because her automatic defenses would have layered her in impenetrable shields in the instant any magic had been directed against her.
He’d shot her in the back.
“Tezzeret?” Renn said, loud but casual, squinting against the blinding glare that crackled from my skin. “Is that you, old friend?”
“Friend?” Doc sputtered in my ear.
“I’ve got him. Check out Baltrice as best you can,” I muttered. “I need to know what exactly has her frozen there.”
“This is not how I imagined us to meet again,” Renn called. “I was sure you’d have clothes on.”
“WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT,” I thundered down at him.
“Oh, I think we do.”
“WE CAN COOPERATE. FIND CRUCIUS TOGETHER.”
“Cooperate? Absolutely.” Renn raised his right hand and summoned a grayish, unwieldy artifact. If he was still as unimaginative as he used to be, this would be the same artifact he had used on Baltrice. “Cooperate by holding still.”
He pointed the device at me, and in that instant I understood. He was not simply a psychopath, a bloodthirsty maniac attacking for sport. He was attacking because he thought he had no choice. He was fighting the man I used to be. In self-defense.
When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.
He narrowed his eyes, and from the end of the device came a flash like fire.
His personal shields had to be down to permit physical projectiles’ passage, and so I thrust my hands forward, twisting them sideways to again open rips in reality between us, two of them, as this was an opportunity to experimentally verify a hypothesis I’d formulated some years ago. I’d proposed that there is no interdimensional conservation of vector. In plain language, when allowing a moving body to pass through a reality warp, its vector on re entry will be, effectively, any direction I feel like.
One of my rips in reality gaped in the path of the hypersonic projectiles and swallowed them whole, while the other rip opened in front of Renn, but below his line of sight. Specifically, it opened less than two feet in front of his knees at a shallow angle. Even as the artifact’s sharp report reached my ears, the projectiles the device had fired blasted up through the second rip and hit Silas Renn square in the crotch.
As Nicol Bolas would say: Now, that’s comedy!
The impact lifted him up on his toes and tore a sizable hole in his breeches in exactly the most embarrassing possible place-which was not, however, actually embarrassing for Renn, because all that was displayed through the hole was a mess of raggedly bloody meat. This was not a serious wound for him; lacking anything resembling a working circulatory system, he was in no danger of bleeding out, and those etherium legs would go right on keeping him upright and mobile even if his pelvic bone was shattered.
Still: it must have stung.
His face went white, and an instant later it was red enough that even the glare of energy I cast upon the dunes could not bleach it away. And he wasn’t blushing. He made a fist with his free hand, and sheets of gauzy blue layered themselves around him as he cast the artifact aside.
“That might have hurt,” Renn said scornfully, “if I were nothing but a meatbag like you-but the power to regenerate my flesh is built into my enhancements, scrapper boy. I barely even felt it. Now watch how a real mage fights.”
Taunts. Just like the old days. Did he think we were in the Academy’s arena, showing off for the Masters? After all these years, he thought he could still get into my head with smack talk. Pathetic.
Being pathetic, however, was no guarantee he wouldn’t kill me.
He finished the gesture of casting the artifact aside by pointing toward it and shouting some sort of trigger word, while with a swift twist of his opposite hand-another school yard trick-he now unleashed a swelling torrent of blue fire that roiled up at me. I had no idea what it might be.
I assumed it was some sort of temporal manipulation. I employed my best hypothetical defense against clockworking, which was to force another rip in the fabric of reality, and place this rip where it would intercept his spell and suck away his blue torrent as swiftly as he could pour it forth.
It worked well enough-except he didn’t show any sign of canceling the spell, and I didn’t know how much energy that opening could channel before closing-or if adding energy might instead swell the rip until it swallowed us all. Or the whole desert, or Esper, even all of Alara. Possibly even the Multiverse itself.
This is why I hate improvising.
I was using a power I didn’t understand to fight other powers I also didn’t understand-which is decidedly not my game. On the other hand, I reflected, at least I wasn’t losing.
Yet.
“Doc. What do you have on Baltrice?”
“Uh, you do remember that I can’t see her unless you can, right?”
“Sorry.” I swooped around to another spot, where the frozen form of Baltrice was in my field of vision, a dozen meters beyond Renn. “A little busy here.”
“I still hate that guy.”
“I still agree.”
Renn shot from his other hand rectangular sheets of azure fire, one after another, like playing cards or baffle curtains. They expanded as they came at me, and went from transparent to translucent, heading for opaque. My best guess: some kind of at-range shield, possibly an exotic flavor of telekinesis.
I used my left hand to intercept the rectangles with a twisting chain of lightning. The lightning seemed to stop their approach, chewing through their middles, again one after another, on its way toward Renn-though each rectangle held longer than the one before it had, which wasn’t promising. I had no way to know how long my sangrite-supercharged power would last, and Renn wasn’t even breathing hard. “Doc. Baltrice?”
“Got it,” he said. “Nothing fancy-time’s running about a tenth of a percent of normal for a couple of yards on all sides of her. Each second for her is about seventeen minutes for us. Cold storage.”
“This could be a problem,” I said through clenched teeth, opening every mana channel I had to pour power into my continuous writhe of lightning.
Renn canceled his blue torrent-whatever in the hells it had been-and gestured with his right hand, drawing blue sigils that danced in the air like fey-charmed runes. My lightning hung transfixed on one of those blue rectangles-which didn’t look inclined to fail-and there were still at least two more of them between Renn and grievous bodily harm. “What are those damned shields, then?”
“Same kind of thing,” Doc told me grimly. “Hypotemporal boundaries. Each one marks a downshift of about half. Between those last two… let’s see, a quarter, an eighth… yeah. One two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth of normal.”
Damn. “How long can he keep them up?”
“How should I know? You’re the one who said he could have spent subjective weeks or even months getting ready; best to assume he can do whatever he’s doing as long as he feels like doing it.”
“Yes.” I tried to loop my lightning and hook it around the outside of the rectangles, but they moved instantly to intercept, seemingly without requiring any attention from Renn. Worse news. “What about those glowing runes in the air?”
“Shrug. More clockworking?”
The runes were still dancing, but as Renn added to them, they began to organize themselves into a curving band… bent into a broad half-circle arch. “A gate?”
“Hey, that’s it! A temporal gate!” Doc chirped. “He’s going for another time line-we got him on the run!”
“I don’t think so.” Flee? From me? Not Silas Renn.
He stepped into the gate and vanished.
“The gate’s still open-go get him!”
“I don’t think so,” I repeated. The only plausible reason for the gate to still be there is that he wanted me to go after him. I’m just not that gullible.
Those time shields were still between me and the gate-but I had a work-around. I did my new reality-rip trick in front of my chest, and opened another one at the mouth of the gate-sighting through the warp showed me Renn
