Test of Metal

TEZZERET

The hand I brought to my mouth came back bloody. Hot oil trickled down the back of my head: scalp wound. No concern there: my great mass of thick hair would both absorb blood and trigger coagulation. If any bones were broken, they didn’t yet hurt, though I anticipated that once the shock wore off, I would be in considerable pain.

Bolas paced toward me across the cavern, smiling, which on a dragon indicates neither amusement nor friendliness. It’s a display of how many large and pretty teeth he has, and how sharp they are. “Tezzeret, Tezzeret,” he murmured, insufferably pleased with himself. “Tezzie-may I call you Tezzie?”

“Can I stop you?”

Almost too fast to be seen, his foreleg lashed out, and he seized me in his talons. “The list of what you can’t stop me from doing is, I’m pretty sure, infinite.”

To demonstrate the truth of this, he tossed me sharply upward, as a child might a ball. I bounced off the ceiling, got a mouthful of fresh blood when my teeth clacked together and ripped open my cheek, and then tumbled helplessly back into his grasp.

It occurred to me that Bolas might possibly have done all this simply for the pleasure of killing me personally.

“I admit and confess that you are larger than I am,” I said, a bit thickly due to the blood and ragged scraps of the inside of my cheek. “You are stronger than I am. You can snuff my life with a thought. Can we skip the rest of your Intimidate the Naked Prisoner game and jump straight to what you want from me?”

His talons closed around me so tightly that black splotches bloomed in my vision. “But I like this game,” he said. “What I like best about it is that it’s not over until I get bored. By then you’ll be free…” He smiled again. “Or lunch.”

He let up on the pressure, as I’d known he would; if he aspired to mutilate an unconscious body, he had no need to use mine. “How long have you been here?”

“Before just now?”

This answer meant either that he thought me stupid, or that he was playing stupid.

Stupider.

I decided to explain. “You didn’t arrive by teleport-no air displacement. Nor did you shift in from the Blind Eternities-even you can’t planeswalk swiftly or accurately enough to make that sophomorically dramatic entrance. Finally, I could smell you.”

“Smell me?” One scaly brow ridge took on a deeper arch. “Really?”

“At first, I thought it was my armpits. I have two words for you, old worm.” I held up a finger. “Dental.” I folded that finger and lifted the next. “Floss.”

I fully expected him to crush me until I passed out; or, alternatively, that he would start bouncing me off the walls again. Instead, he did what I was least expecting: he chuckled and set me down. He then lowered himself into what might have been, for a dragon, a comfortable position, looking for all the Multiverse as though he’d just stopped by for a friendly chat.

Bouncing off walls seemed to be a more attractive option.

I waited for him to speak. He seemed content to simply recline on the crystal floor, wrap his tail around his neck, and chuckle. A dragon’s chuckle is very like rubbing two bricks together. Against your teeth. I didn’t wait very long; if I wished to play patience games, I would have chosen an opponent younger than, for example, human civilization. “You need me for something.”

“Need you? Don’t insult me. It amuses me to employ you in a particular task. If you fail?” Bolas rather absently began to clean out his nose with the tip of his tail. “That will amuse me, too. If you succeed, you may be rewarded… with other tasks.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“The opportunity,” Bolas said, “to obey me by choice.”

“I’ve had better offers.”

“It’s not an offer,” the dragon said. “It’s a description of reality. Do you understand the difference?”

“Let’s not start on what we do and do not understand,” I said. “What specifically do you want of me?”

“Not yet. There is one feature of our new working relationship that I’ve really been looking forward to showing you.”

“Are we back to Intimidate the Naked Prisoner already?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, we are, but with a new rule. As much as I enjoy bashing you into the rocks, the scent of your blood is making me peckish. And I can’t be wasting my life showing up to slap you around every time you need it. I’d hardly have time for anything else. So I’ve brought a friend for you.”

“I don’t have friends.”

“You do now,” he assured me, in a cheerfully evil tone, like a demonic used-carriage salesman. “But don’t worry, he won’t hurt your reputation. And he doesn’t have a reputation to worry about. I call him Mr. Chuckles.”

“I’m bored already.”

“I can fix that,” the dragon said. “Though I suppose you’re right-Mr. Chuckles is an undignified name. Let’s call him Jest, shall we? And make him a doctor. Doctor Jest. Do you like it? Doesn’t matter.” This seemed to tickle the dragon in some private way, as though it referenced a joke only he knew. “Doctor Jest, be polite. Introduce yourself to Tezzeret.”

This introduction took the form of a shattering blast of agony so overwhelming that I instantly collapsed. It felt like being hit by lightning while I was roasted alive in wasp venom. Over and over and over. I spasmed into convulsions, which did me the favor of banging my head into the floor hard enough to knock me unconscious.

Briefly.

“I know you’re awake, Tezzie. Sit up.”

My hand found yet another scalp wound. “Do I have to?”

“Unless you’d rather get the invitation from Doctor Jest.”

“All right. All right, don’t,” I said, my voice husky. I had probably been screaming. I didn’t remember. “Doctor Jest?”

“You don’t think he’s funny? I just about laughed my tail off.”

“What is it?”

“He.”

“He. Whatever. What is he?”

“You don’t need to know,” Bolas said. “All you need to know about your new best friend is that he has only two purposes in life. The first, as you’ve discovered, is to cause you pain. Unsupportable agony, in fact.”

“Anytime I do something you don’t like.”

“Almost. I don’t ask Doctor Jest to read my mind. So he has some leeway; he’ll hurt you anytime he thinks you might be doing something I won’t like-or that you might be about to. Get it?”

“So that ‘obey me by choice’ business was a joke.”

“You never did appreciate my sense of humor.”

“I get it,” I said. “You don’t have to show me again.”

“The other thing Doctor Jest lives for is to make sure you don’t do anything foolish, like try to run away from me. At your first inkling of attempting to planeswalk without my express permission, he will put you right back here. And I think you understand that here is a place you can’t get out of on your own. Still with me?”

“I told you: I get it.” I held up my right arm of meat. “Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it better if I’m not crippled. If this task is something you prefer I succeed at, give me back my arm.”

“Well…” The dragon shrugged. “Can’t really help you. Sorry. Best I can do is cut off the new one.”

“Give me my real arm and I’ll do it myself. I have before. Is watching me suffer your petty revenge more important than this task you raised me from the dead for?”

“Raised you from the dead? Don’t flatter yourself. I undid some of Beleren’s damage to your brain, that’s all.”

“Ah.” At the time, that was all I could think to say.

“It’s kind of complicated. You were dead enough for me; I’m not a philosopher. He just didn’t bother to finish the job on your body. Probably thought you’re not worth the trouble.”

Not worth the trouble. “I’ll have to thank him. Personally.”

“If you find him, I wouldn’t mind thanking him a bit myself. He’d make a better agent than you ever will.”

“And my arm?”

“It was gone when I found you,” he said. “Probably a lovely parting gift from Jace. Lying in some swamp on Kamigawa, I’d guess-if he’d tried to take it with him, I’d have known. I did arrange for the new one. Don’t you like it?”

“I’m not that attached to it.”

The dragon gave me a cough’s worth of courtesy laugh. “So… wait, Tezzie. Really? You thought I raised you from the dead? You thought I took off your arm? Really?”

“I was reasoning from available evidence.” And, I realized, my conclusion was accurate even though both of my premises were flawed; a curious phenomenon, and one that might bear further investigation.

Bolas shook his head pityingly. “I know you have an irrationally high opinion of yourself, but seriously, Tezzeret, get a clue. You’re not remotely that important.”

“Important enough for you to arrange all this.”

“Tezzie, it’s not about you. Really. You’re here because I have spent a very long time setting up an exceedingly elaborate prank, and you’re the only person I know who’ll really appreciate it. You’re audience. Nothing more. Well-let’s say, you’re an educated audience.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“You’ll be impressed.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“Satisfaction guaranteed or double your money back. Do you remember,” Bolas said, mock coy, “when we first met?”

“Sure I remember. You wore red. The demons wore black.” Even the threat of agony wasn’t enough to make Bolas interesting. “Ah, the romance of Grixis when the corpse fungus blooms…”

Bolas started scraping those bricks together again. “The question’s relevant, Tezzie. We met not long after you murdered the Hieresiarch of the Seekers of Carmot.”

My jaw locked; playtime was over. “I murdered no one.”

“You ripped a sick old man’s head off his shoulders and left it on the desk in his study,” Bolas said. “What should I call it? Self-defense?”

“Call it a better death than he deserved,” I said through my teeth. “Amalex Pannet was just another bandit.”

“A bandit? That wheezy old fart? What did he ever steal from you?”

“Three years of service.” Even now, well beyond a decade on, the wound was raw. “Three years of devotion. Three years I spent doing their scut work. Enduring their petty humiliations. Three years studying their useless pretend wisdom to show them I was worthy of learning their made-up fraud of a mystery. Three years of belief in their horseshit.”

“You sound like you’re angry all over again.”

“Not again,” I said. “Still.”

“After all these years? Whatever happened to forgive and forget?”

“I don’t forget, and I don’t trade in forgiveness; I give none and I don’t expect to get any. There are consequences,” I said as evenly as I could manage, “for abusing my good nature.”

Bolas snorted. “What good nature?”

I sought to replicate his too-many-teeth smile. “The good may be rhetorical. The consequences aren’t.”

“Oh, Tezzie, I’m flattered,” Bolas said, splaying one taloned foot against his chest like a blushing debutante. “A threat? Just for me? You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s not a threat, Bolas. It’s a reminder.” I could play his redefinition game, too-better than he could.

He pretended to find something interesting on the ceiling. “And what was your original disagreement with the Seekers of Carmot? You killed what, four of them? A respectable body count, especially against an order of mages. Why so angry?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.” My jaw ached with strain. “The Seekers were your damned hand puppets in the first place! You invented the whole festering Order!”

“Humor me.” The dragon turned his eyes on me, and the fake insouciance evaporated, leaving only bleak malice. “I’m about to spring the punch line, Tezzie. This little prank that I’ve been setting up for years. Decades. Play along.”

This did not sound like a friendly request.

“All right,” I said. I managed a deep breath, and another, and got a better grip on my temper. “All right. I joined the Seekers of Carmot for only one reason: to learn the secret of etherium creation. I had considerable hope invested in them and their secret. I had spent more than ten years, with great effort and at considerable personal risk, to amass the etherium for my right arm.”

I held up my meat arm and wriggled its fingers. ‘My erstwhile right arm,’ I corrected myself. The Seekers said they could create etherium. They had supposedly uncovered the secret during intensive study of the legacy of this imaginary Mad Sphinx of theirs, something to do with a mythological mineral called sangrite that can be infused with?ther by using another mythological substance called carmot. Presto change-o, new etherium. If they’d been telling the truth, it would have revolutionized life on Esper.”

“If,” Bolas said, getting those bricks scraping again. “Go on.”

“Only the Fellowship-the Fellows of the Arcane Council, the most advanced and holy adepts of the entire Order-were allowed to read and care for the book they called the Codex Etherium, where they had recorded everything they’d learned about Crucius, about his life and wisdom, his disappearance, his techniques of working etherium… and the secrets of carmot and sangrite. With the ancient sphinxian wisdom in the Codex, the Fellowship-alone among all the mages of Esper-could create etherium. So I joined them. I studied with them, trained with them, took their orders-I even mucked out their damned toilets-for three years. Because I believed. I did. I thought we were going to transform Esper into paradise. I even told-”

I bit down hard enough to draw fresh blood from my injured cheek. There was no reason to tell Bolas about my last visit to my father’s hovel in Tidehollow-about how I had been practically babbling with enthusiasm, and what my father had said…

Bolas didn’t need to know.

“So?” the dragon said, his upper lip peeling back. “Tell me about this paradise, Tezzie.”

I shrugged with a great deal more nonchalance than I felt. “There’s nothing to tell. It was all lies. As you know. Every scrap and every shred. Lies.”

The curve of his upper lip twisted toward a definite sneer. “Are you sure?”

“I was there, Bolas. I broke into the Sanctum. I read the Codex-no. I opened the Codex. There was nothing to read. Nothing. The whole rectum-blistering book was blank.”

Bolas unwrapped his tail from his neck and stood, folding his wings and looking so happy that I knew whatever came next would be bad.

“So, Tezzie, nice story,” he said. “Entertaining, and enlightening! You deserve a special surprise, and here it is-the task you will perform for me. You’re going to find Crucius.”

“Oh, is that all?” I could not restrain a snort. “Brilliant. Is that your genius punch line? Where should I start looking? Up your ass?”

He laughed. “That’s what I like best about you, Tezzie. Repartee, gold-plated vocabulary, culture and education and refinement… Scratch that cultured Esper mage with one fingernail, and all you find underneath is just another filthy scrapper’s spawnling… What did they call you? Cave brats? You can take the boy out of Tidehollow, but…”

“Who I am-what I was-has never been a secret. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.”

“But you are anyway.” Bolas had his too-many-teeth smile going again. “Now: Crucius.”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s not real-that whole Mad Sphinx business is just more of the Seekers’ lies.”

“How sure are you?”

“As sure as I-” The dragon’s hideously smug grin stopped me in mid-reply. “I don’t… I mean, what are you saying?”

“There. See? That’s the punch line.”

I could only stare in dumb incomprehension.

“You don’t get it? Joke’s on you, cave brat. Crucius is real. He is a sphinx, and he did create etherium. He’s a Planeswalker, just like us. Come on, Tezzie-did you really think everything the Seekers taught was a lie?”

“I…” I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say. “I suppose I did.”

“Now, that’s comedy-but wait, there’s more!” The dragon shrugged open his wings and spread them as if to say, Look around, dumbass. “Where do you think we are?”

“What do you mean?”

“This.” He reached over, and with a casual yank he broke loose a chunk of the rose-glowing crystal bigger than my two doubled fists. He tossed it to me.

The chunk of crystal was heavy, far denser than it looked… and in its depths, I could see little flaws, like tiny cracks spidering through the rock… and it was from these flaws that the glow came…

A sort of existential horror began to squeeze my throat. “I don’t understand…” I looked up at Bolas. “I don’t… What is this stuff?”

“Blood.”

I blinked. “Blood?”

“Petrified dragon blood,” Bolas said with a sort of savage satisfaction, as if he really had spent fifteen years putting together a prank just for me, and he was enjoying the payoff more than he’d ever dared hope. “This particular blood belonged to… Well, you don’t need to know, do you? There was a serious dragon-war thing going on here some few years back, as you can probably guess.”

“Jund,” I said. “We’re on Jund…”

“These days, we say we’re in Jund.”

“What?”

“You’ll find out. The important thing, here, is that dragon blood spilled in battle is different from what you’d get if, oh, you were somehow foolish enough to actually cut me, for example. It’s a stress hormone thing, as well as all manner of esoteric metabolites left over from powering our various magical abilities. And here in Jund-in the high mountains, in fact, probably something relating to some unique quality of mana here-dragon blood leaves this interesting residue. That you are holding in your hand. Right now.”

I could feel some of what made this crystal interesting-mana leaked from it, giving it the warmth and the light, but it was also absorbing mana from some unknown source… It was gaining power, not losing it…

I couldn’t raise my voice above a whisper. “What in the hells is it?”

“You’re the Giant Brain, aren’t you? So proud of your self-education. So tell me: what’s the etymology of the word sangrite?”

“It’s vedalken for bloodstone,” I said reflexively… Then, when I heard the words that had come from my lips, I found I could no longer breathe.

“You must be joking…” I managed.

“Oh, I certainly am. But I’m not lying. It’s all true. Those lies that you murdered all these people over? All true. Every single one. That’s what makes it funny.”

I had to sit down. “All… true…?”

“Except for the part about them actually having the stuff. Other than that…? Yes. All true. Every rectum-blistering word. How’s that for a prank?”

I could only stare.

Nicol Bolas, twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon, Planeswalker, sometime god, destroyer of worlds, winked at me like a demented carnival barker. “How do you like me now?”

Before I could answer, he produced a globe of milky glass and cast it at my feet. It exploded with a binding flash… and when I could see again, I was in Tidehollow.