He actually turned to ask before he remembered that he’d sequestered Tezzeret in a different temporal strand, and that awakening him to inquire would not only require a considerable expenditure of mana to heal his wounds, but it would also force Bolas to endure more of the artificer’s unspeakably irritating conversation.
Bolas shook his head, disgusted with himself again. Really, this advancing senility or whatever it was had gotten entirely out of control. Good thing he had all this etherium, and all his captive Planeswalkers, because he really needed to get his whole personal recovery and reconstruction business fully under way before he forgot what it was he needed to… what?
He couldn’t remember why he had to remember anything, much less what it might be. How was he supposed to think around here? An unanswerable question, which led him inexorably toward an even less pleasant contemplation.
Wasn’t he breaking down a great deal faster than he should?
Had to have something to do with the etherium. Or with this particular plane, as etherium had never had any noticeable effect on him anywhere else. Or with Crucius or the Metal Sphinx or whoever was supposed to be either one of them, whenever they might be each other, or not. Or something.
More damned riddles.
He shook his head again, but somehow instead of clearing, the shaking only thickened the fog inside his various minds. How had Tezzeret deciphered the glyphs? How could he know Classical Draconic at all, much less the dialect of Bolas’s native mountains? Bolas decided that maybe it was worth both spending the mana and enduring the aggravation in exchange for some answers… if he could just recollect where he’d stashed the deanimated mechanist…
Oh, yes. Of course. Over in that temporal strand with Jace and Baltrice and his last-remaining Liliana-the time line where Tezzeret had never made it to the Metal Island.
He stopped, scowling. “Wait… wait, there’s something wrong…”
Tezzeret had made it to the Metal Island in that time line. That’s what was wrong. Bolas had just put him there. But that didn’t make any difference. It couldn’t. Could it?
Somehow, he couldn’t escape the feeling that it had been a bad idea.
Either way, the whole business worried him. It was as though when he’d done it, he hadn’t even been paying attention…
Nicol Bolas discovered that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t certain about anything. And he didn’t like it. Not one little bit.
“Fine,” he muttered. “This, at least, is something I can fix.”
He cast his perception once more sideways in time; all he had to do was find a temporal strand where he had decided not to stick Tezzeret over there, but to keep him close, here on the beach. Simple.
In concept, anyway.
In execution, however, it was not only unexpectedly complicated but thoroughly disquieting. He discovered there was no time line, anywhere, in which he’d made the choice he was looking for. In fact, he could not find one where he’d made any other choice at all. Did that mean he’d never really had a choice? That it was some kind of preposterously predestinated fate or something?
He was beginning to favor the or something, as he found to his dismay that in fact no temporal strand-not a single one within the considerable range of his perception-showed any sign of Tezzeret at all, save only the strand where the artificer lay on the etherium beach, suspended animation holding him minutes from death. And now Bolas recalled that earlier, when at Tezzeret’s invitation he had scanned their future-when he had found so many of his own corpses on so many versions of the beach-he had seen nothing of Tezzeret at all. Nothing. Alive or dead or anywhere in between.
How could there be only one of him?
Bolas had a feeling he’d be able to work it all out easily if he were only somewhere else, far away from the Metal Sphinx, the Metal Island, the world that was ocean itself-far from whatever it was that was pumping pea soup into his brain. He gathered mana as easily as he might take a deep breath, then ripped open the surface of the universe so that he might step through into the Blind Eternities.
But how could there be only one Tezzeret? And how could Tezzeret read Classical Draconic? And what was up with the whole sun-not-moving business? And if it was etherium messing with his brain, shouldn’t he figure out how and why? Wouldn’t leaving all these mysteries behind him be tantamount to driving stakes through his own hearts?
The rumblings and mumblings of his various subminds as they mulled over these and other troubling questions were so diverting that when he came back to himself, he found his rip in reality had closed without him ever having taken so much as a step toward it.
This, he realized, might be a problem.
With great determination and preternaturally focused intention, he again exerted mana and ripped open a portal to the Blind Eternities.
And some indeterminate interval later, he again found himself standing on the beach with unanswerable questions chasing one another’s tails through the various and sundry compartments of his mind, the rip having closed while he was woolgathering.
“All right, I’m done. That is exactly as much as I am going to take,” he muttered to himself. “Time to fix it, or to burn down this whole bloody universe. Or both. Extra bonus points for whoever guesses which.”
His face contorted into an involuntary snarl as he fixed his intention upon the temporal strand where the four Planeswalkers lay side by side. With a needlessly violent wrench of will, he thrust himself into their time line.
He stood over Tezzeret’s body, which might as well have been a statue. When he noted that his angle of shadow here was subtly different from that of the time line he’d just left, his snarl deepened to a rictus of rage. He snatched up Tezzeret’s body in one hand and with the other gouged a ton or so of etherium from the plinth. Then he jammed Tezzeret’s body fully into the now-viscous metal, let the metal reharden around him, and then simply hurled it with all the strength he could muster-physical and magical-out over the infinite ocean. He didn’t even bother to mark where it would hit the water, some hundreds of miles from the island, but turned instead to the other three deanimated Planeswalkers.
He took just a moment to fasten each of them with his power so that he could summon them from anywhere across the Multiverse. Then, one at a time, he picked them up, ripped open reality, and shoved each at random into the Blind Eternities. There was no way to predict where any of them might end up, or if any would ever reappear into ordinary reality. While this might be disastrous for unprotected Planeswalkers, the power of Nicol Bolas would preserve them intact until the end of time, and a considerable while beyond it. All Bolas knew for sure-all he needed to know-was that he could bring them to his hand at will. The magic that held them in suspended animation and bound them to him could be broken only by a mage more powerful than its caster. Bolas felt justified in his confidence that the existence of said “more powerful mage” would remain safely hypothetical.
That being accomplished, he turned his attention once more to Tezzeret. Being in the same universe-especially this one, which seemed to be otherwise uninhabited-relieved Bolas of any need for physical proximity. Tezzeret’s deanimated form was still sinking, far out in the ocean, plunging ever deeper into mile upon mile of crushing lightless depths, but for Bolas it was a simple matter to spear the mechanist’s frozen brain with a tendril of power, and delve again into Tezzeret’s memories.