“You don’t need to know,” Bolas said. “All you need to know about your new best friend is that he has only two purposes in life. The first, as you’ve discovered, is to cause you pain. Unsupportable agony, in fact.”
“Anytime I do something you don’t like.”
“Almost. I don’t ask Doctor Jest to read my mind. So he has some leeway; he’ll hurt you anytime he thinks you might be doing something I won’t like-or that you might be about to. Get it?”
“So that ‘obey me by choice’ business was a joke.”
“You never did appreciate my sense of humor.”
“I get it,” I said. “You don’t have to show me again.”
“The other thing Doctor Jest lives for is to make sure you don’t do anything foolish, like try to run away from me. At your first inkling of attempting to planeswalk without my express permission, he will put you right back here. And I think you understand that here is a place you can’t get out of on your own. Still with me?”
“I told you: I get it.” I held up my right arm of meat. “Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll do it better if I’m not crippled. If this task is something you prefer I succeed at, give me back my arm.”
“Well…” The dragon shrugged. “Can’t really help you. Sorry. Best I can do is cut off the new one.”
“Give me my real arm and I’ll do it myself. I have before. Is watching me suffer your petty revenge more important than this task you raised me from the dead for?”
“Raised you from the dead? Don’t flatter yourself. I undid some of Beleren’s damage to your brain, that’s all.”
“Ah.” At the time, that was all I could think to say.
“It’s kind of complicated. You were dead enough for me; I’m not a philosopher. He just didn’t bother to finish the job on your body. Probably thought you’re not worth the trouble.”
Not worth the trouble. “I’ll have to thank him. Personally.”
“If you find him, I wouldn’t mind thanking him a bit myself. He’d make a better agent than you ever will.”
“And my arm?”
“It was gone when I found you,” he said. “Probably a lovely parting gift from Jace. Lying in some swamp on Kamigawa, I’d guess-if he’d tried to take it with him, I’d have known. I did arrange for the new one. Don’t you like it?”
“I’m not that attached to it.”
The dragon gave me a cough’s worth of courtesy laugh. “So… wait, Tezzie. Really? You thought I raised you from the dead? You thought I took off your arm? Really?”
“I was reasoning from available evidence.” And, I realized, my conclusion was accurate even though both of my premises were flawed; a curious phenomenon, and one that might bear further investigation.
Bolas shook his head pityingly. “I know you have an irrationally high opinion of yourself, but seriously, Tezzeret, get a clue. You’re not remotely that important.”
“Important enough for you to arrange all this.”
“Tezzie, it’s not about you. Really. You’re here because I have spent a very long time setting up an exceedingly elaborate prank, and you’re the only person I know who’ll really appreciate it. You’re audience. Nothing more. Well-let’s say, you’re an educated audience.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“You’ll be impressed.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“Satisfaction guaranteed or double your money back. Do you remember,” Bolas said, mock coy, “when we first met?”
“Sure I remember. You wore red. The demons wore black.” Even the threat of agony wasn’t enough to make Bolas interesting. “Ah, the romance of Grixis when the corpse fungus blooms…”
Bolas started scraping those bricks together again. “The question’s relevant, Tezzie. We met not long after you murdered the Hieresiarch of the Seekers of Carmot.”
My jaw locked; playtime was over. “I murdered no one.”
“You ripped a sick old man’s head off his shoulders and left it on the desk in his study,” Bolas said. “What should I call it? Self-defense?”
“Call it a better death than he deserved,” I said through my teeth. “Amalex Pannet was just another bandit.”
“A bandit? That wheezy old fart? What did he ever steal from you?”
“Three years of service.” Even now, well beyond a decade on, the wound was raw. “Three years of devotion. Three years I spent doing their scut work. Enduring their petty humiliations. Three years studying their useless pretend wisdom to show them I was worthy of learning their made-up fraud of a mystery. Three years of belief in their horseshit.”
“You sound like you’re angry all over again.”
“Not again,” I said. “Still.”
“After all these years? Whatever happened to forgive and forget?”
“I don’t forget, and I don’t trade in forgiveness; I give none and I don’t expect to get any. There are consequences,” I said as evenly as I could manage, “for abusing my good nature.”
Bolas snorted. “What good nature?”
I sought to replicate his too-many-teeth smile. “The good may be rhetorical. The consequences aren’t.”
“Oh, Tezzie, I’m flattered,” Bolas said, splaying one taloned foot against his chest like a blushing debutante. “A threat? Just for me? You shouldn’t have.”
“It’s not a threat, Bolas. It’s a reminder.” I could play his redefinition game, too-better than he could.
He pretended to find something interesting on the ceiling. “And what was your original disagreement with the Seekers of Carmot? You killed what, four of them? A respectable body count, especially against an order of mages. Why so angry?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.” My jaw ached with strain. “The Seekers were your damned hand puppets in the first place! You invented the whole festering Order!”
“Humor me.” The dragon turned his eyes on me, and the fake insouciance evaporated, leaving only bleak malice. “I’m about to spring the punch line, Tezzie. This little prank that I’ve been setting up for years. Decades. Play along.”
This did not sound like a friendly request.
“All right,” I said. I managed a deep breath, and another, and got a better grip on my temper. “All right. I joined the Seekers of Carmot for only one reason: to learn the secret of etherium creation. I had considerable hope invested in them and their secret. I had spent more than ten years, with great effort and at considerable personal risk, to amass the etherium for my right arm.”
I held up my meat arm and wriggled its fingers. ‘My erstwhile right arm,’ I corrected myself. The Seekers said they could create etherium. They had supposedly uncovered the secret during intensive study of the legacy of this imaginary Mad Sphinx of theirs, something to do with a mythological mineral called sangrite that can be infused with?ther by using another mythological substance called carmot. Presto change-o, new etherium. If they’d been telling the truth, it would have revolutionized life on Esper.”
“If,” Bolas said, getting those bricks scraping again. “Go on.”
“Only the Fellowship-the Fellows of the Arcane Council, the most advanced and holy adepts of the entire Order-were allowed to read and care for the book they called the Codex Etherium, where they had recorded everything they’d learned about Crucius, about his life and wisdom, his disappearance, his techniques of working etherium… and the secrets of carmot and sangrite. With the ancient sphinxian wisdom in the Codex, the Fellowship-alone among all the mages of Esper-could create etherium. So I joined them. I studied with them, trained with them, took their orders-I even mucked out their damned toilets-for three years. Because I believed. I did. I thought we were going to transform Esper into paradise. I even told-”
I bit down hard enough to draw fresh blood from my injured cheek. There was no reason to tell Bolas about my last visit to my father’s hovel in Tidehollow-about how I had been practically babbling with enthusiasm, and what my father had said…
Bolas didn’t need to know.
“So?” the dragon said, his upper lip peeling back. “Tell me about this paradise, Tezzie.”
