“Is anyone? Is there a worse boss in the Multiverse?”
“If we ever find one, don’t tell Bolas,” I muttered. “He’d never resist proving us wrong.”
“So, how’re we gonna get him?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on,” Doctor Jest said. “You’re not the type to take this kind of rumpthumpin’ lying down.”
“You’ve been conscious less than three hours, and you’re already an authority on my type?”
“You’re planning something,” he insisted. “You gotta be planning something.”
“And if I am,” I said, “why would I tell you?”
“Aw, c’mon, Tezzie! I’m on your side! We’re in this together, shoulder to shoulder-ah, you know what I mean. Man to-well, to whatever I am.”
“Don’t call me Tezzie.”
“No wonder you got no friends.”
“I’m not interested in your friendship.”
“Aw, c’mon… I’ll let you call me Doc,” he offered.
Painfully aware-and I do mean painfully aware-that while no power at my command could cause Doctor Jest the slightest discomfort, he could make of my existence an endless carnival of suffering, I decided to compromise. “Tezz,” I said reluctantly. “You can call me Tezz.”
“All right! And we’re buds, right? For real. I’m your best friend?”
I sighed. “You’re my only friend, Doc.”
“That’s sad. Really. Man, do you have a crummy life or what?”
“If I do,” I said through my teeth, “you’re not making it any better.”
“Aww. That hurts, Tezz. Really.”
I decided to change the subject. Any discussion of hurt with Doc would potentially be cataclysmically one- sided. So I picked myself up-hmp, I suppose I picked us up to my feet-and stepped closer to the hollow stone that contained my device. “Doc?”
“Yeah, bud? Er, chum, you think? Best pal?”
“Doc, why did you stop me?”
“Huh?”
“When I reached for the device, you made me feel like my hand was on fire. Why?”
“Why? What am I, an idiot?”
With considerable exercise of self-discipline, I resisted offering an answer. “Why don’t you want me to pick it up?”
“Because whatever happens to you, happens to me,” he said slowly, overenunciating as though explaining the obvious to a small, not especially bright, child. “Can’t you see that whole friggin’ thing is just one big trap?”
“Of course I can,” I said. “I built it.”
Being a mechanist, when I went to hide a substantial amount of etherium, I had seen no reason to stash it as bullion or bars… and I have always had a knack for small, intricate automata. I had fashioned the entire stash into a trap-and a rather nifty one, if I do say so myself.
This trap would fishhook the hand of anyone other than me at first touch, and insinuate a network of hair-thin etherium wires transdermally, to hijack the thief’s nervous system and magically override the voluntary motor nerves, inflicting permanent paralysis. This would leave the thief alive, awake, and aware, but unable to do anything save, oh, for example, die of thirst. Or drown in a particularly large dumping of trub. Or meet some other unpleasantly lingering death.
No: the pertinent fact here was not that it was a trap, but that Doc could see it was a trap. My nifty little device no more resembled a trap than it did a clod of dung. Even an exceedingly skilled mechanist would have needed hours, if not days, to detect the hazard I had built into it-and would most likely have fallen victim to it in the process.
This meant that Doc had access to some portion of my memory, or that he could perceive things on a level that I could not. Or both. Any of these eventualities was interesting, and all were potentially significant. “How did you know?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Isn’t it?”
“Not to anyone but you.”
“Huh. No kidding?”
“Doc,” I said with uncharacteristic sincerity, “you have unplumbed depths of talent.”
“You’re welcome. That was a compliment, right? Right?”
I didn’t answer. My attention had been captured by a potential feature of the trap that had never struck me before. After all, if the device could hijack its victim’s motor nerves, it might do all manner of interesting things. It suddenly became obvious how I could tune it to hijack someone’s whole form and function-to make of its victim an unwilling telemin, acting wholly in my control-or as directed by the device, because I now saw also how I might imbue it with a consciousness of its own… to make it into, for example, a mechanical Doctor Jest. It was obvious. It wouldn’t even be difficult.
Curious that I’d never seen it before.
Perhaps among all the changes inflicted upon my form and function by Jace and Bolas, some few might have to be counted as positive. It was a sobering thought. Did I actually have something to thank Bolas for?
Or worse, to thank Jace Beleren for?
Distracted by this unpleasant possibility, I somewhat absently deactivated my device, only to discover there had been something I must have missed; I felt a tiny whisper of a mana release that had not been part of my design.
“What was that?” Doc said. “Did you see that? Was that supposed to happen?”
“No.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Yes.”
Above us on the wall, the stone began to burn.
“A bad kind of problem?”
“Potentially fatal.”
I had underestimated Jace again. Only now did it occur to me that anything I had known-anything-he could have taken from my mind when he attacked me. Including the location of my local etherium stash.
The burning stone sputtered and flared, white-hot now, so intense I had to shield my face with my useless right arm. The stone began to melt, dripping like hot wax, and where these droplets struck, what they struck ignited with unnatural intensity.
“We should be running away, right?” Doc said. “Why aren’t we running?”
“Fire is not Jace’s strength,” I said. “He’s a mind ripper.”
“That’s good news, right?”
“No.”
Where the stone burned away, the hole in the wall didn’t open onto the brewery. Through the hole I could see black clouds on fire, burning above a volcanic cone that spilled white-hot lava.
I was about to find out just how worried Jace had been about my possible return.
First through the fire gate came a glossy, jet-black lobsterish pincer bigger than I am, which latched on to the unburned stone, followed by another that did the same… Where they touched, the stone went red and soft, and from the joints of the pincers glared flesh that burned white as the sun. Because these claws did not belong to any variety of lobster, and I no longer needed to see the rows of compound eyes that were to follow, I intended to actively avoid seeing the upcurving jointed metasoma with a white-hot barb the size of a greatsword.
I am not, as a rule, given to either profanity or vulgarity, but when confronted at close range by hippopotamus-size scorpions whose very flesh is white-hot rock, I might be forgiven for indulging in both.
“Holy shit…”
Apparently Jace had been very worried indeed. Worried enough to have signed up at least one very, very serious pyromancer.
“That’s bad, isn’t it? I can tell it’s bad. What are we going to do?”
