Wait.
The unlimited power of etherium…
Manipulating etherium didn’t require mana. Not for me. The metal itself would furnish the power. Renn was half lost in his fantasies of torturing me to death. I was half lost in my blinding epiphany that there was one more thing I could do that Renn didn’t know I could do.
Rhabdomancy.
With only the slightest twist of will, I could perceive the etherium in the area. All of it. Renn’s body. The transit gate. The gravity sleds.
The needle in my aorta.
I chose the needle in my aorta for my first move. It withdrew from the blood vessel, leaving only a bead in place to seal the puncture. With no need for caution, I wrenched the needle back out through my ribs, my pectoral tendon, and my skin. I decided against a bravura line; why warn him? With my mind, I shaped the needle into a thin blade, then stabbed it through the iris of Renn’s right eye.
He screamed, throwing me aside, clawing at his face, ripping bloody stripes with his fingernails. I counted myself lucky that the shock hadn’t made him reflexively rip my head off, but his incredible strength nearly killed me anyway: throwing me aside involved sending me spinning through the air, twisting helplessly until my spine crashed into the arch of the transit gate hard enough that it very nearly broke me in half. Gasping, I fell to the sand, my arms and legs twitching and flopping in partial seizure.
If Renn pulled himself together before I could do the same, he was going to kill me anyway. I couldn’t even get up. Couldn’t stand and take it like a man. Maybe I could crawl. Maybe.
Power had made me stupid. I had been strong, so I didn’t bother to be smart. A mistake I swore never to make again.
Though the lesson would be wasted if learning it killed me.
I had a chance. One chance, because all that power was gone now, and my intellect was again on the job. One chance.
I reached out with my mind and activated the transit gate. A view of the zombie mob in the Netherglass opened above me, for I lay only a few feet from the gate’s threshold.
Renn stopped screaming. Perhaps the twist of power had been enough to remind him that he hadn’t killed me yet. His left eye fixed upon me, and his bloody mouth stretched like a nightmare ogre. “Running?” he shrieked, hurling himself toward me. “Run then! Run! I’ll start by severing your legs! One festering joint at a time!”
But when he got close to me, he skidded to a stop, staring down at me in open puzzlement, because I wasn’t trying to crawl through the gate. That was the moment he realized it was a trap. I saw it in his eyes.
He knew he was about to die.
His mouth opened like he was going to ask what in the hells I thought I was up to; he managed to say, “Tezzer-” before my gravity sled at full shrieking speed smashed into the small of his etherium back hard enough to cut an ordinary man in two. Renn was no ordinary man, and the gravity sled weighed less than thirty pounds, so the impact only knocked him forward, stumbling, trying to regain his balance.
It was enough.
Arms flailing, he actually would have made it-stopped himself short-had I not managed to make one twitching foot move at the last second, to hook his ankle and send him headlong into the transit gate.
Not through the gate. Into the gate.
Into the gate because I canceled the spell just as his head and shoulders broke the plane of transmission. About half his torso, his pelvis, both his legs, and one arm fell on me. Which hurt. But I really didn’t mind.
The rest of him-head, shoulders, heart, and one arm-was lying on the sand of the Netherglass, fifteen miles away.
Perhaps my prejudice against improvisation was unfair. My own, just now, had produced satisfactory results.
Less than elegant, far from painless, and passingly humiliating, but satisfactory.
I lay there for a second or two, trying to regain enough breath to tell myself I was still alive. When I found my insistence sufficiently convincing, I got up and triggered the transit gate again.
On the far side, Renn’s remaining arm was scrabbling for purchase in the soft powder, trying to drag itself, his shoulders, and his head off toward some imaginary safety. He seemed to be in some kind of shock. When I stepped through the gate and moved around to head him off-so to speak-he didn’t seem capable of speech, producing only a thick gargle, a few lip smacks, and a pop or two.
“Stop it, Renn. It’s over.”
His eyes rolled, and his hand reversed course, and I sighed. Once the shock wore off, he’d be dangerous again; magic is a function of the mind, and his would, given the chance, come through this largely unharmed. His heart was still glowing in what was left of his chest, and the enchantments that served him in place of blood and lungs and other organs could keep his head alive indefinitely. The last thing I wanted to do was give him a chance to reassemble himself.
I stepped over him and caught his wrist, lifting him from the ground. His eyes rolled, and his mouth worked, and now he was able to form intelligible words. “… kill me… Tezzeret… kill me…”
“You’re too valuable to waste simply because I hate you,” I said. “I gave you a chance to cooperate by choice. I will not repeat that mistake.”
“… Tidehollow scrapper bitch…”
“Hush now. Try not to heckle me while I save your life.”
The severed ends of his enhancements were leaking mana like blood. It was the work of a moment or two for me to make contact with his etherium and manipulate its function sufficiently to seal the severed strands of latticework. That accomplished, I mentally took hold of the tiny blade in his eye and stretched it into an ultrafine thread, about a third the diameter of a human hair. I sent that back through his retina and along his optic nerve, which must have been a bit uncomfortable, because it made him shudder and moan.
Using the thread, I probed his brain matter until I found his sleep center. Hooking one end of the thread there, I sent the other directly into his pineal gland and worked the thread to feed its small mana current as a trickle charge. In about five seconds his eyes closed, and he relaxed into slumber.
A gust of breeze came from behind me toward the transit gate, bringing with it enough odor of zombie that I borrowed a bit of Renn’s shoulder joint to put up an anti-glass-and-stink field. Looking through the gate, I understood why the breeze seemed to blow from here to there, as the Glass Dunes for a mile or two on the far side were no longer so much dunes as they were glass-molten glass, at the base of a firestorm bigger than most thunder-heads. In the heart of the firestorm, Baltrice still battled three of the e-drakes, all of them appearing to be having a fine old time.
I looked from the firestorm to the million-strong zombie army in the Netherglass, and back again to the fire. It struck me that as long as I had a pyromancer in mortal combat with etherium-enhanced firedrakes, there was a more useful location for their battle.
Reaching out with my mind, I found Baltrice’s ear-and-eye piece. Renn’s down, I sent. Still having fun?
Would it be too corny for me to say I’m just getting warmed up?
Over here in the Netherglass, I have a, ah… pest control issue. One that’s begging for personal attention from you and your playmates. Can you lead them through the transit gate?
Incendiary sanitation? My specialty. Hold the door, we’re on our way.
Making sure I did so required nearly all the strength I had left. I sagged to the ground, and set the sleeping Renn down beside me. I hugged my knees and tucked my battered face against them. For what felt like a very a long time, I could do nothing except sit there and shiver.
So this was what winning felt like. Finally.
Triumph. Victory.
Whatever.
“We won, right?” Doc said. “I mean, we did win, didn’t we? This has to count as an old-fashioned ass- whuppin’, huh? An authoritative spanking. A whack and smack that cracked his rack. We beat him like a red-headed stepchild. Thumped him like a rented drum…”
“Doc. Enough.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever. Must feel good, though. Right? After all these years?”
