“Then we take him to your damned-”
“Second,” Tezzeret said, raising a hand to interrupt, “is your presumption that either of us is going anywhere.”
The fire shield flared around Baltrice and Beleren until the etherium sand began to fuse at her feet. “I’d like to see somebody try to stop me.”
“Your wish is about to be granted.”
“You’re ready, aren’t you,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re ready for any move I can make. Fight, walk away, cooperate, whatever. You’re ready.”
“It’s not impossible to surprise me,” he said. “It’s only difficult.”
“You planned all this,” she said accusingly. “You had it all worked out in advance.”
“I allowed for a range of possibilities. Something resembling this situation was among them,” he said. “I certainly didn’t plan for it to be here; here is a place that at the time, I did not believe existed. And I did not plan on being naked. Fortunately, there is one thing about you that I can always count on, Baltrice.”
“Yeah?”
“I can count on you to be Baltrice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do you remember how I tried to teach you contingency planning? How to analyze a situation in all its possibilities and permutations, and how to be sure you’re prepared against the ones you won’t like?”
“Never cared much for lessons.” The pyromancer shrugged. “If I can’t blow it up or burn it down, I pretty much don’t give a damn.”
“I know.” He smiled a bit, a fond sort of smile, slightly sad, like that of a father watching his most difficult child leave home. “Do you remember my slogan-my watchword-about being thorough, careful, and distrusting anything that might blur your perception? ‘It’s never a question of whether you’re paranoid…’ ”
“ ‘It’s a question of whether you’re paranoid enough,’ ” she finished for him. “Yeah, sure, what of it?”
He sighed. “All you know are the words.”
Instantly the fire shield around her roared back to full power, and both of her hands ignited with the intensity of the sun. She could barely be seen within the sphere of raging fire. “I don’t much like the sound of that.”
He had to lift an arm to shade his face. “You’re a great pyromancer, Baltrice. You really are. You’re not only incredibly powerful, you are almost unbelievably fast. Better in a straight-up fight than anybody I’ve ever seen. Except…”
“Yeah?” Fire swept outward from her like a phoenix spreading its wings. “Except what?”
“Except fire magic won’t help you much against an elder dragon.”
“What?”
A massively taloned hand the size of a horse flashed into existence and clenched around Baltrice so tightly that it instantly extinguished her fire shield. As the rest of him returned to visibility, Nicol Bolas lifted Baltrice bodily into the air.
He said, “Let me explain.”
She snarled a string of obscenities while she summoned a flare of power around her right hand that would have done credit to a medium-sized star. Cords bulging in her neck, she ripped her arm free of his casual grip and aimed it at Bolas’s face.
“Really?” he said. “Well, since you’ve gone to all this trouble…”
He leaned down until the corner of his mouth was only a few feet from her outstretched hand, and he winked at her. “All right. How’s this?”
“You tell me,” she said, and a blast of incandescent flame roared from her fingertips and caught the dragon squarely in his right eye. The raging fire ripped across the dragon’s cornea. It almost made him blink.
Almost.
“Oh, you are adorable,” he said with an indulgent chuckle. “Hush now. Settle down before I smoke you like a cigar.”
Before she could even begin to regather her power, Bolas cocooned her in a Web of Restraint, sealing her lips as well as her limbs and magics. This web was more than double the size of the one he’d used on Tezzeret, which may have been a gesture of respect for her power, but probably wasn’t.
Many traits can be truthfully ascribed to Nicol Bolas, but respect is not among them.
He balanced her on one extended talon, regarding her with the dispassionate interest he might have given to an exotic insect. “I should thank you,” he said. “Until you got here, I had only Tezzeret’s memories to amuse me. Yours might be more entertaining. In fact, they’d have to be.”
He tilted his face back toward the artificer. “A couple hours of your life and I’m ready to strangle myself in my own vomit. How do you stand it?”
The artificer, still sitting with feet dangling over the edge of the plinth, appeared to give the question serious consideration. After a second or two, he shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Probably because, unlike you, I don’t have a choice.”
“About much of anything,” Bolas said. “You must be getting used to it.”
The artificer’s only reply was a blank stare. Nicol Bolas snorted, and without even a gesture, he buried Tezzeret in a fresh Web of Restraint. “I’ll be back with you in a minute or two. You won’t have time to feel neglected. I promise.”
The dragon returned his full attention to the pyromancer in his hand, and the searing blue star rekindled between his horns. “I should probably tell you this won’t hurt. But why lie?”
Scintillant blue energy lanced from the star and poured into Baltrice’s forehead-and didn’t burn her at all, likely due to her enchanted fireproofing, so there wasn’t even any stink; yet another way in which she was more agreeable than Tezzeret. “I think you and I are going to be friends,” he said. “Very good friends. Good friends don’t keep secrets, hm? So… let’s see what you were up to, the night I turned Tezzeret loose.”
Baltrice’s memories began to unspool into his mind.
BALTRICE
The whole place stank.
No wonder Tezzeret never talked about where he was from. This Tidehollow of his smelled like dead fish and ass. And not in a good way.
His dad’s house-what he was using for a house-was mostly just a heap of mud bricks and broken rock with some fish oil lamps, a little oil stove, and a pallet of something that smelled like dried seaweed for a bed. One of the local talents-Pisser? Nutless? And who gives a crap anyway?-one of them had the old man shackled to a pillar, and was massaging the geezer’s kidneys with the toe of his boot. The other local talent came at me like he was about to take my arm and pull me aside, which I put a stop to by igniting that arm to the elbow.
I don’t mind the aside part, but no skull banger puts hands on me. Until I tell him to.
He read his future in my flames and backed off. Probably didn’t realize he was sweating like a cross-dress whore in navy nick. “I dunno, Baltrice. He swears he ain’t seen him. Swears. Ain’t seen the kid in ten, twelve years.”
“Tezzeret’s no kid.”
“I’m startin’ to believe the old bastard. I really kinda am.”
“You’re not paid to believe. Work him till you hear me say stop.”
“I dunno, really, I mean, he’d of told us, Baltrice-”
I had had more already of back talk from the local talent than I was prepared to swallow. I stepped next to him. Filthy little squit barely came up to my armpit. “You’re getting awful free with my name, Pimple.”
“I’m Posner-”
“You want to argue your name before you get mine straight?
“Uh, your-?”
