Test of Metal

TEZZERET

This is a stupid plan,” Baltrice said. “And that’s coming from a girl who knows something about stupid plans. I’ve come up with some doozies. But never this stupid. Seriously, Tezzeret, you’re begging him to kill you.”

“Not quite,” I said, a bit abstractedly because most of my attention was focused on fashioning greaves and sabatons out of my sled’s remaining etherium, while reserving enough for rerebraces, vambraces, and gauntlets. “I’m allowing him to choose whether or not to do so, which is not the same thing.”

“Might as well be,” she said. “What in the hells are you gonna do when he makes you start to age like a year per second or something?”

“In that eventuality,” I said, “I’ll depend on you to rescue me.”

“Yeah. And hope that I can get to you-or him-before he kills you.”

I returned my full attention to my work; the obvious needed no validation.

“I’m just worried, that’s all,” she said. “Waiting gets to me. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“You’re waiting,” I said. “I’m working.”

The sabatons seemed to be coming together nicely. Creating my armor from the untempered etherium of my gravity sled obviated the need for tools or workshop. The metal was more than malleable enough to shape with my will alone. It meant as well that the armor would not prove to be much of a defense against spear, sword, arrow, or javelin-but those were not the sorts of threat that concerned me.

I manipulated the several joints of the sabaton’s instep, to ensure that its flexibility sufficed to allow me to walk normally without being so loose that it might expose my tender flesh to Silas Renn’s untender attentions. Finding it suitable, I created its mate without difficulty, donned them both, and moved on to my greaves.

“You’re betting a hell of a lot that he’s a reasonable man,” Baltrice said.

“I am gratified by your concern.”

“I’m not worried for you,” she said. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“It’s-well, you’re tossing my boss’s life in the pot, too. That’s who I’m worried about.”

“Of course you are.” The greaves were actually quite simple, and fitting them to my calves was the work of a moment. I moved on to the gauntlets.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I glanced up at her. “The nature of your working relationship is not a mystery to me.”

She squinted at me suspiciously. I went back to work on my gauntlets.

“I still don’t see how doing something stupid isn’t actually stupid.”

“I won’t pretend it’s not stupid,” I said, “but I believe that of all the varieties of stupid at our disposal, this is the safest.”

“The safest way to go in would be to find the bastard in one of your scrying bowls, then open this gate of yours right behind his neck and boil his brain till his skull explodes.”

“I have explained the issues with direct assault,” I said, again a bit distantly, as the gauntlets proved a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. To make them glovelike, with individually jointed fingers, might consume enough etherium that I’d need to cannibalize some of Baltrice’s sled to complete my bascinet. “Renn may have been here for weeks, subjectively-even months. He knows your abilities, and mine, and he has had more than sufficient time to prepare a defense against any attack we can devise. Which is why we’re not going to attack.”

“Yeah, I follow the logic. It’s just not exactly my style, you know?”

“Yes.” I looked up from the gauntlet, a frown curdling upon my brow. “Nor mine, in fact. The old me-the angry man with the etherium arm-would no doubt use this etherium to devise several Tezzeret doppelgangers of some sort, thinking to use them to confuse Renn’s foresight, as cover for a lightning sally of overwhelming destructive force.”

“Hey, I like that one!” Doc chirped.

Baltrice said, “Sounds un-stupid to me.”

“Doc agrees with you,” I said, “which is reason enough to abandon it.”

“Aww, Tezz, that hurts.”

“I wonder if you even know what it is to hurt,” I muttered in reply. “Do you understand suffering at all?”

“Have to listen to you, don’t I?”

That was, I reflected, a fair point. “Baltrice, there is no form of attack that Renn can’t anticipate. Given enough subjective time, he can scan very nearly all his possible futures. The attack I just described is no doubt among them. And this is why I have no intention of attacking him-why I can’t intend to attack him, or so much as plan a contingency assault. Any tactic I can devise, no matter how subtle or arcane, will be obvious to him in the very instant he first sees me.”

She shook her head skeptically, watching me sidelong. “You are different,” she said.

I shrugged and went back to work on the gauntlet. “So are you.”

“Do you ever wonder who you really are?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” The solution for the gauntlet was clear-a succession of five overlapping bands to cover the backs of my hands and fingers, so that making a fist would protect my entire hand, though my palms would remain bare.

That being accomplished, I focused my will to once again draw from the plates threads of etherium finer than hairs. The hand being relatively more sensitive than the chest and back or the legs, worming those threads in through my skin for the direct connection to my motor neurons was exceptionally uncomfortable, rather like dipping my hand in boiling water. But the direct connection would allow me to use the armor much in the same way as I had used my erstwhile right arm: as an extension of myself.

“You know Bolas did something to you, right?” Baltrice was still giving me that sidelong squint. “That he made you different from who you used to be?”

“It seems the simplest explanation. Otherwise, the difference in my behavior would have to be ascribed to some conjectural experience in a hypothetical afterlife-an afterlife I can neither recall nor seriously imagine.”

The only problem with the vambraces and rerebraces was how to properly joint the elbow. It would have been easier if plate armor had ever been the fashion on Esper, as opposed to our defensive magics. All I had to work from were some none-too-detailed memories of Bantian crusaders and my own ingenuity.

“Doesn’t it bother you? I mean, it’s like he turned you into one of those golems you used to make all the time, except you’re self-aware. You’re so calm all the time, it’s festering creepy. Don’t you ever feel like you should, you know, act like the real you? Do things how you know the real Tezzeret would?”

I set the vambrace on her gravity sled, and for a long moment I stared at the sand beneath my feet. I had no idea how to express an honest answer to her question.

At length, I could say only, “Baltrice, I am the real Tezzeret.”

“Yeah?” She squinted at me. “How do you know?’

I spread my hands. “How do you know you’re the real Baltrice?”

“Well, I–I mean, you know, what do you want me to say? I just am.”

“Yes. I, too, just am.”

“Except you’re not,” she said. “Look, I spent a lot of time with you back before-you know. And I’ve spent time with you here. You are not the same guy.”

“Did you like my previous self better?”

“Oh, Hells no,” she said. “You were a dead plumb rat bastard.”

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“I’m not complaining. I’m wondering. I’m wondering what goes on inside your head. Because, you know, there were a lot of things the old Tezzeret could be called, but hard to read sure as hell isn’t one of them.”

“Perhaps you find me hard to read because you’re looking for depth where there is none to be found. I am what you see. Neither more nor less.”

“Depth, nothing. You’re completely festering screwed in the head, and you act like you’re glad about it.”

“Baltrice, let me turn this around,” I said slowly, and with great care, as this was a subject to broach with her gently. “I, too, remember you as being different from who you are now. The Baltrice I knew was… Well, let’s just say you seemed unhappy. Viciously unhappy. And you seemed to be interested primarily in inflicting unhappiness upon as many other beings as possible, often in the form of burn scars.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t very nice.” She shrugged. “Still not.”

“But you are,” I said. “You smile now. You laugh. You occasionally make a joke that doesn’t involve harming or humiliating someone. You think about things other than how to hurt people.”

“Yeah, well, I found a better job.” She waved a hand. “Again no offense.”

“Again none taken.” I smiled at her, as openly and innocently as all my craft could conspire to display. “But suppose, for just a moment, that your happiness had a foundation more concrete than simply enjoying your work. Suppose someone had made you happy-say, for the sake of argument, with a secret wish like what you’d find in children’s adventure stories. If some mysterious benefactor had cast a spell to transform you from the bitter, angry, aggressive woman you once were into the confident, cheerful woman you’ve become, wouldn’t you be grateful?”

“Are you kidding?” She stared at me incredulously. “If some bastard put magic on me to screw with my life? You think I’d thank him?”

“I would.”

“I’d jam both hands in his ass and rip him in half from the bottom up.” She looked as though even considering the possibility had brought anger to a rolling boil. “People who screw with me get third-degree thank-yous.”

I maintained my smile, to show her I’d not intended to make her angry. “I suppose you haven’t changed so much after all.”

“Festering right I haven’t.” She was still tilting her head, though, and giving me those sidelong looks. “You’re really saying you’re okay with it? Knowing that Nicol Bolas stuck his talons into your brain and stirred it like soup?”

“That was Jace,” I reminded her.

She flushed. “He had reason.”

“Granted,” I said easily. Jace Beleren was a subject about which I could not expect her to be rational. “But Bolas was the one who, to extend your metaphor, un-stirred my brain. With his own real-life version of that spell from the adventure stories. Hypothetically. I’m confident it’s within the range of his powers to alter my brain to make me less volatile, less avaricious, more focused, possibly even more intelligent. More capable in every way. If this is so, I owe him more thanks than I do hatred.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Yes, I have lost my precious arm-but Beleren did that, not Bolas. What Bolas has done is restore me to life and health, and to set me forth upon exactly the fantastical quest I had painfully outgrown, and was forced to abandon decades ago-and because of who I’ve become, I may actually have a chance to achieve what has always been my heart’s most cherished desire. How can I not be grateful? Should I hate Bolas for making me a better man?”

“He made you a better tool.”

“I still fail to see why you think this should upset me.”

“And I can’t understand why it doesn’t. Tezzeret, you’re barely even human.”

“Yes,” I said, picking up the vambrace again. “That’s exactly my point.”

I stopped for a moment before triggering the gate, pausing with my fingers on the control surface of the intricate etherium archway, and looked back at Baltrice. She crouched on her sled, bobbing gently a few feet above the sand. “Controls functional?”

“Sure.” She demonstrated by manipulating the twin control sticks to spin the gravity sled fully around, shoot it toward me, and bring it to an instant stop a hand span from my legs. “Same as when you asked two minutes ago.”

“It’d be better if you’d let me set you up with a mindlink.”

“Maybe in my next life.”

“Those control sticks are the sled’s only moving parts,” I reminded her severely. “If too much sand accumulates-”

“I know, I know.”

“How’s the view?”

She flipped forward my most recent modification to her earpiece, a jointed arm that supported a small ring of etherium a couple of inches in front of her left eye. I blinked as I found the earpiece-ear-and-eyepiece-with my mind. “Focus all right?”

“Dunno.” She squinted through the loop. “All I see from here is a giant festering pile of stupid.”

“Hey, same as me!” Doc chimed in.

“Exactly,” I said, which served as a sufficient response for them both; her view came from the perspective of my left eye. “Doc, I need your whole mind on the job, all right? Sometimes you see things I don’t, which may very well make the difference between success and an ugly death.”

“I’m with you, Tezz. In every conceivable sense. But you know if I had even a hint of a better idea-”

“I’d be thrilled to hear it,” I finished for him. “Baltrice. Ready?”

“Close to it as this lifetime’s gonna get.”

I sent a pulse of mana through my hand into the control surface of the transit gate, and within its archway, the view of the dune beyond wavered and wiped itself away, showing now an up-close-and-personal view of several thousand zombie butts.

“Wow,” Doc said hoarsely. “Wow, they’re worse from close up, huh? Practically smell ’em. Shudder.”

“Yes.” One last glance over my pauldron to Baltrice. “A transit gate is not like a conventional teleport,” I reminded her. “It’s a reality warp, to bring the two points together.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, like a magic door. I get it.”

“Just bear in mind that it’s not a magic door. Do not linger on the threshold,” I said. “I’m holding it open with my own power. When you activate it, the gate will draw on the innate power of the etherium of the archway. It will stay active for only about five seconds, so don’t delay. If it deactivates while you’re passing through, there will be part of you there, and part of you here, and both parts will be messily dead. Right?”

“Right,” she said, all business now.

“If the gate fails somehow with you on this side of it, remember that your sled is very fast. We’re only fifteen miles out, which that sled can cover in less than two minutes from a standing start. Just don’t-”

“Stand up or stick my arms out from the energy screen, or do anything stupid. Stupider. I got it.”

“If all goes well, you’ll never need to move at all. I will let you know via the earpiece when matters are settled. Then you can either return to Vectis or stick with me, at your discretion.”

“Yeah, and how likely is all to go well?”

“It’s not. At all. But the possibility must be prepared for.”

“Yeah.” She gazed pensively through the etherium archway at what I would face at the Labyrinth. At length, she took a deep breath and said softly, “Luck to you.”

“And to you. To us both.”

“It’s a hell of a thing you’re doing. A hell of a thing,” she said. “But I guess you never were a coward. Maybe you’re not so different after all.”

“You’d be amazed.” I turned for the gate.

“Tezzeret?”

I paused at the threshold.

“Have you thought about-I mean, what if he actually takes you up on it? What’ll you do if he just, like, opens his arms and says, Glad to see ya, come on in?”

“Drop dead from the shock,” I said, and stepped through.