efficiently elegant of their designs had no less than seventy-three.
Mine had nine.
On nearly every assignment, I completed my work far ahead of my fellows. To amuse myself while waiting for them to finish, I would gather their debris and cast-off materials from the shop’s dustbin and use them to create oddments-children’s toys, tiny automata, the sorts of fanciful devices that have no actual purpose other than to delight by their design and action-which I then sold in the Lower Vectis Grand Bazaar, for what eventually became a tidy sum, to help finance my education.
It was not long until my schoolmates lost the habit of throwing away anything at all; they would, however, sell their leftover materials and discarded parts to me for pocket change, and so for a time I ran a thriving little trade. This lasted until our supervising master noted that every dustbin was as clean after our shop hours as it had been before them. The explanation-that they were selling their scraps to me, and I was peddling devices I made from them-earned me a visit from the three Governing Masters.
The masters looked over my impeccably organized work space-I had built a variety of storage devices to keep my materials clean, separate, and easy to locate at need-and one of them asked me why my bench was stuffed with trash.
“What trash?” said I. He indicated my multitudinous cabinets and arrays of drawers, which were stocked with everything from crumpled scraps of gold foil to tailings of badly tanned sluice serpent hide.
“With apologies for daring to disagree with my betters, Masters,” I said, “none of these contain trash; their contents are simply materials I have not yet found a use for.”
They elevated me to journeyman on the spot.
The position of journeyman was the only reason I’d come to the Guild in the first place. I did not plan to spend my life flattering the vanity of the wealthy and powerful by providing them with self-powered trinkets and enhanced body parts. I was there to learn to work etherium, and nothing else.
I was ready to build my right arm.
I had known what I was to build-I had dreamed it a decade before, and spent every intervening day of my life refining its design until I knew it would make of me the man I had decided to be. My right arm was why I taught myself the art of scrapping for etherium, why I had trained myself to steal from my father, why I’d apprenticed as an artificer, and why I had become a sneak thief and a killer of bandits and rippers. My right arm was the reason I had devoted my life to the study of all conceivable elements of design and construction.
When my father had been in one of his occasional expansive moods-merely intoxicated by the drugs he craved, rather than unconscious and prostrate-he liked to say that there were only two things in all creation he knew would never fail him: death and his right arm. Fool that he was.
His right arm was nothing. Flesh and bone. As corrupt and rotten as his filthy heart.
My right arm is none of these things.
There are some who have spoken of my arm, and claimed it to be psychological compensation for my lowly birth. Others have called it the badge of my self-creation. Still others have named it a symbol of power, a fetish, a talisman against self-doubt. All these people have one defining trait in common.
They’re idiots.
The circumstances of my birth are irrelevant. I have no need for a “badge” of any kind; I am the proof of my self-creation. And my arm is not, nor has it ever been, a symbol of power, nor of anything else. It’s not a symbol.
It is power.
Most “etherium enhancements” barely warrant the name. Etherium in its unworked state is a soft metal and almost infinitely ductile. Even the richest mages use baser metals that are stronger, and a great deal easier to come by, such as titanium or cobalt. They build their enhancements of these, merely threading the structure through with infinitesimal strands of etherium-only enough to power the enchantments that enable the prosthesis to mimic the function of the part it replaces.
I delved deeply into the mysteries of mana quenching and?theric tempering, and I invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana- sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles. It is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures-but not for long.
I went days at a time without sleep, learning to use mana to keep myself alert and focused, for my nights were passed risking my life against bandits and my freedom against thief-takers to search out new and ever-larger caches of etherium.
I learned to make my new arm do not only all the work of my old one, but everything else my imagination could devise. Though I am no more gifted a mage than I am a rhabdomant, I again found ways to exploit my minimal talents to accomplish maximal results. When my arm was completed, it comprised more than ten pounds of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip. Merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage-and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.
One black midnight, I alone, without witness, assistant, or aid, performed the ritual that severed my arm of useless flesh and permanently attached the arm that would make a scruffy, ill-fed scrapper’s boy into a man to be reckoned with. A man with the power to revenge injury a thousandfold.
A mage.
When morning came and the Masters saw what I had achieved, they elected to elevate me to Mastery and immediately began preparations for the weeklong ceremony. I thanked them, and walked out from the Guild Hall that same morning, never to return. This time, I did not look back.
I had what I’d wanted from them. Master is just a name. Names are nothing.
Power is everything.
I had not been out of the Mechanists’ Guild a week before I was approached by the Seekers of Carmot.
It seemed the Seekers had been aware of me for some considerable time, as early as the first year of my apprenticeship to the artificer. I later learned that several of the rippers I had killed had been aspiring Seekers. The Anointed Fellows of the Seekers of Carmot had been most impressed, as these aspirants had been possessed of talent for magery in proportion to their avarice… yet they had fallen before a Tidehollow boy whose talent was limited to a knack with gadgets.
When that knack had produced an arm of tempered etherium, the Seekers decided I might be useful, and so allowed me to study at their Academy.
The Seekers of Carmot styled themselves a noble order, committed to the service of all Esper. The carmot from which they’d taken their name was an arcane substance necessary to the production of etherium, some sort of catalyst that allowed the Anointed Fellows to create etherium by infusing?ther into sangrite.
They created etherium.
Supposedly.
And they would teach me the secret. Supposedly.
And they were committed to giving etherium away until it became as common as dirt.
Supposedly.
The Seekers of Carmot had been the last thing I’d ever believed in.
When I discovered the truth, I demonstrated to them that my talent wasn’t so much a knack with gadgets as it was a knack for using gadgets to kill people.
In the end, I had come to appreciate my father’s lesson. Only two things would never fail me: death and my right arm.
My arm was everything I had. It was everything I would ever have.
When I awoke in that red crystal cave to find attached to my right shoulder an arm of mere flesh, already corrupt and rotting, that was exactly what had been taken from me.
Everything.
When I regained consciousness, I undertook to examine my new appendage. It appeared, in every functional sense, identical to the one I had severed some years before. Missing were only an array of minor scars across my knuckles and into the palm of my hand-souvenirs of a particularly tricky midnight etherium retrieval-and a much larger scar along my biceps, a knife wound. This scar, while I had still used my flesh arm, had been a useful
