“Two hundred eighty-six Vectis, two hundred eight-seven Vectis.”
“Good. Keep on it.” I frowned, disturbed with myself, because without any logical reason I could imagine, I felt that he deserved at least a warning. “Doc, listen. You’ll want to pull back from my sensory nerves, if you still can. Some of this may hurt. A lot.”
“Two hundred ninety-five Vectis. Thanks, Tezz. You’re a pal. Two hundred ninety-eight Vectis.”
Apparently I am, I thought. What a strange person I had become. And getting stranger as I went.
The blood smears on the floor burned themselves out in seconds. I bit down on my tongue to fill my mouth with saliva, which I promptly spit on the floor. After wasting a few seconds waiting for an ignition that never came, I smeared the spittle with one hand and could detect no change in viscosity, coloration, or temperature, which led me to the conclusion that spit lacked some essential characteristic necessary to the reaction. Still, sangrite had dissolved and ignited in the bare smears of blood; it was possible that sangrite’s structure might be similar to rock sugar, halite, or similarly soluble minerals.
So I tasted it.
I went over to a wall and gave it a cautious lick-it would be unfortunate if I discovered sharp edges in the deposit by setting my tongue on fire-and found that it had no flavor at all that I could detect. Not so soluble as I’d hoped; it seemed the reaction was blood to blood. Crystal to liquid, and liquid to crystal.
Eating the stuff seemed to be out of the question. Injection was problematic; if the sangrite dissolved only in blood, there seemed to be no way to liquefy it without causing catastrophic ignition. The closest thing I had to a working hypothesis involved direct injection of intact crystals. But how could I even try it without making myself explode?
My only hope was to find or make crystals that were very, very small.
But without any sort of useful tool, how was I to make crystals small? I didn’t even have a chunk that I could knock against other chunks to flake off chips, nor did I have the ability to free such a chunk. If only I had a tool, any tool-or better yet, a couple of pounds of etherium-hells, with no more than an ounce or two of etherium, I could…
Wait.
I stood very, very still. Thinking.
I discovered I was smiling. One answer that solves three problems.
That’s elegance.
“Doc-the count.”
“Three hundred seventy Vectis.”
Less than nine minutes. Not enough time. Not nearly enough time.
It didn’t matter.
Standing nude in the center of the cavern, I closed my eyes and focused my will, and shortly there appeared in my perception a chaotic array of very, very faint points of energy, glowing faintly like stars on a misty night: a halo around my scalp, clustered around my groin, and scattered among my hands and feet. I fixed my attention to them each individually, and to them all generally, and pulled them out from under my skin.
It was a point of curiosity to me that now, here, where I struggled to intercept a catastrophe of monstrous proportion-one so dire and immediate that all the resources of the Infinite Consortium might not have sufficed-the tools I had to work with were those I’d acquired a lifetime ago, in my father’s Tidehollow hoveclass="underline" my intellect, my clarity of purpose, and my talent for rhabdomancy.
Not to mention the tiny slivers and shards of etherium lodged under the skin of my scalp and groin, hands and feet, that were half-forgotten remnants of what I had stolen from my father.
Stolen is a stark word. Someone less devoted to precision than I would likely try to justify such a theft as some sort of moral necessity; I myself have been guilty of such. For many years I had thought of myself as a victim who had transformed himself into a clever rogue-hero like those of childhood fables, using ingenuity and patience to win freedom against impossible odds-and though that was exactly what I had done, at the same time, the unsentimental truth of the matter is that I had been only a clever thief. Worse than a thief: a bandit. A ripper.
I had used my mind instead of a weapon, but that was a distinction of style, not substance. Irrelevant to the truth.
Yes: my father was a bad man. Is a bad man. A drunkard, a wastrel, an addict, a violent abuser of my mother and myself-a figure of terror before he became one of contempt. And yet-
And yet there had been two things left in his life that he’d called his own: his tiny trade in etherium scraps, and his son the rhabdomant, who had kept him in business. And I had ripped them both forever beyond his grasp.
As he had taught me, all those years ago: whatever can be taken, will be taken.
I took from a man who’d had nothing else.
While I was contemplating this unflattering concept, I was also bringing forth all those residual shreds of etherium that had lingered under my skin all these years. Tiny spheres crawled across my skin like silvery mites, gathering themselves in the palm of my left hand, until finally they all joined into a single smooth ball, a half inch in diameter and weighing less than an ounce.
It would have to be enough.
A particularly bright fist-size sangrite protrusion from the nearby wall seemed a likely spot to test my idea. A brief inspection revealed several faults and fissures, one of which extended all the way to its surface near to its joining with the rest of the wall. I formed the etherium into a tiny needle, which I used to scratch open a vein in the back of my hand. Clenching my fist produced a satisfactory droplet of blood, small enough that I did not need to worry about it dripping on the floor and blowing one of my feet off. I stuck the end of the needle into the blood droplet, and with my mind thinned the needle while gradually hollowing an internal channel up its length. This produced a slight vacuum, enough to draw a little of my blood up within it, converting my needle to an etherium pipette.
I sealed the end of my pipette, and very carefully wiped the exterior. Inserting it as far as was practicable into the surface fissure of the protrusion, I caused the etherium to open and retract very briskly, so that I could step away before that portion of my blood inside the protrusion could react with the sangrite and detonate. Which it did.
With a stunningly intense crack! the sangrite protuberance exploded from the wall as though shot from a ballista. It hit the far wall, and the impact produced a shattering blast of raw power that lifted me from my feet and slammed me into the wall-fortunately without drawing blood.
Detonation on impact. Interesting. But inconvenient.
“YOW!” Doc exclaimed in my ear, louder even than the explosion. “Warn me when you’re gonna do something like that!”
“Doc,” I said, checking my bones as best I could for fractures, “I’m gonna do something like that.”
“Oh, very funny.”
“It’s not a joke.” I climbed back to my feet and stepped carefully over some fragments to locate a few tiny chips. I wet my finger and touched the smallest of the chips-a sliver less than half an inch long, and so thin that it looked clear. Folding my pipette into tweezers, I took the splinter and jammed it into the lateral side of my left butt cheek.
For what seemed like a terribly long time but was probably no more than a second or two, nothing happened-but then I felt a definite surge of energy from the splinter, for a bare instant before my ass caught fire.
Nothing actually exploded, which was a relief, but a patch of flesh almost an inch in diameter spit fire and poured black smoke and felt, for about five seconds, as if it was burning all the way into to my hip joint.
“Ow wow wow WOW!” Doc wailed. “You had to do it on the left side, didn’t you?”
“It’s good manners to share. What’s the count?”
“Are you kidding? After you set our butt on fire?”
Meat-scented smoke trailed up from a charred divot about the size of the end of my thumb. He wasn’t kidding: it hurt. It felt like someone was excavating my butt cheek with a red-hot spoon. And that was the good news. “Where were you when you lost track?”