Ravnica

by Cory Herndon

  “A human of your advanced age should not travel far with broken ribs, Lieu—Kos,” Feather interjected. “I can easily return the suspect to the Leaguehall. If you wish, I can have healers sent from the League infirmary.”

  Kos sighed, and winced again. “Thanks, but I’ll make it. It’s time I got back to Borca. Poor bastard’s probably gotten himself a wrist cramp. I’ll probably stop off at the Backwater first.”

  “Should I remind you that drinking on duty is against the rules in the Officer’s Manual?”

  “You can try.”

  Promotion within the League shall be based on meritorious performance in the line of duty.

  —The Wojek Officer’s Manual

  23 ZUUN 9999 Z.C., SUNSET

  “You’re a … you’re an,” Kos raised a hand for a moment, swallowed a hiccup, and drove on, “ugly one, aren’t you?”

  “Sir, now that is uncalled for,” the minotaur said over one shoulder. “Do you mind?” He waved a three-fingered hand at the goblin on the barstool in the seat to his right. “We’re trying to have a conversation here.”

  “Kos, Garulsz make you some coffee,” the bartender said.

  “Garulsz, this is between me and my, my friends and me here,” Kos snarled, waving her off. The ogre barkeep glanced beneath the bar once, then back at Kos, but the wojek had already turned his attention back to the minotaur. “So, someone leave the barn door open or what?”

  “Sir, I’m not sure why you’ve chosen to attempt to start an altercation with us,” said the goblin in the robes of an Izzet Magewright’s apprentice. “But please, we just want to have a quiet drink.”

  “Yeah?” Kos said. “You picked the wrong, the wrong, this is a ’jek bar. ’jeks. You, minoo, minotaur. I’m talking to you.” On “you,” Kos shoved the minotaur’s left shoulder, which sent a tumbler of milk crashing to the floor behind the bar. Garulsz sighed and headed into the back room for her mop as the minotaur slammed both hands down on the bar.

  “Sir!” The minotaur boomed, “I have asked you politely to disengage from this course of action. We have done nothing to disturb you, and I had hoped that we could return peacefully to our conversation.” He slid off the barstool and loomed over Kos. The minotaur snorted and flared his lips to show his teeth.

  “Now, we’re talking,” Kos said, and popped his knuckles—or would have if his hands hadn’t missed each other. He wobbled a bit, pushed back off the bar, and settled into an unsteady boxing stance.

  “I do not wish to fight you, sir, but I will if you continue in this manner. One last time, I ask you, is this the road down which you wish to—Oof!” The bull-headed humanoid doubled over at the waist as his knees collapsed inward, and moaned in stunned agony.

  “That’s a figure of speech,” Kos said. “Shoulda, shoulda said, ‘Now we’re fighting! Next time, I promise.”

  * * * * *

  “How did you get up there?” Borca asked.

  “Kicked a, kicked a—Look, are you going to get me down?” Kos said. He was dizzy, and the blood rushing to his head wasn’t helping any. He waved in the direction of the bar, and the motion sent him spinning lazily in the air. “Garulsz is’n talking. To me. You wanna get me off this or what? I’m getting wax burns.”

  “Hold on,” Borca sighed. He pulled a barstool under the chandelier—the only piece of decorative lighting in the Backwater and fortunately a sturdy piece—and Kos found himself looking almost straight up his partner’s nose. “How do you want to do this?”

  “Just, I ’unno, unhook me.”

  “Right,” Borca said and promptly cut Kos’s belt off with a swipe of his sword.

  Kos had a second to wonder if Gullmott would have appreciated the irony before he hit the floor headfirst. Borca helped him to his feet, but Kos only scowled and clutched his temple.

  “Ow. Really, Borca, just … you couldn’t have … ow,” Kos slurred.

  “Two coffees, Gar,” Borca said and tossed a few coins on the bar. “I’ll make sure he pays for the damages tomorrow.”

  Garulsz looked up from her mopping and rolled her eyes. “Get him stop picking the fights,” she grunted but trundled back with two steaming mugs of impenetrable black liquid. “Milk cheap, lost business expensive. Me go easy on Kos, ’cause me like him. But Garulsz not running gladiator pit. Let him go to Pivlichinos’ if he want fight.”

  Borca added several more coins to the table and nodded. “Mind if we lurk in the corner for a few minutes?”

  The ogress shrugged and returned to the spill.

  “Come on, Lieutenant,” Borca said and led Kos by the shoulder to the usual darkened corner table.

  “Sergeant Borca,” Kos said, making no attempt to hide the irritation in his voice as he slid onto a bench. “You’re interrupting an investigation. What are you doing here?”

  “You’re asking me?” the younger wojek replied incredulously. “Feather reported that you were headed back to the station, Kos. What exactly are you investigating in here anyway? I’m reasonably sure Garulsz hasn’t killed anyone in weeks, but if you keep this up, you’re going to get yourself thrown into Grigor’s Canyon.”

  “Fat man have that right,” the ogress agreed and let the mop lean against the wall so she could return to her true love: smearing her glassware clean.

  Kos looked down at his plain, short-sleeved tunic and saw a void where his badge should have been. He spotted his uniform, badge and all, sitting under his former barstool. He staggered back to retrieve it and pulled it on as he returned to the table.

  “They wouldn’t even fight you if you left that on,” Borca said.

  “That’s the point, Sergeant,” Kos said and took a sip of Garulsz’s potent eye-opener. It helped, but he still felt blurry.

  “But what’s the point of getting your pendrek handed to you on a weekly basis? There’s a gym at the ’hall.”

  “Yeah, but no bar,” Kos said, which to his foggy mind pretty much settled the issue. “Besides, this was, was, an investigation into suspicious activities.”

  Borca handed Kos a silver baton. “Found this on the street outside the theater, where I first went to look for you. Looks like it was left charging. That’s your sigil, right?”

  “Right, as always,” Kos said.

  “You know, one of these days I’m not going to be around to pick up after you,” Borca said.

  “I haven’t needed a mother since my last one dumped me in the Tin Street Market,” Kos said. “I don’t care what you do. You’re—you’re not my partner. One ’jek was my partner. Ever. And he’s dead. You’re someone I work with, not my best friend. Mother-hen someone else.”

  “Drink your coffee,” Borca said. “You’ve got an appointment with the brass.”

  “What’s that to you?”

  “The falcon they sent for you came back.”

  “No falcons are allowed here, not since Hul ended up in the soup.”

  “He was a good bird,” Borca said reflexively.

  “Little stringy,” Kos finished and raised his coffee in a mock salute.

  “So what do they want with you, Kos?”

  “You don’t know?” Kos asked. “I thought you … you were their faithful messenger.”

  “Barely even that,” Borca said. “‘Borca, the falcon came back. Do us a favor and round up your partner.’ And that was after they grilled me about your, er, work habits.”

  “My what?”

  “You heard me.”

  Kos sighed. “Well, did they … did they make it sound urgent?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Good,” Kos said. “Let’s finish our coffee.”

  An hour later, the ogrish coffee had done its work. Kos suspected he still didn’t smell particularly inoffensive, but he could walk without wobbling, and he’d stopped repeating pronouns. In fact, Kos was crossing the line to jittery and finally gave in to curiosity. On their way out the bartender stopped Kos with an unexpected shout that almost gave him a heart attack.

  “No
forget gear, Lieutenant!” There was a thud and a jangle of coins and equipment on the floor behind Kos as the ogress cleared his sliced utility belt and Kos’s assorted accoutrements from her bar. Among them was a bloody minotaur tooth, and Kos left it behind as a tip. He held up the belt, considered it for a moment, then shrugged and slung it over one shoulder. Kos followed Borca into the afternoon sunlight with nary a wobble but with impending anxiety. The brass only called a ’jek to Centerfort for three reasons: hiring, firing, or retiring.

  It was the fourth option, the one that didn’t rhyme and therefore hadn’t become part of what he’d always found a rather misleading wojek saying, that had Kos worried.

  * * * * *

  The two lawmen, one young and ambitious, one feeling older by the second, walked side by side down one of Ravnica’s thousands of elevated thoroughfares. This particular smooth, magically suspended and reinforced bridge led directly to Centerfort, headquarters of the League of Wojek, and they shared it with a few others, mostly fellow ’jeks. Borca made sure to stay a couple of steps ahead, which he seemed to do for no other reason than to get under Kos’s skin.

  Borca showed promise, but at this stage in the game Kos found the man still displayed that special boorishness that came with a mix of youth and responsibilities he hadn’t earned. Maybe it wasn’t an entirely fair assessment, but Kos couldn’t help it. The reaction was knee-jerk, he supposed. Borca was one of the recruits who joined up after the most recent Rakdos uprising only ten years earlier had decimated the ranks of the League. This rebellion was much larger and more widespread than the one that had struck in 9940, just before Kos was promoted to constable. This time hundreds, not dozens, of wojeks had died. It wasn’t easy to work with a partner whose very presence reminded him of dead friends. Especially after what had happened to his first—and last—regular partner.

  He’d long ago figured out why Myczil Zunich had consumed so much bumbat. It was often the only way to deal with everything that got shoveled onto a ’jek lieutenant’s plate and to forget those who weren’t there to help you deal with it anymore. Kos had many such reasons.

  The lieutenant looked down over the side of the path at the darkened lower streets, which were themselves supported by the ancient foundation towers below the city proper. Foggy Grigor’s Canyon sliced like a jagged lightning bolt through the thick concentration of architecture and extended all the way to the northwest edge of the center, where it butted up against the Golgari Orchards, the Swarm’s only major presence on the city’s street level. The metropolis had grown up and around the canyon, which remained because it was the most direct route to Old Rav and the cold, earthen streets of the undercity. Kos watched a Golgari shipping zeppelid rise from the fog and head for a food-storage warehouse not far from the canyon. It left a swirling wake in the roiling mist, which belched up an identical zepp a few seconds later, another link in the chain of commerce that kept the city fed and alive. The second zeppelid opened its wide mouth and whistled a warning to any nearby flyers.

  Kos was thankful that the thoroughfare, a weblike section of the plane’s vast, dedicated road network, was also enchanted to fight feelings of vertigo. From this very spot, one could easily leap into the canyon itself and not stop until reaching the foul depths of Golgari territory. Kos definitely preferred to move about the district at street level, but they were in a hurry.

  The elevated thoroughfare continued on through the oldest spires, the towers that ringed central Ravnica. Tiny, spiky parapets and the silhouettes of the mighty stone titans bit into the lower half of the sun’s orb as it set in the west, and soon the horizon swallowed the last remaining natural light. Sunset faded to dusk, and the lights of the city sprang into existence above, below, and all around the wojeks. The transformation was a nightly wonder that had filled Kos with a little bit of awe ever since he’d first seen the night lights of the district as a child. Still a bit soggy with drink, he stared a bit too long at one tower and caught himself before he took a step right over the side.

  All right. Eyes on the road, Kos, view or no view.

  They reached a five-way intersection where the elevated thoroughfares abruptly ended at the boundary that marked the Center of Ravnica. The hub of the great city, and indeed of the entire plane, was also one of the only exposed areas of Ravnica’s original surface of any appreciable size left in the entire world, and to keep it as such, bridges and walkways there were not allowed to come between the exposed earth and the sky. It was certainly the only such open area that remained in the middle of a densely populated free zone. It was technically the top of a mountain that had its base in the undercity, where development and mining had whittled the ancient peak into more of a giant column housing the Hellhole, where the Rakdos cultists thrived in their mines. The Rakdos inside the disappearing mountain kept apart from the Golgari all around them with a continually eroding wall of stone.

  Up here at street level, the top of the mountain was flat, solid ground, and here the guilds had built many of their most important monuments and halls. Kos followed Borca down the spiraling path to the edge of Rokiric Pavilion and took in the full majesty of Centerfort.

  Even in his current half-drunken state and bitter disposition, Kos was awestruck as usual at the sight of the Tenth’s stone titan, Zobor. The giant stone warrior stood astride the open square named for the legendary wojek who had brought the titans to the city as its ultimate line of defense against invasion. Part monument, part deterrent against those who would challenge the League’s authority, the colossus also formed a triumphal arch that led to the wide marble steps of Centerfort. The pavilion was more densely populated than usual, filled with tourists from all nine guilds milling about in confused groups, pointing at Zobor, the nearby Hall of Judgment, and other landmarks visible from the open square. The other nine titans ringed the city, but this one old Rokiric had left to defend the defenders. The wojeks were the law in the City of Ravnica, and the law needed the appearance of invulnerability. Zobor was invulnerability encased in steel and magic.

  By the time the soles of Kos’s boots struck the baked-earth surface of the pavilion, the sun had disappeared behind the western spires. The onset of dusk triggered the house-sized glowposts that ringed the ’Fort, and their beams probed the sky like a silent fanfare for the ceremony Kos both suspected and feared.

  They entered through the reception lobby, passing by the new academy graduates putting in mandatory guard duty in their dress uniforms. Another hallway led past the holding cells, where suspected violators awaited removal to their trials. Beyond the jail, a gear-driven lift took them to the tenth floor of Centerfort’s central tower on Borca’s spoken command. On the way they passed several levels filled with clerks and bureaucracy. Kos held his breath to listen as they left the offices and passed through the cacophonous sixth and seventh floors, the reinforced cells that provided a last resort for the League when they needed to restrain especially powerful or supernatural prisoners.

  “Holding cells sound more packed than usual for this time of year,” Kos said.

  “Suppose so,” Borca replied with a shrug. “Not our fault if the High Judges can’t work fast enough. More than that, though, it’s that bloody Decamillennial.”

  “You surprise me, Sergeant,” Kos said. “Would have thought a dedicated ’jek like you would already be polishing his star for the parade.”

  “You don’t know me much,” Borca said. “The tourists, the general disorder, it’s not making anyone’s job easy. Especially when the best street ’jek is sitting around drinking himself to death at the Backwater.”

  “Whoa there, Sarge,” Kos said. “Think you’d better just turn around before you head down that particular alley.”

  “Nothing personal,” Borca said, but Kos thought he detected the faintest satisfaction that the fat man had finally, really gotten under Kos’s skin. “Just chatting with a fellow wojek about how many extra violations we’ve been seeing around here. Look, we’re not best friends, Kos, a
nd I don’t think we’re going to be, but you’ve got the best clearance rate in the Tenth. That, and your eternally sunny disposition, are the only reasons I haven’t requested a transfer to another shift. But you’re starting to slip.”

  “Didn’t know you cared.”

  “You start slipping, Kos, and it gets noticed.”

  More crime, more criminals, visiting dignitaries from all over the plane … His clearance rate was still good but slipping. Was that worth the brass’s attention? Kos couldn’t remember the last time a single wojek had been specifically called before the assembled brass—it was the job of the shift captains to deal with the bureaucrats so the field officers could do their jobs.

  An idea was forming about why he’d been called here, and he didn’t like it.

  At long last they arrived at the long, carpeted, cavernous hall that lead to the Brass Chamber, another carpeted affair lined with busts and guards.

  The sculpted busts depicted great wojek commanders-general. There was Ferrous Rokiric, who brought the stone titans to Ravnica in the fourth century of the first millennium. Kos couldn’t imagine what the district looked like before the massive stone guardians took their permanent guard posts around it, serving as both city wall and first line of defense against attack. Here was Wyoryn’vili, the only viashino commander-general to date. He fell defending Centerfort from another Rakdos rebellion, this one back in the year 6342. As they reached the door, Kos nodded at the bust of Wilmer Ordinescu, the commander-general who had signed the order making Kos the partner-apprentice of Myczil Zunich. He’d also read the eulogy at Zunich’s funeral. Great leaders all, and many had served during a time when the job of commander-general was much more “general” than “commander.”