Test of Metal

THE METAL ISLAND

Nicol Bolas settled himself onto the etherium sand. At last he could begin to excise the artificer’s annoying little gimmicks and get himself out of here. “Damn, I thought he’d never leave.”

“You and me both, brother.”

Bolas lurched upright. The voice had been impossibly deep, impossibly dark, and most of all, impossibly close.

Behind him was a rip in the fabric of the universe, held open by some impressively sizable talons. Bolas gathered himself into a crouch-talons like those usually belonged to dragons, and from their dimensions, it wasn’t impossible that this new planeswalking dragon, whoever it was, might be even larger than Bolas himself. “Take it easy, pal,” the new dragon said. “I’m not here to fight.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not,” Bolas growled, “because you have no idea who you’re about to-”

“It’s more the other way around,” the new dragon said as he shouldered his way into the world. He stopped, stretched, and gaped his great fanged mouth wide in a jaw-cracking yawn.

Nicol Bolas stared in uncomprehending astonishment. “You-you look just like me!”

“That’s more the other way around, too.” The dragon grinned down at him, and Bolas realized that despite the resemblance, this dragon was vastly larger than he was, and younger, and possessed of a staggering magnitude of power that Bolas could only faintly glimpse. All his senses, magical as well as physical, told him that this dragon was so powerful he shouldn’t be able to even exist…

Nothing in his twenty-five thousand years of life had prepared him to face a being like this. “You-are you-who-I mean, what? What’s going on? It’s as if you’re me.”

“I am you,” the new dragon said with a vast and gleaming fang-filled grin. “You’re the one who’s not you.”

“What?”

“Nice job with Tezzeret, by the way. You learn a lot about someone by how he treats you when he’s got nothing to fear. And now we’ve got him working for us willingly. Enthusiastically. Hells, he thinks he’s doing us a favor.”

Bolas still couldn’t quite get his mind around what was happening, though a terrible dread had begun to curdle in his gut. “Us? What do you mean, us?”

“Oh, well, there’s that, I suppose.” The dragon waved a talon in languid dismissal. “By us, you should understand that I mean me. There is no you. Not really.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know, you’re having a hard time with this,” the other dragon said sympathetically. “There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that constructs like you have a pretty limited useful life span. You start to break down only a day or two after you’re created. You must have noticed how it’s gotten harder and harder to think.”

“Constructs? Like me?” Bolas shook his head wildly, as though he could jerk himself awake from this terrible nightmare. “You’re saying I’m… that I’ve always been…”

“Don’t take it too hard,” the other dragon said. “It’s a fail-safe, really. Otherwise, every time I put one like you together, I’d have to chase you down and kill you myself, just to keep you from screwing around in my business.”

“Your business? I still don’t understand…”

“Of course you don’t. In addition to that construct thing I told you about, I also had to make you pretty stupid.”

“What?”

“If you were a tenth as smart as I am, you would have been ten times too smart to fall into Tezzeret’s trap. As it is, you’ll be dead a few hours from now, and your corpse will evaporate. If I want Tezzeret to find a Nicol Bolas here when he gets back, I’ll have to make another of you. Maybe even several more.”

“You’re saying-you’re saying that you-?”

“Damn, you really are stupid,” the larger dragon said. “Well, I guess Tezzeret can’t be wrong about everything, can he?”

The vast, unimaginably powerful dragon looked down upon the pale, dying simulacrum he had created, and sighed.

“Yes, idiot. I am the real Nicol Bolas,” he said. “And I did not reach my exceedingly advanced age by being stupid enough to do my dirty work in person.”

“No?” The simulacrum coughed weakly, and after a moment the real Nicol Bolas realized his creation was laughing. At him. “Doing it right now, aren’t you?”

The real Nicol Bolas scowled and made no reply.

“Maybe that’s the real lesson,” the simulacrum said. “You should make a note of it, so you don’t forget.

“Because when you come right down to it, none of us is as smart as we think we are.”