Mathew Stover - Test of Metal

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

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

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

“Not again,” I said. “Still.”

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

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

Bolas snorted. “What good nature?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

This did not sound like a friendly request.

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

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

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

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

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

Bolas didn’t need to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How sure are you?”

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

“There. See? That’s the punch line.”

I could only stare in dumb incomprehension.

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“Blood.”

I blinked. “Blood?”

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

“Jund,” I said. “We’re on Jund…”

“These days, we say we’re in Jund.”

“What?”

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