“I’m supposed to be a clockworker?”
“No. Count time. Specifically: seconds.”
“You mean like ‘one Vectis, two Vectis’? Sure. How many seconds?”
Allowing for three minutes of recovering from the teleport and bickering with Doc, discovering I was naked and getting my thoughts organized, plus perhaps thirty seconds of sag time for final adjustments…
“Nine hundred and ninety.”
“Starting?”
“Now.”
“One Vectis. Good thing I don’t lithp. Three Vectis, four Vectis-”
“Silently.”
“Check. Sorry.” His voice evaporated into blessed silence.
An unsentimental appraisal of the odds against me was not encouraging. Last time, I couldn’t even get out of this cavern without help. I had no way to know if Baltrice was still at her sled by the transit gate. I had no way to know if she was free or captured, fighting or already dead. I knew for sure only one thing.
I knew where Silas Renn would be in twenty minutes.
I have come to think of myself as a resourceful person; in fact, I have flattered myself into believing that given a specific problem, a specific time frame, and specific materials, I can deliver not only an effective solution, but an elegantly creative one.
I had about sixteen minutes to prove I haven’t been kidding myself.
I arranged myself into a rough simulacrum of a comfortable position and applied my full attention to the problem. Unfortunately, this specific problem was a long-standing one, and one to which I had never achieved any working solution at all. Three years of trial and error. Mostly the latter. Three years of hypotheses and experiments, resulting only in bruises and humiliation. Disgrace. Expulsion, and murder… but I couldn’t think about that now; dwelling on my failures was diversion. Distraction. Nothing more than an excuse to lose. I didn’t need an excuse.
I needed to win.
Getting away unharmed had been a victory in itself, though I could take no credit for that. I had escaped because he didn’t know about Doc. What else could I do that Renn didn’t know I could?
It was imponderable. I shook my head and moved on. Everything in its turn. First: escape. If I couldn’t get out of the cavern, any tactical plan was moot.
This cavern had already proven to be secure against my best efforts. I had been unable to reach the Blind Eternities after awakening here, and now I found that an attempt to teleport proved equally futile. Something about the sangrite not only blocked my mana channels, but seemed to absorb mana directly; opening more channels only brightened the blood-colored light in the cavern.
So: sangrite is a mana sink. Not just stored energy, but actually gathering energy every instant it remained untapped. A lot of energy, I reminded myself, in view of what had happened to the sculler in Tidehollow, not to mention the two mercenaries at my father’s hovel. I needed that power. I needed to harness it somehow.
Without making myself explode.
Dragon’s blood, Bolas had said. Spilled in mortal combat. Stress hormones and glucose. I pondered briefly whom Bolas had killed here, but only briefly. The blood’s original owner was no concern of mine. He lost it. I found it. The end.
But I wished I could ask him a question or two.
A quick search of the cavern failed to locate any sangrite chunks broken loose from ceiling or wall. A brief but painful attempt to yank or kick some free ended with me limping away on a bleeding foot… but then a sputtering sizzle ignited behind me, and my naked back registered sharply painful heat. I looked over my shoulder.
The floor had erupted into blinding fountains of raw power as high as my chest, like the insides of blast furnaces fueled by mana. Several, in fact.
Every spot where I had set my bleeding foot.
Interesting. Soluble in blood. Soluble in other fluids as well? “Doc. What’s the count?”
“Two hundred eighty-six Vectis, two hundred eight-seven Vectis.”
“Good. Keep on it.” I frowned, disturbed with myself, because without any logical reason I could imagine, I felt that he deserved at least a warning. “Doc, listen. You’ll want to pull back from my sensory nerves, if you still can. Some of this may hurt. A lot.”
“Two hundred ninety-five Vectis. Thanks, Tezz. You’re a pal. Two hundred ninety-eight Vectis.”
Apparently I am, I thought. What a strange person I had become. And getting stranger as I went.
The blood smears on the floor burned themselves out in seconds. I bit down on my tongue to fill my mouth with saliva, which I promptly spit on the floor. After wasting a few seconds waiting for an ignition that never came, I smeared the spittle with one hand and could detect no change in viscosity, coloration, or temperature, which led me to the conclusion that spit lacked some essential characteristic necessary to the reaction. Still, sangrite had dissolved and ignited in the bare smears of blood; it was possible that sangrite’s structure might be similar to rock sugar, halite, or similarly soluble minerals.
So I tasted it.
I went over to a wall and gave it a cautious lick-it would be unfortunate if I discovered sharp edges in the deposit by setting my tongue on fire-and found that it had no flavor at all that I could detect. Not so soluble as I’d hoped; it seemed the reaction was blood to blood. Crystal to liquid, and liquid to crystal.
Eating the stuff seemed to be out of the question. Injection was problematic; if the sangrite dissolved only in blood, there seemed to be no way to liquefy it without causing catastrophic ignition. The closest thing I had to a working hypothesis involved direct injection of intact crystals. But how could I even try it without making myself explode?
My only hope was to find or make crystals that were very, very small.
But without any sort of useful tool, how was I to make crystals small? I didn’t even have a chunk that I could knock against other chunks to flake off chips, nor did I have the ability to free such a chunk. If only I had a tool, any tool-or better yet, a couple of pounds of etherium-hells, with no more than an ounce or two of etherium, I could…
Wait.
I stood very, very still. Thinking.
I discovered I was smiling. One answer that solves three problems.
That’s elegance.
“Doc-the count.”
“Three hundred seventy Vectis.”
Less than nine minutes. Not enough time. Not nearly enough time.
It didn’t matter.
Standing nude in the center of the cavern, I closed my eyes and focused my will, and shortly there appeared in my perception a chaotic array of very, very faint points of energy, glowing faintly like stars on a misty night: a halo around my scalp, clustered around my groin, and scattered among my hands and feet. I fixed my attention to them each individually, and to them all generally, and pulled them out from under my skin.
It was a point of curiosity to me that now, here, where I struggled to intercept a catastrophe of monstrous proportion-one so dire and immediate that all the resources of the Infinite Consortium might not have sufficed-the tools I had to work with were those I’d acquired a lifetime ago, in my father’s Tidehollow hovel: my intellect, my clarity of purpose, and my talent for rhabdomancy.
Not to mention the tiny slivers and shards of etherium lodged under the skin of my scalp and groin, hands and feet, that were half-forgotten remnants of what I had stolen from my father.
Stolen is a stark word. Someone less devoted to precision than I would likely try to justify such a theft as some sort of moral necessity; I myself have been guilty of such. For many years I had thought of myself as a victim who had transformed himself into a clever rogue-hero like those of childhood fables, using ingenuity and patience to win freedom against impossible odds-and though that was exactly what I had done, at the same time, the unsentimental truth of the matter is that I had been only a clever thief. Worse than a thief: a bandit. A ripper.
I had used my mind instead of a weapon, but that was a distinction of style, not substance. Irrelevant to the truth.
