“How is it,” Nicol Bolas said distantly, once more frowning down the beach beyond the captive Planeswalkers, “that every time I talk to you, I end up getting a speech about how smart you are?”
“Our whole relationship is about how smart I am,” Tezzeret said. “It goes back to your predictability.”
“Good liar, too.”
Tezzeret smiled. “When I have to be.”
“If you’re so smart and I’m so predictable, what have I been waiting for?”
“You’re waiting for an interplanar gate to open down the beach.”
The dragon jerked as though he’d been stung. His long sinuous neck practically put a kink in itself to bring his huge yellow eyes back around to stare down at the human. He made no effort to conceal his surprise; on the contrary, he fixed his gaze on Tezzeret with predatory focus. “And why do I expect it?”
“For the same reason you knew Baltrice and Jace were planeswalking in. You’ve learned some clockworking.”
“I dabble, I dabble. As a hobby,” the dragon admitted. “How did you know?”
“You’re seeing the future-what, a few minutes out? Something like that. Silas Renn could to that trick-see the quantum smear of possible futures and watch events develop as they become more and more likely.”
“And so it’s possible,” the dragon purred, “that I am what I eat, after all.”
“It was probably the last thing he taught you.”
“Oh, please. In twenty-five thousand years, you think I never learned clockworking?”
“I’m sure you did,” Tezzeret said. “Funny that you needed to learn it again, isn’t it?”
Nicol Bolas went very, very still.
“You’re not the dragon you used to be, old worm,” Tezzeret said with an odd note in his voice, one almost of sympathy. “You’re not even the dragon you were twelve years ago, when I stole the Infinite Consortium out from under your tail. You put a good face on it, but the cracks in your mask have begun to show. Someone who knows how to look can see right into you.”
“Oh?” The dragon’s voice sounded like the early notes of a distant volcanic eruption. “Then what am I thinking right now?”
Tezzeret smiled again. “You’re remembering how you had thought my declared intention to kill you had been merely a vain boast. Now you’re reflecting that suddenly you’re not so sure, and you’re wondering if perhaps you should kill me before you find out.”
The dragon’s response was to turn fully to face Tezzeret, to spread his wings and draw mana from throughout the Multiverse until the air around him blazed with power.
Tezzeret said, “You’re not going to like how this ends.”
Nicol Bolas lifted one enormous fist. “I’ll regret it in the morning, right?”
“In the morning you’ll be decomposing on this beach.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“You can see futures. In how many of them am I dead?”
The dragon’s fleshy brow ridges drew together, and his fist lowered, just a bit.
“Look into the futures that arise from you assaulting me now,” Tezzeret said. “In how many of them are you alive?”
Bolas’s eyes widened, and his fist fell forgotten to his side. “It’s not…” His voice was no more than a strangled whisper. “How can you… it… just isn’t possible…”
“You need to understand that our relationship has turned a corner,” Tezzeret said, and walked out of the Web of Restraint as if it wasn’t even there.
Bolas stared. “You can’t do that!”
“Sorry,” he said. “You might want to take a seat. We should talk.”
“It’s a trick,” the dragon snarled. “It’s some kind of illusion-once you’re dead, it’ll be-”
Tezzeret sighed and lifted his right hand above his head, then clenched his fist with a yank as if plucking unripe fruit from a tree. As though animated by the gesture, the leading edge of the right wing of the Metal Sphinx-a single vast girder of etherium, by itself larger and heavier than Nicol Bolas’s whole body-shrieked through the air and slammed into the dragon just below his wing joint with crushing force.
Bolas folded around the impact, and went skidding helplessly back to sprawl in the sand. His roar of sudden rage sounded a bit thin and wheezy, but thoroughly sincere as he scrambled to rise and gathered power to strike back.
Tezzeret said, “Think about the future.”
Bolas hesitated.
“Look around you,” he went on. “Think about where you are, and what this place is made of. Think about who I am and what you have made of me.”
The dragon cast his gaze toward the etherium trees, at the etherium sphinx and the etherium plinth, the etherium rocks and the etherium sand on which he rested. Then very slowly, very cautiously, he adjusted his posture to a feline seated position, wings folded and tail curled around himself, and he looked upon Tezzeret with a decidedly more guarded expression. “So.”
“I know it’s a shock,” Tezzeret said. “But at your age, you should have learned that many truths we regard as immutable are, in fact, surprisingly context dependent. For example, when I acknowledged earlier that you are the most powerful being in the Multiverse, it would have been more precise to say: in the rest of the Multiverse.”
“I see I have underestimated you.”
“You always did.”
“You could have killed me at any time. From the very first instant I arrived.”
Tezzeret spread his hands. “Surprise.”
“You can kill me right now. Why don’t you?”
“You may as well ask why we haven’t played Intimidate the Naked Prisoner. Or why I haven’t insisted on calling you Nicky, or perpetrated any of the various indignities with which you have amused yourself at my expense,” Tezzeret said. “The answer to all three is an aspect of character that I value; one which you, I might add, conspicuously lack.”
“And that is?”
“Manners.”
The dragon’s response was a contemptuous snort.
Tezzeret shrugged. “Manners are commonly derided by those who have none, just as education is derided by the ignorant, refinement by the coarse, and intellect,” he said with a tiny sigh of apology, “by the stupid.”
The dragon’s growl, low in his throat, had much the same brick-grinding quality as had his earlier chuckle. “Who in the hells cares about your manners?”
“My manners, for better or worse, are keeping you alive.”
“This is a joke, right? Some kind of a put-on. You’re just yanking my tail.”
“I would never taunt someone in my power,” he replied. “To mock those who have power over you is a valid occupation of anyone with the wit to do so; witness satirists, jesters, and court fools across every plane of creation. Rulers who mock their subjects, on the other hand, only advertise their unfitness for the position they hold. Taunting the helpless is the province of scumbags, assholes, and doltish thugs like you.”
He lifted a hand before Bolas could respond. “No disrespect intended; I use doltish thug in its technical sense: a violently criminal blockhead.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Now that I think of it,” he mused, “I may owe you an apology for my earlier use of the word stupid; blockhead is a more apt term. It’s not that you can’t think; it’s just that you don’t like to.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“No more than is appropriate, I hope,” Tezzeret said with a thin smile. “When I allow the gate to open, it is very important that you make no sudden move, and that you make no attempt to exert power of any kind. Either will be dangerous for you. Possibly fatal.”
The dragon blinked. “When you allow-?”
“Yes.”
“You are yanking my tail.”
“Bolas,” Tezzeret said patiently, “weren’t you at all curious about why you kept seeing an interplanar gate in your immediate future, while none ever appeared? Every time you looked for it, I delayed its opening-which is to say, I moved the gate farther along our time line. I couldn’t risk allowing our visitor to arrive before you and I had our little talk.”