Test of Metal

JACE BELEREN

I woke up coughing. My throat felt like I’d been trying to dry swallow barbed wire. Probably screaming when I passed out. I couldn’t remember. The taste of vomit made my stomach heave, but all that came from my mouth was half-clotted blood.

The strong hands cradling me I would have known anywhere. That helped pull me together. As long as Baltrice was with me, whatever this was couldn’t be too bad.

Could it?

“Jace, listen to me,” she was saying, low and urgent.

I tried to nod, but moving my head made me retch again. “Sorry…” My voice sounded blurry and cracked. Notes played on a broken woodwind. “Sorry… I’m sorry, Baltrice, I… don’t know what happened…”

“Jace, you’re in trouble.”

“Oh…” I said, “oh… crap…”

Even semiconscious, I didn’t miss that she said you’re, not we’re.

“How… bad?”

“Don’t do any magic, Jace. You hear me? No matter what happens. Don’t do anything.”

“What…? What? Why not?”

“Because,” said a voice I hear in nightmares, “that will make a bad situation even worse.”

And I turned my head, and there he was, just standing, standing and smiling and it was instinct, or training, or practice, that snapped my shields into existence and whichever it was didn’t matter at all because before my shields could even fully form, a blast of agony whited out the world.

This time, I remember screaming.

I didn’t quite pass out, even though it felt like a lightning bolt had exploded inside my head. It had me convulsing in Baltrice’s arms, and I thrashed for a lifetime or two until I finally let go of the magic. When my vision cleared, he was still standing there. He wasn’t even watching, though I could feel his attention attached to me, the sort of link I can back-chain almost without effort and get into his mind-

This time rats were chewing through my skull. From the inside.

Within a second or two the pain shredded my concentration; even the most basic telepathy was shut behind a door locked with agony. All I could do was lie there across Baltrice’s knees. Lie there and look at Tezzeret and wait to die.

Tezzeret didn’t look happy. Or angry or triumphant or really anything at all. He wasn’t even paying that much attention to me. Instead, he seemed to be cutting some bandages off his fingertips with a small curved knife. The whole place was drenched with bucketsful of blood. Some random-looking body parts lay here and there, and one live mercenary sat propped into a corner, ashen and shaking, clutching at a tourniquet that closed off the stump of his arm.

All the different ways my nightmares had shown me this moment never looked anything like this. I guess as prophets go, I’m a pretty good telepath.

“Baltrice, are you hurt? Because if you are-”

She gave her head one tight shake. “Wasn’t much of a fight, boss. Didn’t get a nick.”

“You need to go,” I told her. “Get the hell out while you still can.”

“Not a chance. We go together or we stay right here. Both of us.”

That damned spell-of course she wouldn’t leave me. She couldn’t. And it was my fault.

Canceling the spell wouldn’t take five seconds; then at least she’d have a choice. Maybe even a chance. I reached out with my mind-and collapsed again under the surge of agony. All I could do was let out a shuddering moan.

I had no idea how to get Baltrice out of this alive.

There had to be a way. Had to. I couldn’t let her die just because she liked me too much to be sensible.

Especially considering why she liked me so much.

The moan had finally gotten Tezzeret’s attention, but only for a second. He gave me a level stare for maybe a heartbeat, then went back to work on his hand. When he spoke, he sounded distracted. Affectless.

Like a machine.

“Beleren. I have never verified how much pain a human nervous system can endure without permanent damage. Nor do I know whether a person can be killed by pain alone-if you can ‘hurt to death,’ as it were. If you try something as extreme as planeswalking, we likely will find out.”

“What… What did you do to me?”

This earned me another look. It was as cold as his voice. “I let you live.”

“Am I supposed to thank you?”

“Boss,” Baltrice hissed. “For the love of crap, don’t antagonize him!”

“What you are supposed to do, Beleren,” he said as he removed the last of the bandages, “is what you’re told.”

He held the hand up to inspect the damage. He had some kind of wire twisted so tightly around his wrist that it was cutting into his flesh. Two of the fingers on that hand were missing their last joint, and all had only ragged bloody splotches where his fingernails should have been. His only reaction was a tiny compression of the lips, as though he were mildly irritated.

“It was you,” I said. “It was you all along.”

“No,” he said. “The body was mine, within the illusion, but the mind you felt was my father’s. Inspired by the trick you pulled with Rhoka, in fact-you can be surprisingly resourceful. It was the closest I could come to a prudent course. My estimate of your ability is comprehensive. And apparently accurate.”

“Have I told you lately that you scare the crap out of me?”

“I should.” This earned me another look-and there was a hint of softening to his features, as though he might actually smile. A friendly smile, instead of the predatory grimace I always used to see. “That’s a compliment,” he said. “My estimate of your intellect is similarly comprehensive.”

He stepped over a body part or two on his way to the shocky mercenary in the corner. The mercenary looked up at Tezzeret with eyes like moons on a clear night. “Don’t… come on, don’t…” the mercenary managed to say. “I can… I can help you, right?”

“Right.” Tezzeret leaned down and took the mercenary’s remaining hand as though to pull the man to his feet. When instead he produced the small hooked knife he’d used to cut away the bandages, the mercenary started to scream.

He didn’t stop screaming until Tezzeret had severed the man’s hand at the wrist. It wasn’t a gentle kind of thing. Or fast; the guy stopped screaming because he was bleeding out. When Tezzeret finally dropped the arm, its fountain of blood had already slowed to a trickle. He held the dying man’s hand upright on the palm of his own injured hand as he unlooped the wire around his wrist.

As the wire came free, blood spurted from his two severed fingers-and just as swiftly, the blood stopped, and the last joints of the dying man’s fingers turned black and rotted away. The fingernails disintegrated, and shortly Tezzeret tossed the dead hand onto the body of its dead owner.

“Necromancy,” he said, holding up his hand again, which was now only bloody. His fingertips were back, all his nails were in place, and now he did smile, just a bit. “A useful trick I picked up from an unlucky bandit, when I was just a teenager.”

With Baltrice’s help, I eventually managed to sit up. “Tezzeret…” I began, then shook my head. There had to be something I could say. Some way to convince him to let her go. “I have these dreams, sometimes. Ever since I… uh, you know, since our fight. Nightmares, I guess. Where you were still alive. Coming after me.”

The smile wiped itself from existence. “Likewise. Except in mine, I catch you.”

“And then I’d wake up and tell myself I was being stupid, because I knew you were dead. You were dead. I felt you die. But I could never make myself believe it.”

“The avenging revenant.” He nodded. “Your conscience always did have a way of manifesting itself at… inconvenient times.”

And this would be one of them, I thought. “You know that Baltrice was fighting for you, all the way to the end, right?”

She made a face sour as old vinegar. “Do we really have to bring all that up again?”

“She went toe to toe with Liliana Vess. What Liliana did to her-well, never mind. She suffered a lot for being loyal to you, that’s all.”

“And?”

“I just hope you won’t make her suffer for being loyal to me.”

The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes deepened a bit. “She won’t be the one who suffers.”

“I guessed that part already,” I told him. “I don’t expect to get out of this alive. I thought-I knew-that if I ever saw you again, you were gonna snuff me like a candle.”

“I considered it,” he said. “It would have been an inelegant solution.”

“What?”

“And… well, not to grind too fine an edge on it, but it seemed rather foolish for me, alive, to kill you in revenge for my murder.”

“That wasn’t your attitude at the time.”

“I recall. I also recall that I was, at the time, hmmm, a bit emotional. If my eyes had been knives, I would have yanked them both out of my face to throw them at you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was there.”

“Perhaps returning from the dead has altered my perspective. All I know is how I feel now, and what I think now-which is at some considerable remove from what I felt and thought then.”

“So-what, you’re forgiving me?”

“I do not forgive,” he said with a level stare. “But a blood vendetta between us is of no use to anyone but our enemies.”

“We have enemies?” I said. “We as in you and me? Really?”

“Dead, you would be nothing more than an excuse for Baltrice to kill me.”

“That decision isn’t made yet,” she growled.

“You see?” He opened a hand toward her, as a conjuror might invite his audience to observe a nifty trick. “You’re an excellent hostage, a fact that has saved my life already tonight. As for you, Baltrice, well… you have your own reasons to hate me, and I’m sorry for that. I can only plead exigent circumstances, and ask that you accept my apology.”

She blinked up at him, her face slack in surprise-which was pretty much how I felt, too. “Are you yanking my chain?”

“I am not the man who cut you with the mana knife, Baltrice. I am not the man who ordered you into that last battle. Whether I am a better man, or a worse one, is not yet determined. Meanwhile, I am truly sorry for what I-the man I was then-did to you.”

Color was rising in Baltrice’s cheeks-never a good thing. “You think that gets you off the hook?”

“I don’t expect it to,” he said. “I wish only to express my regret. What to do with that knowledge is a decision you’ll have to face on your own.”

“I got a decision you can face in the seat of my pants.”

Tezzeret stepped over another body part or three to squat down in front of me, close enough that if I’d had a dagger I could have stabbed him. His face still displayed nothing beyond that eerie calm. “Please believe me when I tell you that I do not desire your death. I have done this to you because I have been saddled with a fiendishly difficult task, and I can’t risk any interference. Especially from you. You need to understand your situation, Jace-may I call you Jace?”

“I guess not killing me lets you call me whatever you want.”

“Thank you. You have some idea already of the gross parameters of what I’ve done. To make sure you don’t inadvertently take your own life, I must share with you some of the subtleties that underlie your condition.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve any more demonstrations,” I said. “Tell, don’t show, all right?”

“See this?” He held out the coil of wire that he’d used to tourniquet his hand. “This is a metal called etherium.”

“It’s what that arm of yours was made of, right?”

“Very similar. It is also what the device is made of, the one that is currently inhabiting your central nervous system. The salient feature of etherium is that it doesn’t wholly exist in this universe. Or in any. In ways that can’t be precisely explained in words, etherium simultaneously exists in the Blind Eternities; it is an alloy of?ther itself. Etherium, in a very real sense, has a, oh, I suppose you’d say, an inanimate version of a Planeswalker’s Spark. Understanding this is essential for your survival. Are you following me so far?”

“I guess…”

“I know that you will try to remove my device, or deactivate it. You will fail, and the attempt may kill you.”

Well, of course he’d say so. Didn’t make it true. “Go on.”

“First, the device cannot be drained of power, or choked off from its source of mana; etherium, by virtue of its special nature, is a source of mana. Or it channels mana from the Blind Eternities, or carries with it the energy that is reality. As I said, words are imprecise.

“You have experienced already the sort of pain that attempting magical operations can cause. You need to understand that even worse effects will be created by someone using magic on you. You also need to know that analgesic treatment, up to and including magically deactivating your brain’s pain center, will only hasten your death. It would be a death you wouldn’t want me to even describe. Trust that it will be torment that transcends description.

“The special nature of etherium also means that it cannot-I repeat, cannot-be fully manipulated by anyone who is not a Planeswalker. My own Spark-my own connection to the Blind Eternities-enables me to do things with etherium that cannot be matched by any plane-bound mage, no matter how powerful.”

“So I’d have to find a Planeswalker to turn this thing off.”

“One particular Planeswalker,” he said. “Me. Unless you know of another Planeswalker who is a mechanist of my ability. To the best of my knowledge, there has ever been only one other being with the requisite abilities, and he has been lost in the infinite reach of the Blind Eternities for decades. Nicol Bolas himself can’t find this being. Nothing that can be done by you or anyone you can find will work, and any serious attempt will likely kill you. Your best course is to resign yourself to your situation, and console yourself that it is temporary.”

“Is it?” I said. “Temporary?”

“Unless I am slain or incapacitated,” he said. “Think of it as a vacation.”

I wasn’t worried. Not really. Not yet. Though I had a feeling that after a try or two demonstrated Tezzeret wasn’t lying, I might start getting a little anxious.

Baltrice found the words that I didn’t even really want to think, let alone say. “This ‘fiendish task’ of yours-just how dangerous is it?”

He turned to her with a decidedly pensive look. “I do not expect to succeed,” he said evenly. “Nor do I expect to survive the attempt.”

“Then why in the hells are you gonna try it in the first place?”

He sighed. “I have never been a notably original thinker,” he said. “My gifts lie in the realms of attention to detail, and-I believe the phrase is-an infinite capacity for taking pains. The device I inflicted upon you, Jace, is a slight elaboration of one that has recently been inflicted on me.”

“You?” I blinked at him while I tried to figure out how I felt about that. “I kind of think that should make me feel better.”

“But it doesn’t,” he said, again frank and almost friendly. “I know.”

“So when you don’t survive the experience,” Baltrice said heavily, “what happens to him?”

“Eventually? Insanity,” he said with a half-apologetic shrug in my direction, “and a horrible death.”

“If he’s gonna go that way anyway-” She stood up, and flames gathered around her head and shoulders. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t roast you right here.”

“Because,” he said seriously, still squatting, showing no slightest sign of worry, “that prediction was based on my working alone.”

She looked at him, then she looked at me, and I looked back at her, and that flush on her cheeks got brighter. So did the flames. “Oh, come on, not really, no way…” she said. “You are not expecting me to-no way!”

Tezzeret shrugged. “I have never been a great fighter, even when I had my arm and all the resources of the Infinite Consortium to back me. You, though-Baltrice, you are more than a great fighter. You’re a one-woman bloody damned army.”

Her flush spread up around her eyes, replacing some of the white-hot anger she’d been carrying there a second before. “You took me easily enough.”

“I took him. You?” He still had that open but serious look on his face. “If I’d had to fight you, I’d be dead already. You surrendered to save Jace’s life.”

“And you’re asking me to do it all over again.”

“His life isn’t actually saved yet,” he pointed out. “And if what you really want is a clear shot at me, where’s better for you to stand than right at my back?”

She looked at me, and again I looked back at her, and I could see that somehow both our lives hung on what I said next.

“I… I can’t ask you to do this for me,” I told her, and if I had even a whisper of a chance to undo the spell, I wouldn’t have to make the speech. “I sure as hell won’t order you to. Do what you think is best. Not for me. For you.”

She sighed and chuckled ruefully. “You little turd,” she said to me, shaking her head. “Like I’m gonna say no after a speech like that.”

Tezzeret’s gaze flicked back and forth between her face and mine, and he had a distinctive steely glint in his eyes-a lot like he used to look when one of his inventions had performed exactly as designed.

Baltrice said, “So what’s this fiendish task?”

Tezzeret stood. “I am to find a Planeswalker known as Crucius the Mad Sphinx, who was last seen here on Esper, some decades ago,” he said. “By literally no coincidence at all, he is that other Planeswalker I spoke of just now-the one being in the Multiverse who is better at handling etherium than I am. At least, I believe him to be superior, and I think I am justified in my belief by the fact that it was Crucius who invented etherium in the first place, and that Crucius is to this day the only being who ever has had the ability to create it.”

“Oh, I get it,” Baltrice said. “A little extra incentive, right? So you want me to think that if you and I can find him, he’ll be able to take care of Beleren… and I won’t need you anymore.”

“That is an accurate summary of the situation.”

“You expect me to believe it? You can’t smell the giant pile of Way Too Convenient heaped on top of that story?”

Tezzeret’s lips compressed briefly, and after a moment he nodded. “There are a number of features of my new life that seem to be, well… overly contrived is, I think, the best description,” he said slowly. “As though I had set about to create an entirely new machine, then found the parts already manufactured and laid out precisely in order on my workbench. Having been conscious for less than twenty-four hours, I have been too busy trying to survive to spare any time for deep analysis of my situation. I surmise that there is an underlying teleology here, but I have not yet been able to verify it.”

“Sucks to be you, huh?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “The pertinent detail is that I have been forced into a role very like the one I had originally intended for you, Jace. I discover that I don’t like it any better than you did, and I have decided-not being a notably original thinker, after all-to employ the same solution you did.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Nicol Bolas,” he said. “You remember Nicol Bolas.”

“Only in bad dreams.”

“I’m going to kill him,” he said as though he was commenting it looked like rain.

It was a good thing I was already sitting down. I could only stare. Baltrice spluttered like a balky skyrocket. “You… you what? Are you completely frappin’ cracked?”

“Very likely. But cracked or not, the fact remains,” he said. “I am going to kill Nicol Bolas.”

“Oh, sure,” I said when I found my voice. “And while you’re off burning down three-quarters of the Multiverse, I’m supposed to sit here in Vectis with my thumb up my butt?”

“Not at all. You,” said Tezzeret with that eerie calm that was starting to look more and more like crazy every time I saw it, “are going to look after my father.”