my working alone.”
She looked at him, then she looked at me, and I looked back at her, and that flush on her cheeks got brighter. So did the flames. “Oh, come on, not really, no way…” she said. “You are not expecting me to-no way!”
Tezzeret shrugged. “I have never been a great fighter, even when I had my arm and all the resources of the Infinite Consortium to back me. You, though-Baltrice, you are more than a great fighter. You’re a one-woman bloody damned army.”
Her flush spread up around her eyes, replacing some of the white-hot anger she’d been carrying there a second before. “You took me easily enough.”
“I took him. You?” He still had that open but serious look on his face. “If I’d had to fight you, I’d be dead already. You surrendered to save Jace’s life.”
“And you’re asking me to do it all over again.”
“His life isn’t actually saved yet,” he pointed out. “And if what you really want is a clear shot at me, where’s better for you to stand than right at my back?”
She looked at me, and again I looked back at her, and I could see that somehow both our lives hung on what I said next.
“I… I can’t ask you to do this for me,” I told her, and if I had even a whisper of a chance to undo the spell, I wouldn’t have to make the speech. “I sure as hell won’t order you to. Do what you think is best. Not for me. For you.”
She sighed and chuckled ruefully. “You little turd,” she said to me, shaking her head. “Like I’m gonna say no after a speech like that.”
Tezzeret’s gaze flicked back and forth between her face and mine, and he had a distinctive steely glint in his eyes-a lot like he used to look when one of his inventions had performed exactly as designed.
Baltrice said, “So what’s this fiendish task?”
Tezzeret stood. “I am to find a Planeswalker known as Crucius the Mad Sphinx, who was last seen here on Esper, some decades ago,” he said. “By literally no coincidence at all, he is that other Planeswalker I spoke of just now-the one being in the Multiverse who is better at handling etherium than I am. At least, I believe him to be superior, and I think I am justified in my belief by the fact that it was Crucius who invented etherium in the first place, and that Crucius is to this day the only being who ever has had the ability to create it.”
“Oh, I get it,” Baltrice said. “A little extra incentive, right? So you want me to think that if you and I can find him, he’ll be able to take care of Beleren… and I won’t need you anymore.”
“That is an accurate summary of the situation.”
“You expect me to believe it? You can’t smell the giant pile of Way Too Convenient heaped on top of that story?”
Tezzeret’s lips compressed briefly, and after a moment he nodded. “There are a number of features of my new life that seem to be, well… overly contrived is, I think, the best description,” he said slowly. “As though I had set about to create an entirely new machine, then found the parts already manufactured and laid out precisely in order on my workbench. Having been conscious for less than twenty-four hours, I have been too busy trying to survive to spare any time for deep analysis of my situation. I surmise that there is an underlying teleology here, but I have not yet been able to verify it.”
“Sucks to be you, huh?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “The pertinent detail is that I have been forced into a role very like the one I had originally intended for you, Jace. I discover that I don’t like it any better than you did, and I have decided-not being a notably original thinker, after all-to employ the same solution you did.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Nicol Bolas,” he said. “You remember Nicol Bolas.”
“Only in bad dreams.”
“I’m going to kill him,” he said as though he was commenting it looked like rain.
It was a good thing I was already sitting down. I could only stare. Baltrice spluttered like a balky skyrocket. “You… you what? Are you completely frappin’ cracked?”
“Very likely. But cracked or not, the fact remains,” he said. “I am going to kill Nicol Bolas.”
“Oh, sure,” I said when I found my voice. “And while you’re off burning down three-quarters of the Multiverse, I’m supposed to sit here in Vectis with my thumb up my butt?”
“Not at all. You,” said Tezzeret with that eerie calm that was starting to look more and more like crazy every time I saw it, “are going to look after my father.”
THE METAL ISLAND
A curious feature of human memory,” Bolas murmured as he disengaged his brilliant blue memory siphon from Jace Beleren’s brain, and returned the mind-ripper’s unconscious body to the plinth with oddly gentle care. “You remember being in pain, but you don’t remember the pain itself.”
Nearby, Tezzeret still hung in a Web of Restraint, though a less uncomfortable one. “I suspect,” he said, “that it’s an artifact of construction.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The human brain is largely a signal-processing apparatus. As such, it is divided into specialized sectors. Pain is a product of specific neural activity in a specific sector of the brain. Memory arises of neural activity in a different sector. The pain sector is not activated in the process, except in pathological cases. If it hurt as much to remember pain as it had to experience it, there would be little disincentive to repeat the experience. Which would defeat the design function of pain in the first place.”
“Of course-the lecture on mechanics. You’re so predictable.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Tezzeret replied. “Reliability is the most useful objective measure of superior design.”
The dragon’s brows arched to a comically skeptical height. “Am I to believe that your personal design is supposedly superior? And if it weren’t, am I to believe that you would actually admit it?”
“My design,” Tezzeret replied imperturbably, “is a work in progress. I find myself more interested in what you’re not talking about. And why.”
“Tezzie, Tezzie, come on. Do you actually expect me to waste breath discussing your preposterous vanity? It’s just you and me here, Tezzie. You don’t have to pretend that you really believe you can kill me. How about we just stipulate the truth and move on, shall we?”
Tezzeret said, “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not prepared to stipulate. It’s not the truth.”
The dragon belched a gust of incredulous laughter. “Are you prepared to stipulate that you’re batshit insane?” he said.
“And which of us is the more predictable, after all?” Tezzeret said. “Whenever confronted with something you do not understand, you dismiss it as irrelevant, misconstructed, or damaged.”
“Does being completely staggering cracked count as a design flaw?”
“Not necessarily,” Tezzeret said. “What if I am insane, but also right? Perhaps being completely staggering cracked is not so much a design flaw as it is a fillip of stylistic excess-baroque filigree on a headsman’s axe, if you see what I mean.”
“Were you always this nuts? Did I just not notice?”
“I can’t say,” he replied. “However, you should bear in mind that whatever I am now-how well or poorly I function-is largely the result of your own talents, or lack thereof, as a designer; the result of your presumed gifts as an artificer of human flesh. It seems clear to me that you were less than wholly satisfied with who I was previously. When you restored my consciousness and functionality, I can only assume that you made certain alterations. You would not be the first artificer to discover that his device exhibits unexpected-perhaps unwelcome, even actively
