The zombies shuffled to his side, as near as they could get, ready to drag him out.
'Do it,' he breathed.
Liliana began to chant, a litany not quite so deep, but somehow far more sinister, than those she used to call her spectral minions. The air beside her clouded over, filled with a faintly luminescent mist, and once again the runic tattoos sprouted across her back and neck. The chamber's still air grew humid and uncomfortably chill.
Between one blink and the next, the mist was gone, and in its place stood a tall man. Dark-haired and cleanshaven, he was clad in formal tunic, vest, and leggings that might have been the height of fashion on Ravnica a century gone by. He turned his piercing stare on Liliana. For a moment they stood locked in what Jace could only assume was a battle of wills, until finally he bowed, mouth twisted in a scornful moue.
The necromancer turned back to Jace, and he recognized the unspoken message. Last chance to back out.
'Do it,' he said again, voice steadier.
Liliana nodded, once to him, once to the newcomer. He smiled broadly, showing a mouthful of fangs that lengthened even as she watched.
Jace shuddered violently as the vampire pressed its mouth to his arm and began to drink gluttonously of his contaminated blood.
'Jace?'
He felt himself afloat, swaddled in the softest darkness, far from the pains and the fears of the light. He drifted on the border, not between waking and sleeping, but on the edge of something greater, something deeper than slumber. It sang to him in the voice of a thousand sirens, a call far easier to heed than to resist.
'Damn it, Jace! Stay with me!'
He tried not to hear the words, not to know the voice. But it nagged at him, even over the restful urgings of the dark.
That's right; there was something he was supposed to do.
Jace opened his eyes, and even that was a monumental victory. His entire body was a leaden weight, his thoughts mired in painful lethargy, and even his heartbeat felt slowed. He no longer sensed the horrible creature's lips and teeth on his arm, but when he forced himself to look and make certain, all he could see was the corpse- white pallor of his own skin.
Which made sense, really, given that he was currently rather blood-deficient. For no good reason, Jace found the notion hysterical, but all he could muster was a single giggle.
Liliana frowned, though she couldn't quite mask her relief that he hadn't just died on her. Moving swiftly, she pressed the largest tube of the artifact to his face. Jace coughed once as a strange vapor that wasn't quite steam wafted over him, permeating his lungs. He felt a strength growing within him, a potency he hadn't consciously realized he was missing.
But it was a vigor of the spirit only, not the body. Though the mana infused his soul, the languor in his limbs refused to fade. He was able, barely, to turn his head-and he noticed, for the first time, that the zombies had dragged him from the cell while he was out-but nothing more.
'Oh, yeah, this was a great idea,' Liliana grumbled. 'As long as Tezzeret accidentally trips and falls on something sharp, we've got him where we want him!'
'I'm so glad… I don't have the strength… to pretend to laugh.' Jace closed his eyes.
'Are you sure you-'
'No. Be quiet.'
Liliana glared at him-or at least he assumed so, though he didn't open his eyes to check. He let the darkness and the silence roll over him once more, not to fall into it as he had nearly done, but to blot out the distractions, the lingering pain, the sound of his own labored breaths.
Carefully, as though afraid his thoughts might topple if he didn't stack them just so, he cast his mind back to Emmara's home on Ravnica. As he'd done then, he pushed himself to remember the feel of her magics, the warmth that suffused his body at the elfs healing touch, the seemingly endless plains that ran beneath Ovitzia where he'd recently spent so much time. He turned it over in his mind, examining the sensation, delving into it, forcing it to become real, more real than the cold floor beneath him, than the burns that had transformed his body into a map of suffering, than the weakness the vampire had left in place of his stolen blood.
The one and only time Jace had done this before, he'd barely felt a tremor in his wounds before his concentration lapsed. This time, he had to literally haul himself from death's door; to regenerate a loss of blood that should, by all rights, have already killed him.
And then he was going to take on Tezzeret again.
Jace allowed himself to break focus just long enough to wonder if he could cure himself of his obvious insanity while he was at it-and then he bent every last bit of will to a task that he knew he shouldn't be able to perform, but at which he could not afford to fail.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The laboratory was neither a room nor a complex of rooms, but a multilevel network of pipes and tubes that, at various points throughout, formed floors and hollows in which people might work. Smoke and arcs of raw mana, in a variety of peculiar colors and pungent scents, wafted between pillars and spheres that emitted strange, multihued auras. The entire chamber smelled strongly of ozone, and when entering one of its many doors, or climbing up from level to level, one had to be careful where one put one's hands, lest one find them violently shocked.
Tezzeret himself, of course, simply willed the various protrusions to lift and carry him wherever he needed to go. Now he stood within one of those hollow 'workrooms,' Baltrice at his side, as he turned his creation over and over in his hands, inspecting it for impurities.
'There, if you would,' he said, indicating a rough seam. She nodded, tensed in brief concentration, and sparks flew as the metal welded itself together.
'Enough. I think that's as done as it's getting.'
Baltrice frowned at the pronouncement. 'Really?' She reached out and tapped the many thin protrusions, then the glass reservoir filled with a viscous green fluid. 'It doesn't look all that sturdy to me, boss.'
'I wouldn't take it into battle,' he agreed, 'but it'll do until I can devise a more portable version. We'll need a brain to test it on first, of course, but barring any unforeseen flaws, I think Beleren's about to find himself moving to slightly smaller quarters.'
Baltrice snickered, a sound that transformed abruptly to a shout of pain as the reservoir bulb shattered, spraying glass shards and its caustic contents across her skin. She struggled to clear her eyes with a sleeve as Tezzeret, utterly bewildered, gawped at the ruins of his creation.
And his gaze grew wider still, jaw dropping in slack amazement, as the manablade detached itself from Baltrice's belt. Carried aloft by a rat-sized drake, it soared upward between the preponderance of tubes. He watched the creature rise, watched until it dropped the weapon gently into the hands of a man who could not be there!
'I believe this is mine,' Jace called from the level above. Clad in boots and leathers stolen from one of Tezzeret's guards, and his own tattered blue cloak, he loomed over them like a vengeful ghost-and for long seconds, the artificer could only assume that's indeed what he was. He couldn't possibly have escaped that cell alive! He couldn't!
But no, he saw the lingering burns on Beleren's neck, on the arm that had reached to snatch the dagger from the air; saw the mind-reader wince as he moved.
Tezzeret's disbelief burned away beneath the heat of a terrible, volcanic anger. His entire body shook, and he felt as though he couldn't even draw a breath.
And then the little bastard waved at him and produced a damned Infinity Globe from somewhere up his sleeve. It pulsed once, twice, attuning itself to the beating of its wielder's heart. Then Beleren was simply gone, nothing but a few wisps of mana-vapor to show that he'd been present at all.
