I found myself gasping a bit for breath. Apparently that’s another thing I’m still angry about.
Sharuum stared at me without moving for what felt like a very long time, then finally showed a hint of emotion by taking a deep breath and releasing a melancholy sigh.
“I am very sorry for your loss,” she said, and turned as if to leave.
“And I am very sorry for yours,” I answered sharply, “though my loss is real, and yours may be as fictional as carmot.”
She stopped in the doorway.
She stood very, very still.
“I will ask that you explain yourself,” she said softly, as though speaking only to the downward spiral of the Great Stair. “Please do so with the clear understanding that I may decide I am angry enough to destroy all of you and raze this sickening mausoleum of fraud to the naked rock it stands on.”
Baltrice gave me a look, brows raised over flames in her eyes, frankly asking my permission to commit regicide. I held up a hand, partly because I wished no harm to Sharuum… but mostly because Baltrice had no idea of the magnitude of power she faced. She’d be killed even sooner than I would, because-unlike me-she wouldn’t be running away.
“At a certain point in my researches,” I said carefully, “I could no longer avoid the question: Why is the Grand Hegemon of Esper really visiting the etherium cults? Any salvageable metal can as easily-more easily-be collected by any number of official mages and wizardly functionaries who have more power than they know what to do with; and why is she seeking an answer she already knows does not exist?”
“And you are certain of this?” she said, still facing away. “That the answer I seek does not exist?”
“On the contrary, I’m certain that it does. The answer is fictional only because the question is likewise. The real question has an answer fully as real.”
“Yet I have no answer at all.” Now she sounded only tired. “Sphinxes are creatures of questions. We leave answers to those naive enough to seek them. I wish you joy of your answers, Tezzeret the Seeker; elsewise there will be none to be found.”
She moved on out the door and very likely would have proceeded down the stairs and out of Vectis, back to her secluded island in the Sea of Unknowing, had I not said, “He’s alive, you know.”
I heard her stop. I heard her start again, and stop again. And then I heard her turn around. “I hear both truth and honesty,” she said faintly, a bit breathlessly, as though not allowing herself to hope. “How are you certain?”
“When I find him, shall I remember you to him?”
“Little mage…” Slowly, slowly, she came back to the door, her face wholly blank but her stare as fiercely concentrated as that of a hungry dragon. “Little human mage, how do you hope to achieve this, where the great powers of our world have failed?”
“I am little, and human, and a mage. But that is not all I am. You and I both know that our world is not the only world.”
Renn made a choking sound; I indulged in a passing fantasy that he’d swallowed his tongue. “Um, Tezzeret? Hey,” Baltrice said uncertainly, “are you really sure you want to be having this conversation? Here? With her?”
I moved toward Sharuum, slowly, reverently, to place myself once again between her forepaws. Laying my life at the mercy of her whim. Looking up into her ageless, beautiful face, I discovered that her eyes were damp with unshed tears.
“This conversation,” I said, “is why I have hazarded my life to meet you, Your Wisdom. To bring you this news, and to ask a single question.”
“I fear your question has no answer,” she said. “Crucius could not teach even me the creation of etherium. He said no Esperite could ever accomplish it, no matter how powerful. Nor did he share with me any slightest knowledge of carmot, of what it might be, or where it might be found.”
“Then I suppose we’re both fortunate that we’re less interested in the creation of etherium than we are in finding its creator.”
“I fear my beloved wanders beyond the walls of death,” she said solemnly. “For decades, the greatest of my servitors-and I myself-have sought him in every corner of creation, yet no trace of his passage has ever been discovered. I have even set clockworkers to shift in time back to when I know he was here… only to find that he is gone even from the past.”
Really? Now, that was interesting…
“I have dreamed…” she went on. “Still I dream… that he is returned, that he has come again to set the world aright. This Conflux-this catastrophe that has crushed Esper together with Naya and Bant, with Jund and Grixis-this was to him a dream of peace. Of wholeness and sanity. He said that etherium itself was the key to restoring a sundered universe… but the wars, the Great Maelstrom, wild destruction unleashed upon every living thing… This is what I fear he foresaw. This is what I fear he fled, in hopes that his leaving might somehow stop, or even slow, this unimaginable cataclysm that has overtaken our world. I fear his flight was to escape this future. To end, in sorrow and despair, a life he had devoted to the hope of peace. Elsewise why would he not return to save what shreds of our land that remain?”
“I can’t usefully speculate on why he hasn’t returned,” I said, “but you should know that he is alive indeed. My source is… uncommonly reliable.” An astonishing thing to find myself saying of Nicol Bolas, but I was done trying to lie to Sharuum. “Perhaps you simply don’t know how to look.”
“Uh-” Renn coughed, trying to clear his throat while he leaned as far away from Baltrice as he could without falling off his chair. “You mean where to look, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, my gaze never wavering from the great sphinx’s. “Of course that’s what I mean.”
“Ah,” she said. “Ah, little human mage, shall I give you the answer to a question you do not know to ask?”
“Any answer you might offer, Your Wisdom, will be gratefully accepted.”
“He told me once, centuries ago, that if he were to vanish wholly from the world, there would come, some years along, a mage in search of him. He said I would know this mage because he or she would be a created thing, not of this world, bearing not the slightest scrap of etherium. He said this mage would be a creature all of flesh while being only metal.”
“Were those his words? The slightest scrap?”
She nodded, and a wave of prickling climbed the back of my neck. “Go on.”
She said, “I had taken this to mean a mage of extraordinary strength of character, and of power so great he had no need of etherium enhancement. In truth, his very words crossed my mind when you, Baltrice, introduced yourself.”
“Me?” Baltrice managed to look flattered and profoundly skeptical at the same time. “Really?”
Sharuum smiled sadly. “Should you again venture to impersonate a mage of Esper, you’d do well to get yourself an actual etherium arm, and better a leg or two, as part of your disguise. Illusion deceives only those who do not think to look for it.”
“Yeah, okay, sure,” Baltrice said. “Uh, no thanks, okay?”
“Crucius said that on that day, I should say two things to this unlikely mage,” Sharuum said. “I’m afraid they may be of little or no use in your search. Crucius, like any sphinx, was fond of riddles, wordplay, and obscure aphorisms-and he perhaps more than most. The first was an epigram that I ventured just outside this door, to judge your reaction,” she said to Baltrice. “He asked me to say, ‘When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.’ ”
“Might even be true,” Baltrice said with a shrug. “If you’re enough of a coward.”
“It’s not a commentary on courage,” I said. Something about it struck me strangely. More than strangely; the saying seemed to coil around my mind, slipping around knots and in through nooks and crannies as it searched for something solid to latch on to. Where it could grow. It was an unfamiliar sensation, and wholly unpleasant. I found myself dizzily holding on to my forehead as if doing so could brace me against toppling over.