Test of Metal

TEZZERET

I arrived a few yards short of the outer fringe of the zombie mob. Checking back over my shoulder revealed no sign of the gate, which was as it should be. I triggered the eye-and-ear link built into my bascinet. “You there?”

“Everything’s go,” she whispered in my ear.

“All right, then.” I activated my armor’s primary defenses, took a deep breath-and was seized by a fit of uncontrollable retching.

“Duh-ammn,” Doc said. “Gag. Choke. Guess I was wrong about smelling ’em before, huh? Gag some more. Retch, too, just to be sociable.”

I was unable to reply, as the feculent miasma of decay gases unleashed by the rotting flesh of a million-plus zombies had exceeded by far the limits of my imagination, and thus also overwhelmed my countermeasures. I was wholly occupied with trying to avoid filling my bascinet with my own vomit.

Holding my breath did not help, as the air I inhaled might as well have been a chemical weapon. It scalded my nose and throat, and presumably my lungs as well, triggering an equally convulsive spasm of coughing. Eventually, I gathered enough of my mental resources to tweak the armor’s anti-sand field, intensifying its blue crackle so that it would burn off noxious decay products as it did the desert’s powdered glass-and so I was once more able to breathe.

“Tezzeret, what happened? Are you hit? What’s going on?”

“Nothing. It’s all right. Zombies stink.”

“Well sure they do, but-”

“Imagine swimming in nyxathid vomit.”

“Ooo. Damn, do I have to?”

“I have a fix. One moment.” I was able to mentally retrace my armor’s link to her ear-and-eyepiece, and adjust her anti-sand field as I had my own; she couldn’t be much use to me if she was retching too hard to breathe. “That should cover you. Now it’s your turn to cover me.”

“I’m on it.”

I activated another prepared spell, this one a very straightforward sonic illusion, which made the sky seem to crack with thunder, and followed with words that might be heard, like thunder, for tens of miles.

“MY NAME IS TEZZERET.

“I AM NOT HERE TO FIGHT. I WOULD SPEAK WITH THOSE WHO SEEK THE