“I have two more gifts for you.” I pulled the navigator out of the same pocket. “It has a concealed catch-just here, do you see? Press it like this and the device opens.”
“It’s a locket.”
“It’s a navigator. Very much like your ring, actually. Single use, I’m afraid, but I think you’ll appreciate having it. If there is someone you need to find, for any reason, all you have to do is take something of them and secure it inside. Any sort of tissue sample will do-a drop of blood, a hair, even a fingernail paring. The navigator will show you where that person is and help you chart a path to him. Or her. It’s very effective, as long as your target is not using some rather advanced types of magical concealment. It works best on someone who doesn’t know you’re after them.”
“Target?” she said warily. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about my third gift, part of which will be a transit gate to what I believe is an apartment in Bant. I think you might be interested in going there because, as recently as this morning, our necromancer was there.”
“Necromancer? One?” She looked suspicious and appalled at the same time. She threw her arms wide, to encompass the soot and smoke and ash throughout the Netherglass. “This was all from one guy?”
“Not a guy,” I said. “If you had the chance to scour the entire Multiverse for one particular necromancer’s ass to slow roast in the deepest furnace in Grixis, who would that necromancer be?”
Her eyes widened. “Are you kidding?” Her teeth came out, and in her eyes was only flame. “Are you festering kidding me?”
“Not about this,” I said. “I’m no fan of hers myself.”
“Your gift is a shot at her?”
“Yes. Do you like it?”
“Oh, man, if I had any way to tell you…” She shrugged herself into full blaze. I had to raise a hand to shield my face from her heat. “Get to work on that gate, bud. I need to pick up my ride.”
She stuck two fingers in her mouth and unleashed an ear-stabbing shriek of a whistle that would have done credit to a Vectis dragon-raid siren. Up over the white monolith of a Labyrinth hall soared the wickedly gleaming sinuous body of an etherium drake. A few powerful wing beats sent it toward us in a steep dive.
The choking noise I made was the sound of my trying not to swallow my tongue.
Baltrice grinned at me. “They’re not all bad. Some of ’em are just, y’know, misunderstood.”
Realizing my mouth was hanging open, I shut it with a clack that sent a white jolt of pain through my loosened teeth.
The e-drake landed a few meters away. Baltrice ambled over to it, spreading her arms, and I found myself in the preposterous position of witnessing something I could never even hint about without being named a liar or a madman. The etherium drake settled down onto the sand, folded its wings, and laid its head on Baltrice’s shoulder.
“Good boy.” She patted the back of its skull, and I heard a low, metallic grinding sound that might actually have been the creature purring.
“I call him Mr. Shinypants,” she said, happy and fierce at once. “That gate, huh?”
Night falls suddenly in most deserts, but the Netherglass now had twilight of a sort: the light of the setting sun reflecting downward by the dark cloud of zombie smoke, casting a dully bloody glow upon the Crystal Labyrinth.
And upon me.
The color was essentially identical to the sangrite glow in the cavern; a simple fact, noted without consideration of coincidence or teleology. If it turned out to be relevant, I’d think about it then. I had no interest in noon or midnight, day, night, or anything in between. I did not feel the weather, and my vision had nothing to do with light.
I sat on the sand of powdered glass in the center of the Labyrinth, my legs folded beneath me, and on my knees the head of Silas Renn.
I cannot say how long I sat there. Days, at least. Months? Years? There is no way to know. At some point, my injuries healed. I didn’t notice. The power I drew from the vast wealth of etherium at my command relieved me of any need to eat, drink, or eliminate, and it did so without requiring the intervention of my attention or any fraction of my consciousness at all. I needed all my consciousness for something else.
I was watching myself solve the Labyrinth.
By tapping into Renn’s temporal perception, I could trace the probability-ghosts of myself entering the Labyrinth, and once inside, my own knack for rhabdomancy enabled me to track them by the etherium they-I-carried. Will carry. Potentially. Every twist, every turn, every ascent, descent, or jump.
While I did so, I used a knack from my days at the Mechanists’ Guild to make my hands automatically pull from the etherium around me a series of thin wires, bending, twisting, and occasionally breaking each as I worked them into precise three-dimensional representations-models-of every path I saw myselves take. My long, long experience with precision ensured that these models would depict each path exactly. I had no need to model the Labyrinth itself; the paths were all that mattered.
I had built around myself a pair of rings, constructed so that the lower served as a base in the sand, while the upper could rotate freely along it. At twelve precise intervals around the movable ring, I had affixed a tall cross of etherium wire. The crux of each one marked the entryway of one of the great halls of the Labyrinth. The cross piece marked ground level. Each pin became the anchor for a worked-wire chart of all possible pathways branching from that entrance. By rotating the ring, I could bring any given hall before me without having to shift my own position.
For a maze, that would have sufficed; a three-dimensional solution for a three-dimensional problem. This, however, was a four-dimensional problem.
At least.
Because, after all, it only looked like a maze. It was a Labyrinth. It became a maze-a deadly one-for any who entered unprepared. I would not be one of these.
Preparation is my specialty.
As I worked, I discovered paths that could join two or more others that had seemed to lead to dead ends. Using a slightly thinner, shinier wire to connect magical transit points-where a path might leap from the top of one hall to the bottom of another-I began to join every hall to every other in multiply iterated pathways, nearly identical… but each and every one unique…
The space around me was almost half full of the etherium web work when I discovered the pattern.
I could see it: a mathematical purity that words cannot describe, an elegance that transcended language… I could predict, now, the shape and length of the next wire, and what points it would join. More than predict. See.
Know.
Soon I could see two wires ahead, then five, then a dozen…
Then all of it.
I saw what my model would become. This wasn’t Renn’s power. It had nothing to do with time; this was form and function, stripped to the deep structure of matter itself. I saw the future not with prescience, but with experience. I knew where each strand must be placed and what each wire must connect, for the model to make sense.
“To make sense” is actually an expression for how I experience natural law.
That is: truth.
This experience-this knowing-flowed out from me, directing my hands to assemble the half-dreamed vision in my heart. The impossibly perfect structure of the etherium matrix enfolded me, enwrapped me, joined around and above me like the vault of a cathedral.
I had trained my entire life simply to see this. To do this. To make this.
To be this.
My hands stopped. My eyes froze open. I could not dream of moving. Could not dream of breathing. Could not imagine being anywhere but here.
Ever.
I saw without sight, heard without sound, smelled without scent, felt without touch. Kneeling within this heartbreakingly perfect sanctum that was the only possible answer to the question of my existence, I thought: What do you say without saying? And discovered the answer was obvious.