And I saw the transit gate beside the gravity sleds in the Glass Dunes, where Silas Renn stretched out a hand, and the artifact he held blasted power at the back of an unsuspecting Baltrice.
“Hang on, Doc,” I said, my voice sounding very far away, half buried in the howling hurricane inside me. “It looks like we’re going to be a little late.”
“ ‘Better late than never,’ ” Doc shrieked into the wind, “is just a bloody figure of speech!”
The power blasting outward through my skin allowed no time for a conventional teleport, but I didn’t need to use one. Power was its own answer: with power such as this, I could reach out like Nicol Bolas himself and simply yank and rip and squeeze reality into the shape of my desire. I seized that part of Esper’s existence in the grip of my mind, then dragged it close so that I could pass from the cavern to the desert with a single step.
My arrival cracked the sky.
Through the rip I came, blazing in the air dozens of yards above them. The light from my body whited out the colors of the desert, Baltrice and the sleds, and the hand Renn had raised to shield his eyes.
I spoke in thunderclaps.
“I BELIEVE YOU’VE BEEN EXPECTING ME.”
TEZZERET
The fight was short, by comparison to the hours of mock dueling Renn and I had inflicted upon each other at the Seeker Academy. This confrontation was over in less than a minute. However, when fighting a clockworker, less than a minute is not as brief as it sounds.
He stood perhaps a dozen meters behind where Baltrice was still in the process of being blown off her sled. He had abandoned his usual melodramatically flouncing cape-and-tunic outfit in favor of a simple pair of breeches and heavy boots, leaving exposed his torso and arms, which were constructed of baroquely latticed cobalt-etherium alloy, and his etherium heart shone through his chest like a fist-size golden sun. Only his head, his hands, his groin, and his feet were still flesh. On any other day, his overwhelming etherium advantage would have rendered him functionally immune to the most potent attacks at my command.
This was not, however, any other day.
Her head thrown back and arms wide, her balance tipped far forward beyond the nose of the sled, Baltrice looked as if she might be posing for an action illustration. A motionless cloud of what I assumed to be droplets of her blood sprayed backward from a ragged hole in the back of her tunic, just between her shoulder blades. She hung in the air, frozen, in the middle of pitching onto her face.
My best guess was that Renn had stream-shifted behind her and hit her with some kind of hypersonic ballistic projectile. Or a group of such. Hypersonic because she must have been hit before she heard it coming, ballistic because her automatic defenses would have layered her in impenetrable shields in the instant any magic had been directed against her.
He’d shot her in the back.
“Tezzeret?” Renn said, loud but casual, squinting against the blinding glare that crackled from my skin. “Is that you, old friend?”
“Friend?” Doc sputtered in my ear.
“I’ve got him. Check out Baltrice as best you can,” I muttered. “I need to know what exactly has her frozen there.”
“This is not how I imagined us to meet again,” Renn called. “I was sure you’d have clothes on.”
“WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT,” I thundered down at him.
“Oh, I think we do.”
“WE CAN COOPERATE. FIND CRUCIUS TOGETHER.”
“Cooperate? Absolutely.” Renn raised his right hand and summoned a grayish, unwieldy artifact. If he was still as unimaginative as he used to be, this would be the same artifact he had used on Baltrice. “Cooperate by holding still.”
He pointed the device at me, and in that instant I understood. He was not simply a psychopath, a bloodthirsty maniac attacking for sport. He was attacking because he thought he had no choice. He was fighting the man I used to be. In self-defense.
When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone.
He narrowed his eyes, and from the end of the device came a flash like fire.
His personal shields had to be down to permit physical projectiles’ passage, and so I thrust my hands forward, twisting them sideways to again open rips in reality between us, two of them, as this was an opportunity to experimentally verify a hypothesis I’d formulated some years ago. I’d proposed that there is no interdimensional conservation of vector. In plain language, when allowing a moving body to pass through a reality warp, its vector on re entry will be, effectively, any direction I feel like.
One of my rips in reality gaped in the path of the hypersonic projectiles and swallowed them whole, while the other rip opened in front of Renn, but below his line of sight. Specifically, it opened less than two feet in front of his knees at a shallow angle. Even as the artifact’s sharp report reached my ears, the projectiles the device had fired blasted up through the second rip and hit Silas Renn square in the crotch.
As Nicol Bolas would say: Now, that’s comedy!
The impact lifted him up on his toes and tore a sizable hole in his breeches in exactly the most embarrassing possible place-which was not, however, actually embarrassing for Renn, because all that was displayed through the hole was a mess of raggedly bloody meat. This was not a serious wound for him; lacking anything resembling a working circulatory system, he was in no danger of bleeding out, and those etherium legs would go right on keeping him upright and mobile even if his pelvic bone was shattered.
Stilclass="underline" it must have stung.
His face went white, and an instant later it was red enough that even the glare of energy I cast upon the dunes could not bleach it away. And he wasn’t blushing. He made a fist with his free hand, and sheets of gauzy blue layered themselves around him as he cast the artifact aside.
“That might have hurt,” Renn said scornfully, “if I were nothing but a meatbag like you-but the power to regenerate my flesh is built into my enhancements, scrapper boy. I barely even felt it. Now watch how a real mage fights.”
Taunts. Just like the old days. Did he think we were in the Academy’s arena, showing off for the Masters? After all these years, he thought he could still get into my head with smack talk. Pathetic.
Being pathetic, however, was no guarantee he wouldn’t kill me.
He finished the gesture of casting the artifact aside by pointing toward it and shouting some sort of trigger word, while with a swift twist of his opposite hand-another school yard trick-he now unleashed a swelling torrent of blue fire that roiled up at me. I had no idea what it might be.
I assumed it was some sort of temporal manipulation. I employed my best hypothetical defense against clockworking, which was to force another rip in the fabric of reality, and place this rip where it would intercept his spell and suck away his blue torrent as swiftly as he could pour it forth.
It worked well enough-except he didn’t show any sign of canceling the spell, and I didn’t know how much energy that opening could channel before closing-or if adding energy might instead swell the rip until it swallowed us all. Or the whole desert, or Esper, even all of Alara. Possibly even the Multiverse itself.
This is why I hate improvising.
I was using a power I didn’t understand to fight other powers I also didn’t understand-which is decidedly not my game. On the other hand, I reflected, at least I wasn’t losing.