I shook my head, helpless. “This is my personal hell.”
“Etherium only gets in your way,” Kemuel said gently.
“All right. The other things-the ones you say I already know. The reminders you are permitted to give. Please, tell me.”
“The first is one that I believe you are in the midst of experiencing,” he said. “When one is made of glass-”
“Everything looks like a stone. Yes.” I took a deep breath, nodded, and took another. Somehow, the aphorism helped me calm myself. I seemed to be regaining some of my ability to think.
“I understand. The situation does not have to be designed to torture me. It may be this way because there is no other way it can be; the bitter irony I face here may be an effect of who I am, rather than how it was made. Yes.”
I took another deep breath, and the rest of the whirl within my head slowed, and seemed to settle itself into a manageable progression. When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone-but…
I turned to meet the unfathomable gaze of the Hidden One. “On the other hand,” I said slowly, “sometimes what looks like a stone is a stone. And sometimes a stone has my name on it.”
Kemuel’s smile broadened. “You make me very proud.”
“I can’t imagine why. All right, I get it. I think. What’s the other reminder?”
“I am permitted to remind you of the one way you solved the first two lines of my father’s riddle.”
“How I-?” I put a hand to my head. The whirl seemed to be spinning up again. “The one way?”
It hadn’t been one way at all; the solutions were barely even related. The first two lines…
The first solution was the product of analysis. Logic. Intellect.
The second was the product of diligence. Thoroughness. The infinite capacity for taking pains.
The only thing the two had in common was me.
Fierce light inside my head burst to blinding life.
Me?
The fierce light burned my whirl of confusion away. “Me…” I heard myself saying. “It was me.”
The solutions had been mine. Mine personally. I hadn’t solved “Where do you look for what can’t be found?” and “What do you say without saying?”
My answers had been where I would look for what can’t be found, and what I could say without saying.
Analysis and diligence are two of the four defining traits of greatness in an artificer. The third was exactly what I was experiencing right now.
Inspiration.
The next line had been, “What is your sky when you’re tombed in the ground?”
Well, I was tombed enough, metaphorically. The Riddle Gate was an open grave, just waiting for me to lie down. Tombed… buried alive, or dead, and it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. Not in the tomb.
What was my sky? The answer to my prayer, and forever beyond my grasp? What tortured me every time I so much as thought about it? What did I long for more than life itself?
I opened my eyes and looked at my answer.
“Oh… god…” Tears gathered in my eyes. Why did I not have a god to whom I could appeal? Even a delusional dream of divine mercy would be better than this.
To die staring at the only thing I really want.
But… the sky, any sky, is a metaphor, too. It’s a mental construct, a boundary we imagine, to imaginatively divide infinite space. It’s not real-it’s not air, or clouds, moons, planets, or stars. It’s… what?
It’s always out of reach from wherever you are.
You can’t grab it. You can’t buy it or sell it. It can’t be broken, or stolen, chained, or freed. Because it can’t be owned, it belongs to everyone.
To everything.
My eyes drifted shut. I said softly, “You’re kidding, right? Please say you’re not serious.”
“But I’m not, and I am.”
“Etherium gets in my way.”
“Yes.”
“Because it’s as much an idea as it is a substance.”
“Yes.”
“And etherium can’t pass through the Riddle Gate.”
“Yes.”
“Even the dream of it. Even the hope for it. As long as etherium is something to me, I’m trapped here.”
“Yes.”
“The only way I can get to where I most want to be… is to not care if I ever make it.”
“Yes.”
“So.” I sighed, opened my eyes, and stared out from the Riddle Gate at my dream of paradise, forever out of my reach. In order for me to get there, it has to not be paradise anymore. Not for me. “I imagine this is when I usually take my own life.”
“I am sorry to say that it is.”
“At least now I understand why.” I shook my head. “How am I supposed to do this?”
“I don’t know. None of you ever has,” he piped sadly. “This is why the Riddle Gate will be your end: succeed or fail, the man you are will die here. But the Riddle Gate will be the midpoint for the Seeker who finally passes through; for the rest of your days, your existence will be defined by that passage. Not by your birth, your death, nor your rebirth-no matter how many times you experience each of them. You will mark your days by what came before the Riddle Gate, and what came after.”
Swell.
“So let’s sum up. It looks to me kind of like this: I have spent my entire life turning myself into a man who can get here, because I have been, consciously or not, trying to get there,” I said, jabbing a finger out at the etherium land. “If I wasn’t trying to get there, I would never have gotten here. But in order to actually get there, I have to become somebody who never would have bothered to come here in the first place.”
“Yes, Tezzeret my friend. This next will be what we sphinxes sometimes call,” he said gravely, “the tricky part.”
In the fullness of time, I became that man.
I rose, gave my farewells to Kemuel-along with instructions for Sharuum, should she choose to follow me-and he said, “Meeting her will be interesting. Instructive. I will be born several hundred years from now, when she is younger and my father is king.”
The man I had been would be irritated with that; the man I had become only nodded and stepped forth from the Riddle Gate onto the Metal Island.
For an infinite span, I kneeled on the etherium sand, meditating upon the riddle of the Metal Sphinx. By the time eternity had passed, I had found my answer.
But if you want to know what that answer was, old worm, you’ll have to give up this silly mind-siphon trick of yours and ask me yourself.
Politely.
Don’t trouble to open my tomb; I let myself out. Oh, and by the way?
I’m right behind you.
THE METAL ISLAND
Nicol Bolas jerked as if he’d been hit by lightning. That insufferable little clot of ghoul turd! He should have killed Tezzeret years ago. The inarguable fact that he, himself, not only had not done anything so prudent as kill the artificer, compounded with the other inarguable fact that he, himself, had actually healed that festering pile of
