He paused there, staring off into the caverns, and I thought he was waiting for me to reply somehow, but I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Must be hard.”
“You have no idea,” he muttered. “It’s still there. He’s still there. In my head. I can wall him off, and stuff him down into like my deepest mental subbasement. But I can’t get rid of him. I don’t know if I ever will. I mean, that’s how I knew the codes and stuff to take over the Ravnica cell, right? It’s how I knew that if somehow he wasn’t dead, he’d be coming back here to replace that arm of his. I’m not guessing. I know.”
He turned to me, and for just half a second-something about his eyes, some cold-ass clinical distance, like I was some kind of exotic bug he was deciding whether to squish-he looked like him. Like Tezzeret. “He hates his father. Hates him.”
“Hey, I can relate,” I said. “If my old man was on fire, I wouldn’t pee on him to put him out.”
“It’s not like that. It’s worse than that. It’s like… It’s like his father is a nail that went all the way through his foot. It’s infected and scraping the bone, and every step hurts so bad, he’s always trying not to scream.”
I found myself frowning. “Then how come the big ambush here? Why the beat down? If he hates the old bastard so much, what makes you think-”
“Because he’s never pulled the nail,” Jace said darkly. “Because it’s his.”
I thought of the few times I’d seen Tezzeret really lose it. Not just get angry, because angry was how he got up every morning, but out of control. Wild. Breaking stuff. Slaughtering people. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “Yeah. Anything that’s his, you better just put it down and walk away fast enough that he never sees your hand on it.”
“That’s how I know I’m not wrong. I know Tezzeret is here. Somewhere. Because I know he’d expect me-us-to go after his father. And I know he’ll never let me get away with it.”
“Like I said, Jace,” I told him. “Sure, you know him. He’s in your head, whatever. You know why he’s not behaving the way you expect him to? It’s because he knows you know.”
Jace looked grim. “I get it.”
“Do you? You also got to wonder if whoever put him back together has made some, you know, adjustments.”
“What, that nezumi shaman on Kamigawa?”
“I bet it wasn’t the nezumi-after what he and I did there, I’m surprised they didn’t roast him over a slow fire and eat the sonofabitch-but it’s not like he would have just gotten better on his own, either. So somebody wanted him back, and had the power to do it for him, yeah? I’m just saying. He might not really be the same guy. We don’t know who did it, or why, or what they might want him to do. Until we do, we’re just grape-shotting the smoke and hoping to draw blood.”
Jace looked like he was really seeing me for the first time. “Tezzeret never mentioned how smart you are.”
I had to laugh. “When you work for Tezzeret, thinking just gets you in trouble.”
“I remember.” He gave me that grin again. “It’s lucky you found a better job.”
“Something like it,” I said, smiling back. “Boss.”
He was already squinting through the hovel’s door. “There’s something weird about the old man.”
“Yeah?” A little chill settled into my guts. Anything weird is something bad.
“His mind is… hmp. I don’t know. It’s like there’s not quite enough of him there.”
“He’s been a rustweed addict since forever, I think. There wouldn’t be much of him left, you know?”
“Yeah, but…” Jace said, tilting his head like he was trying to listen for something that human ears can’t really hear. “I don’t know. I can’t quite bring it into focus… doesn’t help that he’s drunk off his ass…”
“Hey, sorry. Next time write me a memo, huh?”
“Forget about it,” he said. “It’s just… I mean, Tezzeret’s not the kind of guy to do magic just for the hell of it.”
“Magic?” A cold shiver flickered up my spine. I do not like to be cold. “I didn’t sense any magic.”
“You’re not a telepath,” he said absently, squinting now through a frown deep enough it should have shown bone. “It’s like… there’s something in there, in his mind, that I can’t quite see.”
That was all I needed to know. I ignited my fire shield and felt in my pockets for Jace’s summoning stones. “You know what? I’m not having fun anymore.”
“Be ready,” he said, low, as he moved cautiously through the doorway, layering shield upon shield around himself until he looked like a man-shaped patch of blue fog.
“Screw ready-don’t you get it? He got here first. It’s time to burn this toilet down to bedrock and run like hell.” I came up as close behind Jace as I could without knocking shields. “Pimple. Nozzle. Change of plan. Kill the old bastard. Now.”
“No, wait-” Jace started.
“Screw wait too.” He had enough shields in place to walk through whatever it’d take to kill everybody else in there. I cranked up myself a Sunball bigger than my butt, which meant it’d make a credible solar flare, but I had to shove Jace out of the way to get the damned thing in through the door. Before I could get Jace clear, the old man dived under the table and rolled out the other side, and the stupid festering skull bangers didn’t even have time to figure out where he’d gone.
The old man rolled up to one knee and snapped his arms wide like he was throwing plates in opposite directions, and in his hands were two little metal toy handbows, comically kid size, neither one as big as the hand that held it, way too small to do any actual damage, which made it altogether sonofabitching astonishing when he fired them both with a couple of high-pitched thocks like squirrel coughs and two little red quarrels not even half the size of a pencil shot out, one into Pimple’s chest right through his armor and the other into Nozzle’s sword arm, and with a noise like fwaptch Nozzle’s arm blew off above the elbow and skittered across the floor along with his sword and Pimple just plain exploded.
Pimple’s head bounced off the ceiling and his right arm went one way and his left went the other, his legs sprayed blood as they flopped onto the floor and his breastplate hit Jace so hard it knocked him back into me like he’d been pimp-slapped by a really, really pissed-off ogre.
While I was trying to get my balance back and at the same time clear Jace out of the way so I could show this bastard what a real explosion looked like, the old man dropped one of the handbows, ripped one of the trestle legs off the table with his bare hands and slung it like a spear at Jace’s chest.
Having just seen something impossible jump out of this bastard’s handbows, I was not prepared to trust Jace’s shields to repel anything at all, so even though the table leg was just a hunk of wood and not even sharp I flicked my Sunball away because it was not something I wanted near Jace if his shields went down, while with my other hand I reached out and flash-fried that hunk of wood so fast there wasn’t even ash, just a puff of white smoke.
What didn’t fry, though, was a little metal gizmo that had been inside the table leg and which flipped right through my best fire like it wasn’t even there. It hit Jace in the chest and sprouted little jointed legs and knives and drills, and it grabbed on to him and started digging through his shields like they were made of grape jam, and right about the time I realized it was made of the same stuff as Tezzeret’s metal arm and that I didn’t have a goddamn clue how to stop it without killing Jace myself, Jace started to scream.
He screamed like a man watching his children die.
He was bucking and writhing in what kind of pain I couldn’t imagine. I had to do something, but his shields were shredding like smoke, and I realized if I didn’t move back I was about to set him on fire.