is mistaken. You and Doc are two of the smartest people I know; I’d like you both to listen, and point out holes or blunders in my analysis. All right?”
Doc said, “Really for real? You want my opinion?”
“Yes. Baltrice?”
She shook her head, blinking as though I’d awakened her from a daydream. “Sorry, Tezzeret. Sorry-I guess I’m, like, hallucinating or something. Because I could have sworn I just heard you ask me to check your work.”
“Ha,” I said, “and ha.”
She blinked some more. “You mean I wasn’t hallucinating?”
This gave me brief pause. It underlined once again the seeming difference in who I am from who I once was. I remember being disdainful of Baltrice’s intellect, just as I remember the starkly malicious hatred I’d nursed for Jace, and the erratic fits of temper from which I had suffered-I just can’t remember why I felt that way.
Being me was proving to be unexpectedly interesting.
I returned my attention to the task at hand. “It is a truism of both artificing and mechanistics that entities are not to be multiplied without reason,” I began.
Baltrice held up her hand to stop me. “Skip the lecture, huh? ‘Multiplying entities’ is the flavor of crap I dropped out of school to avoid.”
I nodded. “Simply put, you don’t design five parts to perform a function that can be performed by one, yes? The only time you design the five parts instead is if you want to build in extra features that require flexibility of function, or if one piece will be only adequate, while the five will become superb.”
“Yeah, okay,” Baltrice said. “It’s the KISS thing, right?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She shrugged. “That’s what they call it where I come from. KISS. It stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ ”
“An elegant phrasing, and proper advice,” I said. “However, simple comes in a variety of sizes and colors. We’re assuming, for example, that all those zombies are the work of one necromancer.”
“What, you think it’s like an army of the bastards? Because those guys aren’t exactly team players, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s more probable to meet one spectacularly powerful necromancer than an organized band of several hundred ordinary ones. But where this framework breaks down is when you consider why this necromancer-no matter how insanely powerful-is spending so much of that power to solve the Crystal Labyrinth, and why it’s happening now.”
“Solve it?” Baltrice and Doc said together.
“Those zombies cannot be there for defense, nor to discourage intruders; anyone out here in the Glass Desert will have more than enough power to simply avoid them-fly over them, teleport or gate past them, or if we’re talking about someone like you, burn hundreds of thousands of them to ash and walk in before the survivors can reach you. No: I am fairly certain that what we’re looking at here is an attempt to reach the heart of the Labyrinth.”
Baltrice frowned “How do you figure?”
Doc said, “BFI, right?”
“Exactly,” I said under my breath, then spoke up for Baltrice’s benefit. “We artificers and mechanists of Esper have a pet acronym of our own: BFI. It stands for Brute Force and Ignorance. Let’s say, to Keep It Simple, that we’re looking at one and a half million zombies. The Crystal Labyrinth is reputed to have fourteen thousand four hundred rooms, which means the necromancer has at his disposal more than one hundred and four zombies per room. Zombies don’t need to eat, drink, or sleep; in fairly short order, even working at random, they will have explored every possible path. Once every path is known, the necromancer can just bloody well teleport in.”
“Hey, I can probably do that!” Doc chirped. “I can teleport, remember? It’s like the only actual thing I can actually do. Except hurt you. And there’s only one place I can teleport you to. But still.”
“There is nothing about you that I have forgotten,” I reassured him.
“Put like that, it sounds easy,” Baltrice said, grim. “Hells, the bastard could have done it already.”
I shook my head. “If he has, why are all the zombies still here?”
“Holiday decorations,” Baltrice said. “How in the hells should I know?”
“And we still haven’t answered the main question: Why is our necromancer working so hard to reach the heart of the Crystal Labyrinth? And why now?”
“I don’t get you.”
“There’s no treasure,” I explained. “There has never been even a legend of treasure. All that lies at the heart of the Crystal Labyrinth is a single ancient sphinx-who may or may not be alive, if he ever existed.”
“Well, that sphinx and-if you’re right-some clue to lead you to Crucius.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Why tells us who.”
“Yeah?” Her face cleared. “Oh, I get it. You’re thinking about that snotty little clockworker from the Seekers, right?”
“Silas Renn,” I said. “Beyond the three of us and Sharuum, who knows that the path to Crucius might be found through the Crystal Labyrinth? Who’s rich enough to hire however many necromancers he might think he needs? Who would sacrifice his entire family’s fortune and all of his remaining body parts to discover the key to creating etherium?”
“Huh. ‘Why tells us who.’ Huh.” Baltrice shook her head. “And all those years, you kept telling everybody with ears that why means nothing at all.”
“Did I?” I said. “I can’t imagine what I must have been thinking.”
“You should have let me kill him back in Vectis.”
“Perhaps.” At the time, I had been unwilling to upset Sharuum, nor did I wish to spark an all-out brawl with the Seekers of Carmot-especially not when the city’s defenses included apport interdiction, so we couldn’t teleport out if things went bad. And if I’d tried to planeswalk, Doc would have dumped me back in that sangrite cave on-in- Jund. And I had discovered myself unwilling to destroy Silas Renn. Despite the danger he represented, he was not trash.
He was something I had not yet found a use for.
“So, it’s this Renn guy who’s got you all worked up? He’s not so much of all that.”
“Renn is tremendously powerful. You caught him by surprise, distracted by the arrival of Sharuum and her retinue. Do you remember how powerful I was? Back when I had my arm?”
“Yeah.”
“Renn and I studied together for three years. I fought him at least once every examination period-thirteen times, in fact. I never beat him.”
Baltrice frowned. “Never?”
“And he wasn’t even allowed to use clockworking,” I said. “At the Academy, clockworking is forbidden in sanctioned duels unless both participants agree to it beforehand.”
“For real? How come? I mean, sure, chronomancy is kind of weird, but it’s hardly-”
“Chronomancy is not even on a nearby plane to clockworking. A clockworker can actually control time. You understand teleportation. To a clockworker adept, time is simply another spatial dimension. They can jump forward and backward in time as easily as you or I might teleport across a room.”
Her frown turned into a scowl. “So if I hit him with something that rocks his world, he can just, like, jump back to right before I hit him and deliver a preemptive smackdown?”
“It’s more complicated than that-clockworking is fiendishly difficult and, no pun intended, time consuming-but essentially, yes. He can also control your own personal temporal flow in ways no magic at our command can counter. No shield will stop you from getting old. And that’s not all.”
She winced. “It gets worse?”
“A good clockworker-which Renn is-can, with proper preparation, move sideways in time.”
“What in the hells is that supposed to mean?”
“You’d have to ask a clockworker for the details,” I said. “I’ve never looked deeply into the theory, and so I have only a layman’s knowledge. The best I can understand is that time isn’t a single straight line-it’s more like a big rope, braided and rebraided out of an infinite number of different temporal strands. Every time you make a choice-turn right instead of left-you split off a new temporal strand. If the choice you make doesn’t affect other nearby main lines-if you arrive at your destination at the same moment you would have if you’d turned the other
