“The late seven hundreds.”
“Not the answer I was hoping for.” Three minutes. I’d been right all along-not enough time. Not as much as I needed. No more tests. No more theories. This would either work, or it would kill me. Us.
I hate improvising. Hate it. Improvisation is for people too lazy or stupid to plan.
A group of stupid, lazy people that now included me.
I dropped to my knees at the edge of the scattered chips and splinters of sangrite. The cleavage appeared to be largely orthorhombic, which was fortunate-most fragments tended to be long and thin, like a crystal stylus. The problem was that the tiniest flakes seemed to be fading away-shrinking like sublimating dry ice. Which explained why I had found no existing fragments on my initial search. The damned stuff evaporates.
Why is it that nothing ever turns out to be easy?
I gathered as many of the medium-to-large crystals as I could fit into both hands and began to stick them into the only place where, first, I wouldn’t lose them, and second, I wouldn’t run the risk of having my colon explode; that is, I stuck them into the long tangles of my hair. Time pressure made my hands tremble, ever so slightly. I carefully kept the crystals away from my scalp, especially those with sharp edges, as having my head blast open would be only slightly less traumatic than full rectal detonation, and that only because I would be too dead to suffer.
And that was the easy part.
I found one crystal that had shrunk to two and a half inches long and about a tenth of an inch in diameter. I held it in the palm of my right hand, along with my tiny bead of etherium.
“What’s that for?”
“Shh. We’re not going to get a second try at this.”
I stared at the etherium bead. It rolled across my palm to the crystal of sangrite, then flowed over and around it, encasing the sangrite in metal. I then refined one end of the etherium to shape it into the sharpest, stiffest point that raw etherium could hold. That accomplished, I used the fingertips of my left hand to locate an intercostal space to the right of my sternum just above my heart, then brought my sangrite-filled needle there and put its point to my skin, the needle angling to aim behind my sternum.
“Um, Tezz? You mind telling me what you’re doing?”
“In a moment.”
“Seriously. What are you doing?”
“This.” With a sharp movement of my right thumb, I stabbed myself in the chest, driving the whole needle in as far as I could push.
“Ow! Damn it!”
“My thoughts exactly,” I gasped. The pain crushed my breath away-like being stabbed with a rusty gate latch. Must have inadvertently nicked a rib. “But… so far so good…”
“You say that like it’s going to get worse.”
“We met only days ago, yet it seems you’ve known me all your life.” I closed my eyes and wasted some few seconds settling my mind and summoning my concentration; a mistake in this part of the operation might kill us both.
Even if I did it right, it might kill us both.
I hate improvising.
I found the needle with my mind, and I induced tiny projections of etherium to stick out from its front end, then slowly creep along it to the rear, while at the same time causing smooth etherium to flow forward from the rear to become new projections-like a conveyor belt in reverse, or the linked-chain treads of a heavily armored vehicle. In sum, the effect was not unlike the scales of a snake. The threads gave the needle purchase on my surrounding tissue, so that it could pull itself slowly-agonizingly slowly-toward my aortal arch.
“Oh, crap,” Doc moaned. “Oh, you bastard. You do this to me on purpose-I apologized for your balls, didn’t I?”
“This is not…” Speech was difficult through the clench of my jaw. The needle felt bigger than my thumb and as though it was using fishhooks to claw its way through my chest. “… punishment. If even a tiny gap opens in the casing… and blood touches the sangrite…”
“I get it. Ka-boom. Splat. How in the hells did you talk me into this?”
“By not… telling you about it…”
“Y’know, real friends don’t keep secrets.”
“How would… you know?”
“Awww…”
“Here’s a plan…” I gritted. The needle had reached the wall of my aortal arch. “Before we take our swing at Bolas… you tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”
“What secrets do I have?”
“You’ll be surprised.” I closed my eyes, and with one spasm of will, I stabbed the needle through the wall of the aorta so that its tip entered the largest flow point in my entire bloodstream.
Doc said, “Golghhg…”
I agreed. The needle seemed to be impinging on a nerve cluster. I felt the stab again with every beat of my heart.
“All right,” I said. Pain, yes. But: no shortness of breath, no faintness, no tachycardia-probably hadn’t torn the aortal wall, or not badly, at any rate. “All right. So far so good.”
“I hate when you say that.”
“Now comes the tricky part.”
“Now?” Doc sounded appalled. “What was that last part, then?”
“That was the ‘difficult but probably won’t kill us’ part.”
“Oog. That means this part-”
“Is really damned tricky. Yes.”
I took a deep breath. “This is how it’s going to work. This sangrite seems to be the next best thing to solid mana. And concentrated. Activated by contact with blood. Instead of jamming a crystal straight through my skin and setting another part of me on fire, I believe that a very, very fine powder fed directly into my bloodstream might distribute the reaction throughout my body in a controlled fashion-so I can use its power without blowing myself apart.”
“Come again? You want to mainline powdered dragon blood?”
“More than mainline. I am equipping the etherium needle with very, very tiny grinding gears, that very, very slowly crush the sangrite as it’s fed into my aorta. If it works the way I’m hoping, the dust particles will spread through my whole body in a few seconds.”
“This sounds like a really bad idea.”
“It is.”
“I am not okay with this.”
“You don’t get a vote.”
“Like hells-”
“It’s already done,” I said. “I did it while I was describing it to you. Stop me now and you’ll burn us to death.”
“Damn it, Tezz!” he shouted furiously, loud enough to make my ear buzz. “We just talked about this kind of crap!”
“No. We were going to talk about it,” I said, extending my arms as each and every hair on my body stood on end, crackling with spits of energy discharge. “That conversation will take place in a future that’ll never happen.”
“What’s that? Is it working, or are we dying?”
“Both.” The hissing in my ears swelled to a full-on hurricane. Arcs of blinding white lightning writhed and sizzled from my hands to the floor, to the walls, to my head. More power than I’d ever felt. Far more than I knew what to do with-but to do nothing was not an option. If I tried to restrain this power, I’d detonate like that sculler.
I felt my blood go fizzy. I felt my heart begin to boil. My brain would be next.
I let the power lift me up from the cavern’s floor. I let it clothe me in searing light. Seeking the Glass Dune, where a transit gate would be standing near two etherium gravity sleds, I sent forth my mind…
And I could say only, “Ohhh…”
“What is it?” Doc said, shouting to make himself heard over the hurricane in my head. “What do you see?”
Hanging in the air, bound to the cavern with chains of lightning, I breathed, “Everything… ” because that is exactly what I saw.
Everything.
I saw the mountains of Jund, the jungles of Naya, the golden plains of Bant, the endless oceans of Esper, and the smoking hellscape that was Grixis. I saw leotau-mounted lancers crashing through a formation of scourge devils while the skies above them were filled with shrieking death struggles between angels and kathari. I saw a hundred stormcallers on the Cliffs of Ot, chanting as they diverted the winds of the Eternal Storm to buffet back flight after flight of swooping dragons. I saw whole armies of elves and humans hurling storms of griffins, hydrae, and chimeras against massed formations of infantry whose armor blazed like the sun itself, while leonin shook flashing weaponry and roared their challenge to the champions of their enemies. I saw Sharuum in her chambers, Nicol Bolas brooding in Grixis, my father collapsed in his hovel…