A resounding detonation and its attendant spray of putrefying dragon blood and meat jerked him back to the present. He snarled at himself. Woolgathering again-and this time in the middle of a fight. An ugly trend, underlining the urgency of his project. No more daydreaming, he told himself. No more. Focus.
Tezzeret had said Bolas wasn’t the dragon he used to be, and Nicol Bolas had no intention of allowing the mechanist to discover how right he was. But even the tiniest sliver of a Bolas was worth a billion Tezzerets, and it was just about time to make that clear.
Just about time-Bolas chuckled to himself. Even after twenty-five thousand years, he was still his own best audience.
He moved out from the matrix of spars to give himself a little room to work; not that he actually needed room for what he was going to do. Clockworking as Bolas practiced it was primarily a mental activity, where all the interesting bits clustered around the intersection of perception and will, but nonetheless moving a little farther from the Metal Sphinx made everything roll along a bit more smoothly. Something about that vast mass of concentrated etherium fogged him up, somehow. He couldn’t actually lay a talon on what it was, except that the more etherium was around, the more difficulty he seemed to have keeping his mind on the business in front of him.
He reflected that once his business with Tezzeret was complete, he might want to destroy this entire universe. Removing all this etherium from creation would be doing himself a favor-but it would also more or less defeat the purpose of this whole endeavor. If only the damned stuff weren’t so bloody useful.
He sighed. Life would be better if he’d killed Crucius a thousand years ago… but on the other claw, he hadn’t yet fully explored the limits of this clockworking power. Perhaps that thousand-year-ago moment wasn’t entirely out of his reach-though some of the temporal stranding involved would be tricky. He might just be jumping himself into a different preexisting main line, or creating a new one, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he would know the difference-or if there even was a difference. And he wasn’t really sure whether or not jumping back to waste Crucius might be a good idea, or if he’d be correcting a mistake he already hadn’t made… and then the specter of the Final Mending hung over his past, too.
Though he no longer could entirely recall, he had a sense that the catastrophic damage to Dominia had something to do with time and paradoxes and, well… something. He couldn’t quite bring it to mind.
It was damnably difficult to navigate five dimensions with a four-dimensional mind. He supposed it would improve with practice; after all, he hadn’t met any of his future selves showing up to warn him he was making mistakes. Of course, if his future selves were anything like him, they wouldn’t give a hot squirt about anyone except themselves, including who they used to be, which was him. After all, he wasn’t in any hurry to jump back to deliver warnings to his own previous selves. Self. Whatever.
His attention was again rudely yanked back to the present by the broken, smoking corpse of a Liliana, which had sailed through the air in a high enough trajectory that she smacked squarely into his face, very nearly going up his nose.
He snapped his head side to side, snarling. What in any flavor of damnation was happening to him? With fierce concentration, he cast his perceptions sideways through time, searching the improbability-frayed temporal strands nearby. There were only two or three more time lines where he lay dead on the beach. He reached out to summon those corpses to his own strand, where they might be put to good use by any among his multiplicity of Lilianas… Wait.
His multiplicity of Lilianas had become surprisingly less multiple.
Unless one added to the count the dead Lilianas who lay scattered about the etherium beach in various states of catastrophic disrepair.
He nodded to himself; he should have expected this. Tezzeret had identified the root of his immediate problem and now was concentrating his counterstrikes on the Lilianas, who were considerably less durable than reanimated undead dragons-not to mention that those undead dragons wouldn’t be reanimated for very long without her power to direct them. Bolas searched nearby temporal strands, but he’d already raided them for their incarnations of Liliana. If he went farther afield, he could find only temporal strands in which the treacherous little necromancer had never bound herself to obey him in the first place, which made yanking any more of her into the middle of this brawl definitely inadvisable.
Tezzeret always had been clever.
But it was exactly his cleverness-the primary feature of which was his ability to focus profoundly on whatever immediate problem he faced-that here would destroy him. No matter how smart Tezzeret might be, no matter how incalculable the power he could wield in this place, he was still only human, with a human brain inside his human skull. He could truly focus only on one thing at a time.
Dragons, however…
Due to their saurian ancestry, most dragons retained great knots of neural ganglia between their wings and at the base of their tails, so large and complex that they were essentially subsidiary brains; the evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to coordinate their subbrains gave many dragons a multitasking capability far beyond any human’s imagination. And Nicol Bolas’s capabilities were beyond the imaginations of dragons.
His mind was a vast and cluttered place, stuffed with twenty-five thousand years of memories, half-forgotten spells, and disordered remnants of dreams and aspirations. Millennia before, he had begun a process of compartmentalizing his mind, setting up an organized mental structure that allowed him to access information he wanted without having to sift through metaphorical mountains of irrelevancies. In the process, he’d split off functions of cognitive processing, virtual minds whose responsibility was the management of each of their particular sectors of knowledge, experience, and skill.
While it was true that this strategy wasn’t currently working as well as it once had-a serious degradation of function that he was certain was wholly due to the destructive effect of the bloody Final Mending-it was more than sufficient for his current needs.
He assigned one submind to keeping track of Baltrice, and of Jace’s body, while investigating the source of the blue mana spell that had killed his mind while leaving his body intact. Another submind was occupied with examining his recent interactions with Tezzeret, especially with regard to Sharuum and the Metal Sphinx who may or may not be Crucius in whole or in part. A third submind managed the fight on the Metal Island-mostly a function of feeding bits of mana to bolster the defenses of whichever of his dead selves was currently being dismantled, and of monitoring his remaining Lilianas. He wanted to finish the fight with at least one left, because she was both valuable and amusing, and while he valued her as an asset, he didn’t want to go to the trouble that might be required to ensnare another version of her. This left his primary consciousness with nothing to worry about except subduing Tezzeret.
As he set about doing so, he found himself considerably amused by the occasional boasts that Tezzeret liked to make, about being the Multiverse’s greatest master of etherium. Apparently Tezzeret’s enormous intellect had managed to slide right past the fact that Bolas himself had created the Seekers of Carmot, and that there was nothing known by any of the Seekers that would not be known to the dragon as well. Not to mention that there were a number of features of etherium that Bolas was reasonably certain only he knew (and possibly Crucius, if the elusive sphinx ever turned up again). One of these was that due to etherium’s peculiar nature-existing simultaneously in reality and in the Blind Eternities-there were certain vulnerabilities that someone with the right sort of power might exploit.