“What…? What? Why not?”
“Because,” said a voice I hear in nightmares, “that will make a bad situation even worse.”
And I turned my head, and there he was, just standing, standing and smiling and it was instinct, or training, or practice, that snapped my shields into existence and whichever it was didn’t matter at all because before my shields could even fully form, a blast of agony whited out the world.
This time, I remember screaming.
I didn’t quite pass out, even though it felt like a lightning bolt had exploded inside my head. It had me convulsing in Baltrice’s arms, and I thrashed for a lifetime or two until I finally let go of the magic. When my vision cleared, he was still standing there. He wasn’t even watching, though I could feel his attention attached to me, the sort of link I can back-chain almost without effort and get into his mind-
This time rats were chewing through my skull. From the inside.
Within a second or two the pain shredded my concentration; even the most basic telepathy was shut behind a door locked with agony. All I could do was lie there across Baltrice’s knees. Lie there and look at Tezzeret and wait to die.
Tezzeret didn’t look happy. Or angry or triumphant or really anything at all. He wasn’t even paying that much attention to me. Instead, he seemed to be cutting some bandages off his fingertips with a small curved knife. The whole place was drenched with bucketsful of blood. Some random-looking body parts lay here and there, and one live mercenary sat propped into a corner, ashen and shaking, clutching at a tourniquet that closed off the stump of his arm.
All the different ways my nightmares had shown me this moment never looked anything like this. I guess as prophets go, I’m a pretty good telepath.
“Baltrice, are you hurt? Because if you are-”
She gave her head one tight shake. “Wasn’t much of a fight, boss. Didn’t get a nick.”
“You need to go,” I told her. “Get the hell out while you still can.”
“Not a chance. We go together or we stay right here. Both of us.”
That damned spell-of course she wouldn’t leave me. She couldn’t. And it was my fault.
Canceling the spell wouldn’t take five seconds; then at least she’d have a choice. Maybe even a chance. I reached out with my mind-and collapsed again under the surge of agony. All I could do was let out a shuddering moan.
I had no idea how to get Baltrice out of this alive.
There had to be a way. Had to. I couldn’t let her die just because she liked me too much to be sensible.
Especially considering why she liked me so much.
The moan had finally gotten Tezzeret’s attention, but only for a second. He gave me a level stare for maybe a heartbeat, then went back to work on his hand. When he spoke, he sounded distracted. Affectless.
Like a machine.
“Beleren. I have never verified how much pain a human nervous system can endure without permanent damage. Nor do I know whether a person can be killed by pain alone-if you can ‘hurt to death,’ as it were. If you try something as extreme as planeswalking, we likely will find out.”
“What… What did you do to me?”
This earned me another look. It was as cold as his voice. “I let you live.”
“Am I supposed to thank you?”
“Boss,” Baltrice hissed. “For the love of crap, don’t antagonize him!”
“What you are supposed to do, Beleren,” he said as he removed the last of the bandages, “is what you’re told.”
He held the hand up to inspect the damage. He had some kind of wire twisted so tightly around his wrist that it was cutting into his flesh. Two of the fingers on that hand were missing their last joint, and all had only ragged bloody splotches where his fingernails should have been. His only reaction was a tiny compression of the lips, as though he were mildly irritated.
“It was you,” I said. “It was you all along.”
“No,” he said. “The body was mine, within the illusion, but the mind you felt was my father’s. Inspired by the trick you pulled with Rhoka, in fact-you can be surprisingly resourceful. It was the closest I could come to a prudent course. My estimate of your ability is comprehensive. And apparently accurate.”
“Have I told you lately that you scare the crap out of me?”
“I should.” This earned me another look-and there was a hint of softening to his features, as though he might actually smile. A friendly smile, instead of the predatory grimace I always used to see. “That’s a compliment,” he said. “My estimate of your intellect is similarly comprehensive.”
He stepped over a body part or two on his way to the shocky mercenary in the corner. The mercenary looked up at Tezzeret with eyes like moons on a clear night. “Don’t… come on, don’t…” the mercenary managed to say. “I can… I can help you, right?”
“Right.” Tezzeret leaned down and took the mercenary’s remaining hand as though to pull the man to his feet. When instead he produced the small hooked knife he’d used to cut away the bandages, the mercenary started to scream.
He didn’t stop screaming until Tezzeret had severed the man’s hand at the wrist. It wasn’t a gentle kind of thing. Or fast; the guy stopped screaming because he was bleeding out. When Tezzeret finally dropped the arm, its fountain of blood had already slowed to a trickle. He held the dying man’s hand upright on the palm of his own injured hand as he unlooped the wire around his wrist.
As the wire came free, blood spurted from his two severed fingers-and just as swiftly, the blood stopped, and the last joints of the dying man’s fingers turned black and rotted away. The fingernails disintegrated, and shortly Tezzeret tossed the dead hand onto the body of its dead owner.
“Necromancy,” he said, holding up his hand again, which was now only bloody. His fingertips were back, all his nails were in place, and now he did smile, just a bit. “A useful trick I picked up from an unlucky bandit, when I was just a teenager.”
With Baltrice’s help, I eventually managed to sit up. “Tezzeret…” I began, then shook my head. There had to be something I could say. Some way to convince him to let her go. “I have these dreams, sometimes. Ever since I… uh, you know, since our fight. Nightmares, I guess. Where you were still alive. Coming after me.”
The smile wiped itself from existence. “Likewise. Except in mine, I catch you.”
“And then I’d wake up and tell myself I was being stupid, because I knew you were dead. You were dead. I felt you die. But I could never make myself believe it.”
“The avenging revenant.” He nodded. “Your conscience always did have a way of manifesting itself at… inconvenient times.”
And this would be one of them, I thought. “You know that Baltrice was fighting for you, all the way to the end, right?”
She made a face sour as old vinegar. “Do we really have to bring all that up again?”
“She went toe to toe with Liliana Vess. What Liliana did to her-well, never mind. She suffered a lot for being loyal to you, that’s all.”
“And?”
“I just hope you won’t make her suffer for being loyal to me.”
The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes deepened a bit. “She won’t be the one who suffers.”
“I guessed that part already,” I told him. “I don’t expect to get out of this alive. I thought-I knew-that if I ever saw you again, you were gonna snuff me like a candle.”
“I considered it,” he said. “It would have been an inelegant solution.”
“What?”
“And… well, not to grind too fine an edge on it, but it seemed rather foolish for me, alive, to kill you in revenge for my murder.”
“That wasn’t your attitude at the time.”
“I recall. I also recall that I was, at the time, hmmm, a bit emotional. If my eyes had been knives, I would have yanked them both out of my face to throw them at you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was there.”
“Perhaps returning from the dead has altered my perspective. All I know is how I feel now, and what I think now-which is at some considerable remove from what I felt and thought then.”