Test of Metal

TEZZERET

Being about to die did not strike me as sufficient reason to abandon either of my treasures. So it was that I undertook to flee with my etherium trap in one hand and my hunk of sangrite in the other. Even without having replenished my mana reserve, I can do surprising things with etherium by using its innate energy to power its action. Reasoning that the least flammable thing in the entire neighborhood was the neck-deep trub in the midden where I stood, I decided to put as much of it as I possibly could between myself and the magma scorpion.

I took a deep breath and went in headfirst. As I clawed my way blindly downward, my fingers found the grating of the sewer drain-a grillwork of chrome steel, set in cement. Encouraged not only by Doc yammering in my ear-“What are you doing? Are you crazy? It’s right up there! Why aren’t you running?”-but also by the sudden impact of something large and heavy landing on the surface of the trub above me, I engaged the etherium device with my mind.

Chrome steel is hard, but even the hardest metal can be overcome by the proper application of force. Working by feel, I brought out from the etherium an assemblage of gears, ratchets, and levers. Jamming levers through the holes in the grating, I then turned the device’s innate mana wholly to working those gears and ratchets and levers to pry apart the bars of the grating as swiftly as possible… because the trub was becoming unpleasantly warm, and I could hear, through the slimy mass itself, a series of minor detonations, which I took to be the steam blasts generated as the scorpion struck blindly downward with its tail barb-a stinger made out of white-hot rock. Again and again and again.

I managed to avoid picturing what that stinger would do to my flesh.

With a squeal that came only dully to my ears, the bars gave way. Well-lubricated by the rotting, yeasty mass around me, I managed to slide through headfirst, and tumbled ten or twelve feet until I hit the sewage stream, which was only a few inches deep. It did nothing to improve the stench.

Entirely the opposite, in fact.

I pulled myself up from the muck and took a quick look around. Witchlight globes were strung every few dozen yards, enabling me to see a lot of straight tunnel to either side, and very little else.

“Hey, not bad,” Doc said brightly. “Now we run.”

“Not yet.”

“Yes yet,” he said, and punctuated his reply with a sensation that felt as I imagine it might if someone were to rip off my testicles. Slowly.

The pain dropped me to my knees. “If I pass out, we both die.”

The scorpion’s blazing stinger jabbed downward through the drain, unleashing a burst of steam and greasy smoke. “And dying is different from what’s about to happen exactly how?”

“You have to trust me.”

“Trust you? Never kid a kidder, chum.”

And somehow when he said it, chum sounded less like the word for pal than it did the word for the rotting fish guts one uses to attract sharks. “This is my hometown. I know every inch of it. That knowledge is the only chance we have.”

The pain vanished. “So what are we waiting for?”

The stinger struck again and again, and the sewer began to fill with smoke. I extended a hand-my right, from reflex, even though I couldn’t help flinching when it entered my field of view-and down through the drain and out of the smoke came my device, sprinting along on spider legs. I had it leap up and wrap itself around my arm, and then I passed the chunk of sangrite over to it. From there it was a simple matter of encasing the sangrite in etherium, and arranging the whole thing to make a sort of yoke, or a harness, holding the sangrite at my back and leaving my hands free.

This took barely a second, but in that time the cement around the drain burned away, and the top curve of the sewer collapsed, dropping a very large, very hot arthropod into the sewage, which did nothing at all to improve its temper; nor did the instant blast of superheated steam that very nearly blew it back up to street level. Catching itself at the rim, it started toward me along the ceiling, leaving a trail of burning footprints.

This was when two more of the creatures clambered down through the hole and clattered along after the first.

“Three?” I said. “Really?”

I could just imagine Jace whipping up this little trick with his pyromancer, whistling cheerfully as they worked, thinking You know, one indestructible monster just isn’t enough. Better double the order.

And one to grow on.

“Um, hey there, Native Son?” Doc chirped in my ear. “Are we running yet?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, we are.”

And we did.

Pelting along the sewer tunnel as fast as my legs could carry me, I very soon discovered a piece of compelling evidence in favor of Bolas’s story that I had not, in fact, been raised from the dead: I found myself gasping and stumbling with fatigue in under a minute-very like how I might if I’d spent a span of time getting no exercise more strenuous than breathing. I was forced to funnel mana into my legs, which burned my limited reserve even faster.

And behind me clattered the magma scorpions. They were gaining.

“How much do you know about these things?” Doc hissed in my ear.

“Not… a lot.” I took a sharp turn into a side tunnel that sloped more sharply downward. Running downhill was vastly easier, and I picked up speed. “They’re not… local.”

“Really? There’s something you don’t know everything about? Stop a second-I gotta mark my calendar.” Doc, having no need to breathe, kept up a running commentary that made thinking even more difficult than being chased by indestructible monsters.

“Magma scorpions,” I said between gasps of breath. “Shells… unbreakable. And hot… set afire… anything they touch. The barb… venom… magma… temperature of a planetary core…”

“Oh, awesome. So if they don’t grab us and burn us to death, we get spiked with planetary core gunk in the back? That’ll leave a mark.”

“No,” I wheezed. “Steam burst… blow me to pieces. Nothing left… to mark.”

“That’s comforting. Um, hey, it sounds like they’re gaining. Are they gaining?”

The growing heat on my backside told me all I needed to know. “Want me to… stop and look?”

“Never mind.”

It seemed, however, that our impending mutual demise was not enough to make him be quiet. “They’re still coming. They’re still gaining. Don’t they get tired? I mean, they’re really just giant bugs, right?”

I did not have the breath to explain to Doc that while ordinary bugs-arthropods in general-are cold-blooded, and thus tire quickly when they overheat, magma scorpions are exactly the opposite; the heat generated by exertion makes them stronger. They tire only when they stop, which they weren’t going to do until I was on the well-done side of dead. Not to mention that they are an apex predator in their ecosystem, fearless, that their brains are larger than mine, and that they are, generally speaking, as intelligent as a medium-size dragon. And nearly as tough; there are only six ways to kill them, of which five would remain out of reach for too long to be useful.

“Um, hey,” Doc said. “They sound different.”

“What?” I was too busy running to waste time listening.

“Still gaining-but down a third.” Doc, it seemed, could use my nervous system more precisely than I could. File the data.

I stifled a curse that I didn’t have breath for anyway. “That means… there’re only two… there.”

“That’s good news, right?”

“They’re not… bugs,” I rasped. “The other… gone ahead to cut us off…”

“Oh. That’s bad.”

I declined to comment on his penchant for stating the obvious, because to do so would make me guilty of exactly that.

“So what do we do?”

“I’m open… to suggestions…”

“Ohhh, sure, now he wants my advice. Yeah, let’s ask the guy who’s been alive for, like, three hours to come up with a plan. Great idea!”

Two hundred yards ahead, the roof of the sewer burst into flame, burning so hot and fast that molten gobbets of burning cement cascaded into the sewer, blasting a wall of superheated steam toward us.

“Can’t you fight them?”

“I can,” I panted grimly. “Just not today.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Same… as before. You… shut up and I… run.”

If there are guardian spirits of fortune somewhere in creation, they must have been smiling upon me then; just ahead was a dump valve.

When hurricanes blow in across the Sea of Unknowing, the huge surge in rainfall can overfill the standard sluice pits around Tidehollow in less than an hour. The sewers are designed with dump valves that can be triggered from the city service center above to divert some of the billions of gallons of water and sewage that otherwise might drown the slums altogether. This was not from any concern for the residents, but only to avoid poisoning the fisheries that are Vectis’s main source of protein.

“What? You’re stopping? Why are you stopping?”

“Shut up.”

I reached up to the gearing of the valve control and sent a shining thread of etherium up along my arm and gave it half a second to spread through the mechanism. I yield to none in my skill with devices; what another being can design, I can subvert, which I proved by causing an earsplitting screech of half-rusted metal as the valve into the dump shaft ground itself open. The etherium was warm to the touch as it trailed back up my arm, almost as though pleased with a job well done.

“Great work!” But when I looked down, Doc discovered why it was called a dump shaft as opposed to, say, a dump tunnel-it is, in fact, vertical. “Um… really? Isn’t that kinda steep?”

“Yes,” I said, and dived headfirst into darkness.

Doc’s reply, “YeeeaaaAAAHHHH!” screeched in my ear as we hurtled downward, free-falling for some seconds. This was enough time for me to recover a bit of my breath, which would become vital, according to my best estimate, in a minute or so. Give or take ten seconds.

“Hey…” he said uncertainly when he finally gave up screaming. “There aren’t any witchlight globes in here, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then where is that light coming from?” He was referring to the rosy glow that now began to catch highlights on the shaft walls.

I said, “Where do you think?”

“Oh, come on! Really?”

“Yes.”

“I’m starting to see why nobody likes you.”

“Not now,” I said, tucking my knees while I reached out and brushed the shaft wall with my fingertips, just enough to flip myself feet-downward. “This is going to hurt.”

“See, that’s exactly what I’m-”

This was as much as he managed to get out before we hit the slant at the bottom of the vertical shaft. I was wrong about it hurting; the impact was a shattering blast that whited out my vision for a second or two. It would hurt later. After I came out of shock.

If I lived that long.

The slant was wet and covered with thick oilmoss, which meant that we slid along it not much more slowly than we had fallen. I had plenty of time to peer backward and see the following magma scorpion hit the slant-and set the oil moss instantly ablaze.

Flames licked down toward us even faster than we could slide “What, fire?” Doc said. “You knew it was gonna catch fire?”

“No.” I chalked it up to the exigencies of planning a clever escape while running for one’s life. “Take it as a lesson to shut up when I need to think.”

“It’s not much of a lesson if learning it kills me!”

“We’re not dead yet,” I said. “Chum.”

At which point we burst down from the shaft through a cavern ceiling to the terminal chute of the spillway, whose semi-radical angle was shallow enough to send us skipping across the surface of the semicoagulated goo of the collection pool instead of burying us in it.

“Hey, not bad,” Doc said as our spinning slowed. “Maybe you are a Giant Brain after all.”

“I believe the appropriate phrase is, under the circumstances,” I said, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

I turned so that I could start sculling us toward the shore, just as several tons of burning magma scorpion hurtled out of the terminal chute. Straight for us.

“This was your plan?”

“Yes.”

“You are completely-”

The rest of his assessment was lost as the magma scorpion splashed down into the collection pool; instead of skipping across the surface as we had, the magma scorpion detonated with the titanic BOOM of a catastrophic volcanic event. White-hot stone went everywhere, and entire segments of scorpion armor flew shrieking like a lobster in the pot through the dank Tidehollow gloom. A huge swelling shock wave picked us up and hurled us onto the bank. I scuttled back from the muck, which had now caught fire with an odor very much like one would expect from well-fermented burning sewage.

“Did you do that?” Doc sounded awed. “Sweet mother of petrified dingleberries…! How did you do that?”

“That steam-burst effect,” I said with what I felt was, under the circumstances, entirely justified satisfaction, “works both ways.”

“Wow. I mean, wow. Good plan!”

“Thank you.” I jogged away from the collection pool even as people from the surrounding hovels began to stream out to see what the noise had been.

“Where we going now?”

“Tide caves.”

“Tide caves?”

“They lead to open sea.”

“You’re saying-”

“I’m not saying. Here, watch.” I stopped and looked back. In the uplight from the burning collection pool, I could clearly see one magma scorpion scuttling sideways across the cavern wall below the dump shaft. Even as I looked, the other one came out and went the other direction.

“I believe what they’re going for is called, excuse the expression,” I said, “a pincers maneuver.”

“Ah, I, ah…” Doc stammered. “Um, all right. We can run now.”

“Thank you.” But when I started to run, the battering I’d taken these past few minutes finally announced its presence. Vigorously. Though it didn’t hurt nearly as much as a shot from Doctor Jest, it was enough to slash my foot speed to a limping stumble. “Can you do anything about the pain?”

“Without doing permanent damage? Only this,” he said, and my whole back from neck to heels burst into flame. Metaphorically, but nonetheless vividly.

This cleared up my running problem admirably. Not that I was in any way grateful for Doc’s assistance.

“The human pain system,” he said conversationally, “is an interesting place. Ever notice that when you break your toe, you forget all about your headache?”

I did not reply, as I needed all my breath for screaming.

“Huh, wait-how’s this?” Instead of being on fire, I felt as though a colony of soldier ants had taken up residence inside my spine and was currently exploring its new territory. Thousands of ants marching along under my skin, along my veins, burrowing into my muscles, crawling around the inside of my ears…

“Tolerable,” I said through clenched teeth. At least it didn’t hurt.

“Itching uses the same nerves as touch/pain-that’s why scratching works, did you know that?”

“Yes, I did,” I said. “And thank you so much for mentioning scratching.”

But at least we were mobile, which was fortunate, given that the magma scorpions had already rounded the collection pool and were nearing flat ground behind us. I ran with not only every ounce of my own energy, but with all the mana I had left. There was no point saving it for later until I found some indication that I would have anything resembling a “later.”

The curious residents of the neighborhood gave back as I ran toward them. It seemed no one was interested in stopping, or even getting significantly in the way of, a large naked running man covered in fermented shit.

“Aren’t you gonna warn people?”

“Of what?”

“Uh, giant, killer rock-bug monsters that set everything on fire?”

“I believe,” I said, “the situation is self-explanatory.”

This was amply demonstrated as people around us began to not press away from us so much as run after us, presumably on the assumption that having survived one of the beasts, I might actually know where I was going. This was a development of which I thoroughly approved, as a large mob of people at my back might slow the magma scorpions enough to let me reach a sculler skiff before they could overtake me-which was why I was astonished and no little amount dismayed to find myself stopping and turning back to the swelling crowd that followed.

“They’re after me!” I shouted with all of my considerable natural lung power. Amplification would have expended mana that I could not spare. “Stay out of their way and they will not harm you! They’re after me!”

They must have gotten the message, as they scattered in all directions, leaving me with a very clear view-vividly illuminated by the great swathes of fire that roared up from everything they touched-of the two remaining monsters coming after me faster than ever.

I turned and, excuse the expression, streaked away.

“Oh, sure, when I want to warn people, the situation is self-explanatory-”

“Shut up.”

There was very little I could do to evade them here in Tidehollow, besides which they were almost certainly tracking the etherium that had triggered their summoning-etherium I had no intention of abandoning. Ever. My best remaining idea was to run tiny hair-thin wires out of the etherium on my back, and stab them into my hamstrings and buttocks, using the etherium’s innate energy to add strength to my failing muscles and send us along at a very brisk clip.

“This is good. This is fast,” Doc said. “How come we didn’t do this before?”

“Because you never stayed quiet long enough for me to think of it.”

“Awww…”

“If you shut up now, I might be able to gimmick a way to fly.”

“Seriously? Because that’d be really-”

“Shut up.”

He actually did, for a brief interval, during which I did not endeavor to think up a way to fly; I was too busy trying to think of a way to kill him.

All too shortly, I ran out of ground. A lightning detour during a second or two that I was out of their line of sight sent me skidding down a steep and slippery path that ended in a salt-caked bank of an utterly, utterly still pool. Only a few yards beyond the shore, the pool and the cavern overhead faded off into dank and impenetrable night. The bank around me was featureless save for the sculler’s cleat of worn-smooth moonstone, glowing with a soft pearlescent light that did nothing to hold back the gloom.

“Awesome!” Doc said. “Now all we have to do is swim-”

“No.” I clapped a hand to the back of my head, and as I had expected, the exertions of the chase had reopened the scalp wound with which Bolas had so considerately supplied me. I took the handful of my blood and smeared it into the slightly concave summoning dish on the top of the sculler’s cleat, hoping that the admixture of sewage wouldn’t interfere with the cleat’s magic.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

“We’re not swimming? I can make you-”

“Do you know what sluice serpents are?”

“Are they as bad as magma scorpions?”

“Not remotely. But they are entirely bad enough to kill me.”

“You mean us.”

“There are also three distinct species of kraken that use these tide caves as their spawning ground. Kraken are viviparous, and the young are born hungry.”

“Uh. Yeah. I get it. We can wait.”

The clatter of armored feet announced the approach of the magma scorpions even before the tunnel showed the light of the fires they left in their wake. I waded out into the tide pool as deep as I dared, salt water doing such unkind things to my varied array of cuts and scrapes that for a moment, the sting overwhelmed the itching.

The magma scorpions moved toward me from the tunnel mouth with gratifying caution. One stayed on the bank, scuttling back and forth to cut off escape in that direction, while the other went to the cavern wall and began to climb.

“Where’s he going?”

“She.”

“You can tell? How can you tell?”

I glanced up to the erosion-pitted limestone of the cavern’s ceiling. “That’s where she’s going.”

“What’s she think she’s gonna do from up there?”

“Fall on us.”

“Um…”

“Summoned creatures usually accomplish their bound task or die in the attempt. Or-like this one-both.”

“Uh… can you unbind them? Send them home?”

“Not today.” To avoid more whining, I offered a scrap of hope. “But this kind of trigger-based summoning has a fixed amount of mana attached to it. Without a mage to maintain their presence, they’ll return to their own plane when the fixed mana is exhausted.”

“Which will be when?”

“No matter what everyone says about me,” I said, “I don’t actually know everything.”

“Oh, ha ha. Ha. So what’s the plan?”

“You need me to say it again?” A sudden stabbing crick in my neck forced my head back and turned my face toward the ceiling, where the magma scorpion was picking its way in our direction. “Stop that.”

The crick only intensified. “I want to see.”

“I need my eyes for something else right now.”

“More important than dying?”

“How about instead of dying?”

“Fine.” The pain vanished. “I’m in.”

“Thanks so much.” I turned away from the bank and, as I had hoped, caught sight of a silent, spectral shape approaching through the gloom, gaining solidity as it came. Having a great deal less to fear from scullers than most, I have availed myself of their services in the past. Familiarity, however, did nothing to put me at ease as the creature poled its skiff toward us out of the darkness.

The skiff had witchlight globes hanging from both its upcurved prow and similar stern, but while these lights were easily seen, they did not actually illuminate the shroud of shadows within the craft. The sculler itself was visible only as a thin drape of hooded cloak in the darkness. Its sleeves draped along skeletally thin arms fleshed with corpse-pale skin as it leaned on its pole to drive the skiff forward.

“Uh, did I miss something?” Doc said dubiously. “Did we get killed already and just now woke up in Grixis?”

I extended an arm, and the sculler bent his course toward me. Lacking leisure for haggling, I wasted no time in clambering aboard.

The shadowy cloak turned the infinite black of its hood toward me, and one clawlike hand held the skiff pole vertical, motionless in the water. I extended my right hand for the creature’s inspection, but the sculler did not react.

“What’s going on? Why isn’t it moving?”

“They don’t start until they’re paid.” I touched my left eye. “We’re negotiating the price.”

“This is negotiating?”

I touched my temple with a single finger. “They don’t speak. No one knows if they understand language, or even hear. They don’t make noise of any sort. A habit you should cultivate.”

The sculler did not move.

Two fingers, and still no response.

A glance back to check on the magma scorpion’s progress gave no reassuring news; even though the monster was picking its way with great caution, we had perhaps a minute.

I put four fingers against my temple.

“What do these buggers charge?”

“Something of value.”

“Erm.”

“Something of value to me. Or I would have offered you already.” I laid my whole hand against my temple.

“What’s with the fingers?”

“I’m offering memories.”

“Memories?”

“Five of them. There are some experiences I cherish,” I said. Few enough, but some. “It doesn’t appear to be interested. Nor in my eye, and it doesn’t want my right arm.”

“Neither do you.”

“Which is the problem.” Another glance back, and the magma scorpion twitched its metasoma at me, squeezing a handful of its burning venom from its barb. With a jerk of its tail, it flicked the white-hot glob of magma in my direction.

The venom fell a few yards short. The steam burst it created rocked the skiff.

“How about some of that etherium?” Doc was starting to sound desperate.

“I’ll die first,” I said.

“I can make you-”

“You can make me pass out. Then we both die. Good plan.”

The magma scorpion hurled another glob of venom, which blew apart when it hit the surface of the water and managed to splatter enough of itself up onto the bulwark to start a small fire on the far side. And, apparently understanding that we were not going to be escaping back into Tidehollow, the other magma scorpion had taken to the cavern wall as well, and was working its way toward us rather more swiftly than had its companion.

“Wait-how about the sangrite? You’ve been hauling that chunk of petrified blood from the hells to Grandma’s and back again-it has to be important to you!”

I reached behind my neck and had the etherium deliver the sangrite to my hand, which was as close to admitting he’d had a good idea as I intended ever to come.

As its dull rose glow warmed my hand, the sculler-for the first time in my experience-showed interest in an item before it was even offered. It released its pole and took a step toward me, leaning forward to get a better look. The sculler extended one long-fingered, skeletal hand, as though the creature wished to feel the warmth of the sangrite with its own withered flesh.

This gave me considerable confidence in my bargaining position.

The etherium of my trap device had never been tempered or treated for hardness; it would be useless to try and form it into a blade capable of cutting the crystal. However, the near-infinite ductility of the metal offered an option. One of the hair-thin wires that had been feeding strength to my legs detached itself and quested over the surface of the crystal until it found one of the glowing flaws. There, I had it insinuate itself into the crystal, forcing more and more metal into the flaw until the sangrite cracked, calving a sharp-pointed shard roughly the size and shape of my forefinger.

The sculler’s hand struck like a snake, snatching the shard from the air. It shook its other hand free of its cloak and cupped the crystal with both, bringing it up before the shadow gape of its hood as though entreating the blessing of a holy relic.

A magma bomb now came from the other monster, and this one managed to strike full on the stern, setting the entire rear of the skiff on fire. The sculler didn’t seem to notice; it stood enraptured by the sangrite. I stood, grabbed the sculler’s forgotten pole, and shoved us away from the shore.

“What’s with the boatman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t know,” I snarled, leaning into the pole to gain velocity. “We have bigger problems.”

The magma scorpions seemed to be unwilling to let us simply float away, even though the aft quarter of the skiff was now burning merrily. They cast aside caution and began scampering after us at a profoundly dismaying speed.

Leaning upon the pole for all I was worth, I managed to get us out through the cavern’s mouth into the echoing reach of the Hollows before the scorpions could catch up-but the Hollows are no place to sail blind. The numberless caves and caverns extend for tens or even hundreds of miles; some are navigable, some are dead ends, and some present in various hazards, from razor-sharp slashcoral to periodic sinkholes and tide spouts.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

“Away from the monsters.”

“Well, that’s reassuring. I meant, do you know your way around down here?”

“No.” My breath was going short again, but at least I didn’t have to run anymore. “Nobody does.”

“Oh, great. What about a map?”

“If there were maps,” I wheezed, “no one would need scullers.”

As if triggered by this exchange, the sculler standing at my back suddenly screamed.

The earsplitting shriek it unleashed was like nothing I’d ever heard: a horrible ragged ululation that rose and fell by no pattern I could discern. I discovered that even despite Doctor Jest’s phantom soldier ants, I could distinctly feel every hair on my body attempt to stand on end at once. I was possibly the first living creature in the history of Esper to hear a sculler’s voice… and that voice was eerie as a banshee’s wail and horrible as the death scream of a berserk dragon.

“Uh, yow,” Doc said. “And probably yikes. Plan B?”

Through the rising flames of the stern, I could see the magma scorpions scuttling up toward the gloom-shrouded ceiling. Without the sculler to take us to the open sea, we could only hope to keep ahead of the monsters until the summoning expired. This, given my physical exhaustion and mana-depleted condition, would be more difficult than it sounded-and it sounded impossible. Not to mention the further complication of the skiff being on fire.

On top of all this, the skiff-pole lost contact with the tide pool’s bottom suddenly enough that I very nearly pitched over the side; without knowledge of the caverns’ submarine topography, I had blundered into water too deep for the pole. And there weren’t any oars.

We were adrift.

With a long, slow sigh, I sat down, unshipped the pole, and laid it across my knees.

“What are you doing?”

I was too exhausted to play any more banter games. “Getting ready to die.”

Before either of us could pursue this line of conversation, the sculler suddenly spread its hands, raising them wide to the ceiling as though imploring a benison from some dark god. The ragged edge left its shriek, making it sound less like a scream and more like some kind of call…

The sculler clapped its hands together with great force, driving the crystal of sangrite through both of its palms, nailing its hands together in an attitude of prayer. Some sort of milky ichor ran from the wounds, and while I was still processing the idea of being not only the first human to hear a sculler’s voice, but also the first to see a sculler’s blood, the creature’s hands burst into flame.

They burned at first like a torch, but soon brightened, and the color of the flame became yellow as a watch fire, and very shortly the light they gave off was white as the inside of a blast furnace, along with a palpable heat. By this time, the creature’s arms were on fire to the elbows, and its call had begun to modulate, taking on a definite tone and a sort of rhythm, and seemed to be gathering harmonic overtones in the echoes from the cavern walls…

The sculler wasn’t screaming. It was singing.

And the echoes and harmonic overtones were no artifact of the tide caves-they were the answering voices of dozens of scullers, hundreds, who came poling their silent skiffs out from the dark-shrouded caves around us, forming an eldritch chorus of voices never raised before.

The flames now spread across the sculler’s chest and up and down its cloak… and then like a scrap of burning paper, the sculler lifted into the air.

It rose like the sun, and cast out the cavern’s permanent gloom.

Even in the face of imminent death I could not restrain my awe. I found myself quite overcome with an inexplicable sense of sanctity, a distinct intuition that what we were witnessing here was something holy, beyond what mortals are meant to see-a sensation with which I was, to the surprise of no one who has ever known me, largely unfamiliar.

But now, here, I found myself flooded with awe… and gratitude.

Perhaps this is one more way in which I am not like other men: to be granted a glimpse of some deeper truth-a hint of mysteries beyond the mundane puzzles of day and night and health and work-meant more to me than my own life. Though perhaps other folk are not so different after all. Perhaps such a sight would mean fully as much to anyone who might ever be granted the gift of seeing it… but they’ve never lifted their eyes.

I know that there are no true gods; that gods worshiped here and there throughout the Multiverse are imaginary-or worse, creatures like Bolas. That knowledge was bitter to me then as never before. When granted such an astonishing blessing, when feeling gratitude so profound that words stumble, too lame to evoke it…

There was no one for me to thank.

The magma scorpions themselves had paused in their pursuit, as though uncertain of the portent of this unexpected flare. They clung to the cavern ceiling, watching. Now engulfed in flame, the sculler continued to rise, higher and higher, while its fellows gathered around the burning skiff where I sat transfixed.

The song’s interlocking harmonics rose toward a climax, and suddenly, shockingly, stopped. Even the echoes. I caught my breath.

The only sound was the lick of flames from my skiff’s stern.

And just as I was about to observe that the proceedings appeared to be about over, the burning sculler exploded in midair.

A far more spectacular detonation than that of the magma scorpion, this had the look of a military explosive, or the burst of a fireball cast by a mage of the power of Nicol Bolas himself. It filled the entire upper reaches of the cavern’s ceiling with a blast of fire that scraped both magma scorpions off the rock and dropped them flat on their backs in the tide pool, adding their own explosive blasts into a roar that blew away my hearing.

This may explain the silence from Doc as well.

It was fortunate that I had sat in the skiff, as the huge swell of shock wave would certainly have cast me into the water-but even that, it may be, would not have presented the sort of hazard it might otherwise have.

It appeared the scullers had decided to look after me.

One of them nearby reached toward my skiff with one empty hand, which it then clenched as though plucking an invisible fruit. The fire at the stern was extinguished instantly, without so much as an ember remaining. Two other scullers maneuvered their skiffs in tandem, just off the forward bow to either side, and leaned into their poles in their usual slow, silent rhythm. Either the deep spot I had found was much smaller than I’d thought, or they had motive powers beyond the leverage of the poles, for they had no difficulty making headway, and though no rope or visible energy bound my craft to theirs, I found my skiff following along as though theirs were mountain geese and mine an obedient gosling.

I was tempted to make an observation to Doc about being out of danger for the moment, but decided against it on the off chance that Doc’s uncharacteristic silence was not, in fact, due to temporary deafness. There was much to think about, and very little time to ponder.

I knew all too well that this moment of safety would not last. Jace would know his trap had been triggered. And he knew of my sentimental flaw, which made it all too obvious where his next trap would be set.

And if I didn’t get there fast, my father would be dead before I could spring it.