him, and for a long moment he couldn’t seem to work out what it was.

Ah, that was it. His shadow hadn’t moved.

Well, it did move when he did-it was after all his shadow-but its angle was exactly the same as it had been when he’d first arrived here. Hours ago. Did this planet not rotate? What in the hells was going on here?

Where we are is all one place. Here, it’s always now.

He moved around to the front of the vast etherium plinth, kicking aside heedlessly the ragged remnants of both his own corpses and Liliana’s. He was not sentimental, and pity was alien to his nature. Even self-pity. Something was going or had gone or will go terribly wrong, and his clockworking ability seemed to make it or had made it or will make it worse instead of better.

He had to know or he had to go. Probably both.

He spared the infantile doggerel on the plinth’s east face only enough of a glance to register that it was written in a long-vanished dialect of Classical Draconic… Wait, that was the language his parents had spoken… a language no living creature had heard or spoken in the twenty-four thousand years since his birthplace had been destroyed and all his close relatives slaughtered (to be precise, since his birthplace had been destroyed and all his close relatives slaughtered by him). He then indulged a passing wonderment at how Tezzeret could possibly have even recognized the glyphs for what they were, much less deciphered what they stood for.

He actually turned to ask before he remembered that he’d sequestered Tezzeret in a different temporal strand, and that awakening him to inquire would not only require a considerable expenditure of mana to heal his wounds, but it would also force Bolas to endure more of the artificer’s unspeakably irritating conversation.

Bolas shook his head, disgusted with himself again. Really, this advancing senility or whatever it was had gotten entirely out of control. Good thing he had all this etherium, and all his captive Planeswalkers, because he really needed to get his whole personal recovery and reconstruction business fully under way before he forgot what it was he needed to… what?

He couldn’t remember why he had to remember anything, much less what it might be. How was he supposed to think around here? An unanswerable question, which led him inexorably toward an even less pleasant contemplation.

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.