Mathew Stover - Test of Metal

I delved deeply into the mysteries of mana quenching and?theric tempering, and I invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana-sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles. It is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures-but not for long.

I went days at a time without sleep, learning to use mana to keep myself alert and focused, for my nights were passed risking my life against bandits and my freedom against thief-takers to search out new and ever-larger caches of etherium.

I learned to make my new arm do not only all the work of my old one, but everything else my imagination could devise. Though I am no more gifted a mage than I am a rhabdomant, I again found ways to exploit my minimal talents to accomplish maximal results. When my arm was completed, it comprised more than ten pounds of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip. Merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage-and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.

One black midnight, I alone, without witness, assistant, or aid, performed the ritual that severed my arm of useless flesh and permanently attached the arm that would make a scruffy, ill-fed scrapper’s boy into a man to be reckoned with. A man with the power to revenge injury a thousandfold.

A mage.

When morning came and the Masters saw what I had achieved, they elected to elevate me to Mastery and immediately began preparations for the weeklong ceremony. I thanked them, and walked out from the Guild Hall that same morning, never to return. This time, I did not look back.

I had what I’d wanted from them. Master is just a name. Names are nothing.

Power is everything.

I had not been out of the Mechanists’ Guild a week before I was approached by the Seekers of Carmot.

It seemed the Seekers had been aware of me for some considerable time, as early as the first year of my apprenticeship to the artificer. I later learned that several of the rippers I had killed had been aspiring Seekers. The Anointed Fellows of the Seekers of Carmot had been most impressed, as these aspirants had been possessed of talent for magery in proportion to their avarice… yet they had fallen before a Tidehollow boy whose talent was limited to a knack with gadgets.

When that knack had produced an arm of tempered etherium, the Seekers decided I might be useful, and so allowed me to study at their Academy.

The Seekers of Carmot styled themselves a noble order, committed to the service of all Esper. The carmot from which they’d taken their name was an arcane substance necessary to the production of etherium, some sort of catalyst that allowed the Anointed Fellows to create etherium by infusing?ther into sangrite.

They created etherium.

Supposedly.

And they would teach me the secret. Supposedly.

And they were committed to giving etherium away until it became as common as dirt.

Supposedly.

The Seekers of Carmot had been the last thing I’d ever believed in.

When I discovered the truth, I demonstrated to them that my talent wasn’t so much a knack with gadgets as it was a knack for using gadgets to kill people.

In the end, I had come to appreciate my father’s lesson. Only two things would never fail me: death and my right arm.

My arm was everything I had. It was everything I would ever have.

When I awoke in that red crystal cave to find attached to my right shoulder an arm of mere flesh, already corrupt and rotting, that was exactly what had been taken from me.

Everything.

When I regained consciousness, I undertook to examine my new appendage. It appeared, in every functional sense, identical to the one I had severed some years before. Missing were only an array of minor scars across my knuckles and into the palm of my hand-souvenirs of a particularly tricky midnight etherium retrieval-and a much larger scar along my biceps, a knife wound. This scar, while I had still used my flesh arm, had been a useful reminder to never assume I had killed the last bandit.

So: the limb very likely had been regenerated. Another extravagance of power-and an astonishingly potent personal affront. There is literally nothing else that could be done to me that would hurt as much, as deeply, and on so many levels.

Without my real arm, the one I had created, I was nothing more than a Tidehollow scrapper. I had been made into my father.

Except with a better vocabulary.

I tallied up the facts of my situation, relevant to whose prisoner I was most likely to be: life, sanity, nudity, maiming, and the bitterest psychic wound I could even imagine.

Framed in those terms, the conclusion was obvious.

“Bolas.” I said it aloud, but not loudly. I knew I didn’t have to. “I know you’re here.”

As a demon is said to be conjured by the sound of its name, after only a single heartbeat he materialized out of the rose-tinged gloom, all sixty-some-odd feet of twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon.

“You always were clever,” he said, and casually backhanded me with one wall-size fist so hard that I flew across the cavern, slammed into a jagged wall, and sank to the floor, stunned into immobility.

“Hello, Tezzeret,” said Nicol Bolas. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

The hand I brought to my mouth came back bloody. Hot oil trickled down the back of my head: scalp wound. No concern there: my great mass of thick hair would both absorb blood and trigger coagulation. If any bones were broken, they didn’t yet hurt, though I anticipated that once the shock wore off, I would be in considerable pain.

Bolas paced toward me across the cavern, smiling, which on a dragon indicates neither amusement nor friendliness. It’s a display of how many large and pretty teeth he has, and how sharp they are. “Tezzeret, Tezzeret,” he murmured, insufferably pleased with himself. “Tezzie-may I call you Tezzie?”

“Can I stop you?”

Almost too fast to be seen, his foreleg lashed out, and he seized me in his talons. “The list of what you can’t stop me from doing is, I’m pretty sure, infinite.”

To demonstrate the truth of this, he tossed me sharply upward, as a child might a ball. I bounced off the ceiling, got a mouthful of fresh blood when my teeth clacked together and ripped open my cheek, and then tumbled helplessly back into his grasp.

It occurred to me that Bolas might possibly have done all this simply for the pleasure of killing me personally.

“I admit and confess that you are larger than I am,” I said, a bit thickly due to the blood and ragged scraps of the inside of my cheek. “You are stronger than I am. You can snuff my life with a thought. Can we skip the rest of your Intimidate the Naked Prisoner game and jump straight to what you want from me?”

His talons closed around me so tightly that black splotches bloomed in my vision. “But I like this game,” he said. “What I like best about it is that it’s not over until I get bored. By then you’ll be free…” He smiled again. “Or lunch.”

He let up on the pressure, as I’d known he would; if he aspired to mutilate an unconscious body, he had no need to use mine. “How long have you been here?”

“Before just now?”

This answer meant either that he thought me stupid, or that he was playing stupid.

Stupider.

I decided to explain. “You didn’t arrive by teleport-no air displacement. Nor did you shift in from the Blind Eternities-even you can’t planeswalk swiftly or accurately enough to make that sophomorically dramatic entrance. Finally, I could smell you.”