Mathew Stover - Test of Metal

I passed some indeterminate interval speculating that perhaps I was not in fact alive, but that my corpse had been reanimated by some ambitious mage-perhaps that tasty little necromancer Jace Beleren had been so fond of… Vess. Something Vess. Lolita? Lilith? Something like that.

I also, for thoroughness’ sake, considered the possibility that my undead essence had been conjured by an embattled wizard on some nearby plane, either to win a duel or to prepare for his next one. But despite my diminished intellectual capacity, I knew that either of these possibilities was unlikely to result in a seemingly interminable span with nothing to do but chew my mental cud.

Further: I was mostly sure that being dead wouldn’t hurt this much.

I seemed to be lying on a pile of jagged rocks. Apparently, I had been lying on these jagged rocks for some significant amount of time-long enough for every single edge and point to work as deeply into my flesh as was possible short of drawing blood. I lay there experiencing the discomfort without attempting to ease it; I was not yet ready to move.

As an artificer by inclination as well as vocation, I have always known that anything worth doing is best accomplished in a deliberate, structured, and meticulous fashion. Feelings and dreams are useless, and imagination is worse. Reality doesn’t care how you think it ought to be, or what you fantasize it might be. Effective action is achieved only by the intelligent application of what is.

An unsentimental perspective on the ‘what is’ of my current situation offered no good news. To have healed and reconstructed my brain, after Beleren pureed it, was itself a feat of impressive power; to have done so after (or in the process of) raising me from the dead expanded the power requirement from impressive to astonishing. This premise led to a grim two-horned conclusion. I’d been returned to life and placed here by a being of astonishing capability who was either unconcerned with my personal welfare, or actively my enemy.

There was no third possibility. I don’t have friends.

Worse: my right arm hurt.

It ached as though it might be nothing more than simple flesh over simple bone. This was overwhelmingly wrong. So powerfully wrong that when I opened my eyes, I looked only to my left.

Not because I was kidding myself; I did not waste mental energy fantasizing that my good right arm-my precious arm, the only feature of my existence in which I can truly take pride-might be intact. Instead, my refusal to look at it arose from a similarly unsentimental understanding of my own psychology. There is a difference between knowing the abstract and seeing the specific.

There was a difference between knowing my mother was dead, and finding her battered corpse trampled and crushed into the muck of a Lower Vectis by-lane.

By looking only to my left, I kept the comprehension of my maiming safely abstract.

My prison appeared to be a natural cavern cloaked in a dull, bloody gloom, as though the light came from hot iron. The jagged rock on which I lay, the floor, the walls, and the ceiling were all some sort of crystalline mineral I did not recognize, darker than ruby quartz, shading toward carnelian-and the light in the cavern was apparently the product of a crimson glow from the deeper deposits of this crystal. From somewhere nearby came the liquid patter of what I hoped might be water.

There was neither sight nor smell of anything to eat, nor of any bedding, clothing, or fabric of any kind with which I might cover myself. The strongest odor in the cavern was of unwashed human armpit, likely my own. I found no indication of anything that might be fashioned into tools, only ever-deeper deposits of glowing red crystal.

This did not mean I was helpless. Fastening my mind upon the gray waves that crash against the cliffs below Vectis, I began to pull mana. At the very least I might fashion temporary covering for my body and protection for my feet, both of which would be useful while exploring the further extents of the cavern.

I discovered, however, that my effort to gather mana resulted only in a barely perceptible brightening of one large crystal in my immediate line of vision. This was not in itself dismaying, as I had not expected to succeed. A number of constructs and magics can deny mana to even the most powerful mage-I’ve designed several myself-but the attempt had to be made.

Everything at which I’ve ever succeeded has been accomplished by exacting attention to detail; a full commitment to exhaustive investigation. To have left a possibility unexplored would be like, well…

Like cutting off my own hand.

And so then, finally, I had to look.

My reaction was largely what I had anticipated it might be: a rush of rage and denial so intense I could only lie there and scream, followed by a flood of nauseous horror so overpowering that I vomited blood-laced saliva and green bile, and then passed out cold.

I began constructing my right arm when I was roughly nine years of age. Though my arm’s completion would require more than a decade, and I would continue to refine it for some years after, the process of acquisition, design, and construction actually began when I finally found myself clever enough to steal from my father, which was, approximately, age nine.

My age has always been approximate.

My birth had been no occasion to celebrate, and so neither were my birthdays; my parents never bothered to share with me the date, if they even remembered. I calculated my approximate age by my size and development relative to the other Tidehollow cave brats.

My parents were scrappers. Scrappers sift the garbage, runoff, and sewage of the city of Vectis, hoping that with careful and patient work they might gather bits of copper, silver, gold, or even the occasional sliver of mislaid etherium. Scrapping is, in Vectis, a less honorable profession than is begging, and it is ranked far, far below whoring. This I understood despite my age; my mother had once been a whore, as she often bitterly reminded my father whenever money ran short, or when the hearth fire sputtered, or the sun rose, or the moon set. When the winds blew, or when they fell silent.

Before her health and looks failed and she was forced to stoop so low as to share a hovel with my father, she would not even have spit on a scrapper in the street; to do so would have meant acknowledging the scrapper’s miserable existence.

I was seven years old when she was killed.

Approximately.

The news of her death arrived in the company of taunting and jeering from the ragged pack of cave brats with whom I commonly associated-children in Tidehollow being not only unsentimental, but largely incapable of understanding the concept of empathy, much less exhibiting any. One of their fathers, who had been begging on the same street in Lower Vectis as had my mother, had seen the incident. By his report, she had pressed too close to a passing guildsmaster’s carriage while supplicating alms. The blow of a whip from the carriage driver had knocked her down, and she had fallen under the wheels. The merchant lord had rolled on without so much as pausing to determine what he had crushed.

My father’s face at first had flushed, and angry color rose toward his eyes-but after only an instant all color drained away. I never saw it return. He became expressionless as a statue, and when he spoke to me, his voice had no more life or emotion than the sound of gravel rolling off a slate roof.

“Boy. Come folla. We has to git yer mother.”

He always called me boy. I am uncertain whether he and my mother had given me a name. Tezzeret is how I was called among the cave brats; a tezzeret is, in Tidehollow cant, the word for any small, improvised or homemade weapon kept concealed on one’s body-knives made from beach glass wrapped in packing twine; slings and garrotes woven of one’s own hair, a carriage spring bent to protect the knuckles of one’s fist. The cave brats had dubbed me Tezzeret after I had used one to butt shank an older boy who had pushed me down into a muck puddle.