“Aww, you don’t like me anymore…”
“Please,” I said. What else could I do? To beg was my sole remaining option short of bashing my head into the stone until I lost consciousness and drowned in the trub.
Though that option became more attractive with every passing second.
After a few moments of careful questioning, during which I was tempted to kill myself only three times, my-our-situation began to come clear.
Doctor Jest was a fully conscious individual, who inhabited-or had some sort of magical bond with-my sensory nerves. He had exceptional control over them, though it seemed their activity remained largely electrochemical, as it is by nature-he spoke only through my left auditory nerves because misuse might cause nerve damage and deafness, and he was, as he’d said, still exploring the parameters of his power.
Beyond that, he knew-or believed, which amounted to the same thing, under the circumstances-that the binding that joined us could be unbound only by Bolas himself. His fate was linked with mine, since Bolas would have no reason to do either of us any favors until we finished his job. And any others that the dragon might think up in the meantime. Our fates were inextricably linked; whatever happened to me would happen to him as well.
I also discovered, to my considerable relief, that he could not read my thoughts. I was able to keep private my suspicion that Doctor Jest had no separate existence at all, being nothing more than a phenomenon of the alteration of my nervous system accomplished by Bolas in the process of repairing what Jace had done to my brain. I wouldn’t put it past the dragon, for example, to have built Doctor Jest into this meat arm he had inflicted on me.
We also determined why gathering sufficient power for any major effect seemed so difficult. Yes: ripping away my right arm had left me magically crippled-but that wasn’t the whole story. It seemed that while Doctor Jest had some not-inconsiderable powers at his command, he did not draw mana directly, but instead existed as a vampirelike mana parasite, living off my own reduced reserve.
“Another gift from Bolas,” I muttered.
“Yeah, I hate that scaly monkey dunker,” said Doctor Jest. “You know what he needs? A good hard boot to the nads. Do him a universe of good.”
“I don’t think he has nads,” I replied glumly.
“Can we try anyway?”
“You’re not thrilled to be working for him.”
“Is anyone? Is there a worse boss in the Multiverse?”
“If we ever find one, don’t tell Bolas,” I muttered. “He’d never resist proving us wrong.”
“So, how’re we gonna get him?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on,” Doctor Jest said. “You’re not the type to take this kind of rumpthumpin’ lying down.”
“You’ve been conscious less than three hours, and you’re already an authority on my type?”
“You’re planning something,” he insisted. “You gotta be planning something.”
“And if I am,” I said, “why would I tell you?”
“Aw, c’mon, Tezzie! I’m on your side! We’re in this together, shoulder to shoulder-ah, you know what I mean. Man to-well, to whatever I am.”
“Don’t call me Tezzie.”
“No wonder you got no friends.”
“I’m not interested in your friendship.”
“Aw, c’mon… I’ll let you call me Doc,” he offered.
Painfully aware-and I do mean painfully aware-that while no power at my command could cause Doctor Jest the slightest discomfort, he could make of my existence an endless carnival of suffering, I decided to compromise. “Tezz,” I said reluctantly. “You can call me Tezz.”
“All right! And we’re buds, right? For real. I’m your best friend?”
I sighed. “You’re my only friend, Doc.”
“That’s sad. Really. Man, do you have a crummy life or what?”
“If I do,” I said through my teeth, “you’re not making it any better.”
“Aww. That hurts, Tezz. Really.”
I decided to change the subject. Any discussion of hurt with Doc would potentially be cataclysmically one-sided. So I picked myself up-hmp, I suppose I picked us up to my feet-and stepped closer to the hollow stone that contained my device. “Doc?”
“Yeah, bud? Er, chum, you think? Best pal?”
“Doc, why did you stop me?”
“Huh?”
“When I reached for the device, you made me feel like my hand was on fire. Why?”
“Why? What am I, an idiot?”
With considerable exercise of self-discipline, I resisted offering an answer. “Why don’t you want me to pick it up?”
“Because whatever happens to you, happens to me,” he said slowly, overenunciating as though explaining the obvious to a small, not especially bright, child. “Can’t you see that whole friggin’ thing is just one big trap?”
“Of course I can,” I said. “I built it.”
Being a mechanist, when I went to hide a substantial amount of etherium, I had seen no reason to stash it as bullion or bars… and I have always had a knack for small, intricate automata. I had fashioned the entire stash into a trap-and a rather nifty one, if I do say so myself.
This trap would fishhook the hand of anyone other than me at first touch, and insinuate a network of hair-thin etherium wires transdermally, to hijack the thief’s nervous system and magically override the voluntary motor nerves, inflicting permanent paralysis. This would leave the thief alive, awake, and aware, but unable to do anything save, oh, for example, die of thirst. Or drown in a particularly large dumping of trub. Or meet some other unpleasantly lingering death.
No: the pertinent fact here was not that it was a trap, but that Doc could see it was a trap. My nifty little device no more resembled a trap than it did a clod of dung. Even an exceedingly skilled mechanist would have needed hours, if not days, to detect the hazard I had built into it-and would most likely have fallen victim to it in the process.
This meant that Doc had access to some portion of my memory, or that he could perceive things on a level that I could not. Or both. Any of these eventualities was interesting, and all were potentially significant. “How did you know?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Isn’t it?”
“Not to anyone but you.”
“Huh. No kidding?”
“Doc,” I said with uncharacteristic sincerity, “you have unplumbed depths of talent.”
“You’re welcome. That was a compliment, right? Right?”
I didn’t answer. My attention had been captured by a potential feature of the trap that had never struck me before. After all, if the device could hijack its victim’s motor nerves, it might do all manner of interesting things. It suddenly became obvious how I could tune it to hijack someone’s whole form and function-to make of its victim an unwilling telemin, acting wholly in my control-or as directed by the device, because I now saw also how I might imbue it with a consciousness of its own… to make it into, for example, a mechanical Doctor Jest. It was obvious. It wouldn’t even be difficult.
Curious that I’d never seen it before.
Perhaps among all the changes inflicted upon my form and function by Jace and Bolas, some few might have to be counted as positive. It was a sobering thought. Did I actually have something to thank Bolas for?
Or worse, to thank Jace Beleren for?
Distracted by this unpleasant possibility, I somewhat absently deactivated my device, only to discover there had been something I must have missed; I felt a tiny whisper of a mana release that had not been part of my design.
“What was that?” Doc said. “Did you see that? Was that supposed to happen?”
“No.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Yes.”
Above us on the wall, the stone began to burn.
“A bad kind of problem?”
“Potentially fatal.”
I had underestimated Jace again. Only now did it occur to me that anything I had known-anything-he could have taken from my mind when he attacked me. Including the location of my local etherium stash.
The burning stone sputtered and flared, white-hot now, so intense I had to shield my face with my useless right arm. The stone began to melt, dripping like hot wax, and where these droplets struck, what they struck ignited with unnatural intensity.