Mathew Stover - Test of Metal

Because I didn’t know. Not really.

I hadn’t even thought about it. There was the job Bolas had inflicted on me, and I had Doc to crack the dragon’s whip… didn’t I? He hadn’t said a word.

This was a subject on which he would have an opinion.

It occurred to me that he’d been silent for some while. Since I’d said good-bye to Baltrice, perhaps. I wasn’t sure exactly what this signified, but I found myself gripped by a sudden and astonishingly bleak apprehension. The idea that he might not be there congealed in my throat like frozen snot. “Doc?”

There came no reply.

“Quit kidding around. You’re not exactly the strong silent type,” I said, but I knew the truth already. I could feel it.

The truth felt like a knife. Lodged somewhere between my stomach and my heart, where it stabbed me with every breath.

The Hidden One regarded me impassively. “Talking to the voice in your head?”

Anger ignited within me as if my bones had caught fire. “He’s not a voice!” I snapped. “He’s not some damned delusion, he’s a-”

I choked on the word. This was ridiculous. More than implausible. It was impossible.

Should have been impossible.

But I had to say it. I owed him that much.

“He was a friend,” I said. My eyes felt hot, and my vision blurred; I shook my head and looked away. I didn’t know why I felt what I felt, but I have never been a man to deny the truth. “The only friend I had.”

Reality is not what we want. It’s what is.

“I did not mean that you are mad, Tezzeret. A few of you have spoken of a voice that drives you onward-usually bitterly. Sometimes with open hatred. You are the first to name the voice a friend.”

“It’s not that I like him,” I said. “But… he’s not bad. He wasn’t the rotten bastard he could have been. He actually helped me. More than once; I wouldn’t have made it here without him. And he was always there. I got used to him. It’s… hard to describe. Of everyone who has ever had power over me, he’s the only one who treated me better than he had to.”

“Mercy is the greatest virtue.”

“If you say so.”

“You agree more than you think you do.”

To me, that meant nothing at all. I shook my head. “I didn’t even say good-bye.”

“Why would you? You and he did not part. Precisely the opposite.”

I looked up at the ancient sphinx. He looked down at me.

“None of you hears voices in this place other than mine and your own. The Seeker faces the Riddle Gate alone.”

I barely heard him. I was still thinking about Precisely the opposite.

Was is possible?

He certainly did seem to understand me better than anyone I’ve ever known. Including my family. He had my sense of humor-at least, down in the guilty-pleasure slush that I usually make a point of not saying aloud. He reminded me of the sort of individual I sometimes thought I might have grown up to be, had I been born into a life less dire than that of scrappers in Tidehollow.

Yes: I had hated Doc instinctively. At first. He’d tormented me with the merciless malice of a demon child. At first. But even at the very start we had, for example, shared a profound hatred of Nicol Bolas. In fact, the only times we’d really disagreed were when he got angry because I was risking our lives.

My life.

Some long-lived creatures have the ability to establish subsidiary selves-subordinate personalities, more or less-to help keep their ever-increasing store of memory organized; dragons are one of these creatures. Anything Bolas could do to himself, I was certain he could do to me. Not to mention it would tickle Bolas right down to the toe-jam between his talons to have set me against myself.

And if it were true, what did that say about what I want? Had Doc been driving me toward Bolas’s goal, or toward my own? What if they were the same?

And if they weren’t, what was the difference?

At some point, I sat down. After an unknown interval, I realized I had been staring past Kemuel, silently thinking about nothing at all. It felt as though I had been doing so for a very, very long time. The sort of interval that is usually measured in decades.

The Hidden One hadn’t moved. Patience is not a virtue to a sphinx. Patience is his nature.

“I know what I’m looking for,” I said eventually. “For now, anyway. I’m looking for the way through the Riddle Gate. If I don’t have that, nothing else matters.”

“Very good, my friend! And how do you propose to find a path where every Seeker fails?”

“That’s the easy part,” I said. “I’ll ask you to show me.”

Kemuel’s eyes widened, then closed to slanted slits. The ancient sphinx drew himself up, the size of a dragon and twice as dire. His voice boomed like thunder among high mountains. “And what do you expect me to do when you ask, you tiny clot of impudence?”

“That’s what I want to find out,” I said. “You’ve mentioned the task your father gave you. I’ll be surprised if it’s to warm the ground with your butt while you wait for a Seeker to show up and keep you company. And I am rarely surprised.”

The Hidden One glared down upon me as though lightning from his eyes might strike me dead.

Having been trapped in a cavern at the mercy of Nicol Bolas, however, had surgically excised any tendency I might have had to be intimidated by a stern look. “Kemuel the Ancient, called the Hidden One, I conjure you in the name of your father Crucius, in the name of the Search, and in the name of every friendship we have ever shared: Describe your task,” I said, and added, “Please.”

The stark threat in his glare might as well have been chiseled into a mask of stone. Until one eyelid drooped and reopened, and those erosion scars began etching themselves into his face all over again.

Blinking, I said, “Was that actually, just now-I mean, did you just wink at me?”

“Your manners have improved,” he said with an indulgent chuckle that sounded a bit like wind chimes the size of a boat. “Come, my friend. Stand at my side, and we will speak of my task.”

I went to the indicated spot. So close to his shoulder, the warmth of his body was like an iron stove on a winter’s night… and all I wanted to do was lie down, let that warmth enfold me, and sleep. Forever.

But there’d be plenty of forever to sleep through if I didn’t pass the Gate.

“I am permitted to show you one thing you have never seen, and remind you of two things you already know.”

“All right,” I said. “Show me.”

“This is what awaits you beyond the Riddle Gate,” he said, and with no gesture nor slightest flicker of expression, where we stood transformed into paradise.

A land of etherium.

Of nothing but etherium. Trees. Stones. Grass. Sand. “Ah,” I said.

It was all I could say.

I found myself on my knees, for I had no strength to stand. Gasping. This was what waited for me beyond the Gate?

This?

“This…?” I whispered. “This is where I’ll find him? This?”

I had never dreamed…

It was all right here. In front of me. Around me. I was already there…

One step away.

I knelt, gazing upon the answer to every question I had ever had, and then I could wait no longer. I wrenched myself to my feet and lurched forward. Nothing stopped me. I recovered my balance and began to walk. Then I began to run.

I ran until I had no breath. Until my feet bled. Until exhaustion slammed me to the ground as if I’d been hit with a thunderbolt.

When at length I regained my senses, the ground on which I lay was not etherium.

I rolled over. Kemuel was three paces behind me. He hadn’t moved.

I hadn’t moved.

“If it were that easy,” he said, “no Seeker would fail.”