“Did I? Well, well.”
“It’s not even possible,” he said. “I have you restrained by a mana siphon and shackles made out of these sleds, so you can’t use any magic at all, and I have you in a hundred thousand-to-one hypertemporal field. So I can watch you age. And then I blink… and you’re gone.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so,” he said, and lashed out with both hands. Blinding white energy erased the sun and the sky and the sand and everything in the universe except for Renn himself. It caught me and held me in its unbreakable grip, turning my own mana reserve against me, so that the harder I struggled, the stronger it became. “Tell me how you escape, and I’ll let you live long enough to try it again.”
“I have a better idea,” I said through my teeth, clenched hard enough to chip by the power of Renn’s binding. Focusing my will in a specific way-not unlike imagining a musical passage so vividly that I could change which mental instruments played it-did not require mana. “I’ll tell you when I see you again… about, hmmm, let’s say, twenty minutes from now.”
Renn tightened his magical grip until I could no longer breathe. “Really? And where you will be in the meantime?”
I could not speak to reply. Instead, I winked at him.
His sneer of triumph coagulated into a frown of uncertain disbelief that warmed me to the centers of my bones. Then I uncoiled the focusing of my will, exactly as I would have if I’d had command of my own mana… exactly as I would have if I were trying to planeswalk.
There followed an exceptionally gratifying blam, which erased Renn and the desert and the gravity sleds, to dump me gasping on the floor of a large, dimly lit cavern lined with glowing red crystals, which smelled strongly of dragon.
“Y’know,” Doc said peevishly, “you could have just asked…”
TEZZERET
I shoved myself up to my knees, but my heaving chest and trembling legs wouldn’t let me rise the rest of the way.
“You think we could have cut that a little closer?” Doc said. “Not like we were in a hurry or anything.”
“Doc, please.” I squeezed my eyes shut and set my hands upon my temples, trying to squeeze the whirl in my mind down to a manageable torrent. “If we weren’t in a hurry then, we certainly are now.”
“In a hurry to do what? Take a nap while we wait for Bolas?”
“Screw Bolas.”
“You first.”
I’d brought no actual tools into the Glass Desert, but the fabric of my tunic and breeches could be cut and braided into a variety of useful types of rope, and the leather of my boots could be useful for strapping. But best of all were the steel of the toe caps and the strap that stiffened the sole, not to mention the grommets. As soon as I thought of this, however, I realized my feet were cold. Worse, I could feel the texture of the sangrite crystals with my toes.
Opening my eyes confirmed my analysis. “Naked? Really? You couldn’t have even left me my boots?”
“Complain to management,” Doc said. “I was designed as a fail-safe, not an ejector seat.”
I let it go; we had no time to bicker. “Twenty minutes,” I said grimly. Without tools.
“Twenty minutes till what?”
“Renn dialed us back along my subjective time line so he could get at me before I made the armor. He couldn’t have attacked Baltrice while I was standing there; I had turned away from her only a few seconds before you smelled the blood and smoke.”
“What happened to her, then? Why was she gone and Renn there?”
“It’s possible Renn was talking to us from our future. Did you notice how black the blood was? And the smoke odor was too faint. On his time line, he might be hours ahead of us-maybe days.”
“What, he was talking to us from after he takes out Baltrice? After he’s going to take out Baltrice? Something like that.”
“Yes. Me-us-too.”
“So in our time line, he hasn’t attacked her yet? Even though in his, he grabbed her days ago?”
“My best guess,” I said, “based on how long it seemed to take from when I began the armor to the moment that our eye-and-ear link went dead, he will attack her in just about twenty minutes.”
“Clockworkers give me a headache.”
“Yes.”
“So you think we can get there in time to warn her, or something?”
“Or something.”
“Hey-hey now, you’re not thinking about actually being there, are you? Tezz, come on, are you nuts? The guy just yanked us backward in time. You want to fight him?”
“No,” I said. “I want to beat him.”
“To save Baltrice?”
“And myself. And you.”
“I don’t get it. Seriously. We can just sit here. Bolas’ll show up to kick us out again, and he can broker a deal with Vess, and we’re in. Crap, Tezz, we might be able to get Bolas to step on Renn-that way we don’t get the snot beat out of us. Or get killed.”
“Baltrice doesn’t have that much time.”
“So?”
That brought me to a full stop. So indeed. “Don’t you like her?”
“Do I need to remind you that she’s tried to kill us at least once already this week?”
“To protect Jace,” I said. “She can’t help it. I don’t hold it against her.”
“Well, I do. Let the fat cow die. Our business is Crucius.”
“We need Baltrice,” I insisted. “We need her.”
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Whether I like her doesn’t matter. You like her.”
I frowned. “Apparently I do,” I said slowly. “But that’s not the issue.”
“I don’t give a ten-pound bucket of rat poo what you think the issue is. Maybe I can’t stop you once crap starts-but I can stop you from starting it yourself.” He underlined his point with a vividly distinct sensation of having my testicles ripped away.
I took it with no more reaction than an involuntary tightening around my eyes. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Think I can’t?”
“Doc, listen to me. I don’t have time to explain. I need you on my side for this. It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
“This what? What’s gonna be worth risking both our lives?”
“It’s kind of a…” I took a deep breath. Might as well tell him the truth. “It’s a practical joke.”
“You’re pulling our leg.”
“On Bolas,” I said. “It’s a practical joke on Nicol Bolas. A good one.”
“How good?”
“Let’s put it this way: If rage doesn’t make his head explode on the spot, he’ll have to suck it up and pretend he likes it. He’ll have to thank us.”
“Wow.”
“Are you in?”
“You should have told me this in the first place,” he said. “Sorry about the nut sack thing.”
“No harm done.” Which was, after all, only the truth. “Can you keep time?”
