Partly in hopes of driving this effect away with a new thought, I asked, “And the second?”
“A much more traditional riddle: simple questions that require a complex answer. Riddles welcome that sort of inversion; the more complex the riddle, the simpler the answer… and the reverse.”
“All right,” I said unsteadily. “All right. I’m ready.”
“I suspect you aren’t,” she said. “It’s very simple, and those are the hardest of all. Crucius suggested I should ask you, where do you search for what can’t be found, and what do you say without saying? What is your sky when you’re tombed in the ground, and whom do you rescue by slaying?”
Baltrice snorted. “Oh, that’s deep. Be still my beating heart.”
“It’s not…” I had my hand on my forehead again. “It’s… I don’t know. I think it’s deeper than it sounds…”
“Crap, I hope so.”
And then I realized what Sharuum had actually just said. I looked up at her, and my chest felt as though it were being crushed within an invisible fist. “You said… Did I hear you correctly? Did you just say that Crucius suggested you should ask me?”
She smiled faintly, and this motion of her cheeks was enough to spill tears down her face. “He didn’t mention you by name, child.”
“Wait… wait,” I said. I squeezed shut my eyes and tried to massage ideas into my brain through the outside. Even thinking clearly about this riddle was impossible for me-it was too entirely alien. I understood the principle perfectly-surface paradox reveals a deeper answer-but it pointed to this answer in a language I simply could not decipher. Riddles? Metaphors? Epigrams and aphorisms? I am an artificer. A mechanist. I deal in fact. My business is force and reaction, torque and shear, mass and energy-what can be measured, calculated, and designed to work in the real world. I have entirely the wrong sort of mind for this kind of…
Oh.
“Wait,” I repeated. “Wait-Crucius. He was a clockworker as well as a mechanist, yes?”
Sharuum said, “He had many gifts. Clockworking was among them.”
“Then it is… at least conceivable… that he could have looked forward through time and seen us standing here, right?”
Baltrice was starting to look worried. “What are you talking about?”
“Analysis,” I said breathlessly. “Wait… It breaks down perfectly…”
“This is, ah, I mean, if I may…?” Renn said. “Clockworking is, after all, my specialty.”
“You want to help? Help me?” I said. “Who are you, and what have you done with Silas Renn?”
“I’m not a monster,” he said in a tone that clearly implied the phrase unlike you. “The direction of time is actually irrelevant to the function of magic. It’s equally probable that Crucius, as a clockworker, could have looked backward from the future and advised his previous self to confide his message to the Grand Hegemon.”
“A nonpertinent distinction,” I said to Sharuum. “In either case, he could have known I would be the one to whom you would tell these things. In fact, there is a specific flow of alternatives-I could draw a chart…”
“Tezzeret,” Baltrice said, “sooner or later somebody’s gonna worry about how long we’ve been up here. Worries like that can lead to bloodshed.”
I took her meaning. “All right. Specifically: either these messages were intended to be passed to me, or to someone else, right?”
“The latter is more likely,” Renn muttered sourly, but he was absolutely right, and I said so.
“Yes. I am one man. The spectrum of alternatives, in terms of statistical probability, makes the likelihood of me being the One in Question infinitesimal-but that’s irrelevant to the problem. If I am not the One, we have no useful solution; whatever we try can’t be expected to succeed. But if I am the One in Question…”
“I get it,” Baltrice said, her eyes wide. “If it’s you, then he knew it would be you-and the questions would be ones he knows you can answer.”
“Exactly. Granted that, we arrive at another alternative: either Crucius wanted or expected me-us-to find him, or he didn’t. If he didn’t, then the questions are deceptions to lead us in the wrong direction… but if he did?”
“Tezzeret,” Sharuum said seriously, “listen to me and heed my word now. If you find Crucius-if you can bring him to me, or me to him, if even for a heartbeat, all that I have is yours. Everything. My treasure, my power, my subjects, my realm. Yours, for one more heartbeat beside my beloved.”
My brain whirling, I was barely paying attention. Where do you seek for what can’t be found?
When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.
“If Crucius the Mad wants to be found, and if he hoped I might be the one to find him,” I said, astonished at myself for this unexpected conviction, “I know exactly where to start looking.”
TEZZERET
The only good news in my forescout mirror was that we had finally reached our destination. The rest of the news was that our destination was surrounded by zombies.
A lot of zombies.
Someone had gotten here first.
A simple exertion of will twisted the levitation fields of our gravity sleds and dropped them both to the white sand. The gravity sleds had proven to be almost ridiculously useful up till now. Having designed and constructed them myself, I could take a certain pride in how well they had performed. Both were virtually pure etherium, representing the entire contribution of the Grand Hegemon to this expedition-her personal reserve of etherium, almost seventy pounds. The variable levitation magics-to provide motive power in addition to keeping them aloft-were quite standard, even pedestrian; the particular elegance on which I prided myself lay in the shimmering blue variable energy screens that had not only protected us from wind and sun, but also shielded the sleds themselves from the incredibly abrasive winds of the Glass Dunes, not to mention that the sleds themselves had only two moving parts.
I had hoped to ride them right up to the entrance of the Labyrinth, but clearly that was not to be. It would be a shame to disassemble them, but there was no help for it. Given this new development, I knew I’d need the etherium.
We might have to fight.
“What’s wrong?” Baltrice’s voice came to my mind just slightly muffled by the anti-grit screen I had tweaked into her earpiece-a smaller and lower-powered version of the screens that protected the gravity sleds. Channeling the extra magics had forced me to almost quadruple the size of the earpiece and to build in a support band that Baltrice wore around her head. Not fashionable, perhaps, but it would keep her alive.
I would have preferred to reserve that etherium for other uses, but she was unwilling to use direct mind-to-mind communication, and considering for whom she worked, I couldn’t blame her. “There a problem?”
Zombies ahead, I sent, to keep Doc out of it, but he’d already seen what I had in the mirror. “Zombies?” Doc said. “Are you kiddin’ me? You’re worried about zombies?”
“Can you count?”
“Sure-two, four, eighteen, carry the twelve-urk. Hot festering crap! There’s like a million-uh, a million six, give or take a couple thousand.”
“My estimate was a million two, but you have better eyes-eye-for this sort of thing, even though you’re using mine. We both could be off by as much as a million, or even several,” I said, “because there’s no way to tell how many are already inside.”
Baltrice dismounted her sled and walked over. She reached up to pull the earpiece. I said, “Leave it.”
“What in the hells for?” she said with a skeptical squint. “I hear you fine.”