TEZZERET

A MAN OF PARTS

Being alive meant I was in trouble.

I remembered dying. Your own murder is not something that slips your mind.

That vicious little gutter-monkey Jace Beleren had reached inside my skull with the invisible fingers of his mind and scrambled my brain into … what? An omelet didn’t seem right—too orderly. Too intentional. A chopped salad? Not meaty enough. My brain felt like something sliced, or scooped, fried in bacon grease … yes.

Head cheese.

But having a brainpan filled with head cheese would leave me incapable of iterating concepts such as brainpan and head cheese, and likely lacking the mental resources to recall my death and formulate a metaphor to describe it. This recursive self-realization developed slowly, because having a functioning brain, which I did, didn’t mean it was functioning very well, which it wasn’t.

I passed some indeterminate interval speculating that perhaps I was not in fact alive, but that my corpse had been reanimated by some ambitious mage—perhaps that tasty little necromancer Jace Beleren had been so fond of … Vess. Something Vess. Lolita? Lilith? Something like that.

I also, for thoroughness’ sake, considered the possibility that my undead essence had been conjured by an embattled wizard on some nearby plane, either to win a duel or to prepare for his next one. But despite my diminished intellectual capacity, I knew that either of these possibilities was unlikely to result in a seemingly interminable span with nothing to do but chew my mental cud.

Further: I was mostly sure that being dead wouldn’t hurt this much.

I seemed to be lying on a pile of jagged rocks. Apparently, I had been lying on these jagged rocks for some significant amount of time—long enough for every single edge and point to work as deeply into my flesh as was possible short of drawing blood. I lay there experiencing the discomfort without attempting to ease it; I was not yet ready to move.

As an artificer by inclination as well as vocation, I have always known that anything worth doing is best accomplished in a deliberate, structured, and meticulous fashion. Feelings and dreams are useless, and imagination is worse. Reality doesn’t care how you think it ought to be, or what you fantasize it might be. Effective action is achieved only by the intelligent application of what is.

An unsentimental perspective on the ‘what is’ of my current situation offered no good news. To have healed and reconstructed my brain, after Beleren puréed it, was itself a feat of impressive power; to have done so after (or in the process of) raising me from the dead expanded the power requirement from impressive to astonishing. This premise led to a grim two-horned conclusion. I’d been returned to life and placed here by a being of astonishing capability who was either unconcerned with my personal welfare, or actively my enemy.

There was no third possibility. I don’t have friends.

Worse: my right arm hurt.

It ached as though it might be nothing more than simple flesh over simple bone. This was overwhelmingly wrong. So powerfully wrong that when I opened my eyes, I looked only to my left.

Not because I was kidding myself; I did not waste mental energy fantasizing that my good right arm—my precious arm, the only feature of my existence in which I can truly take pride—might be intact. Instead, my refusal to look at it arose from a similarly unsentimental understanding of my own psychology. There is a difference between knowing the abstract and seeing the specific.

There was a difference between knowing my mother was dead, and finding her battered corpse trampled and crushed into the muck of a Lower Vectis by-lane.

By looking only to my left, I kept the comprehension of my maiming safely abstract.

My prison appeared to be a natural cavern cloaked in a dull, bloody gloom, as though the light came from hot iron. The jagged rock on which I lay, the floor, the walls, and the ceiling were all some sort of crystalline mineral I did not recognize, darker than ruby quartz, shading toward carnelian—and the light in the cavern was apparently the product of a crimson glow from the deeper deposits of this crystal. From somewhere nearby came the liquid patter of what I hoped might be water.

There was neither sight nor smell of anything to eat, nor of any bedding, clothing, or fabric of any kind with which I might cover myself. The strongest odor in the cavern was of unwashed human armpit, likely my own. I found no indication of anything that might be fashioned into tools, only ever-deeper deposits of glowing red crystal.

This did not mean I was helpless. Fastening my mind upon the gray waves that crash against the cliffs below Vectis, I began to pull mana. At the very least I might fashion temporary covering for my body and protection for my feet, both of which would be useful while exploring the further extents of the cavern.

I discovered, however, that my effort to gather mana resulted only in a barely perceptible brightening of one large crystal in my immediate line of vision. This was not in itself dismaying, as I had not expected to succeed. A number of constructs and magics can deny mana to even the most powerful mage—I’ve designed several myself—but the attempt had to be made.

Everything at which I’ve ever succeeded has been accomplished by exacting attention to detail; a full commitment to exhaustive investigation. To have left a possibility unexplored would be like, well …

Like cutting off my own hand.

And so then, finally, I had to look.

My reaction was largely what I had anticipated it might be: a rush of rage and denial so intense I could only lie there and scream, followed by a flood of nauseous horror so overpowering that I vomited blood-laced saliva and green bile, and then passed out cold.

I began constructing my right arm when I was roughly nine years of age. Though my arm’s completion would require more than a decade, and I would continue to refine it for some years after, the process of acquisition, design, and construction actually began when I finally found myself clever enough to steal from my father, which was, approximately, age nine.

My age has always been approximate.

My birth had been no occasion to celebrate, and so neither were my birthdays; my parents never bothered to share with me the date, if they even remembered. I calculated my approximate age by my size and development relative to the other Tidehollow cave brats.

My parents were scrappers. Scrappers sift the garbage, runoff, and sewage of the city of Vectis, hoping that with careful and patient work they might gather bits of copper, silver, gold, or even the occasional sliver of mislaid etherium. Scrapping is, in Vectis, a less honorable profession than is begging, and it is ranked far, far below whoring. This I understood despite my age; my mother had once been a whore, as she often bitterly reminded my father whenever money ran short, or when the hearth fire sputtered, or the sun rose, or the moon set. When the winds blew, or when they fell silent.

Before her health and looks failed and she was forced to stoop so low as to share a hovel with my father, she would not even have spit on a scrapper in the street; to do so would have meant acknowledging the scrapper’s miserable existence.

I was seven years old when she was killed.

Approximately.

The news of her death arrived in the company of taunting and jeering from the ragged pack of cave brats with whom I commonly associated—children in Tidehollow being not only unsentimental, but largely incapable of understanding the concept of empathy, much less exhibiting any. One of their fathers, who had been begging on the same street in Lower Vectis as had my mother, had seen the incident. By his report, she had pressed too close to a passing guildsmaster’s carriage while supplicating alms. The blow of a whip from the carriage driver had knocked her down, and she had fallen under the wheels. The merchant lord had rolled on without so much as pausing to determine what he had crushed.

My father’s face at first had flushed, and angry color rose toward his eyes—but after only an instant all color drained away. I never saw it return. He became expressionless as a statue, and when he spoke to me, his voice had no more life or emotion than the sound of gravel rolling off a slate roof.

“Boy. Come folla. We has to git yer mother.”

He always called me boy. I am uncertain whether he and my mother had given me a name. Tezzeret is how I was called among the cave brats; a tezzeret is, in Tidehollow cant, the word for any small, improvised or homemade weapon kept concealed on one’s body—knives made from beach glass wrapped in packing twine; slings and garrotes woven of one’s own hair, a carriage spring bent to protect the knuckles of one’s fist. The cave brats had dubbed me Tezzeret after I had used one to butt shank an older boy who had pushed me down into a muck puddle.

My father gathered three or four potato sacks, told me to bring the sheets off his bed, and we went to get my mother.

My father and I did not speak on the long trudge upslope from Tidehollow to Lower Vectis. We didn’t speak while we threaded through the murky lanes and alleys. The sum total of our conversation took place beside my mother’s broken corpse, just before we dug her body out of the greasy muck in the middle of the lane.

“Even this,” my father had said softly, in a bitterly sullen murmur as though reminding himself how angry he should be. “Even this, theyz tooken from me.”

When I asked whom he meant, he sullenly nodded upslope. “Bankers ‘n’ merchants. Guildsfolk. Them as lives up the city.”

I could not imagine why anyone rich enough to live upslope would want anything of ours, and I said so.

“Futter want. They don’ has to want for them to take. Take is what they do. Take is their whole life. Us downslopers myz well be butt rags. One swipe ‘crost some arsehole and down the shitter.”

When I told him I felt this wasn’t right, he cuffed me on the side of the head hard enough to send me staggering. “Right, nothin’,” he said. “Ain’ right I whap ye on the ear, but I do. Cuz I can. Cuz ye ain’ big enow to stop me.”

I didn’t care about the smack; his heart hadn’t been in it, and so I’d barely noticed. I cared only for discovering who might be big enough to stop them. When I asked, my father only shook his head.

“Nobody,” he said. “They owns the whole world, boy.”

Even at seven, my political instincts were already developing; I pointed out that somebody had to be in charge, or nothing would ever get done.

“Dunno ’bout bein’ in charge. Only folks as scares guildsfolk ’ud be mages. When them mages talk, best believe them guildsbuggers chew their tongues ’cept for yessir.”

“Mages?” I’m fairly certain that this was the first time in my life I’d heard that word. It’s certainly the first I remember. “What’s mages?”

“Sumpin as ye need not know, boy. You’ll never see one.”

This was the longest conversation my father and I ever had.

So this was my lesson: The strong—the wealthy, the powerful, the influential—take. The weak are taken from. The strong do to the weak whatever the weak can’t stop them from doing. The strong could run my mother down in the street without even thinking about it.

This did not strike me as injustice. I’m from Tidehollow; I didn’t know what injustice meant until years later, when I came across the word in the course of my self-education. The concepts of justice and injustice struck me at that time as inherently suspect, and nothing in my life has since moved me to alter that opinion. To complain of injustice seems as useful as complaining that the sun shines or that the winds blow.

No: the casual destruction of my mother’s life struck me instead as a reason to make myself strong. She was taken from me because I could not stop them from taking her. I understood that if I remained as I was—a scrapper’s boy in Tidehollow—anything in my life could be taken from me … and everything that could be taken would be taken.

The most reasonable solution, to my young mind, was to make of myself a stronger man. But even if I did, I could be robbed by folk stronger still. How could I stop them?

The answer seemed obvious. The experience that had earned me my nickname left me with an enduring appreciation for the power of precisely applied violence. By the second or third time some other people’s mothers were found dead in the street—the mothers of, say, individuals who had attempted to take from me—I was confident that the warning would be generally understood.

The power to revenge injury a thousandfold was my fondest boyhood dream. No one would dare take what is mine. Ever.

And the word my father taught me that evening, the word meaning “the strongest,” was mage.

I undertook my own investigation into the nature of mages, and how one achieves that title. To ask anyone in Tidehollow would have been futile; I would have gotten more useful answers from my reflection in a mud puddle.

Over the course of some weeks, my investigation took me on surreptitious scouting expeditions into Upper Vectis. There, I discovered for the first time what the slivers and oddments of pale metal that my father gathered were actually used for. I came to understand why a week’s food could be purchased with an amount of etherium that might barely equal the weight of my fingernail parings.

I learned that an individual’s wealth could be calculated to a nicety by observing how much etherium that individual exhibited in jewelry, articles of clothing, slaves, and vehicles. The wealthiest had etherium magically melded to their flesh, and mages—whether human or vedalken or even the great sphinxes of the distant islands—shared one distinguishing feature: a limb, or a body part or several, wholly replaced by a structure of etherium, enchanted to duplicate (and often exceed) the function of the part it replaced.

I also learned I could work as a scrapper for my entire life and never save enough to buy so much as an etherium nose ring.

I was very taken with the esthetics of the etherium enhancements, as well. The indestructible metal for structure and magic for muscles and nerves, clean lines and curves, and elegant purity of operation made them irresistible. Having spent some hours on that street in Lower Vectis, gathering up the filthy shreds of meat and bone that had been my mother, I was—I am—entirely too familiar with the muck restrained by human skin.

I know the color of raw human liver. I know the texture of ripped-open human lung. I saw gobbets of my mother’s brain, and the undigested remnants of a breakfast we had shared in a stew of blood and bile within her torn stomach. And I knew even then that the organs I helped my father scoop back into my mother’s abdominal cavity were no different than what lurked in my own guts, and that the foul stench of corruption lived inside me, too. To this day, I see and smell them again, fully as vivid as they were to my seven-year-old self, in the nightmares that overtake me when I must sleep.

Someone more interested in human psychology than I am might find something ironic in this; I do not think in such literary terms. I am what I am. The key to successful artificing has nothing to do with why; what is the relevant issue. Combined with a properly structured how, one can unlock the universe.

Relevant facts change as circumstances develop, but still …

I’ve known what I am since the night my mother died. I knew what I intended to make of myself, and how to achieve it.

The next day, I entered the family business at my father’s side. I undertook to learn every detail of how one finds and gathers cast-off shreds of etherium. The activity is surprisingly technical, requiring considerable expertise, as the value of the metal makes it very much sought after. One must learn to search where others won’t and learn to retrieve where others can’t.

I very shortly discovered that I surpassed my father in this work, though he’d been a scrapper since he was my age. For a time, I arrogantly assumed it was due to some innate superiority of intellect or character; there were untapped caches of a gram or less of etherium in any number of places, and I assumed my success in finding them—where my father could not—meant I was smarter than he was. I discovered I was wrong when my father decided he no longer needed to work at all, beyond assessing what I had found, calculating a price, and trekking upslope to Vectis to sell it.

He knew as well as I did that I was a better scrapper than he was, and—unlike my ignorant self—he knew why. I chance to have a talent that the vedalken call rhabdomancy. In plain terms, when I have a sample of a particular material, I have a sort of intuition that leads me to wherever I can find more. As rhabdomants go, I was not—nor am I now—especially gifted. My talent enabled me to find etherium because it’s an intense substance, one that casts a vivid shadow upon reality.

One might say that it’s loud.

If gold, for example, were to be counted equivalent to the sound of a man snapping his fingers across the street, etherium would be the sound of an angry sphinx hammering upon a gong larger than a rich man’s house.

My skill had nothing to do with superiority. It was simply an artifact of heredity, like my height or the color of my eyes—or, for that matter, my intellect.

Where I did find myself superior was in the diligence I was willing to exercise in the pursuit of my goal. My father watched me every second; he had learned all too well to read my face—over which I, not yet nine, had little control. If he even suspected I might have located a piece and had not told him, I would endure a memorable beating and would spend the next night, or several, chained to the main ceiling post in the room that served us as both kitchen and bedroom. I never gave over trying, and eventually I hit upon a workable tactic.

Working as a scrapper kept the skin of my hands and feet in a state of continual disrepair. My work involved wading through sewage-drenched cesspools and piles of rotting garbage, pulling out any item that might have come in contact with any etherium—even a smudge of the metal was valuable in its own right. I had no shoes or boots, and my hands were always scratched and torn, and usually infected. Every so often, I would discover slivers of etherium, almost like splinters of glass. The smallest—rarely more than a tenth of a gram—I could conceal by sticking them under the skin of my hands or my feet. Later, after my father was safely snoring in his drug-addled stupor, I could cut these splinters from my flesh and hide them away again.

At that age, I was already an experienced contingency planner. I had secreted four cover stashes in our hovel, each more difficult to uncover than the last. These were used when my father actually caught me stealing—which I took pains that he did, every few months; it made him confident in his vigilance and enabled me to steal all the more. On these occasions, after the customary beating, he would force me to “reveal” the location of my treasure. After absorbing enough physical abuse to make it believable, I would tearfully direct him to the next cover stash.

What my father never caught on to was that my real stash was on—in—my own body. The rank tangles of my hair helped conceal the forty-five grams of etherium splinters I had shoved under my scalp; another thirty grams was in my upper groin, at the tops of and between my thighs. By the time I was ready to leave Tidehollow forever, my permanently grimy flesh concealed two hundred grams of etherium—a princely sum, which, with judicious trading up the sloping streets of Lower Vectis, was enough to purchase clothing, bathing, and adequate food, as well as what I desired most in the world: an apprenticeship in an artificer’s workshop. There I began to learn the ways that metal, glass, and stone can be worked, manipulated, and bent to the tasks my will might require of them.

To this day there are slivers and tiny fragments of etherium lodged in a number of variously private places upon my body. To remove these fragments would be laborious and time-consuming—and, after all, they are my last remaining link to my father, to my childhood, and to the harsh realities of life in Tidehollow.

Keeping them is a symptom of an unfortunate sentimentality. I admit to being sentimental, though perhaps less so than most. Because I acknowledge this, I am able to compensate for the influence this flaw might have on my judgment. I don’t conceal this particular trait—it’s more useful on display, as it often leads others to misread my intentions and to underestimate my capabilities.

I left Tidehollow without saying good-bye. I did look back, but only to ensure that my father was not in pursuit. I was, approximately, eleven years old.

My apprenticeship to the artificer was to span the standard term of seven years; after three, when I had determined to my satisfaction that I had learned all my master could teach, I departed his service in the late hours of a moonless night. Fear of my father’s vengeance had driven me to enter my apprenticeship under an assumed name, which meant that deciding on a new name was no burden and carried no risk of exposure, even by vedalken truth-sayers or suspicious sphinxes. Since I had been given none of my own, whatever word I might choose to call myself in any given moment is my real name.

I have known since a very young age that I am not like other people, be they human, vedalken, viashino, or elf. I have sometimes wondered if the root of that difference might lie in my concept of self, which seems distinctly at variance with the concept others have of themselves. Ask a man who he is, and he will tell you his name. Ask me who I am … and if I wish to give an honest answer, it will come only after a certain amount of detailed self-reflection. I am not a name, and no word truly names me. Who I am is a fluid concept.

It can make social encounters awkward.

I immediately went in search of a new situation—a particular position for which a great deal of wealth would be required. The position I sought was far removed from the humble workshop I had fled; it was beyond the means of all but scions of the wealthiest families of Vectis. Being largely insolvent save for my few remaining grams of etherium, I undertook to supplement my personal financial resources with some judicious prospecting.

There is a particular type of individual—again, species is irrelevant—who is constitutionally incapable of trusting others. (Some say I am one such, but they are mistaken. Unfortunately. The expanding roster of catastrophic betrayals inflicted upon me speaks all too clearly of my trusting nature.)

In Vectis, the inability to trust can lead to some unfortunate behavior; for example, distrusting the reliability of counting houses ends with concealing one’s wealth on one’s person, or on one’s property. When one seeks to conceal wealth, it’s often done by converting said wealth into the most valuable material available, thus lowering the volume and sturdiness required of the hiding place. In Vectis—on the whole of Esper—the most valuable material is etherium, so a rhabdomant might find it in unlikely places.

Buried in someone’s garden, for example.

It was possible to find caches so old that the people who had stashed them away had either forgotten them or had perished without leaving a record of their locations. These were ideal, as one was far less likely to encounter outraged misers who might be armed with any given variety of lethal weapon. Bandits—and worse, rippers—were an issue, especially beyond the city limits, but my time at the artificer’s shop had provided me with the materials for, and the means of, constructing several varieties of lethal weapons of my own. More than one overly optimistic ripper ended up decomposing in the sluice pools of Tidehollow.

It amused me to think of my father investing hours or days in the painstaking dissection of these rotting carcasses, especially because by the time I was through with them, none of these corpses had so much as a microgram of etherium among them.

My unfortunate sentimentality is balanced, I believe, against an elegantly precise capacity for maintaining a grudge.

When I had accumulated five pounds of etherium, I was finally ready to begin my new life. Two pounds was the fee for a year’s study in the Right Ancient Order of Mystic Constructionist Masters—the Mechanists’ Guild.

A mechanist is as far beyond an artificer as a dragon is beyond a goose. At the artificer’s workshop, I had learned how ordinary metal, glass, and stone can be shaped to useful ends. In the Mechanists’ Guild, a student is taught the working of magical materials—and how magic can be used to work one’s materials—as well as how devices, machinery, and automata can be imbued with mana, to give them wholly extraordinary capabilities. After one achieves elevation to journeyman of the Guild, one begins to learn the working of etherium. Then, eventually, as a master, one undertakes the construction of etherium devices—devices with, literally, life of their own.

Mana is, functionally, only power. That is, energy—the capacity to accomplish work. A device of etherium does not require mana to operate; etherium is, itself, a source of mana—and, as I learned in my tenure at the Guild, it is a conduit that channels power from outside the universe.

In the service of the artificer, I had been taught that energy and matter are fundamentally one and the same, regardless of the form of either, and that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The only change we can force is to alter its form. Even mana is a finite resource. Etherium, on the other hand …

Well, etherium itself is a finite resource—but the power it channels is not.

The Mechanists’ Guild teaches that etherium is the stuff of reality itself, and that by working etherium, one can touch directly the mind of god. It is, however, exceedingly bad manners to inquire “Which god?” They prefer to keep the nature of their purported deity carefully abstract. He sometimes is said to reside in etherium, sometimes in ourselves; sometimes he is said to actually be etherium itself … and sometimes etherium is said to be a channel for his grace.

The being who supposedly introduced etherium to Esper—who was reputed to have personally created, in fact, all the etherium that exists—is known there as Crucius the Mad Sphinx. Crucius is a figure of some renown and of considerable dispute. He is considered by the Mechanists to be not a sphinx at all, for example, but rather an incarnation of the will of their abstract god. This peculiar conviction was certainly sparked by the vast list of the Mad Sphinx’s gnomic utterances about “atonement with the æther,” and by his dramatic disappearance some decades past.

Matters certainly aren’t helped by the fact that no one actually saw Crucius, with the possible exception of the Hegemon of Esper; he’s a figure one learns of only by repute, and tales grow in the telling. This bizarre cult of the Vanished Mad Sphinx is maintained and evangelized to this day by a vast and increasingly influential rabble of insufferable fanatics who name themselves the Ethersworn.

These demented pebbleheads decided—based on no actual evidence whatsoever—that the key to the “redemption” of the entire plane of Esper is to infuse every living creature with etherium. They have never been able to explicitly define what it is Esper needs to be redeemed from; again, pointing this out to them is excruciatingly bad manners. Given that the supply of etherium is finite and already fully exploited—its supposed creator may have been mad, but it seemed he was not mad enough to scatter deposits of etherium underground or at the bottom of the Sea of Unknowing—the activities of these simpletons have actually accomplished nothing other than driving the price of etherium to preposterous heights.

The normal progress through the Mechanists’ Guild from student to master is seventeen years; seven years as a student—essentially an apprentice, save that one must pay for the privilege—and ten years as a journeyman.

I was a master in five.

My rapid ascension was due, in part, to the same obsessive diligence that enabled me to escape my father and the slums of my birth, but it was also due to my experience as both scrapper and artificer. Sons and daughters of the rich cannot comprehend the actual value of an object. Nothing real is useless to a scrapper, and the limits of available finance and material are, to an artificer, absolute. If you can’t afford steel gears, you make your own, of whatever happens to be available in your shop—or if you are possessed of a mind like mine, you design your device to work without gears at all.

The pampered children of privilege who were my schoolmates had no concept of the tension between waste and elegance. Assigned to design and build a particular style of chronometer, for example, my supposed peers amassed truly baffling arrays of springs and chains, wires, gears, pendulums, ratchets, precious woods, and baroquely filigreed decorative elements. Many of their designs encompassed several hundred parts; the most efficiently elegant of their designs had no less than seventy-three.

Mine had nine.

On nearly every assignment, I completed my work far ahead of my fellows. To amuse myself while waiting for them to finish, I would gather their debris and cast-off materials from the shop’s dustbin and use them to create oddments—children’s toys, tiny automata, the sorts of fanciful devices that have no actual purpose other than to delight by their design and action—which I then sold in the Lower Vectis Grand Bazaar, for what eventually became a tidy sum, to help finance my education.

It was not long until my schoolmates lost the habit of throwing away anything at all; they would, however, sell their leftover materials and discarded parts to me for pocket change, and so for a time I ran a thriving little trade. This lasted until our supervising master noted that every dustbin was as clean after our shop hours as it had been before them. The explanation—that they were selling their scraps to me, and I was peddling devices I made from them—earned me a visit from the three Governing Masters.

The masters looked over my impeccably organized work space—I had built a variety of storage devices to keep my materials clean, separate, and easy to locate at need—and one of them asked me why my bench was stuffed with trash.

“What trash?” said I. He indicated my multitudinous cabinets and arrays of drawers, which were stocked with everything from crumpled scraps of gold foil to tailings of badly tanned sluice serpent hide.

“With apologies for daring to disagree with my betters, Masters,” I said, “none of these contain trash; their contents are simply materials I have not yet found a use for.”

They elevated me to journeyman on the spot.

The position of journeyman was the only reason I’d come to the Guild in the first place. I did not plan to spend my life flattering the vanity of the wealthy and powerful by providing them with self-powered trinkets and enhanced body parts. I was there to learn to work etherium, and nothing else.

I was ready to build my right arm.

I had known what I was to build—I had dreamed it a decade before, and spent every intervening day of my life refining its design until I knew it would make of me the man I had decided to be. My right arm was why I taught myself the art of scrapping for etherium, why I had trained myself to steal from my father, why I’d apprenticed as an artificer, and why I had become a sneak thief and a killer of bandits and rippers. My right arm was the reason I had devoted my life to the study of all conceivable elements of design and construction.

When my father had been in one of his occasional expansive moods—merely intoxicated by the drugs he craved, rather than unconscious and prostrate—he liked to say that there were only two things in all creation he knew would never fail him: death and his right arm. Fool that he was.

His right arm was nothing. Flesh and bone. As corrupt and rotten as his filthy heart.

My right arm is none of these things.

There are some who have spoken of my arm, and claimed it to be psychological compensation for my lowly birth. Others have called it the badge of my self-creation. Still others have named it a symbol of power, a fetish, a talisman against self-doubt. All these people have one defining trait in common.

They’re idiots.

The circumstances of my birth are irrelevant. I have no need for a “badge” of any kind; I am the proof of my self-creation. And my arm is not, nor has it ever been, a symbol of power, nor of anything else. It’s not a symbol.

It is power.

Most “etherium enhancements” barely warrant the name. Etherium in its unworked state is a soft metal and almost infinitely ductile. Even the richest mages use baser metals that are stronger, and a great deal easier to come by, such as titanium or cobalt. They build their enhancements of these, merely threading the structure through with infinitesimal strands of etherium—only enough to power the enchantments that enable the prosthesis to mimic the function of the part it replaces.

I delved deeply into the mysteries of mana quenching and ætheric tempering, and I invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana-sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles. It is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures—but not for long.

I went days at a time without sleep, learning to use mana to keep myself alert and focused, for my nights were passed risking my life against bandits and my freedom against thief-takers to search out new and ever-larger caches of etherium.

I learned to make my new arm do not only all the work of my old one, but everything else my imagination could devise. Though I am no more gifted a mage than I am a rhabdomant, I again found ways to exploit my minimal talents to accomplish maximal results. When my arm was completed, it comprised more than ten pounds of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip. Merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage—and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.

One black midnight, I alone, without witness, assistant, or aid, performed the ritual that severed my arm of useless flesh and permanently attached the arm that would make a scruffy, ill-fed scrapper’s boy into a man to be reckoned with. A man with the power to revenge injury a thousandfold.

A mage.

When morning came and the Masters saw what I had achieved, they elected to elevate me to Mastery and immediately began preparations for the weeklong ceremony. I thanked them, and walked out from the Guild Hall that same morning, never to return. This time, I did not look back.

I had what I’d wanted from them. Master is just a name. Names are nothing.

Power is everything.

I had not been out of the Mechanists’ Guild a week before I was approached by the Seekers of Carmot.

It seemed the Seekers had been aware of me for some considerable time, as early as the first year of my apprenticeship to the artificer. I later learned that several of the rippers I had killed had been aspiring Seekers. The Anointed Fellows of the Seekers of Carmot had been most impressed, as these aspirants had been possessed of talent for magery in proportion to their avarice … yet they had fallen before a Tidehollow boy whose talent was limited to a knack with gadgets.

When that knack had produced an arm of tempered etherium, the Seekers decided I might be useful, and so allowed me to study at their Academy.

The Seekers of Carmot styled themselves a noble order, committed to the service of all Esper. The carmot from which they’d taken their name was an arcane substance necessary to the production of etherium, some sort of catalyst that allowed the Anointed Fellows to create etherium by infusing æther into sangrite.

They created etherium.

Supposedly.

And they would teach me the secret. Supposedly.

And they were committed to giving etherium away until it became as common as dirt.

Supposedly.

The Seekers of Carmot had been the last thing I’d ever believed in.

When I discovered the truth, I demonstrated to them that my talent wasn’t so much a knack with gadgets as it was a knack for using gadgets to kill people.

In the end, I had come to appreciate my father’s lesson. Only two things would never fail me: death and my right arm.

My arm was everything I had. It was everything I would ever have.

When I awoke in that red crystal cave to find attached to my right shoulder an arm of mere flesh, already corrupt and rotting, that was exactly what had been taken from me.

Everything.

When I regained consciousness, I undertook to examine my new appendage. It appeared, in every functional sense, identical to the one I had severed some years before. Missing were only an array of minor scars across my knuckles and into the palm of my hand—souvenirs of a particularly tricky midnight etherium retrieval—and a much larger scar along my biceps, a knife wound. This scar, while I had still used my flesh arm, had been a useful reminder to never assume I had killed the last bandit.

So: the limb very likely had been regenerated. Another extravagance of power—and an astonishingly potent personal affront. There is literally nothing else that could be done to me that would hurt as much, as deeply, and on so many levels.

Without my real arm, the one I had created, I was nothing more than a Tidehollow scrapper. I had been made into my father.

Except with a better vocabulary.

I tallied up the facts of my situation, relevant to whose prisoner I was most likely to be: life, sanity, nudity, maiming, and the bitterest psychic wound I could even imagine.

Framed in those terms, the conclusion was obvious.

“Bolas.” I said it aloud, but not loudly. I knew I didn’t have to. “I know you’re here.”

As a demon is said to be conjured by the sound of its name, after only a single heartbeat he materialized out of the rose-tinged gloom, all sixty-some-odd feet of twenty-five-thousand-year-old dragon.

“You always were clever,” he said, and casually backhanded me with one wall-size fist so hard that I flew across the cavern, slammed into a jagged wall, and sank to the floor, stunned into immobility.

“Hello, Tezzeret,” said Nicol Bolas. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”