Nicol Bolas jerked as if he’d been hit by lightning. That insufferable little clot of ghoul turd! He should have killed Tezzeret years ago. The inarguable fact that he, himself, not only had not done anything so prudent as kill the artificer, compounded with the other inarguable fact that he, himself, had actually healed that festering pile of scrapings from a dung beetle’s butt, made at least one of his subminds wonder openly if perhaps Tezzeret had been right about him.
Maybe he was stupid.
But having been stupid in the past didn’t mean he had to be stupid now. The great dragon spun, a snarl on his face and a panoply of insanely lethal magics packed into each talon, his mouth, both eyes, both wings, and his tail.
Tezzeret sat calmly on the etherium plinth between the forepaws of the Metal Sphinx. He was smiling. This smile was not friendly, or reassuring, or even smug; it looked more like pity than anything else, and the sight of it spiked the dragon’s rage pressure until it superheated his blood and he cared not the slightest if he was killed right here on this stupid beach in front of this stupid sphinx while doing something stupid, if only he could die with Tezzeret’s blood on his fangs.
He spread wide his arms and wider still his great wings, and unleashed upon his enemy fell magics that could consume this entire universe.
Except he didn’t.
He hesitated, confusion knotting his scaly brow. Again, he summoned the power of entire stars and rained flaming destruction upon his-
Except he didn’t. Again.
“Do you know why not?” Tezzeret said.
Bolas flinched. Was that pestilent artificer reading his mind? Controlling his actions? Could the ramparts of his identity have been breached? His consciousness flashed through the countless chambers of his near-infinite mind, but he could find no sign of tampering.
“Predictable,” Tezzeret said. “To save my time and your effort, it’s not in your mind, Bolas. It’s in your head.”
“What?”
“You brought it on yourself, you know. We never had to be enemies.”
“Enemies? Don’t flatter yourself,” the dragon sneered. “I am a god. You are a cockroach.”
The artificer nodded amiably. “A reasonable metaphor, in a limited way. The cockroach is tiny, and weak, and can be crushed by a finger-yet still it can carry disease, befoul your food, and make your home generally disagreeable. And cockroaches are, as a group, very hard to kill.”
“What are you nattering about?” Bolas snapped. “What does this have to do with me?”
Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s your image, old worm. In those terms, what I’ve done to you is fairly simple. I’ve taken away your pesticide.”
“You are such a preposterous-”
“Kill me,” Tezzeret offered. “However you like. I have no shields and have summoned no magic. You can just step on me, if nothing else; it’s how one customarily destroys cockroaches.”
Bolas growled deep in his throat and lunged for him, talons poised to rip the artificer into bloody shreds.
But he didn’t.
“Because you can’t. Well, you can… but you won’t. Not for a while, at least.”
Tezzeret’s smile reminded Bolas of something unpleasant. With a lurch, Nicol Bolas realized that the smile looked like one he himself liked to show from time to time. Usually when someone he was about eat broke down and began to beg for their life.
But in Tezzeret’s smile there was no sadism. Not even malice.
That, somehow, made it worse.
Bolas began to wonder, for the first time he could remember in all twenty-five thousand long years of his life, if he might be out of his depth.
“I should think you know me as well as any creature in the Multiverse, excepting only Kemuel and Crucius,” Tezzeret said. “What’s my talent? Not superficial, magic and rhabdomancy and artificing. What am I best at? What is my specialty?”
Bolas opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but shut it again without speaking. Shut it with a snap like a dry branch breaking, because he realized he did know Tezzeret’s specialty.
Preparation.
“I want you to understand why I’m revealing what I’ve done to you in this particular way,” Tezzeret said. “There is a lesson I hope you will take from this, and the only way I can be sure you’ve learned it is if you see it yourself.”
“Games,” said Nicol Bolas sourly. “Aren’t I too stupid to understand the rules?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I hope you do, at least, understand the stakes,” said the artificer. “We’re playing for your life.”
Bolas sat, folding his wings about himself in what he hoped might look like nonchalance. He’d suddenly become very cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering.
“Do you remember what I said to Jace Beleren, right after my device settled into his brain?”
Bolas had no need to search his memories for that particular tidbit. “You said you were going to kill me.”
“Yes. And I did.”
“Are you mad?”
“I killed you dozens of times,” Tezzeret said. “Remember?”
Bolas thought of the corpse dragons he had pulled from parallel time lines, and he discovered he was getting colder rather than warmer.
“I kept on killing you,” Tezzeret said, “until finally I found a Nicol Bolas I didn’t have to kill. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand who you are and why you are this way?”
Bolas swallowed.
“You don’t have to answer. Only think. The device I put in Jace’s brain was there not because I feared he’d interfere with me. I put that device in there because I knew you would read his mind. Someday. Somewhere. And when you did, that device would flow into you right along with Jace’s memories. Once that was done, I could kill you…” He shrugged. “Whenever. Any time I happened to feel like it. Because that device is in your brain now.”
Tezzeret sighed apologetically. “The tricky part was programming it to reach the proper neural nexus in your brain. A bit of trial and error there, thus a few extra dead dragons on parallel beaches. I’m sorry for that, by the way.”
Bolas snorted. He’d felt not the faintest sting, let alone the shattering agony that Tezzeret’s device had inflicted upon Beleren. He opened his mouth to express just how pathetically contemptible Tezzeret’s little charade had become, but the artificer held up a hand.
“It’s not there to hurt you. It’s more of a short circuit than a punishment-and besides, I suspect your pain tolerance is beyond the capacity of any device to surpass.”
Bolas blinked. That had sounded almost like a compliment…
“Basically, it shuts down your motivation to kill me. Or any Planeswalker. I decided I could spare that much mercy for Jace… at least partially because I could so vividly imagine the look on your face when you discovered you couldn’t hurt him.”
Bolas could think already of a dozen ways to get that device out of his brain, and once he did-
Again, Tezzeret seemed to be reading his mind. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if it took you more than ten minutes to remove it. But it gives us the opportunity to have this chat.”
Bolas had a different chat in mind. With a very subtle, impenetrably camouflaged exertion of mana, he reached out for a time line where he had never used his mind siphon on Beleren. A quick temporal shift, and matters between him and Tezzeret would be different.
Lethally different.
But he couldn’t. The time lines simply weren’t there… or, worse, he couldn’t see them. The cold seemed to have penetrated his bones. He sent his perceptions forward and back along the time line he was already in… except he didn’t. He couldn’t.
He remembered being able to clockwork. He didn’t remember how.
Tezzeret nodded sympathetically. “You have to keep in mind that I had a long time to prepare for our meeting on this beach.”
“Apparently so.”
“I have come to believe that clockworking in general is a very bad idea. Even in the hands of a well-intentioned mage, it has the intrinsic potential to rend the fabric of the Multiverse-which makes it a particularly bad idea to let you, for example, use it. So you can’t. Possibly forever.”
Bolas could no longer contain his disbelief. “That’s impossible-you can’t just take a power away from me!”
“Yes. The only person who can do that to you is, well… you.”
“What?”
“Jace Beleren wasn’t the only one with a trap in his mind,” Tezzeret said. “This one was a little subtler. I’ve given your clockworking powers into the care of a subpersonality of yours. I based my design on your work. This subpersonality actually understands how dangerous clockworking is, and so he’ll make sure you never do it again. I have given you something more valuable than all the etherium that has ever existed.”
He smiled, and now Bolas did see a trace of that malice that had been formerly absent. Tezzeret said, “I’ve given you a friend.”
“What?” Bolas thought for a moment that his eyes might bulge right out of his skull. “You didn’t-you couldn’t possibly-”
“Doc,” said Tezzeret, “say hello.”
And Nicol Bolas heard a thinly wiseass human voice buzzing in his left ear. “Hiya! Hey, it’s nice in here! Damn, Nicky, we shoulda got together years ago!”
Tezzeret looked unconscionably pleased with himself.
For one horrible second, Bolas was afraid that for the first time in twenty-five millennia, he might actually burst into tears.
“Aww, come on, Nicky. It won’t be that bad. Well, not that bad. Okay, it’ll be pretty bad. But look on the bright side: as long as you don’t try to pull your clockworking crap, I won’t have any reason to talk to you.”
Bolas could understand already how that would become a substantial inducement. “What have you done?” He was almost moaning. “How have you-you could not possibly-”
“I know you haven’t spent much time in Esper, and certainly not in the slums,” the artificer said casually, “and so there is no reason you would know our word for a small, improvised weapon, kept concealed on one’s body until its stroke can kill.”
Incomprehension piled upon humiliation on top of dread, Bolas could only stare.
The artificer leaned toward him and lowered his voice as though imparting a secret. “In Tidehollow,” he said, “we call it a tezzeret.”
Sometime later, after giving him an opportunity to recover his composure, Tezzeret approached the dragon in a gentle, almost companionable way. “I know you’re angry. Embarrassed. Even humiliated. Please understand that it is not my intention to make you feel that way. Please believe that all this has not been arranged to do you any harm at all.”
“Oh, and I would believe this why?”
“If it had been my goal to humiliate you,” Tezzeret said, “we would have had this conversation in front of an audience.”
And before Nicol Bolas’s astonished eyes, Tezzeret the Seeker reached outside the universe, and when his hand returned, it held the wrist of Jace Beleren.
“That’s impossible!”
“Not here.”
“But how-?”
“I can think of no reason why I should tell you.”
“His mind’s dead,” Bolas said. “As dead as yours used to be.”
“Yes.” Tezzeret smiled. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of poetic justice.”
“That spell, during the fight-it was you!”
“Of course it was me. He might have spoiled my surprise.” The artificer shrugged. “A properly partitioned consciousness can, as you know all too well, do several things at once.”
“But killing him that way, all at once, painlessly-” Bolas cocked his head, squinting sidelong. “Uncharacteristically merciful.”
“My friend Kemuel would say that mercy is the greatest of the virtues.”
“Yeah? And what do you say?”
Tezzeret’s smile spread, but his eyes went cold and hard as chips of obsidian. “Virtue,” he said, “is for good guys. You and I have other priorities.”
“Ah. He’s not actually dead.”
A blue haze seemed to leak from the pores of Tezzeret’s right arm. He opened his hand toward Beleren, and the haze became a crackling gap spark that spit itself into the mind ripper’s face. “Not anymore.”
Bolas arched an eyebrow. “He doesn’t seem too lively.”
“He’s still suspended. I will leave him like that while I retrieve Baltrice and Liliana Vess. I have a bit of business with them that must be taken care of, and it might interest you to watch, if you wouldn’t mind. I can ensure that they will not be aware of your presence. Please?”
“You’re asking me? You’re asking for permission to preserve whatever is left of my dignity?”
“Yes,” Tezzeret said. “It’s only polite.”
Nicol Bolas sat on the etherium beach and watched Tezzeret revive the other three planewalkers. With a curiously private smile, he had kneeled beside each of them, placed his hand on each of their heads, and murmured, “Awaken. You are free. Arise and walk.”
And they did.
Bolas couldn’t even tell how Tezzeret had done it.
There was a predictable amount of commotion-especially between Baltrice and Vess, where Beleren had to get between them to prevent bloodshed-but Tezzeret got them settled down in an impressively swift fashion. He answered their most pressing question-“Where’s that damned dragon?”-in a way that Bolas found obscurely tickling.
“It is always safest to assume,” Tezzeret told them gravely, his deadpan unbreakable, “that Nicol Bolas is closer than you think.”
“And what in the hells is up with you?” Beleren demanded. “What is this place? How did you get us away from Bolas? What’s going on?”
Tezzeret favored him with the same smile Bolas had found so infuriating. Beleren didn’t seem to like it any better. “Each of you has been of exceptional assistance to me in recent days. I hope to thank you, and to give each of you a gift. This place is… me. Or I am it. Or I will be, eventually. I did not take you from Bolas. He cast all three of you into the Blind Eternities. I have retrieved you; that’s all. You are, I suppose, salvage. What’s going on is our taking leave of one another. Is that clear enough?”
“Not even close,” Jace said, starting toward him, only to be stopped by Baltrice’s hand on his shoulder.
“Boss. Don’t do it.”
“I’m just saying hello to an old friend,” he growled through his teeth.
“Well, don’t,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is.”
“Looks familiar enough to me.” Beleren shook off her hand and raised his arms to begin a casting, and Baltrice gave his shoulder a hard shove that sent him stumbling sideways into the plinth.
“I’m telling you,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is. He can do things you can’t even imagine.”
Nicol Bolas reflected that he wouldn’t have minded getting that particular warning himself.
“Are we done?” Tezzeret said evenly. “This is a bad time to fight among ourselves. There is still a very angry dragon nearby, who might wish to vent that anger on whatever people he can catch. You don’t want to be those people.”
He looked from one to another until they each subsided.
“Liliana Vess,” he said, stepping to her side and taking her hand. “Your help was inadvertent, but valuable nonetheless. The gift I have for you is freedom.”
She frowned at him. “Freedom?”
“Many of you-alternate Liliana Vesses from parallel time lines-had bound themselves to Bolas’s service by blood pact. Are you one of them?”
“Well…” She flushed and looked ashamed of herself, providing what appeared to be answer enough.
“Listen to me now, Liliana Vess,” he said, placing his hand on her head, “there are also many of you who have never bound yourselves wholly to the dragon. Close your eyes.”
“I don’t care what you think you can do, but there’s no breaking that compact. I’ve tried. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve tried.”
“Please. Indulge me.”
She sighed and closed her eyes.
“You, Liliana Vess, are one of the unbound. In your life, you have learned too well the perils of contracts.”
“Of course I am,” she said, shaking Tezzeret’s hand off her head. “What? That’s it? You tell me something I already know? Thanks for nothing. Literally.”
“And you are welcome for something. Also literally.”
“You think Bolas needs a signed contract to keep his hold on me?”
“Apparently not.”
“I’m out of this place,” she said. “Jace, it’s been real. Baltrice, kiss my ass.”
She stalked off along the beach, gathering the power to shift out.
Tezzeret turned to the pyromancer. “Baltrice.”
She waved him off. “No presents. All I want is for you to take your doohickey out of Jace’s head.”
“That’s already done.”
“It is?”
Jace said, “It is?”
“Before you woke up.”
Bolas noted that Tezzeret did not bother to specify which time.
Baltrice spread her hands. “That’s all I need.”
“It’s all you want,” Tezzeret said. “Not the same thing.”
“Seriously. Looks like things are working out okay for you, and I’m glad for that. Really. Even though you served me up to Nicol Bolas like a snack tray; I figure there’s no way you could have known.”
“And I thank you for that generous estimation.” Tezzeret stepped around her and reached for something on the plinth-a necklace. Its chain was pure etherium and its pendant a carefully shaped red gemstone that glowed with a light of its own.
Sangrite, Bolas realized. Why would the artificer give sangrite to his pet pyromancer?
“More jewelry?” she said with a lopsided smile. “Come on, Tezzeret-people are starting to talk.”
“Baltrice, do you remember the conversation we had in the Glass Dunes, when I was working on my armor? About who I’ve become, and who you’ve become, and why?”
“Not really. Something’s screwy with my memory about all that stuff. Probably something to do with Renn. Hey, did you ever settle that bastard?”
“Not personally.” Tezzeret wasn’t smiling anymore. “This necklace is, like the locator ring and the navigator, more about what it does than what it is, and again it’s a simple device. Slip it on over your head, and you become invulnerable to all forms of mental domination.”
“Yeah?”
Jace Beleren said, “What?”
She hefted it appreciatively, then shrugged her thanks. “Nice. Much appreciated.”
Jace said, an undertone of urgency in his voice, “Baltrice, don’t put it on.”
“Why not?”
Nicol Bolas had occasionally produced, in his alchemical research laboratories, temperatures extreme enough to liquefy helium. He had never seen anything remotely as cold as the look Tezzeret then turned upon Jace Beleren. “Yes, Jace. Tell her why not.”
“It’s a trick,” Beleren said. He was starting to sweat. “Baltrice, you trust me, right?”
“Sure, Jace.” She looked puzzled. “Of course.”
“Do you want to tell her why?” Tezzeret said. “Or shall I?”
“I don’t get it.” Baltrice seemed to be having difficulty processing what was happening, and her confusion was shading toward anger. “Why what? What are you two talking about?”
“Baltrice, you have to believe me-!”
Flames kindled in her hair. “Why what?” she barked.
“Why you trust him,” Tezzeret replied, flat and cold as an etherium knife. “Put on the necklace, and you’ll find out.”
“Jace…? Did you… do something to me?” She turned slowly, her eyes wide, and even though her voice was small and girlish, Beleren took a step back. “What did you do?”
Bolas didn’t know what Beleren saw in her eyes. To the dragon, it looked like death by hellfire.
“Baltrice, come on! You know me better than that-you can’t… don’t let him do this to you!” Beleren pleaded, lifting his hands as though to shield himself.
“Cast that spell,” Tezzeret said, “and die where you stand.”
Beleren froze.
Shortly he must have decided Tezzeret wasn’t bluffing, because he let his hands fall. “Baltrice, please-”
“Shut up! Shut your festering mouth!” She wheeled on Tezzeret. “What is this? Why are you doing this to us?”
“Because I like you,” he said. “And I don’t like him.”
“But… but…” She looked as if something was breaking inside her.
“When he was my prisoner, he was tortured. For months. Tortured almost exclusively by you,” Tezzeret said. “Have you forgotten that? Do you think he has?”
She looked stunned.
“Yes: find out why you trust him,” Tezzeret said. “At the same time you’ll find out why he trusts you.”
She clutched the necklace to her chest as though it were the only solid thing left in her world. “I don’t… I don’t want to know…”
“My gift to you is truth,” Tezzeret said. “I never expected you to thank me for it.”
Tears began to well in her eyes. “Jace…? What did you do to me?”
Beleren lowered his head. “I saved your life.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about-”
“Yes, it is. You just don’t remember.” Jace looked at her, and his eyes brimmed like hers. “Liliana-what she did to you-how she beat you…”
He shook his head. “She hit you with ghosts, Baltrice. Shades. She infected you with the shades of every living thing that had ever died at Tezzeret’s tower. Even after we healed your body, the memory alone was killing you. Driving you insane.”
“That’s not-” Her fists clenched, and flames sprouted across her shoulders. “You had no right-it’s not your call, Jace!”
“It wasn’t,” he said softly. “It was yours. Baltrice, I didn’t want to. You begged me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I… just couldn’t think of any other way to save your life.”
“How can I believe you?”
Tezzeret said, “There’s one way to find out.”
“Baltrice, don’t-!” Jace said desperately. “The shades, the memories, all that stuff-it’s not gone, Baltrice. I buried it, that’s all. Putting on that necklace could kill you.”
“Of course he would say that.”
Baltrice looked wildly from one of them to the other, and then back again, baring her teeth like a cornered animal. “How can I… How am I supposed to know?”
Tezzeret stood impassive as stone. “The truth is in your hand.”
Tears spilled over and rolled down her cheeks, and with a strangled sob she turned and stumbled away in the direction opposite the necromancer’s.
Jace watched her go. His face was empty. Without even loss. “You bastard…” he said hoarsely. Quietly. Without inflection. “You evil, murdering son of a bitch. She was happy. Happy. Do you even know what happy feels like?”
“I suspect it very much resembles how I feel right now.”
Beleren turned his empty face toward the artificer. “And what’s for me? Do you kill me now?”
“I can be persuaded.”
He looked down. “Then can I go?”
“I strongly recommend that you do.”
His head came up warily. Frowning, he began slowly to back away.
“I don’t want to kill you, Jace. You’re too useful; I may need your talents someday. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason I should let a vicious little gutter monkey like you walk off without a scratch.”
“What are you going to do?” Jace was slowly lowering himself toward a crouch. To Bolas, he looked like a herd animal trying to be inconspicuous to a predator.
“Right now? I’m going to let you go.”
“That’s it?”
“For now. Your gift,” Tezzeret said, “is fear.”
He stopped. “I don’t get it.”
“You will. You never were a brave man. I have decided to remove from you the burden of courage. Take Baltrice, for example. Once she tries on that necklace, I would not want to be you. Not to grind too fine an edge on it, I would rather not be on the same plane as you. Because I would not be at all surprised to learn that Baltrice had incinerated an entire planet just because you were on it.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever. I can handle Baltrice. She’s a better person than you think.”
“She was. Circumstances may change. And you have others to fear-me, for instance. Should I ever look in on you and decide you are insufficiently frightened, I will hurt you. I will hurt your family, if you have such. I will hurt your friends. Every person you have ever met will die screaming curses upon your name.”
Beleren’s jaw clenched. “Then maybe I should take you out right now.”
“Too late,” Tezzeret said. “You also have a little bit of a Nicol Bolas problem.”
The mentalist went still.
“Do you remember that device in your brain? I should hardly think you’ve forgotten already. Would you be interested in what happened to that device?”
Beleren’s only reply was a guarded stare.
“You gave it to Nicol Bolas. Against his will.”
Jace went pale. “You-you couldn’t have! It’s not possible!”
“That’s exactly what Bolas said. Another thing you two have in common.”
“But-but I didn’t have anything to do with it!” Beleren said, going even whiter. “You did it to me-and you did it to him-”
“And you helped.”
“But I didn’t!” he whined. “There was nothing I could have done about it!”
“Tragic, isn’t it?” He sighed. “I suspect Bolas is not interested in subtle distinctions.”
“But-what about you? You’re the one who actually did it!”
“I’m touched by your concern,” Tezzeret said. “You’ll be comforted to learn that Nicol Bolas and I have reached an understanding. A truce. You might even call it a partnership.”
“That’s-that’s not-I mean, you and Bolas? You’re just making that up!”
“You think so?” Tezzeret said, opening his hand in a gesture of invitation. “You can ask him.”
From the goggle-eyed whiter-than-foam countenance Jace Beleren turned up in his direction, Nicol Bolas assumed he was now visible. And since there was nothing, at the moment, he could do to harm either one of them, he settled for a fang-filled grin.
“Jace. Lovely to see you again. Lovely to…” He sniffed the air, broadened his grin, and sniffed again. “Is that fear? Delicious. If I were to, say, lunge at you suddenly, do you think you might wet your pants?”
Why not? It was funny. To Bolas, anyway. Beleren didn’t seem amused, but there was no way to know for sure, as the mentalist’s response was a gurgle like a dragon choking on a griffin bone, followed hard upon by a magically enhanced sprint for the tree line.
Bolas watched him go, and then he sighed. Diverting as this tiny episode had been, nothing had changed in his intolerable situation. He sighed again and looked down upon his tormentor. He said, “Partnership?”
Tezzeret said, “Yes.”
“Are you insane?”
“It’s possible,” the artificer allowed. “A wasted question.”
“Then a pertinent one. Why would I make a deal with you, much less keep it?”
“Because you need me.”
“Do I?”
“No more games, Bolas. That’s over for us. I know you’re failing. Your faculties are degrading. You’ve aged more in the last ten years than in the last ten thousand. That’s the only reason I was able to do what I’ve done to you.”
The dragon frowned down at the artificer. He had to admit the scrawny little scut worm had a point.
“Listen to me: I don’t know what you’ve planned, but I know it’s big, and I suspect it is intended to repair your mind and rebuild your power. I also believe that your plan is going to involve a great deal of destruction, not to mention the deaths of many planeswalkers, including myself. This is where you and I have a problem. I’m not certain that you even know how destructive whatever you’re doing will be. As far as I can see, you might have passed your mental tipping point, and millions or billions may die for nothing at all. So I’m going to help you.”
Bolas stared. “You may need to say that again.”
“Think about what you’ve seen here, since you came. Think about what happened on the beach, and what you took from my mind. Bolas, I know it’s hard. Especially now. But think. What do you know?”
The dragon lowered his head. “I know that you beat me.”
“Yes.”
“You could have killed me at any time since I arrived here. I have been completely at your mercy the entire time.”
“Mercy,” he said, “is the greatest virtue.”
“But you haven’t killed me. You expect to get some use out of me.”
“Expect is too strong a word. But I am allowing for the possibility.”
“Because… there is no such thing as trash-only materials you haven’t yet found a use for. Including me.”
“Yes.”
“This whole thing hasn’t been about you at all. It’s-you did all this-everything you have shown me, everything you have done to me, and everything you haven’t done to me… you…”
Bolas felt the dawn of a sensation he could not identify. He wondered if it might be awe. “It was about me all along…”
“Yes,” Tezzeret said. “Also all about me. At the same time. Curious, isn’t it?”
“To prove that I can trust you… and find out if you can trust me…”
Tezzeret shrugged. “Trust is too much to hope for between beings like us, Bolas. But you can believe I will not harm you unless you leave me no other choice. You can believe that I do not want you to kill billions, for good reason or otherwise, and I certainly don’t want you to kill me. I believe that you want so badly to be restored to your former glory that you will accept help. Even from me.”
“So this…” Bolas began to understand the feeling of the metal whirl that had plagued Tezzeret in the Riddle Gate. “So this is about the fourth line.”
“The last riddle,” Tezzeret said seriously. “The most important one; the one that requires the fourth trait of greatness in an artificer.”
Bolas looked at him in silent query.
“Insight,” Tezzeret said.
“Whom do you rescue by slaying…”
“Exactly. Whom do I rescue by slaying.” The artificer offered his hand. “I don’t want the answer to be you.”
Bolas stared.
He had never, in all his vast life, felt so wholly at a loss.
“I suppose…” Bolas murmured. “I suppose… I don’t, either.” And to his own astonishment, he lowered one great talon and shook Tezzeret’s hand. “Though I’ll probably kill you anyway.”
“But not today.”
“Yes,” Bolas said. “Not today.”
A moment later, he discovered something still troubled him. “But Crucius,” he said, waving a talon up at the Metal Sphinx. “That’s really him? The Mad Sphinx?”
“Not really.”
“Where is he, then?”
Tezzeret said gravely, “Speaking.”
Nicol Bolas felt as though all the air had turned to stone and all the stone was piled upon his chest. “You…?” he gasped. “You…?”
“Of course not,” Tezzeret said, grinning at him. “But the look on your face? I will treasure that for the rest of my life. It will keep me warm through the long winter nights.”
After a moment, Bolas discovered himself smiling as well. “All right, all right. Very well. But still-tell me.”
“Say please.”
“Are you serious?”
“Manners cost nothing, though their value is beyond gold. Or even etherium,” Tezzeret said. “If you like, Doc can teach you.”
Bolas shook his head, and some fist in his chest, so old and tight and layered with scars that he had forgotten it had ever been there, now loosed and let him laugh outright.
“Please, then,” he said, still chuckling, “tell me of finding Crucius.”
“You’re standing on him. More or less.”
“Really? This isn’t another joke?”
“It’s not a joke, but it’s not really him, either. It used to be him, and if the Multiverse is lucky, it might be him again. Remember how I said that here, it’s always now? He was a clockworker. Will be a clockworker. Potentially. Probably the only clockworker I would actually trust to do clockworking.”
“Was? Will be? Potentially what?”
“It’s complicated. Things become other things. Seeds become plants. Drops become rivers. Eggs become dragons. But those transformations are a great deal more certain than anything that happens to, around, or concerning a clockworker. The same for me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That Speaking bit was a joke before-but it’s also true. Sort of. Potentially true. Someday I may be him, or he may have been me. Formerly. Or both of us might be you. And vice versa. Or I’m what he turned into. And so forth. Like I said before…” Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“Apparently so.”
“It’s true that there is no secret. It’s just that language is insufficient to express truth clearly. That’s why I decided it would be better to show you.”
“But-” The dragon waved up toward the Metal Sphinx, and at the riddle engraved into the plinth. “What is all that, then? What’s with the statue?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“I, ah, well…”
“The dynamic balance of intersecting arcs that makes it seem as though at any instant it might wake up, yawn, stretch, and take wing for any place-any time-in the Multiverse. The simple purity of it-he has taken the ugly necessities of blood and bone, of eating, shitting, screwing and decay, and transformed them into clean, spare lines of perfect elegance.”
“Hmp,” the dragon said. To Bolas, the only thing more boring than art was listening to someone talk about art. “You sound as though you envy him.”
“To become as he has become,” Tezzeret said seriously, “is my heart’s fondest dream.”
“Why don’t you, then?” The great dragon gave a shrug that encompassed the whole world that was ocean. “In this place, you are master of all you survey. Literally. There is nothing in this entire universe that does not answer to your will. Not even me. If that’s what you want to be, you can just… be.”
Tezzeret nodded. “I can.”
“So why don’t you?”
“To be master of this place,” the artificer said precisely, “is not what I’m for.”
“What, some kind of higher-calling crap? Really? You expect me to believe that?”
“You can believe that I believe it.” Tezzeret scooped up a handful of the etherium sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “You’ve heard of finding God in a grain of sand? Here, it’s the literal truth. This place is its own master. There is nothing here that is not part of its own creator. Including me.”
“But I made you.”
Tezzeret shrugged. “Who made you?”
“Let’s not go there, can we?”
“I don’t expect you to really understand this. I’m not sure I really understand it. Crucius thought he had an answer to existence-he thought he understood himself, the Multiverse, and his place in it. This place is what he became after he found out he was wrong.”
Tezzeret looked up into the face of the Metal Sphinx as though it were looking back at him. “I don’t know if he decided there was no answer, or if he simply realized that whatever answer there was, he wasn’t the one who could find it. So he set out to design and build someone who was.”
Bolas snorted. “You?”
“Not me personally. Someone who can do what I have done. Who can become what I’ve become. Someone who can reach this place, understand what it is, and realize that the real Search is only now beginning.”
The dragon sighed and let his heavy lids droop across his vast yellow eyes. The only thing duller than talking about art was mystical claptrap and gnostic flummery. “What about that riddle, though? Where did Crucius learn Classical Draconic-and how in any flavor of hell did you learn to read it?”
“Oh, it’s not. It’s whatever language you know best. As for the riddle, I wrote it.” He shrugged and gave a tired sigh. “That is, I’m going to write it. The Seeker will. Someday. Currently, I presume that Seeker will be me. Of course, I didn’t know I wrote it-will write it, whatever-until after I solved it. Inconvenient. But probably better that way.”
“So? What’s the answer?”
Tezzeret smiled. “I am the carmot.”
“Really? That’s it? That’s the thunderbolt of enlightenment that turned you into… whatever in the hells you are? ‘I am the carmot’?”
“Not at all. I am the carmot; you are an ill-mannered dragon with an unfortunate impulse control problem.”
“I don’t get it.”
Tezzeret shrugged. “Watch.”
He reached into the tangles of his hair and brought out a needle of sangrite about one-fourth the size of his little finger. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said, and stabbed the sangrite into his left eye.
His face burst into flame. The fire swiftly spread to the rest of his body, and his head… vanished.
Bolas scowled. The stump of Tezzeret’s neck showed a clean, smooth surface, exactly the color of etherium. A moment later, Tezzeret’s head wiped itself back into existence.
His left eye, along with its lid, its socket, and a diagonal band that extended across his face from his hairline above his right eye to his jaw at the left corner of his mouth, was now metal, metal the color of burnished pewter…
He batted away what was left of the smoke. “Sorry about the odor.”
“Not at all,” Bolas said. “You forget whom you’re talking to.”
“Of course. Well, here,” Tezzeret said, then stuck his thumb into the corner of his etherium eye socket and gouged out his etherium eye. He flinched, just a bit, as it came free. “Damn, that smarts. Here. This is my gift to you.”
He tossed his eyeball to an astonished Nicol Bolas, who bobbled it for a second or two before getting a solid grip. He held it up to inspect it.
Solid etherium. Pure. And indescribably precious, not in money, but in power. “Impressive.”
By the time he looked back at Tezzeret, the artificer had an eye of flesh in his etherium socket to match the one on the opposite side of his nose. He winked his brand-new eye at the dragon. “This is my body, broken for you. More or less.”
“So it’s you,” Nicol Bolas said, a bit breathlessly. “You are the carmot…”
“As I just told you.”
“You’ll forgive me for being surprised.” A Planeswalker who can create etherium? Exactly why he’d been after Crucius in the first place. Power. Unlimited power. It was only a question of stuffing Tezzeret someplace he couldn’t get out of, and his problems would be more than half solved. “I have underestimated you, indeed,” he murmured appreciatively. Now it was only a matter of finding a workaround for this blasted device in his head, and-
“That will be all for now,” Tezzeret said. “I’ll be back in a day or two. Just to check on you. Make sure everything’s all right.”
“As if I’ll still be here? I’m leaving now.”
“No. You’re not.” He sounded disturbingly certain.
“How do you mean?”
“This place is, in one crucial respect, very like the Riddle Gate. You can’t take etherium out of here.”
“Very well.” Bolas cast the eye aside without hesitation-after all, he had a line on an unlimited supply-and he reached out to rip his way into the Blind Eternities.
But reality did not rip.
He tried again, disbelieving, and once more in desperation, and then he wheeled, staring in horror at the artificer, who spread his hands and shrugged apologetically.
“You must not have been paying very close attention to my problem in the Riddle Gate,” he said. “For beings such as yourself-such as I once was-leaving here is… difficult. But I’ll give you this hint for free: the metal is easy to discard. Discarding your desire for it is a much more difficult operation.”
“You’re making this up!” Bolas breathed, hating the edge of desperation he heard in his own voice.
“Funny how people keep saying that to me.”
“This is another of your stupid jokes! It has to be!”
“Compliments on the humor of the situation should be directed to Crucius-but under the circumstances, I am happy to accept them in his place.” He turned and began to walk away along the beach.
“Wait! You can’t just leave me here!”
“Of course I can.” Tezzeret stopped, and now looked over his shoulder at the dragon. “In fact, I have to. Away from this place, my powers are as limited as they have ever been. It wouldn’t be a heartbeat before you’d have me shackled and stuffed in your deepest dungeon. Which I would prefer to avoid. And as I said, I’ll be back in a day or two. Then we can start work on your problem. Together.”
“Where could you possibly be going that is remotely as important as getting me out of here?”
“I’m going to spend some time with my father,” he said, and with a single step passed beyond the bounds of the universe.