Bolas stared.
He had never, in all his vast life, felt so wholly at a loss.
“I suppose…” Bolas murmured. “I suppose… I don’t, either.” And to his own astonishment, he lowered one great talon and shook Tezzeret’s hand. “Though I’ll probably kill you anyway.”
“But not today.”
“Yes,” Bolas said. “Not today.”
A moment later, he discovered something still troubled him. “But Crucius,” he said, waving a talon up at the Metal Sphinx. “That’s really him? The Mad Sphinx?”
“Not really.”
“Where is he, then?”
Tezzeret said gravely, “Speaking.”
Nicol Bolas felt as though all the air had turned to stone and all the stone was piled upon his chest. “You…?” he gasped. “You…?”
“Of course not,” Tezzeret said, grinning at him. “But the look on your face? I will treasure that for the rest of my life. It will keep me warm through the long winter nights.”
After a moment, Bolas discovered himself smiling as well. “All right, all right. Very well. But still-tell me.”
“Say please.”
“Are you serious?”
“Manners cost nothing, though their value is beyond gold. Or even etherium,” Tezzeret said. “If you like, Doc can teach you.”
Bolas shook his head, and some fist in his chest, so old and tight and layered with scars that he had forgotten it had ever been there, now loosed and let him laugh outright.
“Please, then,” he said, still chuckling, “tell me of finding Crucius.”
“You’re standing on him. More or less.”
“Really? This isn’t another joke?”
“It’s not a joke, but it’s not really him, either. It used to be him, and if the Multiverse is lucky, it might be him again. Remember how I said that here, it’s always now? He was a clockworker. Will be a clockworker. Potentially. Probably the only clockworker I would actually trust to do clockworking.”
“Was? Will be? Potentially what?”
“It’s complicated. Things become other things. Seeds become plants. Drops become rivers. Eggs become dragons. But those transformations are a great deal more certain than anything that happens to, around, or concerning a clockworker. The same for me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That Speaking bit was a joke before-but it’s also true. Sort of. Potentially true. Someday I may be him, or he may have been me. Formerly. Or both of us might be you. And vice versa. Or I’m what he turned into. And so forth. Like I said before…” Tezzeret shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“Apparently so.”
“It’s true that there is no secret. It’s just that language is insufficient to express truth clearly. That’s why I decided it would be better to show you.”
“But-” The dragon waved up toward the Metal Sphinx, and at the riddle engraved into the plinth. “What is all that, then? What’s with the statue?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“I, ah, well…”
“The dynamic balance of intersecting arcs that makes it seem as though at any instant it might wake up, yawn, stretch, and take wing for any place-any time-in the Multiverse. The simple purity of it-he has taken the ugly necessities of blood and bone, of eating, shitting, screwing and decay, and transformed them into clean, spare lines of perfect elegance.”
“Hmp,” the dragon said. To Bolas, the only thing more boring than art was listening to someone talk about art. “You sound as though you envy him.”
“To become as he has become,” Tezzeret said seriously, “is my heart’s fondest dream.”
“Why don’t you, then?” The great dragon gave a shrug that encompassed the whole world that was ocean. “In this place, you are master of all you survey. Literally. There is nothing in this entire universe that does not answer to your will. Not even me. If that’s what you want to be, you can just… be.”
Tezzeret nodded. “I can.”
“So why don’t you?”
“To be master of this place,” the artificer said precisely, “is not what I’m for.”
“What, some kind of higher-calling crap? Really? You expect me to believe that?”
“You can believe that I believe it.” Tezzeret scooped up a handful of the etherium sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “You’ve heard of finding God in a grain of sand? Here, it’s the literal truth. This place is its own master. There is nothing here that is not part of its own creator. Including me.”
“But I made you.”
Tezzeret shrugged. “Who made you?”
“Let’s not go there, can we?”
“I don’t expect you to really understand this. I’m not sure I really understand it. Crucius thought he had an answer to existence-he thought he understood himself, the Multiverse, and his place in it. This place is what he became after he found out he was wrong.”
Tezzeret looked up into the face of the Metal Sphinx as though it were looking back at him. “I don’t know if he decided there was no answer, or if he simply realized that whatever answer there was, he wasn’t the one who could find it. So he set out to design and build someone who was.”
Bolas snorted. “You?”
“Not me personally. Someone who can do what I have done. Who can become what I’ve become. Someone who can reach this place, understand what it is, and realize that the real Search is only now beginning.”
The dragon sighed and let his heavy lids droop across his vast yellow eyes. The only thing duller than talking about art was mystical claptrap and gnostic flummery. “What about that riddle, though? Where did Crucius learn Classical Draconic-and how in any flavor of hell did you learn to read it?”
“Oh, it’s not. It’s whatever language you know best. As for the riddle, I wrote it.” He shrugged and gave a tired sigh. “That is, I’m going to write it. The Seeker will. Someday. Currently, I presume that Seeker will be me. Of course, I didn’t know I wrote it-will write it, whatever-until after I solved it. Inconvenient. But probably better that way.”
“So? What’s the answer?”
Tezzeret smiled. “I am the carmot.”
“Really? That’s it? That’s the thunderbolt of enlightenment that turned you into… whatever in the hells you are? ‘I am the carmot’?”
“Not at all. I am the carmot; you are an ill-mannered dragon with an unfortunate impulse control problem.”
“I don’t get it.”
Tezzeret shrugged. “Watch.”
He reached into the tangles of his hair and brought out a needle of sangrite about one-fourth the size of his little finger. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said, and stabbed the sangrite into his left eye.
His face burst into flame. The fire swiftly spread to the rest of his body, and his head… vanished.
Bolas scowled. The stump of Tezzeret’s neck showed a clean, smooth surface, exactly the color of etherium. A moment later, Tezzeret’s head wiped itself back into existence.
His left eye, along with its lid, its socket, and a diagonal band that extended across his face from his hairline above his right eye to his jaw at the left corner of his mouth, was now metal, metal the color of burnished pewter…
He batted away what was left of the smoke. “Sorry about the odor.”
“Not at all,” Bolas said. “You forget whom you’re talking to.”
“Of course. Well, here,” Tezzeret said, then stuck his thumb into the corner of his etherium eye socket and
