Ikoria

by Wizards of the Coast

  IKORIA: LAIR OF BEHEMOTHS – SUNDERED BOND

  by

  Django Wexler

  IKORIA: LAIR OF BEHEMOTHS – SUNDERED BOND

  ©2020 Wizards of the Coast LLC. Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering, Magic, Ikoria, their respective logos, and characters’ names and distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA and other countries. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  www.MagicTheGathering.com

  Written by Django Wexler

  Cover illustration by Chris Rallis

  Special thanks to Jay Annelli, Nat Moes, and Elizabeth Bellisario

  The stories, characters, and incidents mentioned in this publication are entirely fictional.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9780786967162

  eBook edition: April 2020

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  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  About the Author

  Other Magic: The Gathering® Fiction

  Also By Django Wexler

  Chapter One

  Lukka found what he was looking for by following the buzz of carrion flies.

  The sheep lay where it had fallen, hidden in a fold of the gently rolling pasture. Its wooly white coat was splotchy with brown blood, but the only wounds were on its head. The top of its skull had been removed, as neat a job as any Drannith surgeon might have managed, and the brain had been removed. The flies that had led Lukka to the corpse clustered thick around the poor creature’s glassy eyes and lolling tongue.

  A nightmare for certain, Lukka thought, prodding the body with his boot. Flies rose, as if offended, and he waved them away. Anything else would have eaten more of the kill.

  “We’ve got tracks, Captain.”

  Epha sauntered over, giving the dead sheep only a passing glance. She was tiny, head coming only to Lukka’s shoulder, and her cherubic face with its blonde curls led many people to assume she was soft. Lukka, who’d seen her butcher a three-horned charger with a skinning knife, no longer made that mistake.

  “Heading south,” Lukka said. Meaning, toward Drannith, the great city they called home. Meaning, they had a problem.

  “Heading south,” Epha confirmed.

  Lukka grunted, but he wasn’t surprised. Anything that feeds on brains isn’t going to be satisfied with sheep for long.

  They were in the Fourth Ring, the outermost of Drannith’s concentric defensive zones, dedicated to pasturage and timber forests. Squads of soldiers—known to one and all as “Coppercoats” for the copper bands and buttons on their uniforms—patrolled the city by day, and sometimes by night. But the Fourth Ring was too large to sweep entirely, and so it had no permanent human inhabitants. The shepherds and loggers retreated to well-guarded hamlets in the Third Ring at night.

  Lukka had no doubt the monster was heading in that direction as well. When it arrived, there would be carnage. Though any Coppercoat would give their life to defend Drannith from monsters, the local defense forces weren’t equipped to take on something this deadly.

  Fortunately, that’s where we come in.

  “It’ll have gone to ground for the day,” Lukka said, glancing at the sun. “Small chance of finding it in time. We’ll push ahead and let it come to us.”

  Epha would have been within her rights to groan. They’d pushed hard getting out here, and Lukka’s orders meant another long march followed by a sleepless night. But Lukka hadn’t made her his sergeant for nothing. She saluted, fist over heart, and turned away. A moment later, fingers in mouth, she gave a shrill, piercing whistle, a sound that always seemed far too loud to have come from the tiny woman.

  Lukka met up with the rest of his team—formally, the First Special Intercept Squad, though their branch was usually just called the Specials—back at the road. It was broad and well-paved, arrow-straight like all the highways that connected Drannith to its hinterlands, allowing for the rapid movement of troops in an emergency. To either side, the gently rolling fields dotted with clusters of fluffy white sheep gave way to a belt of forests a little farther south. In the other direction, the grassland stretched on forever, broken only by clumps of red-brown hills. That was wild country, the vast wastes of Savai, nothing but dry grass and monsters for hundreds of miles. Here and there, crystal formations rose into sky, facets gleaming white with the light of the afternoon sun.

  The other three members of his team had gathered in response to Epha’s whistle. Gox and Gedra were twins, brother and sister, both over six feet tall and broad to match. Each had the long hilt of a hooked monster-killing greatsword over one shoulder. Beside them, Nik was a slimmer figure, though still a head taller than Epha. Her brilliant crimson hair hung in a business-like queue, tucked under the wide frame of her oversized crossbow. A quiver of bolts like miniature spears hung from her hip.

  All five of them wore heavy coats, symbols of the Drannith military, long leather dusters, with a faceted green crystal on the right shoulder. More crystals secured Lukka’s collar, marking his rank, and all of them were functional as well as decorative—they would glow at the approach of most monsters. It was never a completely reliable warning, but Coppercoats learned to take any advantage they could get.

  Epha repeated Lukka’s orders to the others, and Nik made up for the sergeant’s stoicism with the volume and variety of her curses. Gedra and Gox took the news with a shrug, adjusting their packs and the straps that held their massive weapons in place. After a short rest to wolf down field rations, the squad headed south at a steady pace.

  By the time the setting sun turned the western sky to blood, they were on the outskirts of the forest. Lukka lit a lantern and kept them moving a while longer, as the clouds went from red to purple and finally faded to black. The first stars were twinkling through the branches of the trees when he called a halt, raising the lantern over his head.

  “This should be far enough,” he said. Somewhere to the north, the nightmare would be crawling out of whatever burrow it had found, hungry again and smelling the humans and animals of the villages inside the Third Ring. “Sergeant, find us a good spot.”

  “You got it, Captain.” Epha took the lantern and led the way off the road into the woods.

  “What’re you thinking?” Nik said. “Mid-range pattern?”

  “Close-up,” Lukka said. “Has to be.

  Nik made a face. “That’s dangerous.”

  “No way around it,” Lukka said. “Judging by how much ground it covered yesterday, this thing doesn’t move until full dark. If we keep our distance it might get past us.”

  “And if we get too close someone’s likely to get their face torn off,” Nik said.

  “Cheerful as always,” Lukka said. “I’m the one who’s going to be playing bait, so what do you
have to worry about?”

  “She’s just worried about your pretty face,” Gox put in.

  “Don’t worry, Cap’n,” Gedra said. “I’ll still take you even after you get mangled.”

  “Very generous,” Lukka said dryly. Ever since he’d announced his engagement, Gedra’s teasing had been relentless. “But let’s try to get this done with a minimum of me getting maimed, shall we?”

  “Here,” Epha said, stopping in a small clearing ringed with trees. “This’ll do.”

  Lukka looked the ground over with a practiced eye and nodded. “It will at that. Gox and Gedra on the flanks, Nik to the rear. Sergeant, get set up, then join her.”

  “On it,” Epha said, dropping to one knee and shrugging off her heavy pack. She began extracting the tools of the trapper’s trade: spring-loaded trigger, coils of thin metal wire, barbed hooks attached to spun-steel nets.

  Lukka judged where she was placing the snares, then settled himself against a tree a few yards off. Gedra, abruptly all business, exchanged a few quiet words with her brother and vanished into the trees on one side, Gox taking the other. They moved surprisingly quietly for their size and were soon lost to sight. Nik unshouldered her crossbow and started working the foot-crank to cock it, the mechanism ratcheting back the bowstring inch by inch until it was stiff with barely contained tension. She gave Lukka a nod and vanished into the trees as well.

  “All set, Captain,” Epha said, closing her pack again. To the casual eye, the grass of the clearing was unchanged, but Lukka wouldn’t have wanted to set foot anywhere in it. The sergeant shouldered her pack and came over to him, avoiding her own tripwires. “Ready for the lure?”

  “Open it up, Sergeant. Then get yourself hidden. I want this thing to be nice and focused when it comes in.”

  The order was unnecessary, of course. This wasn’t the first time they’d done this, or even the fiftieth. But it made Lukka feel better to say it out loud. Even after spending half his life in the Coppercoats, and the last two years as a captain in the Specials, moments like this made his pulse race and his palms itch.

  It’s perfectly rational, he told himself, as Epha selected a small jar from among many in her pack. Every monster is different. You never know if this is going to be the one that does something unexpected.

  The jar, when Epha opened it, wafted an incredibly pungent smell into the air, something like a cross between raw onion and rotting meat. Epha took a sniff, found it satisfactory, and set it down in front of Lukka. She offered him a salute, then followed Nik into the trees. Lukka was left alone in the clearing, the lantern sitting as his feet beside the jar of rank stuff.

  Now we just hope this thing likes what it smells.

  A quarter of an hour passed, then another. Lukka’s hands clenched and he rubbed his knuckles against the hilt of the sword at his belt, an old nervous habit.

  If it’s gotten past us… If it doesn’t take the bait…

  A spark gleamed in the depth of the crystal on his shoulder. The faintest light imaginable at first, but it grew steadily to a wan green glow.

  Here we go.

  The nightmare slid into the clearing like an inky shadow, insinuating itself out of the darkness. It was big, taller than a horse and much longer, with eight long legs ending in splayed talons. A snaky whip-tail curved behind it, and its diamond-shaped head rose on a long, sinuous neck studded with bony spikes. Three pairs of red eyes, all glowing like banked embers, topped a long jaw full of corkscrew fangs, with a pair of worm-like tongues threaded between them.

  Lukka hated nightmares. They were less common than cats here in Savai but often more dangerous, and so the Specials were often called in to deal with them. Give me a nice honest cat any day over that.

  The thing had sighted him, turning its head to give all six eyes a look. Its tongues flicked out, tasting the air. Lukka put a hand on his sword as it came forward, moving in gentle curves like an eel rippling through water, body boneless and flexible. Its feet made barely any sound.

  “That’s right,” Lukka muttered. He put his hand on his sword. “Here I am.” He tried not to imagine his own head, surgically opened, brain devoured. “Dinner’s on. Come and get it.”

  The nightmare took a step forward, only yards away now. Then another, gathering itself on its haunches, preparing to pounce on this strange human who inexplicably did not flee. It shifted, ready to leap—

  Epha’s trap went off with a metallic snap. Broad bands of metal netting whipped up from the floor of the clearing, drawn over and around the creature until they pulled tight. Inward-facing barbs dug into its scaly skin, hooks biting deep.

  The nightmare screeched, a warbling two-tone sound like a badly tuned trumpet. It threw itself forward, straining at the net, but the metal wires that connected it to the trees held, branches shuddering with the strength of the creature. Lukka grinned as its foreclaws waved helplessly in the air, a yard in front of him.

  His grin faded rapidly as it managed to work one limb free, dislocating whatever passed for its shoulder. Barbed hooks tore free, trailing black blood, and it lunged for him, claws spread. Lukka barely got his sword out in time, parrying the descending claw, and the strength of the nightmare nearly tore the weapon from his hands. He dropped to one knee, bracing the blade with his off hand, twitching talons only inches from his face.

  “Take it!” Epha yelled.

  Gox and Gedra emerged from the underbrush simultaneously with twin roars. Each swung a massive hooked blade down into the nightmare. The weapons bit deep, carving through dark scales, and the monster screamed again and thrashed in the net, pulling away from Lukka. Its tail curved around, slamming into Gox from behind. He stumbled forward, nearly entangling himself in the net, and the nightmare twisted toward him, jaw gaping. Gedra wrenched her sword free and swung again, nearly severing one of the creature’s hind limbs.

  Lukka sprang to his feet and lunged forward, sword in hand. His weapon sank into the nightmare’s cheek, jamming its head against its body. He held it there, putting all his weight on the blade, as Gox scrambled backward. Claws tore at the turf by his feet.

  “Anytime, Nik!” Lukka shouted.

  “Hold your bloody horses,” the sniper shouted back. “You can’t rush these things.”

  “Would you just shoot it?”

  With Gox out of range, the nightmare twisted back toward Lukka, its strength knocking him off his feet. He scrambled backward in the dirt as it reared over him, his sword still stuck in its head, its maw open wide.

  Nik’s crossbow snapped, and a bolt appeared in the monster’s open mouth, embedded to the fletching in the back of its throat. The impact snapped the creature’s head back, and its body thrashed wildly, but these were its death throes. Its head hit the turf with a thump, jaw still working as the red glow faded from its eyes.

  “Gotta go in through the throat,” Nik said, strolling back into the clearing with her bow over one shoulder. “Too much bone in the way to try it through the forehead. I’d only have pissed it off.”

  “One of these days you’re going to line up the perfect shot after I get my head ripped off,” Lukka said, extending a hand.

  Nik grabbed him and helped him up. “If I do, can I have your extra knife? I’ve always liked the one with the little golden eagle on the hilt.”

  ***

  Epha tried to apologize all the way home.

  “The failure is mine, Captain,” she said. “If my snare had been better positioned–”

  “It wasn’t the position that was the problem, Sergeant,” Lukka said. “That thing moved like it had no bones. You couldn’t have anticipated that.”

  “I could have–”

  “Enough,” Lukka said, clapping her on the shoulder. “The monster’s dead, and we’re not. That’s what matters.”

  “And,” Nik said, “we’ve got four days of leave owing. Four days withou
t anything trying to kill us.”

  “Four days without having to get up at dawn,” Gedra said.

  “Which means four nights of drinking the bloody pub dry,” Gox added.

  “Here’s to that,” Nik said. “There’s a bottle or three with my name on them.”

  Lukka grinned to himself at the banter. Truth be told, he had a bottle waiting as well, top-end stuff from the south he’d talked a trader friend out of. It wasn’t the bottle that haunted his dreams, though, but smooth dark skin and silky raven hair. Four days of leave. There were definitely worse prospects.

  The road grew wider and more heavily trafficked as they made their way south toward Drannith. The Third Ring was more heavily patrolled and dotted with walled and guarded hamlets. The boundary with the Second Ring was marked by a stone wall, eight feet high, with a wall-walk for guards and warning crystals at regular intervals. This was the outer layer of Drannith’s true defenses, intended to turn away smaller creatures. A really large monster could break through but not undetected.

  The guards at the gate saluted smartly as the Specials came through, and admiring glances followed the squad as they passed into the Second Ring. For most Coppercoats, joining the Specials was only a fantasy, but it was rare to find a young soldier who didn’t hope to one day be a part of the elite. That had been Lukka, once. How times change, he thought, as he grinned at a fresh-faced girl in a newly minted uniform.

  The Second Ring was the heart of Drannith’s hinterland, a wide belt of flat country where every available square foot was planted with whatever crops it would support. Vast fields of wheat stretched out from the wall, with hills levelled or terraced into more growing land by generations of hard-working farmers. Where the ground was wrong for grains, there were potatoes or grapevines. Scraps went to pigs and chickens. Everything that could be used, was. The city elders were adamant—today, Drannith might be strong, but the monsters of Ikoria would never stop, and there would come a day when the city needed every bit of its reserves. It was drummed into every schoolchild how close the city had come to destruction, on several occasions, and the need for every citizen to do their part to keep it from ever happening again.