It was enough.
Arms flailing, he actually would have made it-stopped himself short-had I not managed to make one twitching foot move at the last second, to hook his ankle and send him headlong into the transit gate.
Not through the gate. Into the gate.
Into the gate because I canceled the spell just as his head and shoulders broke the plane of transmission. About half his torso, his pelvis, both his legs, and one arm fell on me. Which hurt. But I really didn’t mind.
The rest of him-head, shoulders, heart, and one arm-was lying on the sand of the Netherglass, fifteen miles away.
Perhaps my prejudice against improvisation was unfair. My own, just now, had produced satisfactory results.
Less than elegant, far from painless, and passingly humiliating, but satisfactory.
I lay there for a second or two, trying to regain enough breath to tell myself I was still alive. When I found my insistence sufficiently convincing, I got up and triggered the transit gate again.
On the far side, Renn’s remaining arm was scrabbling for purchase in the soft powder, trying to drag itself, his shoulders, and his head off toward some imaginary safety. He seemed to be in some kind of shock. When I stepped through the gate and moved around to head him off-so to speak-he didn’t seem capable of speech, producing only a thick gargle, a few lip smacks, and a pop or two.
“Stop it, Renn. It’s over.”
His eyes rolled, and his hand reversed course, and I sighed. Once the shock wore off, he’d be dangerous again; magic is a function of the mind, and his would, given the chance, come through this largely unharmed. His heart was still glowing in what was left of his chest, and the enchantments that served him in place of blood and lungs and other organs could keep his head alive indefinitely. The last thing I wanted to do was give him a chance to reassemble himself.
I stepped over him and caught his wrist, lifting him from the ground. His eyes rolled, and his mouth worked, and now he was able to form intelligible words. “… kill me… Tezzeret… kill me…”
“You’re too valuable to waste simply because I hate you,” I said. “I gave you a chance to cooperate by choice. I will not repeat that mistake.”
“… Tidehollow scrapper bitch…”
“Hush now. Try not to heckle me while I save your life.”
The severed ends of his enhancements were leaking mana like blood. It was the work of a moment or two for me to make contact with his etherium and manipulate its function sufficiently to seal the severed strands of latticework. That accomplished, I mentally took hold of the tiny blade in his eye and stretched it into an ultrafine thread, about a third the diameter of a human hair. I sent that back through his retina and along his optic nerve, which must have been a bit uncomfortable, because it made him shudder and moan.
Using the thread, I probed his brain matter until I found his sleep center. Hooking one end of the thread there, I sent the other directly into his pineal gland and worked the thread to feed its small mana current as a trickle charge. In about five seconds his eyes closed, and he relaxed into slumber.
A gust of breeze came from behind me toward the transit gate, bringing with it enough odor of zombie that I borrowed a bit of Renn’s shoulder joint to put up an anti-glass-and-stink field. Looking through the gate, I understood why the breeze seemed to blow from here to there, as the Glass Dunes for a mile or two on the far side were no longer so much dunes as they were glass-molten glass, at the base of a firestorm bigger than most thunder-heads. In the heart of the firestorm, Baltrice still battled three of the e-drakes, all of them appearing to be having a fine old time.
I looked from the firestorm to the million-strong zombie army in the Netherglass, and back again to the fire. It struck me that as long as I had a pyromancer in mortal combat with etherium-enhanced firedrakes, there was a more useful location for their battle.
Reaching out with my mind, I found Baltrice’s ear-and-eye piece. Renn’s down, I sent. Still having fun?
Would it be too corny for me to say I’m just getting warmed up?
Over here in the Netherglass, I have a, ah… pest control issue. One that’s begging for personal attention from you and your playmates. Can you lead them through the transit gate?
Incendiary sanitation? My specialty. Hold the door, we’re on our way.
Making sure I did so required nearly all the strength I had left. I sagged to the ground, and set the sleeping Renn down beside me. I hugged my knees and tucked my battered face against them. For what felt like a very a long time, I could do nothing except sit there and shiver.
So this was what winning felt like. Finally.
Triumph. Victory.
Whatever.
“We won, right?” Doc said. “I mean, we did win, didn’t we? This has to count as an old-fashioned ass-whuppin’, huh? An authoritative spanking. A whack and smack that cracked his rack. We beat him like a red-headed stepchild. Thumped him like a rented drum…”
“Doc. Enough.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever. Must feel good, though. Right? After all these years?”
I took a deep breath, then sighed it out. I didn’t reply. I didn’t have anything to say, because victory didn’t feel like anything at all.
I felt nothing but tired.
One more thing, I told myself. I lifted my head and gazed off toward the incomprehensibly huge monolithic halls of the Crystal Labyrinth.
One more thing.
TEZZERET
I sat on the sand, tinkering with Renn’s perceptual powers while Baltrice incinerated the last few thousand zombies. To the limits of my vision around us, the desert was stained with black soot and dusted with white ash. A vast pall of smoke filled the sky above the Netherglass, casting a permanent twilight upon the Crystal Labyrinth. Given that the peculiarities of the area included a huge stationary vortex in the prevailing winds, it was possible that the smoke would be there forever. Or at least until some powerful stormcaller could be persuaded to blow it away.
I had to pause in my tinkering every so often; the clothing I had magicked for myself was not quite sand-proof. I had been more comfortable naked.
The telemin halo I’d fashioned out of Renn’s etheriumalloy body had turned out unexpectedly well. The external screening and impact cage was almost three feet in diameter; the bowed centering struts screwed into Renn’s skull had enough flex to provide effective shock absorption. I daresay within this halo, Renn was in no danger of impact damage; I could have bounced him like a rubber ball without doing more than making him dizzy. The six carry handles I had built onto the impact cage’s exterior projected far enough to prevent the halo from rolling on any surface less than a thirty-degree incline, and I certainly wouldn’t be placing Renn’s head on any slope steeper than that. He was too valuable.
A few more threads of pure etherium, similar to the one that kept him asleep, inserted into other parts of his brain allowed me to directly access his entire perceptual system-which was, I discovered, unexpectedly impressive. In addition to being able to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel what was in front of him, he could do the same with objects that were only potentially present, as well as objects that were long gone. Though as the interval increased, perception dimmed, it was still a useful talent.
Most interesting of all was his ability to see sideways in time. With the expenditure of considerable mana-easily done, given my current plenitude of etherium-he (and I, through him) could directly perceive the consequence of any given choice or string of choices, as the temporal streams bifurcated outward from each decision point. The more probable any given potential time line was, the easier it was to see.