The right sort of power, in this case, was a combination of planeswalking and clockworking.
Nicol Bolas subdivided his primary consciousness into three parts. One part undertook the mystical focusing of will that was the beginning of planeswalking. The second undertook to summon a specific subset of the dragon’s memories dealing with a certain type of magic. The third phased its attention into the near future, scanning the probability smears for hints of coalescence. When the first part completed its task, a hole in reality began to rip itself open… but instead of stepping into it, Bolas used the second part of his primary consciousness to reach into the Blind Eternities with an intention to doing one or more of a list of magics at his command, while the third kept focused on the future, seeking one that would end with Tezzeret in his hand.
The submind that had been processing his interactions with Tezzeret warned Bolas sternly not to kill him; there was still too much to be learned.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Bolas muttered to himself. “But this is going to hurt.”
He could judge the potential effect of each magic on his second part’s list by scanning the probable futures that shifted and developed as the second part considered this or that spell, power, or combination of such. Neither the first nor third part of his mind was actually aware of what spell he ended up using, but they didn’t have to be; the second part had that issue fully under control, as it was able to use the?theric dimension of Tezzeret’s armor to channel a combination of telekinesis and minor shaping that transformed, in the current reality, the inside of the mechanist’s etherium breastplate into a blade that shattered his breastbone, slashed open his heart, and severed his spine just between the shoulder blades.
“How’s that for power?” several of his subminds said in unison, as at least three of them saw-and one felt-the mechanist’s heart spew most of his blood out through the joints in his armor.
The Tezzeret-tasked submind, though, reacted with enough alarm to give Nicol Bolas actual pain.
“I already said I’m not going to kill him!” Bolas snarled. “Shut the hell up.”
As Tezzeret fell dying to the blood-caked sand, Bolas’s fourth submind released the power that held all but one of the Lilianas in this temporal strand. The last Liliana simply blinked in astonishment at her inexplicable victory until that same submind reached into her brain and said, Sleep, whereupon she collapsed into unconsciousness.
This freed up that submind to rejoin his primary consciousness, and-as the assigned tasks of two of the three divisions of his primary mind were complete-he reassembled an uncharacteristically large fraction of his mental resources to attend to the dying mechanist.
He stretched forth a talon, and Tezzeret’s limp body rose into the air and floated into his grasp, dripping liquid etherium as though the armor were ice instead of metal. When Tezzeret was once again naked, Bolas-who had a somewhat more detailed understanding of human anatomy than did nearly any human alive-worked a simple charm that placed the mechanist in a state of suspended animation similar to that of Baltrice and Jace. Bolas estimated that if he ever chose to reanimate Tezzeret, he’d be able to repair the physical damage with very little permanent loss of function.
He looked down with a contemptuous sneer upon the human lying broken and bloody in his grip. “As though I could ever be in any danger from you, you pathetic worm. I am Nicol Bolas! What have I to fear from any mortal mage?”
His second submind-that troublesome Tezzeret-tasked one again-inquired silently that if Bolas had never been in danger, why were all those nearby temporal strands loaded with his corpses? Which was a wholly disquieting question, and one he had no intention of pondering.
His primary consciousness reflected that his condition might be more grave than he’d allowed himself to believe. How far must you have deteriorated to have begun to heckle yourself?
He paused for a moment to assess his situation. His Tezzeret issue seemed to be well in hand-literally-and the lightly snoring form of Liliana could be easily enough shifted into suspended animation, and both of them could without much difficulty be stored next to Jace and Baltrice on the Metal Island in that nearby temporal strand… so this was exactly what he did.
“I suppose that means I win,” he said. “Whoopee.”
It was impossible to be much elated by victory over such pathetic opponents; celebrating this triumph would be like doing a victory dance after stepping on an anthill.
Stilclass="underline" not bad. And accomplished by very little cost or exertion on his part. He supposed he could give himself points for style-for what Tezzeret would call elegance. Poor little Tezzeret… just another of the ants.
He could not quite make himself believe it, though. It didn’t seem real. Had he really snared not only Tezzeret, but Liliana, and Jace and Baltrice, after all this time?
Apparently so. He could not find a temporal strand anywhere in which they were not his prisoners. So that, in so many words, was that. Period.
He glanced up at the expressionless face of the Metal Sphinx. “And I’m pretty sure you’re not going anywhere.”
The sphinx-after the custom of his kind-did not reply.
Bolas stepped close to the sphinx’s cleanly abstracted semblance of a forepaw, and he laid his own talons upon it, marveling in the thought that this, right here, might be all there was left of Crucius. All there would ever be.
“What were you thinking, though? What brought you here? Why is this place what it is?”
He supposed he would find these questions a great deal more compelling if he actually cared about their answers. He had not only five more Planeswalkers to add to the considerable assortment under his absolute control, but also now this unimaginably vast trove of etherium. He discounted Tezzeret’s assertion that it could not be taken from this plane. The sets of What Tezzeret Can’t Do and of What Bolas Can’t Do did not intersect in any meaningful way. Discovering how he could take the etherium-all the etherium-with him was simply a question of evaluating powers that Tezzeret did not have, lore that Tezzeret did not know, and magics that Tezzeret could not work.
All this etherium, and all the many Planeswalkers in his hands, and now that he thought about it, he realized that what he had right now might actually, finally, unexpectedly, be enough.
“Maybe I really have won. Won it all. Hmp. Whoopee again.” He sighed. “My Crowning Moment of Triumph should really have been more dramatic.”
He passed some considerable interval wandering a bit aimlessly around the island, admiring the etherium trees and the etherium grass and the etherium outcroppings of bedrock that shouldered into the light. And speaking of light… He frowned down at the shadow he cast upon the etherium underbrush. Something about his shadow was troubling him, and for a long moment he couldn’t seem to work out what it was.
Ah, that was it. His shadow hadn’t moved.
Well, it did move when he did-it was after all his shadow-but its angle was exactly the same as it had been when he’d first arrived here. Hours ago. Did this planet not rotate? What in the hells was going on here?
Where we are is all one place. Here, it’s always now.
He moved around to the front of the vast etherium plinth, kicking aside heedlessly the ragged remnants of both his own corpses and Liliana’s. He was not sentimental, and pity was alien to his nature. Even self-pity. Something was going or had gone or will go terribly wrong, and his clockworking ability seemed to make it or had made it or will make it worse instead of better.
He had to know or he had to go. Probably both.
He spared the infantile doggerel on the plinth’s east face only enough of a glance to register that it was written in a long-vanished dialect of Classical Draconic… Wait, that was the language his parents had spoken… a language no living creature had heard or spoken in the twenty-four thousand years since his birthplace had been destroyed and all his close relatives slaughtered (to be precise, since his birthplace had been destroyed and all his close relatives slaughtered by him). He then indulged a passing wonderment at how Tezzeret could possibly have even recognized the glyphs for what they were, much less deciphered what they stood for.