Test of Metal

TEZZERET

I knew it was Tidehollow. I cannot mistake my birthplace for anywhere else in the Multiverse; the cavern slums below Vectis have a unique odor, compounded of mildew, rotten fish, feces, poverty, and despair. The air feels as if it’s been breathed already-as if the distinctive odor is actually the product of someone’s breath.

Everyone’s breath.

I stood exactly as I had in the crystal cave: two flesh arms, one large chunk of sangrite, and no clothing at all.

And it was raining.

There was no wind-there almost never was-and the permanent drizzle of condensate that is Tidehollow’s rain felt icy and tasted of mold. Thank Bolas for small favors; he’d put me in deep shadow on one of the twisty beast paths that serve for streets down here. He could just as easily have dropped me in the Grand Bazaar at noon. Or the Hegemon’s bedchamber. I took my reasonably surreptitious arrival as a sign that Bolas, so far, actually wanted me to pursue his preposterous mission.

Probably.

Dragons as a species tend to be of uncertain temper, and Bolas in particular is uniquely opaque. Guessing his intention in any given sphere is a hazardous undertaking. Even his practical jokes can blossom into deadly serious schemes, and what appear to be substantive projects can, as I had just learned, turn out to be elaborate pranks.

Though, I reminded myself, the fact that Bolas claimed the Seekers of Carmot had been a prank didn’t mean anything. With Bolas, nothing is ever wholly one thing or another.

He was playing some deeper game. He always plays some deeper game.

I suppose I am not entirely different. It struck me then, for example, that I should pay a visit to the Seekers, as I was in town anyway-which could be read as a flaw of sentiment, and perhaps it was. But that’s not all it was.

First: clothing.

It should have been a small matter to summon mana sufficient for an illusion of clothing. In previous days, when I’d had my arm, I routinely wore illusory clothing of such sophistication that it was, for all intents and purposes, real. It was solid to the touch and interacted normally with sun, wind, and weather. I could carry small items in my pockets, hang pouches from my belt, and I could fine-tune it to provide warmth in cold climates, keep me cool in warm climes, or even function as armor against physical attack.

But that had been when I’d had my arm.

Now to gather the mana alone was time-consuming and difficult, despite my proximity to the deep mana wells of the Sea of Unknowing. Binding myself to them to replenish my reserves actually fatigued me instead of reviving me. Clearly, my newly reduced capacity would take some getting used to. The chill drizzle intensified, as it often did through the evening, and I was already shivering.

Not far away, however, a line of seastone topped with sharp slate served someone as a fence… and it seemed this someone had been overly optimistic about the weather here, as several large tunics and one pair of breeches had been hung over the fence to dry.

The actual caverns of Tidehollow-about three-quarters of the slum’s total extent-afford considerable protection from the weather on the Sea of Unknowing, but in exchange one must live in a state of perpetual gloom and permanent damp. The exhalations of each cavern’s inhabitants inevitably condense on the stone, forming much of the drizzle that falls through every night. The owner of these articles had either forgotten them, or simply did not care enough to take them in from the rain. In either case, I had more need of them than did their owner.

But I could not make my hand close upon them.

I stood at that fence for an indeterminable interval; it seemed a very long time. I needed clothing, and here this was, laid out before me like an offering to honor my homecoming. There was not one reason in the Multiverse I should stand naked in the rain while in front of me lay perfectly appropriate clothing that had been forgotten or discarded here. Or abandoned. One might argue that I’d be doing these people a favor by helping them dispose of what they clearly considered to be trash.

It wasn’t as though I haven’t done worse. I’ve done much, much worse. Without hesitation. Many times. In my roster of criminal activity, this oh-so-petty theft would not merit even a glancing reference.

But still I could not make myself do it.

There at the improvised fence in the dark Tidehollow drizzle, I kept hearing my father’s voice. “They don’ has to want for them to take. Take is what they do. Take is their whole life.”

To take these pitifully ragged, nearly valueless scraps of clothing would somehow break a vow I didn’t remember swearing-a vow I’d made with all my heart. An oath sworn to my seven-year-old self.

Yes: I am sentimental, and sentiment is a flaw, and despite knowing full well how irrational it was, I found myself up against a wall of unexpected principle. I have never hesitated to steal from the wealthy, from the powerful, from beings who might crush me with a thought. Even my thefts from my own father happened only while he had absolute power over my life and my death. To pit my skill and wit against the greats of the worlds, with my life as the stake, is what gives my existence meaning.

To take from people who already have nothing is too vile, even for me.

I am not known for honesty, nor for fidelity. I don’t think I’ve ever made a promise I haven’t broken. Except, apparently, this one.

It seems that filthy little scrapper’s brat is the only person I’ve ever met whom I am unwilling to betray.

I may very well have stood there all night but for a woman’s voice, a harsh whisper in the darkness, that came from the dimly lamp-lit window of the stone hovel on the other side of the fence. “Hsst! Chammie! Theyz sumpin over th’ fence! Chammie, look!”

An infant began to bawl, and a large shadow filled the tiny window. “Hoy!” The shout was a man’s, hoarse and sudden and Tidehollow swampy. “Git out from there, sluice sucker! Garn! Fore I git out to shoo yer!”

For an instant I lingered, snared by memory. There had been a boy named Chammie among my gang of cave brats… Small, ginger hair, a cast in one eye, he’d fight anyone, anytime, any odds…

The shadow vanished from the window and reappeared rounding from the far side of the hovel, a pickaxe held high in both hands. “Garn! Git, you! Less yer after a taste a this!”

I faded back into the shadows, away from the fence. “Your clothes,” I said softly, astonishing myself. “Your clothes are getting wet.”

The shadow stopped, suddenly uncertain. “I come ‘crost th’ wall, I come back with yer blood on my axe,” he said, trying for a gruff warning but sounding as though he spoke more to bolster his own nerve than to shake mine.

And had he crossed that wall…

He would have found himself facing a creature beyond his darkest imagining. All his strength, his raw courage that brought him out into the dark to put himself and his weapon between his family and the unknowable dangers of night in Tidehollow, all his fierceness, all his love, all his skill… In the end, these would only be the why of his death.

And why is nothing at all.

“You’ll never see me again,” I said. “Take in your clothes.”

“Garn,” he said, gathering the tunics and the pants with one hand while the other still held the pick high, and his eye never wavered from my dark silhouette. “Git yerself gone.”

Having mana sufficient for a minor seeming, I wrapped shadows about myself and watched. I found myself, inexplicably, wanting desperately to talk to him-to ask if he’d been the Chammie I had known, to ask if he remembered the boy he and his friends had called Tezzeret… but Chammie is a name not uncommon in Tidehollow. Could this be the man who’d grown from the boy I’d known? The odds were ridiculously slim. I couldn’t even see if he had the ginger hair.

And if it was he, and if he did remember me… what then?

Would I tell him of my life, of what it’s like to be an artificer and a mage? A confidence trickster, a racketeer, and a slayer of bandits? Should I tell him of Nicol Bolas and how I had stolen the Infinite Consortium from the most powerful being in creation? Would I boast of walking worlds he could not imagine? And if I did, would he even understand, let alone believe me?

Would I want him to?

In the end, I had been only a shape in the darkness. He cast a last glance toward where he’d seen me fade away, then shook his head and went into his hovel with his clothing, there to be with his woman and their child.

I gathered my cloak of shadows around myself and went my way alone.

As I always have.

Considering how much effort was required merely to drape myself in shadow, I decided I shouldn’t depend on magic for dress and shelter. Fortunately, mana is only one variety of power; there are others, one of which I could put my hands on with only a little effort.

I keep stashes of local currency or items of value on every plane I’ve ever walked; every single city in which the Infinite Consortium does business has funds on deposit that only I can retrieve. These were placed against the eventuality that someone-say, for example, Jace Beleren-should pull the same trick as I had, and take the Infinite Consortium from me as I had taken it from Bolas. Admittedly, I had failed to credit Beleren with either the power or the ruthlessness to kill me outright. Short of that, there was always a chance I might be stranded somewhere, in the sort of trouble that can only be cured with cash.

Money is a fungible resource. Virtually the only thing of value that can’t be purchased is mana itself… though with funds sufficient to interest particular sorts of mages and sorcerers, even mana can be bought. Since I had never anticipated returning to Tidehollow itself, my nearest stash was a considerable distance upslope, built into the rear wall of a small brewery in the mazy backways of Lower Vectis-and it was considerably more valuable than mere money.

I moved though the slums like a brinewraith, slipping from shadow to shadow, working my tortuous way up out of the caverns, avoiding crowds, brightly lit lanes, and heavily trafficked streets. At one point I was less than a fifteen-minute walk from my old neighborhood, where for all I knew my father might still live. I did not succumb to a passing urge to drop in.

I’m not that sentimental.

The brewery stood two stories taller than the surrounding buildings, which were primarily warehouses and handcraft workshops. At this hour only scattered windows showed lamplight, but here, above the caverns, the night was clear and the moon provided light enough for me to find my way. A wall of stone twice my height and topped with razorglass closed off the brewery’s midden, and theoretically prevented rats and other local vermin from feasting upon the rotting remnants of the malted grain and dead yeast dumped here to drain.

The smell alone was a powerful deterrent to potential interlopers. Also, being who I am, the stash was concealed not only from mortal eyes, but from every magical sense I could replicate. The most powerful rhabdomant on Esper might lean against this wall for however long he might fancy and never get the faintest glimmer of what lay inside.

I paused only long enough to reach inside the wall with the fingers of my mind; to trip a hidden catch, where none but a mage could use it. A section of the wall above the plinth turned sideways just long enough for me to slip through. Wading through the chest-deep trub, the slimy high-protein residuum of the wort, was an unattractive but necessary step; here in the midden, the trub was allowed to drain much of its water through gratings into the sewers, after which it was scooped out and pressed into the yeast cakes that are the only protein source most Tidehollow folk can afford.

At the buttress, I spent a bit more of my available mana to press the trub away from the stone; to give myself room to work, and also to clear a spot to set down the chunk of sangrite Bolas had given me. I didn’t know what dropping the sangrite into the trub might do, and I had no desire to find out.

There was no sign of any kind that a treasure might lie within the wall. This particular treasure had, in fact, been built into the wall at its first construction, when the brewery was expanded some seven or eight years ago-the brewery being a local venture financed and partly owned by the Infinite Consortium. Having built my career on etherium salvaged from inadequately concealed caches, I had made quite certain that this could not be found by anyone who did not already know it was there.

I pressed the flat of my left hand against the block I knew to be hollow, and cast my mind within it, allowing the device within to slowly define itself within my consciousness. Once it had, I tapped the device itself for the power necessary to recover it; being cast of pure etherium, it was a generous source. Though at clockworking I am not even competent, much less great, I know a trick or two; creating a localized hypertemporal field in an inanimate object is no large feat. Only seconds later, the stone collapsed to powder.

But as I reached for the device, my hand burst into flame-of a sort. I saw a flare of scarlet fire, and I felt my flesh char and peel back from the bone… but my instinctive recoil drew back my hand, uninjured. Not even smoking. And I had seen the flare and the flames only from my left eye.

The source of the pain was obvious. “Doctor Jest,” I murmured grimly. “Interesting. It seems you’re hooked into my optic nerves in addition to my touch/pain network.”

“WOW. YOU ARE A GIANT BRAIN, AREN’T YOU?”

I clapped the hand now to my left ear. The roar had been so overpowering that had it been actual sound, I should have been bleeding from a ruptured eardrum. That I was not, and that I had heard the titanic roar only with my left ear, made its source obvious.

“You can talk.”

“SO CAN YOU.”

Flinching, I could not help pressing my hand more tightly to my ear… though of course it could do no good at all. Bolas must have given this “Doctor Jest” access to my entire sensory system; the incredible roar had to be the result of direct neural stimulation, in very much the same fashion as had the pain. “Um, can you speak a bit more softly?”

“How’s this?” This time the voice was only that of a large man standing too close and shouting.

I took a moment to catch my breath and settle the triphammer race of my heart. “That’s… tolerable. Even softer would be better. Um, hello.”

“We’ve already met.”

“I recall,” I said grimly. “How should I call you?”

“Anything but late for breakfast.”

My hand went from my ear to my forehead. “You did not just say that. Please. You didn’t.”

“My friends call me Doc. You can call me Doctor Jest.”

I had to sit down. “Let’s go about this in something like an organized fashion, can we? So. You are conscious; are you a living creature, as opposed to a device?”

“Yes. Nineteen. And I’m smaller than a bread box. Whatever in the hells a bread box is. That one’s free.”

“Are you a naturally occurring creature? That is, you are not a homunculus, golem, nor other form of constructed life?”

“Yes. Eighteen. Wait-no, I’m not. Still eighteen. But… aw, crap. Truth is, I don’t know. I’m still kinda new at this consciousness business.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Why would I lie?”

Say rather, I thought, why would you tell the truth? “Why do I hear you only with my left ear?”

“Shrug. I might screw something up.”

“Did you just say shrug?”

“How am I supposed to gesture? Smoke signals?”

“All right,” I said. My head was pounding, and it wasn’t because of Doctor Jest. Well, it was, but not in the usual fashion, so… “All right, wait. Let me think.”

“I won’t hold my breath.”

“What?”

“Because I can’t, dumbass.”

“Look, can you… Can you please just be quiet for a moment? Not very long, I promise. Please.”

“Aww, you don’t like me anymore…”

“Please,” I said. What else could I do? To beg was my sole remaining option short of bashing my head into the stone until I lost consciousness and drowned in the trub.

Though that option became more attractive with every passing second.

After a few moments of careful questioning, during which I was tempted to kill myself only three times, my-our-situation began to come clear.

Doctor Jest was a fully conscious individual, who inhabited-or had some sort of magical bond with-my sensory nerves. He had exceptional control over them, though it seemed their activity remained largely electrochemical, as it is by nature-he spoke only through my left auditory nerves because misuse might cause nerve damage and deafness, and he was, as he’d said, still exploring the parameters of his power.

Beyond that, he knew-or believed, which amounted to the same thing, under the circumstances-that the binding that joined us could be unbound only by Bolas himself. His fate was linked with mine, since Bolas would have no reason to do either of us any favors until we finished his job. And any others that the dragon might think up in the meantime. Our fates were inextricably linked; whatever happened to me would happen to him as well.

I also discovered, to my considerable relief, that he could not read my thoughts. I was able to keep private my suspicion that Doctor Jest had no separate existence at all, being nothing more than a phenomenon of the alteration of my nervous system accomplished by Bolas in the process of repairing what Jace had done to my brain. I wouldn’t put it past the dragon, for example, to have built Doctor Jest into this meat arm he had inflicted on me.

We also determined why gathering sufficient power for any major effect seemed so difficult. Yes: ripping away my right arm had left me magically crippled-but that wasn’t the whole story. It seemed that while Doctor Jest had some not-inconsiderable powers at his command, he did not draw mana directly, but instead existed as a vampirelike mana parasite, living off my own reduced reserve.

“Another gift from Bolas,” I muttered.

“Yeah, I hate that scaly monkey dunker,” said Doctor Jest. “You know what he needs? A good hard boot to the nads. Do him a universe of good.”

“I don’t think he has nads,” I replied glumly.

“Can we try anyway?”

“You’re not thrilled to be working for him.”

“Is anyone? Is there a worse boss in the Multiverse?”

“If we ever find one, don’t tell Bolas,” I muttered. “He’d never resist proving us wrong.”

“So, how’re we gonna get him?”

“Excuse me?”

“Come on,” Doctor Jest said. “You’re not the type to take this kind of rumpthumpin’ lying down.”

“You’ve been conscious less than three hours, and you’re already an authority on my type?”

“You’re planning something,” he insisted. “You gotta be planning something.”

“And if I am,” I said, “why would I tell you?”

“Aw, c’mon, Tezzie! I’m on your side! We’re in this together, shoulder to shoulder-ah, you know what I mean. Man to-well, to whatever I am.”

“Don’t call me Tezzie.”

“No wonder you got no friends.”

“I’m not interested in your friendship.”

“Aw, c’mon… I’ll let you call me Doc,” he offered.

Painfully aware-and I do mean painfully aware-that while no power at my command could cause Doctor Jest the slightest discomfort, he could make of my existence an endless carnival of suffering, I decided to compromise. “Tezz,” I said reluctantly. “You can call me Tezz.”

“All right! And we’re buds, right? For real. I’m your best friend?”

I sighed. “You’re my only friend, Doc.”

“That’s sad. Really. Man, do you have a crummy life or what?”

“If I do,” I said through my teeth, “you’re not making it any better.”

“Aww. That hurts, Tezz. Really.”

I decided to change the subject. Any discussion of hurt with Doc would potentially be cataclysmically one-sided. So I picked myself up-hmp, I suppose I picked us up to my feet-and stepped closer to the hollow stone that contained my device. “Doc?”

“Yeah, bud? Er, chum, you think? Best pal?”

“Doc, why did you stop me?”

“Huh?”

“When I reached for the device, you made me feel like my hand was on fire. Why?”

“Why? What am I, an idiot?”

With considerable exercise of self-discipline, I resisted offering an answer. “Why don’t you want me to pick it up?”

“Because whatever happens to you, happens to me,” he said slowly, overenunciating as though explaining the obvious to a small, not especially bright, child. “Can’t you see that whole friggin’ thing is just one big trap?”

“Of course I can,” I said. “I built it.”

Being a mechanist, when I went to hide a substantial amount of etherium, I had seen no reason to stash it as bullion or bars… and I have always had a knack for small, intricate automata. I had fashioned the entire stash into a trap-and a rather nifty one, if I do say so myself.

This trap would fishhook the hand of anyone other than me at first touch, and insinuate a network of hair-thin etherium wires transdermally, to hijack the thief’s nervous system and magically override the voluntary motor nerves, inflicting permanent paralysis. This would leave the thief alive, awake, and aware, but unable to do anything save, oh, for example, die of thirst. Or drown in a particularly large dumping of trub. Or meet some other unpleasantly lingering death.

No: the pertinent fact here was not that it was a trap, but that Doc could see it was a trap. My nifty little device no more resembled a trap than it did a clod of dung. Even an exceedingly skilled mechanist would have needed hours, if not days, to detect the hazard I had built into it-and would most likely have fallen victim to it in the process.

This meant that Doc had access to some portion of my memory, or that he could perceive things on a level that I could not. Or both. Any of these eventualities was interesting, and all were potentially significant. “How did you know?”

“Well, it’s obvious. Isn’t it?”

“Not to anyone but you.”

“Huh. No kidding?”

“Doc,” I said with uncharacteristic sincerity, “you have unplumbed depths of talent.”

“You’re welcome. That was a compliment, right? Right?”

I didn’t answer. My attention had been captured by a potential feature of the trap that had never struck me before. After all, if the device could hijack its victim’s motor nerves, it might do all manner of interesting things. It suddenly became obvious how I could tune it to hijack someone’s whole form and function-to make of its victim an unwilling telemin, acting wholly in my control-or as directed by the device, because I now saw also how I might imbue it with a consciousness of its own… to make it into, for example, a mechanical Doctor Jest. It was obvious. It wouldn’t even be difficult.

Curious that I’d never seen it before.

Perhaps among all the changes inflicted upon my form and function by Jace and Bolas, some few might have to be counted as positive. It was a sobering thought. Did I actually have something to thank Bolas for?

Or worse, to thank Jace Beleren for?

Distracted by this unpleasant possibility, I somewhat absently deactivated my device, only to discover there had been something I must have missed; I felt a tiny whisper of a mana release that had not been part of my design.

“What was that?” Doc said. “Did you see that? Was that supposed to happen?”

“No.”

“Is it a problem?”

“Yes.”

Above us on the wall, the stone began to burn.

“A bad kind of problem?”

“Potentially fatal.”

I had underestimated Jace again. Only now did it occur to me that anything I had known-anything-he could have taken from my mind when he attacked me. Including the location of my local etherium stash.

The burning stone sputtered and flared, white-hot now, so intense I had to shield my face with my useless right arm. The stone began to melt, dripping like hot wax, and where these droplets struck, what they struck ignited with unnatural intensity.

“We should be running away, right?” Doc said. “Why aren’t we running?”

“Fire is not Jace’s strength,” I said. “He’s a mind ripper.”

“That’s good news, right?”

“No.”

Where the stone burned away, the hole in the wall didn’t open onto the brewery. Through the hole I could see black clouds on fire, burning above a volcanic cone that spilled white-hot lava.

I was about to find out just how worried Jace had been about my possible return.

First through the fire gate came a glossy, jet-black lobsterish pincer bigger than I am, which latched on to the unburned stone, followed by another that did the same… Where they touched, the stone went red and soft, and from the joints of the pincers glared flesh that burned white as the sun. Because these claws did not belong to any variety of lobster, and I no longer needed to see the rows of compound eyes that were to follow, I intended to actively avoid seeing the upcurving jointed metasoma with a white-hot barb the size of a greatsword.

I am not, as a rule, given to either profanity or vulgarity, but when confronted at close range by hippopotamus-size scorpions whose very flesh is white-hot rock, I might be forgiven for indulging in both.

“Holy shit…”

Apparently Jace had been very worried indeed. Worried enough to have signed up at least one very, very serious pyromancer.

“That’s bad, isn’t it? I can tell it’s bad. What are we going to do?”

“We? Nothing. You’re going to shut up,” I said, “and I am going to run like hell.”