“Y’know, real friends don’t keep secrets.”
“How would… you know?”
“Awww…”
“Here’s a plan…” I gritted. The needle had reached the wall of my aortal arch. “Before we take our swing at Bolas… you tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”
“What secrets do I have?”
“You’ll be surprised.” I closed my eyes, and with one spasm of will, I stabbed the needle through the wall of the aorta so that its tip entered the largest flow point in my entire bloodstream.
Doc said, “Golghhg…”
I agreed. The needle seemed to be impinging on a nerve cluster. I felt the stab again with every beat of my heart.
“All right,” I said. Pain, yes. But: no shortness of breath, no faintness, no tachycardia-probably hadn’t torn the aortal wall, or not badly, at any rate. “All right. So far so good.”
“I hate when you say that.”
“Now comes the tricky part.”
“Now?” Doc sounded appalled. “What was that last part, then?”
“That was the ‘difficult but probably won’t kill us’ part.”
“Oog. That means this part-”
“Is really damned tricky. Yes.”
I took a deep breath. “This is how it’s going to work. This sangrite seems to be the next best thing to solid mana. And concentrated. Activated by contact with blood. Instead of jamming a crystal straight through my skin and setting another part of me on fire, I believe that a very, very fine powder fed directly into my bloodstream might distribute the reaction throughout my body in a controlled fashion-so I can use its power without blowing myself apart.”
“Come again? You want to mainline powdered dragon blood?”
“More than mainline. I am equipping the etherium needle with very, very tiny grinding gears, that very, very slowly crush the sangrite as it’s fed into my aorta. If it works the way I’m hoping, the dust particles will spread through my whole body in a few seconds.”
“This sounds like a really bad idea.”
“It is.”
“I am not okay with this.”
“You don’t get a vote.”
“Like hells-”
“It’s already done,” I said. “I did it while I was describing it to you. Stop me now and you’ll burn us to death.”
“Damn it, Tezz!” he shouted furiously, loud enough to make my ear buzz. “We just talked about this kind of crap!”
“No. We were going to talk about it,” I said, extending my arms as each and every hair on my body stood on end, crackling with spits of energy discharge. “That conversation will take place in a future that’ll never happen.”
“What’s that? Is it working, or are we dying?”
“Both.” The hissing in my ears swelled to a full-on hurricane. Arcs of blinding white lightning writhed and sizzled from my hands to the floor, to the walls, to my head. More power than I’d ever felt. Far more than I knew what to do with-but to do nothing was not an option. If I tried to restrain this power, I’d detonate like that sculler.
I felt my blood go fizzy. I felt my heart begin to boil. My brain would be next.
I let the power lift me up from the cavern’s floor. I let it clothe me in searing light. Seeking the Glass Dune, where a transit gate would be standing near two etherium gravity sleds, I sent forth my mind…
And I could say only, “Ohhh…”
“What is it?” Doc said, shouting to make himself heard over the hurricane in my head. “What do you see?”
Hanging in the air, bound to the cavern with chains of lightning, I breathed, “Everything… ” because that is exactly what I saw.
Everything.
I saw the mountains of Jund, the jungles of Naya, the golden plains of Bant, the endless oceans of Esper, and the smoking hellscape that was Grixis. I saw leotau-mounted lancers crashing through a formation of scourge devils while the skies above them were filled with shrieking death struggles between angels and kathari. I saw a hundred stormcallers on the Cliffs of Ot, chanting as they diverted the winds of the Eternal Storm to buffet back flight after flight of swooping dragons. I saw whole armies of elves and humans hurling storms of griffins, hydrae, and chimeras against massed formations of infantry whose armor blazed like the sun itself, while leonin shook flashing weaponry and roared their challenge to the champions of their enemies. I saw Sharuum in her chambers, Nicol Bolas brooding in Grixis, my father collapsed in his hovel…
And I saw the transit gate beside the gravity sleds in the Glass Dunes, where Silas Renn stretched out a hand, and the artifact he held blasted power at the back of an unsuspecting Baltrice.
“Hang on, Doc,” I said, my voice sounding very far away, half buried in the howling hurricane inside me. “It looks like we’re going to be a little late.”
“ ‘Better late than never,’ ” Doc shrieked into the wind, “is just a bloody figure of speech!”
The power blasting outward through my skin allowed no time for a conventional teleport, but I didn’t need to use one. Power was its own answer: with power such as this, I could reach out like Nicol Bolas himself and simply yank and rip and squeeze reality into the shape of my desire. I seized that part of Esper’s existence in the grip of my mind, then dragged it close so that I could pass from the cavern to the desert with a single step.
My arrival cracked the sky.
Through the rip I came, blazing in the air dozens of yards above them. The light from my body whited out the colors of the desert, Baltrice and the sleds, and the hand Renn had raised to shield his eyes.
I spoke in thunderclaps.
“I BELIEVE YOU’VE BEEN EXPECTING ME.”
TEZZERET
The fight was short, by comparison to the hours of mock dueling Renn and I had inflicted upon each other at the Seeker Academy. This confrontation was over in less than a minute. However, when fighting a clockworker, less than a minute is not as brief as it sounds.
He stood perhaps a dozen meters behind where Baltrice was still in the process of being blown off her sled. He had abandoned his usual melodramatically flouncing cape-and-tunic outfit in favor of a simple pair of breeches and heavy boots, leaving exposed his torso and arms, which were constructed of baroquely latticed cobalt-etherium alloy, and his etherium heart shone through his chest like a fist-size golden sun. Only his head, his hands, his groin, and his feet were still flesh. On any other day, his overwhelming etherium advantage would have rendered him functionally immune to the most potent attacks at my command.
This was not, however, any other day.
Her head thrown back and arms wide, her balance tipped far forward beyond the nose of the sled, Baltrice looked as if she might be posing for an action illustration. A motionless cloud of what I assumed to be droplets of her blood sprayed backward from a ragged hole in the back of her tunic, just between her shoulder blades. She hung in the air, frozen, in the middle of pitching onto her face.
My best guess was that Renn had stream-shifted behind her and hit her with some kind of hypersonic ballistic projectile. Or a group of such. Hypersonic because she must have been hit before she heard it coming, ballistic
