But when Bolas 'spoke' again, he sounded wistful rather than angry. We were gods once, Beleren. Did you know that?
I-what?
No, I suppose you wouldn't. Not at your age. The dragon heaved what Jace could only call a mental sigh. The Spark burned so much brighter then. We willed our desires upon the worlds, and the worlds obeyed. And then, the catastrophe on Dominaria and we…
We are less, Beleren. Less than we were… The dragon's mind threatened to burn Jace's soul with its sudden heat. And less than we will be!
Jace felt his world spinning, overwhelmed at the intensity of Bolas's fervor. Why… Why are you telling me this?
Why, Jace Beleren? I thought that you would care to know. That, and it made for a magnificent diversion, don't you think?
Even as Jace froze, a lightning bolt of panic flashing through him, he felt the dragon's mind sweep past, arrowing for gaps in the 'net' of thoughts and notions with which he had surrounded Tezzeret's mind.
His body rigid, as though he'd long since succumbed to the blizzard's touch, Jace hurled the entire force of his will into a mental lunge. His mind screamed into the ice, and nobody heard. Like a closing fist, he snapped shut the grid of thought, trying to block Bolas before he-
Oh, dear Heaven!
Jace's mind quailed before the greatest power he had ever felt. The innermost depths of Alhammarret's psyche, the very core of the wizard's being, had been nothing, a gentle springtime gust to the roaring hurricane that was this single tendril of the dragon's mind.
That tendril became a spear, stabbing at Tezzeret's mind. The web-work of Jace's magic closed around it, trapping it between ideas. Bolas pushed, Jace squeezed, and for just an instant- precious little time, yet a far more impressive feat than Jace would ever realize-the young mage held fast.
Sweat poured from his brow and froze, forming a tiny hedge of his hair. His eyes watered, threatening to do the same, and Jace blinked them clear before the forming icicles could blind him. His head pounded, and the sky and the snow turned gray before his fading vision. In seconds, what little mana waited to be tapped underground was gone. He strained to reach farther out, hoping for more, and found almost none to be had. Bolas, or whatever wizards dwelt on this inhospitable world, had truly sucked the region dry.
His breathing came in short and ragged gasps, the frigid air burning his lungs. His stomach knotted, his fists clenched inside their gloves. He felt a capillary burst in his left eye, heard something pop deep in his sinuses. He felt a liquid warmth running from his nose, a warmth that didn't last long before it, too, began to freeze.
Still the pressure grew, the mind-tendril shifting in his grasp, and Jace knew, without knowing how he knew, that the dragon had not yet begun to struggle. Maybe-maybe-if Jace had remained focused, if he'd caught the attack before it had already penetrated his scattered defenses, he might have had a chance. He could have altered the phalanx of concentration and deliberation that protected Tezzeret, closed the gaps before Bolas exploited them, and just perhaps repulsed the dragon long enough to get Tezzeret some sort of warning.
But now? Every instinct Jace had, every part of his soul, shrieked at him to retreat, to draw back into his mind and get as far away as possible. With a defeated gasp, he tumbled to the ground. His body shook, and the ice and snow around him turned pink with blood.
Tezzeret saw none of this. The artificer, still in mid-sentence, staggered as the weight of Nicol Bolas's mind touched his own. Only then, jaw slack with shock and a growing alarm, did he glance behind long enough to notice Jace crawling across the ice.
'Really, Tezzeret,' Nicol Bolas said, his tone unchanged. 'I'm disappointed. Of course, I've already killed him; I've known he was being paid off for some time. But he didn't seem to know who was receiving the ore he skimmed from my shipments. Smart move, using a third party.
'Coming to see me afterward, somewhat less so.'
'You can't touch me, Bolas!' Tezzeret insisted, drawing himself back to his full height even as his body began to shake for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold. His left hand was behind him, hovering over a pouch of implements and tools, while his prosthetic was raised high, ready to cast a battery of potent spells. 'Whatever you're accusing me of doing outside this place, the wards bind you while you're here!'
The dragon's laughter thundered through the canyons and set the snow atop the nearest mountains to quivering. 'Little artificer, you are absolutely correct. I am bound by the same wards you are, and you would be long gone by the time I could break them.'
Tezzeret felt at least a bit of tension drain from his shoulders-only to return twice over as an arrow thudded into the ground at his feet, sending shards of ice slicing into the leather of his boot.
'Of course,' Bolas continued, as a veritable mob of humanoid silhouettes appeared atop the chasm's walls, 'as you've already so generously established when bribing my servants, third parties don't count.'
The crunch of his steps drowned out by the sounds of running men, twanging bowstrings, and the hideous rumble of Bolas's laughter, Tezzeret fled.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The snow gave only slightly beneath the artificer's feet, scarcely slowing him, as though he were partly held aloft by some invisible platform. Swiftly he drew even with Jace, and for a moment he appeared disinclined to stop. Only when he saw the younger mage already struggling to rise did he reach out a metallic hand and haul him to his feet.
'Can you run?' Tezzeret demanded of him.
'I-'
'Run or die.' Jace ran.
Arrows fell around them, thick as sleet, and Jace stumbled frequently in the deep snows, slowing their progress. One of the razor-edged missiles sliced through the flesh of Tezzeret's left arm, sending a spray of blood to solidify swiftly on the freezing earth. The artificer grunted, scooped a fistful of snow in his etherium hand and clamped it over the shallow wound to stanch the blood, but otherwise seemed scarcely to notice.
Yet the sleet was their ally, as was the howling wind, for they caused most of the native hunters' bows to aim wide, protecting the fugitives until Tezzeret gathered his wits sufficiently to cast an illusion of shifting white above them, blending, at least from a distance, with the fallen snow.
He dashed around a sharp bend in the canyon wall, bodily yanking a panting Jace after him. From his pouch he yanked a crystal sphere, the same he'd used to spy on Jace during Baltrice's test. Holding it to his eye, sharpening his vision far beyond what might qualify as human, he peered back around the corner.
Distance meant nothing; the falling snow ceased to blur his sight. He saw several dozen men scaling the chasm walls like spiders, some not even bothering with ropes to aid their descent. Each sported a heavy beard of red or brown or blond, and each was clad in leathers and furs belonging to no animal Tezzeret had ever seen alive. Axes and scramaseaxes hung from their waists, short but powerful bows across their backs. Barbarians, then, no doubt hired or pressed into service from native tribes. Of Bolas, he could detect no sign, save for a trace of laughter still hovering upon the frigid winds.
But what worried him most were not the barbarians themselves, though their numbers were daunting indeed. Rather, it was a pair of men already at the base of the cliff, each of whom wore a heavy cloak of red-dyed fur atop his armor. How they got there, Tezzeret didn't know, but they pulled a two-wheeled wagon made of old, cracked wood. Atop it stood a box, perhaps five feet on a side, sculpted entirely of black iron and covered with simple runes that steamed in the icy air.
Even as Tezzeret found himself wondering what might lurk in that cage of steel and spell, one of the bearers leaned in toward the metal, ran a hand over the carven symbols. Starting from that rune, the metal warped, bending and peeling away, a grotesque flower of blackened iron. And the thing within emerged.
A single limb struck the ice and snow, like the front paw of a stalking hound, yet this was no paw but a humanoid hand. Long fingers splayed out as the palm touched the ice, followed instantly by a second hand.
It was humanoid, this thing, and indeed roughly human size, yet it crept on all fours as a hunting beast.
