“As am I. When Kemuel revealed the stricture of the Riddle Gate, I very nearly despaired.”
“But only nearly,” Tezzeret said fondly, “for here you are: a living testament to your own greatness of spirit.”
“You flatter like a vedalken, child.”
“I only attempt to emulate their gift of conversation. Flattery it may be, but truth it is.”
She tilted her face up toward the hundred-times-larger face of the Metal Sphinx. “And so,” she said, her rasp going even hoarser with awe, “this is the place, and the hour, you prescribed?”
“It is, Your Wisdom.”
“And so this…” She shook her head helplessly, in the face of wealth enough to buy her whole planet dozens of times over. “This… extravagance of etherium… I can feel him. I can feel him near.”
“He is, Your Wisdom.”
“Yet I see nothing but blur.” Her great face shone with tears. “And so I have crossed entire universes to see him, this once and final time, stripped away every scrap of my power… only to have my eyes fail me at the last. The final bitter jest in my mockery of a life.”
Tezzeret bent down and took a handful of the etherium sand. “Your Wisdom, if you’ll permit me-?”
She slowly, painfully, lowered herself to lie in the sand like a great winged cat. Tezzeret reached up and laid his free hand gently upon her face, and the etherium sand in his other hand spilled upward, as though the local gravity had somehow been reversed. It gathered into the filigree scars across her face, and then without heat, fused itself there.
She blinked, and blinked again, and when she looked up into the majestic face of the Metal Sphinx, she gasped.
Tezzeret said, “I did not invite you here to see you disappointed.”
“Oh, Tezzeret…” she breathed. Tears like liquid diamonds caught the brilliant sun in points of fire. “Oh, my child…”
“Shall I give you privacy?”
“Please.”
He backed solemnly away from her, then turned to walk over to Bolas. Behind him, an etherium-colored mist gathered in the air around the Metal Sphinx and the sphinx of flesh.
“I am, I think,” the dragon said, shaking his head in wonder, “as close to speechless as I have ever come. The way the old beast carried on, you’d think that bloody statue was Crucius himself!”
“When I said there is no secret,” Tezzeret said through another of his slim smiles, “that’s what I was talking about.”
“That-? That?” The dragon’s great yellow eyes widened, and for a long second his huge lower jaw swung loose. “That’s him?” he wheezed as though he couldn’t quite get his breath. “That-that statue right there-that’s Crucius…?”
“Some of him. It’s more accurate to say that the Metal Sphinx is an expression of him. Everything in this place is an expression of Crucius and of his not-so-mortal remains. He is what he made, and what he made is him.”
“All this time-ever since-you were standing right there, when you said you know everywhere he isn’t. You were standing between his paws!”
“Yes,” Tezzeret said. “Interested in more of the story?”
TEZZERET
So, Tezz,” Doc said thoughtfully inside my head, “this Silas Renn character-you know what I like about him?” Watching in the scrying dish as Renn strode about as though he were actually doing something useful in the Academy’s defense, shouting orders at the top of a voice I had hoped to never hear again, I could say only, “No.”
“Me neither. What a tool, huh?”
“I agree. And as a master mechanist, I am a recognized authority on the subject.”
“Tezz-wow. Was that a pun? Is it my birthday?”
“Hush now, Doc. He’s moving.”
“What, somebody’s gonna hear me?”
“No, but I have to pay attention. The only reason he does not know he is being observed is that our surveillance is not focused on him personally, but generally, on the chamber. If I lose him, he will be difficult to reacquire without giving myself away.”
“So? You’re still afraid of him?”
“No. I despised him,” I muttered as I adjusted the point-of-view angle in the scrying dish to follow Renn out into the corridor. “I was never afraid of him.”
“Even when he was handing your ass to you with a complimentary swirly on the side?”
“Like most weak men, he is dangerous only when frightened,” I said.
“If he’s so weak, how come he kicked your butt up and down that courtyard all the time?”
“Weak in character, not in ability.”
Renn paused at an intersection long enough to berate a couple of the Order’s chairwomen. I left the vision silent-I have heard enough of Renn’s self-righteous upsloper ranting to last me several lifetimes-but I took the opportunity to adjust the scry view to where it could cover the intersecting corridors in any direction.
“His natural magical ability outstrips mine by an order of magnitude. And his family is obscenely wealthy-they bought enough etherium for him to replace most of his body. In three years of trying, I never defeated him.”
“You don’t sound too worried about losing again.”
Several nearby detonations rocked the building enough to shake not only dust from the ceiling but flakes of stone from the buttresses.
“I didn’t come here to fight, Doc.”
“Good thing, too,” he said. “Save your fighting for sometime when screwing up won’t get me killed along with you.”
“If we have to fight, I’ve already screwed up,” I muttered. The shrieking discharge of the city’s anti-dragon artillery set my teeth on edge.
A string of detonations laddered rising thunder as though coming straight for me; the final blast seemed to be just next door. The room pitched and bucked like a maddened gargoyle. Dust and razor-edged stone chips filled the air. Statues that had stood for centuries tumbled from their pedestals and shattered on the floor.
“I hate that-that explosion thing!” Doc whined in my ear. “What in the hells are those?”
“I’m not sure.” Renn was moving again. I turned the scry-view angle to follow. “Magical, mundane, whatever-I hope never to be close enough to one to find out. Don’t worry too much; the Academy’s defensive screens will deflect any that might hit us directly.”
“Which isn’t gonna do us a hell of a lot of good if the concussion knocks down the building and thirty bajillion tons of stone falls on our head,” Doc said. “I still think we could have done this from a little bit farther away. Like, say, Bant.”
Further blasts, however, sounded only in the distance, and shortly they too faded. No more than a few moments passed before the sirens outside wailed the all clear. The etherium chime on the desk by my left hand gave out a musical ping. “All right. Apport interdiction’s suspended while they evacuate the wounded, which means that right about now…”
There came a deep, resonant thump, more like distant thunder than nearby explosives, which was, to my educated ear, exactly the sound I’d been expecting-the air displacement created by something very, very large teleporting into the Academy’s courtyard. In the scrying dish, Renn jumped as if stung and ran for a window.
“Do you get tired of being right all the time?”
“If I were right all the time,” I muttered, “you and I would have never met.”
