“How powerful is he?”
I shrugged. “How bright is the sun?”
“Oh, sure. Sure. One hour with a nice-lookin’ sphinx and you’re all up in their gnomic utterance crap. Do you even know how old he is?”
“I cannot venture a guess that would have meaning.”
“Aw, come on, for crap’s sake, Tezzeret, you know how old Nicol festering Bolas is!”
“Time and age are not the same for a clockworker as for others. Even Planeswalkers. It’s at least conceivable that when Crucius decided he needed a Labyrinth, he clockworked his way back to pre-vedalken days. That way he could build it without fear of interruption.”
“Wait,” Baltrice said, massaging her forehead with one hand. “You’re saying-wait, seriously? Okay. So twenty-thirty years ago, whatever, Crucius decides to disappear, so he figures to go back to like the beginning of time to build himself a place to hide? So that it’ll already be there when he needs it in ten thousand years or whatever?”
“Possibly. It’s also possible that he built it because he knew that he would one day disappear, and he wished to leave a trail to lead someone-we’re assuming me, or someone like me-to wherever it is he has disappeared to.”
“So, now wait again-now you’re saying that the Labyrinth isn’t intended to keep people out?”
“Labyrinth is not a fancy word for maze. They are two different things. A maze is a puzzle path, a set of cognitive traps intended, for entertainment or some darker purpose, to trick or baffle those who try to navigate it, and prevent their success. A labyrinth is supposed to be solved. Many classical labyrinths have only a single path, and many have no walls at all. Treading a labyrinth from entrance to center is intended to affect those who do so in specific ways-usually to produce some variety of meditative or contemplative state, but sometimes for other uses. There is a whole subspecialty of magic devoted to the effects of following esoteric pathways.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of them. Whackos. All whackos. You can only follow so many multidimensional loops before your brain goes loopy too.”
“Becoming loopy, as you say, is actually the point,” I said. “The key to understanding a labyrinth is to recognize that who you will be when you reach the center is not who you were when you set out. In other words, the Crystal Labyrinth is not intended to keep anyone out, but in order to reach the center, you must transform yourself into the person the designer wants you to be.”
“What, like a giant self-help book? Building a Better You in Only Fourteen Thousand Rooms?”
“I prefer to think of it as an entry code, or an elaborate lock. To reach the center, instead of merely knowing a password, you must be the password. The Labyrinth itself machines you into a key to turn its own particular lock.”
“You know, there’s a point where piling on more education just makes you soft in the head.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am living proof of it.”
Once we had labored up the long slope of soft powdered sand to the top of the dune, she could see what I meant-for perhaps a mile around the Crystal Labyrinth, the desert could not be seen through the solid press of zombies. She signified her understanding with a low whistle and a breathy, “Damn…”
“Yes.”
“I guess somebody took down the Vacancy sign.”
“In so many words.”
“Wow.”
Doc said, “Zombies give me the willies.”
“You don’t even have a willie.”
Baltrice shot me a sidelong look. “Doc?”
“Yes. He doesn’t like zombies.”
She looked back down into the center of the Netherglass. “Well, somebody sure does.”
“Yes,” I said. “Here, look.”
I turned my hand downward, and the tiny forescout device lifted from the sand. Spreading my fingers thinned and expanded the device into a hoop of etherium as wide in diameter as my arm was long. A simple adjustment of the refractive index of the air within the hoop made a section of the Crystal Labyrinth spring into focus as though we were only yards away, instead of miles.
The zombies all faced inward. They pressed against one another until they formed a solid writhing mass of flesh and bone, as though they were a crowd come to see some insanely huge undead entertainment, for which the Labyrinth was the ampitheater.
“It looks like they’re trying to get inside.”
“Yes.”
“Well, okay. Sure, there’s a lot of them,” Baltrice said, “but we don’t have to fight them all at once, right? Hells, we can fly right to the nearest door, clear them out and seal it behind us. Even if they’re already inside, so what? They’re just zombies. If we have to fight our way through shoulder-to-shoulder zombies in all fourteen thousand rooms, I don’t figure it’ll raise too much of a sweat. Take a long damn time, though.”
“Yes. That’s not our problem.”
She squinted through the etherium hoop, then leaned to the side to take in the full scene. “Oh. Oh, sorry, I get it,” she said with an apologetic shrug. “My first thing’s always the tactical situation. You know.”
“And that’s why I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “Now for the strategic question.”
“Yeah. Strategic. And the answer’s no: I’ve never even heard a story about a necromancer who could summon a million zombies all at once.”
“Likely several million,” I said. “I am acquainted with several beings who are, or have been, worshiped as gods, and I’ve never seen any of them do anything that even approached this sort of scale. I don’t think Nicol Bolas himself could do this. Not all at once.”
“That’s why I was wondering if they might have just marched here,” she said. “Doesn’t Esper share a border with Grixis these days?”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh, “but that gets us nowhere-to march zombies all the way from Grixis through the winds of the Glass Desert? Keeping the flesh on their bones would take more power than summoning them directly.”
“Oh, sure. Cheer me up.”
“It only gets worse from here,” I said, massaging my forehead. I’d never been the sort of person who gets a headache from thinking too hard-until, apparently, now. “I have an idea-almost a conviction-that I really, really hope is mistaken. You and Doc are two of the smartest people I know; I’d like you both to listen, and point out holes or blunders in my analysis. All right?”
Doc said, “Really for real? You want my opinion?”
“Yes. Baltrice?”
She shook her head, blinking as though I’d awakened her from a daydream. “Sorry, Tezzeret. Sorry-I guess I’m, like, hallucinating or something. Because I could have sworn I just heard you ask me to check your work.”
“Ha,” I said, “and ha.”
She blinked some more. “You mean I wasn’t hallucinating?”
This gave me brief pause. It underlined once again the seeming difference in who I am from who I once was. I remember being disdainful of Baltrice’s intellect, just as I remember the starkly malicious hatred I’d nursed for Jace, and the erratic fits of temper from which I had suffered-I just can’t remember why I felt that way.
Being me was proving to be unexpectedly interesting.
I returned my attention to the task at hand. “It is a truism of both artificing and mechanistics that entities are not to be multiplied without reason,” I began.
Baltrice held up her hand to stop me. “Skip the lecture, huh? ‘Multiplying entities’ is the flavor of crap I dropped out of school to avoid.”
I nodded. “Simply put, you don’t design five parts to perform a function that can be performed by one, yes? The only time you design the five parts instead is if you want to build in extra features that require flexibility of function, or if one piece will be only adequate, while the five will become superb.”
“Yeah, okay,” Baltrice said. “It’s the KISS thing, right?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She shrugged. “That’s what they call it where I come from. KISS. It stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ ”