reminder to never assume I had killed the last bandit.
So: the limb very likely had been regenerated. Another extravagance of power-and an astonishingly potent personal affront. There is literally nothing else that could be done to me that would hurt as much, as deeply, and on so many levels.
Without my real arm, the one I had created, I was nothing more than a Tidehollow scrapper. I had been made into my father.
Except with a better vocabulary.
I tallied up the facts of my situation, relevant to whose prisoner I was most likely to be: life, sanity, nudity, maiming, and the bitterest psychic wound I could even imagine.
Framed in those terms, the conclusion was obvious.
“Bolas.” I said it aloud, but not loudly. I knew I didn’t have to. “I know you’re here.”
As a demon is said to be conjured by the sound of its name, after only a single heartbeat he materialized out of the rose-tinged gloom, all sixty-some-odd feet of twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon.
“You always were clever,” he said, and casually backhanded me with one wall-size fist so hard that I flew across the cavern, slammed into a jagged wall, and sank to the floor, stunned into immobility.
“Hello, Tezzeret,” said Nicol Bolas. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”
TEZZERET
The hand I brought to my mouth came back bloody. Hot oil trickled down the back of my head: scalp wound. No concern there: my great mass of thick hair would both absorb blood and trigger coagulation. If any bones were broken, they didn’t yet hurt, though I anticipated that once the shock wore off, I would be in considerable pain.
Bolas paced toward me across the cavern, smiling, which on a dragon indicates neither amusement nor friendliness. It’s a display of how many large and pretty teeth he has, and how sharp they are. “Tezzeret, Tezzeret,” he murmured, insufferably pleased with himself. “Tezzie-may I call you Tezzie?”
“Can I stop you?”
Almost too fast to be seen, his foreleg lashed out, and he seized me in his talons. “The list of what you can’t stop me from doing is, I’m pretty sure, infinite.”
To demonstrate the truth of this, he tossed me sharply upward, as a child might a ball. I bounced off the ceiling, got a mouthful of fresh blood when my teeth clacked together and ripped open my cheek, and then tumbled helplessly back into his grasp.
It occurred to me that Bolas might possibly have done all this simply for the pleasure of killing me personally.
“I admit and confess that you are larger than I am,” I said, a bit thickly due to the blood and ragged scraps of the inside of my cheek. “You are stronger than I am. You can snuff my life with a thought. Can we skip the rest of your Intimidate the Naked Prisoner game and jump straight to what you want from me?”
His talons closed around me so tightly that black splotches bloomed in my vision. “But I like this game,” he said. “What I like best about it is that it’s not over until I get bored. By then you’ll be free…” He smiled again. “Or lunch.”
He let up on the pressure, as I’d known he would; if he aspired to mutilate an unconscious body, he had no need to use mine. “How long have you been here?”
“Before just now?”
This answer meant either that he thought me stupid, or that he was playing stupid.
Stupider.
I decided to explain. “You didn’t arrive by teleport-no air displacement. Nor did you shift in from the Blind Eternities-even you can’t planeswalk swiftly or accurately enough to make that sophomorically dramatic entrance. Finally, I could smell you.”
“Smell me?” One scaly brow ridge took on a deeper arch. “Really?”
“At first, I thought it was my armpits. I have two words for you, old worm.” I held up a finger. “Dental.” I folded that finger and lifted the next. “Floss.”
I fully expected him to crush me until I passed out; or, alternatively, that he would start bouncing me off the walls again. Instead, he did what I was least expecting: he chuckled and set me down. He then lowered himself into what might have been, for a dragon, a comfortable position, looking for all the Multiverse as though he’d just stopped by for a friendly chat.
Bouncing off walls seemed to be a more attractive option.
I waited for him to speak. He seemed content to simply recline on the crystal floor, wrap his tail around his neck, and chuckle. A dragon’s chuckle is very like rubbing two bricks together. Against your teeth. I didn’t wait very long; if I wished to play patience games, I would have chosen an opponent younger than, for example, human civilization. “You need me for something.”
“Need you? Don’t insult me. It amuses me to employ you in a particular task. If you fail?” Bolas rather absently began to clean out his nose with the tip of his tail. “That will amuse me, too. If you succeed, you may be rewarded… with other tasks.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“The opportunity,” Bolas said, “to obey me by choice.”
“I’ve had better offers.”
“It’s not an offer,” the dragon said. “It’s a description of reality. Do you understand the difference?”
“Let’s not start on what we do and do not understand,” I said. “What specifically do you want of me?”
“Not yet. There is one feature of our new working relationship that I’ve really been looking forward to showing you.”
“Are we back to Intimidate the Naked Prisoner already?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, we are, but with a new rule. As much as I enjoy bashing you into the rocks, the scent of your blood is making me peckish. And I can’t be wasting my life showing up to slap you around every time you need it. I’d hardly have time for anything else. So I’ve brought a friend for you.”
“I don’t have friends.”
“You do now,” he assured me, in a cheerfully evil tone, like a demonic used-carriage salesman. “But don’t worry, he won’t hurt your reputation. And he doesn’t have a reputation to worry about. I call him Mr. Chuckles.”
“I’m bored already.”
“I can fix that,” the dragon said. “Though I suppose you’re right-Mr. Chuckles is an undignified name. Let’s call him Jest, shall we? And make him a doctor. Doctor Jest. Do you like it? Doesn’t matter.” This seemed to tickle the dragon in some private way, as though it referenced a joke only he knew. “Doctor Jest, be polite. Introduce yourself to Tezzeret.”
This introduction took the form of a shattering blast of agony so overwhelming that I instantly collapsed. It felt like being hit by lightning while I was roasted alive in wasp venom. Over and over and over. I spasmed into convulsions, which did me the favor of banging my head into the floor hard enough to knock me unconscious.
Briefly.
“I know you’re awake, Tezzie. Sit up.”
My hand found yet another scalp wound. “Do I have to?”
“Unless you’d rather get the invitation from Doctor Jest.”
“All right. All right, don’t,” I said, my voice husky. I had probably been screaming. I didn’t remember. “Doctor Jest?”
“You don’t think he’s funny? I just about laughed my tail off.”
“What is it?”
“He.”
“He. Whatever. What is he?”
