Mathew Stover - Test of Metal

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

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

And had he crossed that wall…

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

And why is nothing at all.

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

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

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

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

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

Would I want him to?

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

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

As I always have.

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

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

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

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

I’m not that sentimental.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can talk.”

“SO CAN YOU.”

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