Not that it would have mattered if they were, as eight more Nicol Bolases came wading through the gore of their predecessors, waiting their turn to attack.
“Jace, we gotta get gone,” she hissed. “Tezz can’t hold ’em off forever, and after they get him chewed and swallowed, they’re still gonna be hungry. Your magic’s working and who in the hells cares why or why Tezzeret’s getting killed by mindless whatevers or why any damn thing else because I think I hear my festering mother calling and she’s been dead twenty years so come on, let’s go!”
A blue haze of power crackled around Jace’s head. “Wait-they’re not fake,” he said, his brow furrowed in concentration. “And they’re not illusions… It’s like they’re dead. Like… like-”
“Like zombies,” Baltrice said through her teeth. “Son of a bitch. Now my day is festering complete. Vess.”
“What?”
“I said Vess. As in that little zombie-sucking slut bag you used to like so much.”
“Liliana? What would she be doing here?”
“If I were a little faster, she wouldn’t be doing anything anywhere,” Baltrice growled. “Find her.”
“But she wouldn’t-wait. Oh, hells,” he said. He reached out with his right hand, and a flash of white shot from his fingertips and whipped around another of the Metal Sphinx’s spars.
Out from where the white mana had vanished stepped Liliana Vess, her lustrous raven hair falling in curls around her flawless face. Her dancer’s lithe grace was not in evidence, however; she moved jerkily, resisting every step, a broken marionette dragged forward by white fire that wreathed her arms and legs and chest.
“Jace…” she said softly, her eyes glistening with welling tears. “Jace, I didn’t know it’d be you. You have to believe me. I’m sorry-I’m so sorry!”
“I’m not,” Baltrice said, and blasted her with a flame bolt so powerful that the beautiful necromancer was instantly burned down to her bones. “Go zombie that, bitch.”
“Baltrice!” Jace gasped. “Baltrice, what have you done?”
“No more screwing around, Jace,” Baltrice growled. “Are we leaving, or am I going alone?”
Liliana’s charred bones were still skidding across the plinth when Jace and Baltrice heard her voice again. “Well, that wasn’t very nice.”
They whirled. She stepped out from behind a different spar, alive and whole and not even singed, the air around her grayed with layered shields.
Baltrice’s lips peeled back from her teeth, and another flame bolt gathered in her right hand-but before she could attack, she was blasted with glistening obsidian ooze from a third Vess, who was perched atop a curve of an overhead beam. The smothering goo knocked Baltrice sideways, and it clung to her shields, chewing down through them even as it caught fire from the shield and began to burn away.
“What in the hells?” As he sprang to Baltrice’s side, Jace raised his own defenses and pushed them thicker and deeper until everything he saw was some shade of blue. The roaring and blasting from Tezzeret’s battle against the conflagration of undead dragons rocked the world around him, and by the time he reached Baltrice, two more Lilianas had appeared, rising over the rim of the plinth, carried in the arms of spirits like black smoke with embers for eyes.
“You should give up, Jace,” one of them said.
He could no longer tell which Liliana was speaking.
“There will be as many of me as we need, Jace. You can’t win. Fighting will only get you hurt.”
“Baltrice, what’s going on?” he said, low, poised for combat. “How can she do this?”
“She can’t,” Baltrice snarled. “The only way she could pull this off is if she’s with a sonofabitching-”
“Clockworker,” Nicol Bolas supplied cheerfully from behind them, just as his huge talons closed around them both. “Right you are. Congratulations. Now don’t struggle, and this doesn’t have to hurt.”
Jace went boneless in his grip; he knew better than to fight Bolas. Baltrice, who also knew better than to fight Bolas, fought anyway, unleashing the full fury of her power, which could not even singe his talons.
This’d be the real Nicol Bolas, she figured. She still couldn’t make the bastard blink.
“Sad little girl,” the dragon said. “Did you think I wouldn’t be ready for you? Sleep now.”
A curl of power coiled in front of her face, then stabbed in through her shields almost without resistance. She collapsed into unconsciousness.
Jace took advantage of this brief distraction to slide a tendril of thought into the great dragon’s mind. Having become a great deal more proficient a mind ripper since their last encounter, he nursed a half-formed hope that he might be able to erase himself and Baltrice from Bolas’s mind, at least for long enough that they might be able to slip away. But in the instant he had within the dragon’s brain, he found something so astonishing that he gasped, “What in the hells is that doing there?”
Nicol Bolas turned his mind and gaze to Jace. “What in the hells is what doing where?”
Before Jace could reply, a flash of blue snaked under the dragon’s wing and speared into Beleren’s face-and Jace’s mind vanished. Simply disappeared.
It was gone as though his body had never been more than a mannequin. His body still breathed and his heart still beat, but the young mentalist was mind-dead.
As dead as Tezzeret had been.
Bolas snarled and twisted around-but Tezzeret was still battling the corpse dragons. Someone else must have done this. Or was doing it. Or was going to do it shortly. Or something. Even when he could do it himself, clockworking didn’t actually get easier to think logically about.
“Lilianas!” he said. Most of them were out in front of the Metal Sphinx, controlling the zombie Bolases that Tezzeret was so studiously dismantling, but a few were still lingering back here within the sound of his voice.
“Yes, Great and Mighty Bolas?” all eight of her replied in unison. She always called him that, and he didn’t even mind the bitter edge of sarcasm in her voice; he liked the title well enough that he might make it official. It would be particularly amusing to make Tezzeret use it. “Get up there and help your other selves stomp Tezzeret.” Bolas stopped for a moment, frowning. He was suddenly dizzy and decidedly queasy. A side effect of so much clockworking all at once? Or the effect of whatever it had been that Beleren saw? Whatever it was, he decided the time had come to bring this charade to a close.
He shook his head clear and said, “Don’t kill him. Just beat him until he can’t fight back. I need his mind intact.”
“As you command, Great and-”
“Save it. Just do as you’re told,” Bolas growled around his clenched teeth. Suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore.
He tucked away the pyromancer and the mind ripper’s empty body into an alternate time line, one in which Tezzeret had never reached the Metal Island. With the aid of a minor binding to preserve them in suspended animation, he could be confident that they would be there whenever he wanted them.
“I really should have learned this stuff a long time ago,” he said to himself. He decided not to think about Tezzeret’s suggestion that he’d learned clockworking centuries or even millennia before, and had simply forgotten. He remembered well enough being a functionally omnipotent master of time and space, back before the Final Mending, but those powers were far beyond him now. Clockworking was a different approach to almost the same thing, and was gratifyingly easy, for a being of his intellect and power.
If he ever figured out how, he might just slide over to a temporal main line where the Final Mending never happened. If he could find one, anyway. When first he’d searched for a main line where his power was undiminished, he’d discovered there weren’t any-which might indicate that the rabble of meddling Planeswalkers who’d forced the Final Mending down Dominia’s throat had been right all along. Bolas was gracious enough to grant them the possibility. It was easy to be generous, considering their Final Mending had killed them all.