Mathew Stover - Test of Metal

“It’s not… treasure…” Tezzeret coughed. “It’s just how this place is. And how it will always be. More or less. Ever hear the expression ‘You can’t take it with you’?”

“Really?” Bolas lifted his head, frowning at the etherium gigafortune all around. If Tezzeret could have taken even an armload or two of etherium back across the Blind Eternities to Esper, Bolas would hardly have found him naked on this beach.

He probably wouldn’t have found Tezzeret at all.

“So…” Bolas again bent his neck to bring his jaws within biting distance of Tezzeret’s face. “You know where he is.”

“I know everywhere he isn’t.”

“Close enough. Tell me.”

“That’s a long story, even for you.”

“What, is he dead?”

Tezzeret cocked his head as though this question had only now occurred to him. “It would be most accurate to say that he’s not yet alive.”

“Oh, I love when you do that. I do. Really. Tell me another.” Dragon drool began to puddle near Tezzeret’s ears, and the dragon’s voice went deep as a mine shaft and twice as dark. “I can take the secret from your mind.”

“There is no secret.”

“I can peel your brain like an onion.”

“What do you know about onions, carnivore?”

“A fair point,” Bolas conceded. “How about instead, I peel your brain like the skull of an obnoxious artificer who has about a minute to live?”

“Is this multiple choice? None of the above.”

“You haven’t heard all the choices.”

Tezzeret smiled. “With you, it’s always none of the above.”

“You think you can play sphinx with me, you filthy little scut?” Those yellow eyes darkened toward red. “You don’t have the power. You don’t have a millionth of the power.”

“Power’s irrelevant,” Tezzeret said apologetically. “And I’m not playing sphinx, nor any other game; why would I? You’re too stupid to understand the rules.”

“Stupid?” Bolas snatched Tezzeret into the air, shaking him like a doll. “Will I be stupid while I skin you and gut you and roast you alive? Will I still be stupid after the last of your bones digests in my third stomach?”

“Yes. You will. You,” said Tezzeret, wheezing a bit from the shaking, “are not what you eat.”

The dragon made a sound as if boulders might be grinding together in his crop. “I was master of the Blind Eternities when your pathetic species didn’t yet know how to make fire. I have not survived twenty-five thousand years by being stupid.”

“That’s true,” Tezzeret allowed. “You survived in spite of being stupid.”

“What do you gain by insulting me?” The dragon seemed honestly puzzled. “Are you so tired of living?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Tezzeret said. “Telling you that you’re stupid is not an insult. It’s an explanation.”

He spoke very slowly, and very clearly, as though speaking to a dim-witted child. “It’s not your fault, Bolas. You can’t help it. You are probably the most powerful being in the Multiverse-”

“Probably?” the dragon sneered. “Another insult.”

“And that’s why. That right there. Power makes you stupid, Bolas. Power makes everyone stupid. You don’t have to be smart when you can be strong. When was the last time you had to, say, outwit someone? Why bother, when you can destroy them-destroy anyone-with a shrug?”

“Which you should keep in mind.”

“That’s the difference between us. I have to be smart; my intellect is my only useful weapon. That man you just killed-Silas Renn? He had the power to squash me like a bug. He used to do exactly that, regularly, back when we both studied with the Seekers of Carmot. He was ten times the mage I’ll ever be… yet what’s left of his corpse is drifting with the tides in a universe he could never have imagined. And I…?” Tezzeret smiled. “I am about to teach the most powerful being in the Multiverse a lesson in weakness.”

“We’ll see who teaches whom.” He opened his claws to hold Tezzeret cupped in his palm. One wickedly hooked talon, as long as Tezzeret was tall and sharp as a stiletto, traced a complex design in the air around the human’s form. Where the talon passed, lines of actinic white fire ignited, becoming a spherical lattice around Tezzeret, anchoring his wrists and ankles and stretching them to full extension-and then a bit more.

Nicol Bolas hummed to himself as he wove the restraints. “Comfortable? No? Good.”

Gap-spark blue energy crackled between the dragon’s horns like lightning leaping from mountain to mountain. “This, by the way, is going to hurt. A lot.”

“Everything… hurts…” His body locked outstretched within the globe of white, Tezzeret could only barely force the words past his clenched teeth. “Whenever you’re… ready…”

“You can spare yourself this pain.”

“No… I can’t…”

“Share your secrets willingly, and I’ll leave your mind intact.”

“The only secret… is that there is no secret…”

“Have it your way. You were warned.”

The gap spark between Bolas’s horns intensified, gathering itself until it became a seething blue-tinged sun, too bright to look at. This blue sun grew horns of its own, two writhing jets of energy, one from above and the other from below. These jets spidered out, paused for a heartbeat or two in the air between the dragon and the man, then lanced through the Web of Restraint and stabbed into Tezzeret’s head.

Bolas grimaced, fanning the air with one wing as he peeled Tezzeret’s mind. Burning hair was one odor he’d never enjoyed-and burning bone wasn’t much better. He sighed for a moment, thinking of Jace Beleren. If he’d still had a tether on that grubby little mind ripper, he could have farmed out this business. He decided that when this was over, he would take himself off to, oh, say, Esper’s Glass Dunes for a good sand bath-something nice and abrasive, to really scour this stink off his scales.

The dragon’s memory siphon was very reliable and very thorough. As long as the spell was active, Bolas could replay Tezzeret’s memories, as vivid as a nightmare. It was very much like being Tezzeret as he endured the original experiences.

“Really, the things I put myself through…” Nicol Bolas said with a melancholy sigh. On the other hand, it would give him one more reason to punish Tezzeret. Not that he needed another reason.

Or any reason at all.

“Let’s see what’s inside this head of yours, shall we?” he murmured to himself. “Right from the moment I woke you up…”

The memories began to flow, slowly at first, then with increasing speed and force: the sensation of being rudely awakened, naked and alone, in the crystal cavern… then Tezzeret’s fuzzy, almost incoherent thoughts, before the artificer had even opened his eyes…

Being alive meant I was in trouble.

I remembered dying. Your own murder is not something that slips your mind.

That vicious little gutter-monkey Jace Beleren had reached inside my skull with the invisible fingers of his mind and scrambled my brain into… what? An omelet didn’t seem right-too orderly. Too intentional. A chopped salad? Not meaty enough. My brain felt like something sliced, or scooped, fried in bacon grease… yes.

Head cheese.

But having a brainpan filled with head cheese would leave me incapable of iterating concepts such as brainpan and head cheese, and likely lacking the mental resources to recall my death and formulate a metaphor to describe it. This recursive self-realization developed slowly, because having a functioning brain, which I did, didn’t mean it was functioning very well, which it wasn’t.