Opening my eyes confirmed my analysis. “Naked? Really? You couldn’t have even left me my boots?”
“Complain to management,” Doc said. “I was designed as a fail-safe, not an ejector seat.”
I let it go; we had no time to bicker. “Twenty minutes,” I said grimly. Without tools.
“Twenty minutes till what?”
“Renn dialed us back along my subjective time line so he could get at me before I made the armor. He couldn’t have attacked Baltrice while I was standing there; I had turned away from her only a few seconds before you smelled the blood and smoke.”
“What happened to her, then? Why was she gone and Renn there?”
“It’s possible Renn was talking to us from our future. Did you notice how black the blood was? And the smoke odor was too faint. On his time line, he might be hours ahead of us-maybe days.”
“What, he was talking to us from after he takes out Baltrice? After he’s going to take out Baltrice? Something like that.”
“Yes. Me-us-too.”
“So in our time line, he hasn’t attacked her yet? Even though in his, he grabbed her days ago?”
“My best guess,” I said, “based on how long it seemed to take from when I began the armor to the moment that our eye-and-ear link went dead, he will attack her in just about twenty minutes.”
“Clockworkers give me a headache.”
“Yes.”
“So you think we can get there in time to warn her, or something?”
“Or something.”
“Hey-hey now, you’re not thinking about actually being there, are you? Tezz, come on, are you nuts? The guy just yanked us backward in time. You want to fight him?”
“No,” I said. “I want to beat him.”
“To save Baltrice?”
“And myself. And you.”
“I don’t get it. Seriously. We can just sit here. Bolas’ll show up to kick us out again, and he can broker a deal with Vess, and we’re in. Crap, Tezz, we might be able to get Bolas to step on Renn-that way we don’t get the snot beat out of us. Or get killed.”
“Baltrice doesn’t have that much time.”
“So?”
That brought me to a full stop. So indeed. “Don’t you like her?”
“Do I need to remind you that she’s tried to kill us at least once already this week?”
“To protect Jace,” I said. “She can’t help it. I don’t hold it against her.”
“Well, I do. Let the fat cow die. Our business is Crucius.”
“We need Baltrice,” I insisted. “We need her.”
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Whether I like her doesn’t matter. You like her.”
I frowned. “Apparently I do,” I said slowly. “But that’s not the issue.”
“I don’t give a ten-pound bucket of rat poo what you think the issue is. Maybe I can’t stop you once crap starts-but I can stop you from starting it yourself.” He underlined his point with a vividly distinct sensation of having my testicles ripped away.
I took it with no more reaction than an involuntary tightening around my eyes. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Think I can’t?”
“Doc, listen to me. I don’t have time to explain. I need you on my side for this. It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
“This what? What’s gonna be worth risking both our lives?”
“It’s kind of a…” I took a deep breath. Might as well tell him the truth. “It’s a practical joke.”
“You’re pulling our leg.”
“On Bolas,” I said. “It’s a practical joke on Nicol Bolas. A good one.”
“How good?”
“Let’s put it this way: If rage doesn’t make his head explode on the spot, he’ll have to suck it up and pretend he likes it. He’ll have to thank us.”
“Wow.”
“Are you in?”
“You should have told me this in the first place,” he said. “Sorry about the nut sack thing.”
“No harm done.” Which was, after all, only the truth. “Can you keep time?”
“I’m supposed to be a clockworker?”
“No. Count time. Specifically: seconds.”
“You mean like ‘one Vectis, two Vectis’? Sure. How many seconds?”
Allowing for three minutes of recovering from the teleport and bickering with Doc, discovering I was naked and getting my thoughts organized, plus perhaps thirty seconds of sag time for final adjustments…
“Nine hundred and ninety.”
“Starting?”
“Now.”
“One Vectis. Good thing I don’t lithp. Three Vectis, four Vectis-”
“Silently.”
“Check. Sorry.” His voice evaporated into blessed silence.
An unsentimental appraisal of the odds against me was not encouraging. Last time, I couldn’t even get out of this cavern without help. I had no way to know if Baltrice was still at her sled by the transit gate. I had no way to know if she was free or captured, fighting or already dead. I knew for sure only one thing.
I knew where Silas Renn would be in twenty minutes.
I have come to think of myself as a resourceful person; in fact, I have flattered myself into believing that given a specific problem, a specific time frame, and specific materials, I can deliver not only an effective solution, but an elegantly creative one.
I had about sixteen minutes to prove I haven’t been kidding myself.
I arranged myself into a rough simulacrum of a comfortable position and applied my full attention to the problem. Unfortunately, this specific problem was a long-standing one, and one to which I had never achieved any working solution at all. Three years of trial and error. Mostly the latter. Three years of hypotheses and experiments, resulting only in bruises and humiliation. Disgrace. Expulsion, and murder… but I couldn’t think about that now; dwelling on my failures was diversion. Distraction. Nothing more than an excuse to lose. I didn’t need an excuse.
I needed to win.
Getting away unharmed had been a victory in itself, though I could take no credit for that. I had escaped because he didn’t know about Doc. What else could I do that Renn didn’t know I could?
It was imponderable. I shook my head and moved on. Everything in its turn. First: escape. If I couldn’t get out of the cavern, any tactical plan was moot.
This cavern had already proven to be secure against my best efforts. I had been unable to reach the Blind Eternities after awakening here, and now I found that an attempt to teleport proved equally futile. Something about the sangrite not only blocked my mana channels, but seemed to absorb mana directly; opening more channels only brightened the blood-colored light in the cavern.
So: sangrite is a mana sink. Not just stored energy, but actually gathering energy every instant it remained untapped. A lot of energy, I reminded myself, in view of what had happened to the sculler in Tidehollow, not to mention the two mercenaries at my father’s hovel. I needed that power. I needed to harness it somehow.
Without making myself explode.
Dragon’s blood, Bolas had said. Spilled in mortal combat. Stress hormones and glucose. I pondered briefly whom Bolas had killed here, but only briefly. The blood’s original owner was no concern of mine. He lost it. I found it. The end.
But I wished I could ask him a question or two.
A quick search of the cavern failed to locate any sangrite chunks broken loose from ceiling or wall. A brief but painful attempt to yank or kick some free ended with me limping away on a bleeding foot… but then a sputtering sizzle ignited behind me, and my naked back registered sharply painful heat. I looked over my shoulder.
The floor had erupted into blinding fountains of raw power as high as my chest, like the insides of blast furnaces fueled by mana. Several, in fact.
Every spot where I had set my bleeding foot.
Interesting. Soluble in blood. Soluble in other fluids as well? “Doc. What’s the count?”