Bolas had a different chat in mind. With a very subtle, impenetrably camouflaged exertion of mana, he reached out for a time line where he had never used his mind siphon on Beleren. A quick temporal shift, and matters between him and Tezzeret would be different.
Lethally different.
But he couldn’t. The time lines simply weren’t there… or, worse, he couldn’t see them. The cold seemed to have penetrated his bones. He sent his perceptions forward and back along the time line he was already in… except he didn’t. He couldn’t.
He remembered being able to clockwork. He didn’t remember how.
Tezzeret nodded sympathetically. “You have to keep in mind that I had a long time to prepare for our meeting on this beach.”
“Apparently so.”
“I have come to believe that clockworking in general is a very bad idea. Even in the hands of a well-intentioned mage, it has the intrinsic potential to rend the fabric of the Multiverse-which makes it a particularly bad idea to let you, for example, use it. So you can’t. Possibly forever.”
Bolas could no longer contain his disbelief. “That’s impossible-you can’t just take a power away from me!”
“Yes. The only person who can do that to you is, well… you.”
“What?”
“Jace Beleren wasn’t the only one with a trap in his mind,” Tezzeret said. “This one was a little subtler. I’ve given your clockworking powers into the care of a subpersonality of yours. I based my design on your work. This subpersonality actually understands how dangerous clockworking is, and so he’ll make sure you never do it again. I have given you something more valuable than all the etherium that has ever existed.”
He smiled, and now Bolas did see a trace of that malice that had been formerly absent. Tezzeret said, “I’ve given you a friend.”
“What?” Bolas thought for a moment that his eyes might bulge right out of his skull. “You didn’t-you couldn’t possibly-”
“Doc,” said Tezzeret, “say hello.”
And Nicol Bolas heard a thinly wiseass human voice buzzing in his left ear. “Hiya! Hey, it’s nice in here! Damn, Nicky, we shoulda got together years ago!”
Tezzeret looked unconscionably pleased with himself.
For one horrible second, Bolas was afraid that for the first time in twenty-five millennia, he might actually burst into tears.
“Aww, come on, Nicky. It won’t be that bad. Well, not that bad. Okay, it’ll be pretty bad. But look on the bright side: as long as you don’t try to pull your clockworking crap, I won’t have any reason to talk to you.”
Bolas could understand already how that would become a substantial inducement. “What have you done?” He was almost moaning. “How have you-you could not possibly-”
“I know you haven’t spent much time in Esper, and certainly not in the slums,” the artificer said casually, “and so there is no reason you would know our word for a small, improvised weapon, kept concealed on one’s body until its stroke can kill.”
Incomprehension piled upon humiliation on top of dread, Bolas could only stare.
The artificer leaned toward him and lowered his voice as though imparting a secret. “In Tidehollow,” he said, “we call it a tezzeret.”
Sometime later, after giving him an opportunity to recover his composure, Tezzeret approached the dragon in a gentle, almost companionable way. “I know you’re angry. Embarrassed. Even humiliated. Please understand that it is not my intention to make you feel that way. Please believe that all this has not been arranged to do you any harm at all.”
“Oh, and I would believe this why?”
“If it had been my goal to humiliate you,” Tezzeret said, “we would have had this conversation in front of an audience.”
And before Nicol Bolas’s astonished eyes, Tezzeret the Seeker reached outside the universe, and when his hand returned, it held the wrist of Jace Beleren.
“That’s impossible!”
“Not here.”
“But how-?”
“I can think of no reason why I should tell you.”
“His mind’s dead,” Bolas said. “As dead as yours used to be.”
“Yes.” Tezzeret smiled. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of poetic justice.”
“That spell, during the fight-it was you!”
“Of course it was me. He might have spoiled my surprise.” The artificer shrugged. “A properly partitioned consciousness can, as you know all too well, do several things at once.”
“But killing him that way, all at once, painlessly-” Bolas cocked his head, squinting sidelong. “Uncharacteristically merciful.”
“My friend Kemuel would say that mercy is the greatest of the virtues.”
“Yeah? And what do you say?”
Tezzeret’s smile spread, but his eyes went cold and hard as chips of obsidian. “Virtue,” he said, “is for good guys. You and I have other priorities.”
“Ah. He’s not actually dead.”
A blue haze seemed to leak from the pores of Tezzeret’s right arm. He opened his hand toward Beleren, and the haze became a crackling gap spark that spit itself into the mind ripper’s face. “Not anymore.”
Bolas arched an eyebrow. “He doesn’t seem too lively.”
“He’s still suspended. I will leave him like that while I retrieve Baltrice and Liliana Vess. I have a bit of business with them that must be taken care of, and it might interest you to watch, if you wouldn’t mind. I can ensure that they will not be aware of your presence. Please?”
“You’re asking me? You’re asking for permission to preserve whatever is left of my dignity?”
“Yes,” Tezzeret said. “It’s only polite.”
Nicol Bolas sat on the etherium beach and watched Tezzeret revive the other three planewalkers. With a curiously private smile, he had kneeled beside each of them, placed his hand on each of their heads, and murmured, “Awaken. You are free. Arise and walk.”
And they did.
Bolas couldn’t even tell how Tezzeret had done it.
There was a predictable amount of commotion-especially between Baltrice and Vess, where Beleren had to get between them to prevent bloodshed-but Tezzeret got them settled down in an impressively swift fashion. He answered their most pressing question-“Where’s that damned dragon?”-in a way that Bolas found obscurely tickling.
“It is always safest to assume,” Tezzeret told them gravely, his deadpan unbreakable, “that Nicol Bolas is closer than you think.”
“And what in the hells is up with you?” Beleren demanded. “What is this place? How did you get us away from Bolas? What’s going on?”
Tezzeret favored him with the same smile Bolas had found so infuriating. Beleren didn’t seem to like it any better. “Each of you has been of exceptional assistance to me in recent days. I hope to thank you, and to give each of you a gift. This place is… me. Or I am it. Or I will be, eventually. I did not take you from Bolas. He cast all three of you into the Blind Eternities. I have retrieved you; that’s all. You are, I suppose, salvage. What’s going on is our taking leave of one another. Is that clear enough?”
“Not even close,” Jace said, starting toward him, only to be stopped by Baltrice’s hand on his shoulder.
“Boss. Don’t do it.”
“I’m just saying hello to an old friend,” he growled through his teeth.
“Well, don’t,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is.”
“Looks familiar enough to me.” Beleren shook off her hand and raised his arms to begin a casting, and Baltrice gave his shoulder a hard shove that sent him stumbling sideways into the plinth.
“I’m telling you,” she said. “He’s not who you think he is. He can do things you can’t even imagine.”
Nicol Bolas reflected that he wouldn’t have minded getting that particular warning himself.
“Are we done?” Tezzeret said evenly. “This is a bad time to fight among ourselves. There is still a very angry dragon nearby, who might wish to vent that anger on whatever people he can catch. You don’t want to be those people.”
He looked from one to another until they each subsided.