scrapings from a dung beetle’s butt, made at least one of his subminds wonder openly if perhaps Tezzeret had been right about him.
Maybe he was stupid.
But having been stupid in the past didn’t mean he had to be stupid now. The great dragon spun, a snarl on his face and a panoply of insanely lethal magics packed into each talon, his mouth, both eyes, both wings, and his tail.
Tezzeret sat calmly on the etherium plinth between the forepaws of the Metal Sphinx. He was smiling. This smile was not friendly, or reassuring, or even smug; it looked more like pity than anything else, and the sight of it spiked the dragon’s rage pressure until it superheated his blood and he cared not the slightest if he was killed right here on this stupid beach in front of this stupid sphinx while doing something stupid, if only he could die with Tezzeret’s blood on his fangs.
He spread wide his arms and wider still his great wings, and unleashed upon his enemy fell magics that could consume this entire universe.
Except he didn’t.
He hesitated, confusion knotting his scaly brow. Again, he summoned the power of entire stars and rained flaming destruction upon his-
Except he didn’t. Again.
“Do you know why not?” Tezzeret said.
Bolas flinched. Was that pestilent artificer reading his mind? Controlling his actions? Could the ramparts of his identity have been breached? His consciousness flashed through the countless chambers of his near-infinite mind, but he could find no sign of tampering.
“Predictable,” Tezzeret said. “To save my time and your effort, it’s not in your mind, Bolas. It’s in your head.”
“What?”
“You brought it on yourself, you know. We never had to be enemies.”
“Enemies? Don’t flatter yourself,” the dragon sneered. “I am a god. You are a cockroach.”
The artificer nodded amiably. “A reasonable metaphor, in a limited way. The cockroach is tiny, and weak, and can be crushed by a finger-yet still it can carry disease, befoul your food, and make your home generally disagreeable. And cockroaches are, as a group, very hard to kill.”
“What are you nattering about?” Bolas snapped. “What does this have to do with me?”
Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s your image, old worm. In those terms, what I’ve done to you is fairly simple. I’ve taken away your pesticide.”
“You are such a preposterous-”
“Kill me,” Tezzeret offered. “However you like. I have no shields and have summoned no magic. You can just step on me, if nothing else; it’s how one customarily destroys cockroaches.”
Bolas growled deep in his throat and lunged for him, talons poised to rip the artificer into bloody shreds.
But he didn’t.
“Because you can’t. Well, you can… but you won’t. Not for a while, at least.”
Tezzeret’s smile reminded Bolas of something unpleasant. With a lurch, Nicol Bolas realized that the smile looked like one he himself liked to show from time to time. Usually when someone he was about eat broke down and began to beg for their life.
But in Tezzeret’s smile there was no sadism. Not even malice.
That, somehow, made it worse.
Bolas began to wonder, for the first time he could remember in all twenty-five thousand long years of his life, if he might be out of his depth.
“I should think you know me as well as any creature in the Multiverse, excepting only Kemuel and Crucius,” Tezzeret said. “What’s my talent? Not superficial, magic and rhabdomancy and artificing. What am I best at? What is my specialty?”
Bolas opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but shut it again without speaking. Shut it with a snap like a dry branch breaking, because he realized he did know Tezzeret’s specialty.
Preparation.
“I want you to understand why I’m revealing what I’ve done to you in this particular way,” Tezzeret said. “There is a lesson I hope you will take from this, and the only way I can be sure you’ve learned it is if you see it yourself.”
“Games,” said Nicol Bolas sourly. “Aren’t I too stupid to understand the rules?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I hope you do, at least, understand the stakes,” said the artificer. “We’re playing for your life.”
Bolas sat, folding his wings about himself in what he hoped might look like nonchalance. He’d suddenly become very cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering.
“Do you remember what I said to Jace Beleren, right after my device settled into his brain?”
Bolas had no need to search his memories for that particular tidbit. “You said you were going to kill me.”
“Yes. And I did.”
“Are you mad?”
“I killed you dozens of times,” Tezzeret said. “Remember?”
Bolas thought of the corpse dragons he had pulled from parallel time lines, and he discovered he was getting colder rather than warmer.
“I kept on killing you,” Tezzeret said, “until finally I found a Nicol Bolas I didn’t have to kill. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand who you are and why you are this way?”
Bolas swallowed.
“You don’t have to answer. Only think. The device I put in Jace’s brain was there not because I feared he’d interfere with me. I put that device in there because I knew you would read his mind. Someday. Somewhere. And when you did, that device would flow into you right along with Jace’s memories. Once that was done, I could kill you…” He shrugged. “Whenever. Any time I happened to feel like it. Because that device is in your brain now.”
Tezzeret sighed apologetically. “The tricky part was programming it to reach the proper neural nexus in your brain. A bit of trial and error there, thus a few extra dead dragons on parallel beaches. I’m sorry for that, by the way.”
Bolas snorted. He’d felt not the faintest sting, let alone the shattering agony that Tezzeret’s device had inflicted upon Beleren. He opened his mouth to express just how pathetically contemptible Tezzeret’s little charade had become, but the artificer held up a hand.
“It’s not there to hurt you. It’s more of a short circuit than a punishment-and besides, I suspect your pain tolerance is beyond the capacity of any device to surpass.”
Bolas blinked. That had sounded almost like a compliment…
“Basically, it shuts down your motivation to kill me. Or any Planeswalker. I decided I could spare that much mercy for Jace… at least partially because I could so vividly imagine the look on your face when you discovered you couldn’t hurt him.”
Bolas could think already of a dozen ways to get that device out of his brain, and once he did-
Again, Tezzeret seemed to be reading his mind. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if it took you more than ten minutes to remove it. But it gives us the opportunity to have this chat.”
Bolas had a different chat in mind. With a very subtle, impenetrably camouflaged exertion of mana, he reached out for a time line where he had never used his mind siphon on Beleren. A quick temporal shift, and matters between him and Tezzeret would be different.
Lethally different.
But he couldn’t. The time lines simply weren’t there… or, worse, he couldn’t see them. The cold seemed to have penetrated his bones. He sent his perceptions forward and back along the time line he was already in… except he didn’t. He couldn’t.
He remembered being able to clockwork. He didn’t remember how.
Tezzeret nodded sympathetically. “You have to keep in mind that I had a long time to prepare for our meeting on this beach.”
