by Cory Herndon
“Congratulations,” Gharti said. “Both of you.”
“Yes, congratulations,” Valenco added. She was the first to offer Kos her hand, and not the last. The quietman never moved from his spot or reacted in the slightest. Kos was sure he could feel the quietman’s blank face staring into his back as he and Borca filed out of the hall and through the gold-plated doors. The effect on Kos’s nerves was not unlike a shot of ogrish coffee.
* * * * *
By the time Kos and Borca returned to the Tenth, the shift was almost over, so they wrapped up a bit of open scrollwork and headed their separate ways. For the first time in a while, Kos didn’t feel like heading to the Backwater. Instead he followed the winding alleys from the ’hall to the residential tower where he’d rented an apartment at a ’jek discount since his most recent former spouse had gotten both an Orzhov lawmage and a civil court ruling granting her the house on Farv Street. One more marriage and he’d be living in the barracks with the recruits and guards.
If he hadn’t dropped his key to the tower, he might not have spotted the pale, translucent form at the end of the alley adjoining his apartment building. The ghost had the appearance of a wojek lieutenant, bald, with a full handlebar mustache.
“Mycz?” Kos whispered. He left the key and bolted down the alley toward the specter but slipped on a piece of garbage and stumbled, catching himself just before he went down. When he raised his head again, the figure had disappeared.
Myczil Zunich had been dead for fifty-seven years. Kos knew that without a doubt. He’d seen it happen. He’d seen Zunich’s ghost, watched it disappear into the street and fade into nothingness. Fifty-seven years ago. Ghosts simply didn’t last that long in Ravnica. Everyone knew that. It was impossible, a hallucination borne of the guilt that had been brought to the surface again by his promotion, which went against everything Zunich had ever taught him. And even after eight decades, that guilt had the power to surge back to life at the slightest provocation.
After all, Kos had killed Zunich himself.
Kos shook his head, turned, and walked back to his dropped key. The first heavy drops of rain began to fall, and Kos stood for a long time watching the cold downpour before he finally opened the door and stepped inside.
No guild may control access to or travel upon any road, street, or thoroughfare designated a part of the Great Arterial Network.
—Guildpact Amendment VII (the “Ledev Act”)
23 ZUUN 9999 Z.C., EVENING
Night settled over the City of Ravnica like a muggy woolen blanket. The black towers lit up the sky with millions of lights that gave the metropolis a hazy rainbow glow. The stone titans looked like minor gods astride the beating heart of a magical lost world. Fonn supposed that was as good a comparison as any. The young half-elf had managed to steer clear of the city for decades, but the opportunity to safeguard an actual member of the Selesnya Conclave—and one of the only ones who regularly left the safety of Vitu Ghazi to represent the Conclave’s interests all over the plane—had been an honor no ledev guardian could refuse. The road to the city that had birthed her had been a long one, in distance and in years. To Biracazir, the goldenhide wolf beneath her, it was just the end of another long journey in a series of long journeys.
Fonn leaned forward in her saddle and whispered into the ear of the mount that carried her along the ancient cobblestones. “There it is, Bir,” she whispered. “Keep your nose sharp.” Biracazir the wolf replied—after a fashion—with a soft sound that was half canine bark, half relieved huff.
“What was that, Fonn?”
“Holiness, I see our destination,” she said. The loxodon who walked at her side raised his elephantine head and cast white, sightless eyes toward the metropolitan vista. The white orbs formed two points of a triangular tattoo that covered his gray, leathery face. The top point of the triangle was a pale green gemstone set into Bayul’s hide between his wide, gently flapping ears. Without slowing his measured, heavy steps, he nodded and patted the wolf’s neck.
“I am glad,” he said, his cavernous voice simultaneously commanding and as gentle as a dryad’s song. His white linen robes whipped in the cool breeze that followed at their backs. “I had thought we might not make our appointment.”
“You are faster than you look, Holiness,” Fonn said.
Fonn had offered her saddle to Saint Bayul at the start of their journey as a necessary courtesy, but her charge, who massed half again as much as Biracazir, had politely refused. His people were not built for riding. “It’s a trade-off, my ledev friend,” Bayul had said at the time. “This trunk will kill me someday, but these old feet will keep on walking.”
“I fear the air has not gotten much better,” the loxodon now said and trumpeted a sneeze as if on cue. “I have been away from the City of Ravnica for a long time. I had forgotten.”
Fonn almost sneezed too but stifled it. This close to the metropolis, the smog and soot of Ravnica’s mighty civilization was a palpable thing. It was even worse for Bayul, of course. The loxodon trunk, which contained a hundred times the sensitive nasal tissue of any other humanoid species, found the smell ultimately deadly. Ravnica herself was killing off the loxodons.
“I was born here, but I barely remember it,” Fonn said.
“Your family left for greener lands?” Bayul asked. He was naturally curious and had been quizzing Fonn about her past for much of the trip.
“What green lands?” Fonn asked, changing the subject. She hadn’t spoken so much on the topic of “Fonn” in her entire life, but something about the loxodon—something magical, but also something more basic and instinctive than that—usually made her want to reveal everything about herself. The topic of family, however, was not her favorite. Not that it was easy to resist the gentle questions of her charge.
“That is no answer,” Bayul chided.
“My family is the ledev guard, Holiness,” she said. “My father and mother are … gone.”
“I feared as much,” Bayul said. “Were they not both protectors of the law?”
“My father was a wojek,” Fonn said, not bothering to add that both her parents were dead. “My mother was a ledev, like me.”
“I sensed dedication and duty in your soul, Fonn,” Bayul said as they crested the rise. “It is—Wait.” The loxodon’s trunk curled, a sign he was searching the air with his sensitive nose even as he stretched out with other senses. He stopped short, bringing Fonn and Biracazir to a halt with a raised walking stick. “There are—yes. Someone nearby means us harm.”
“Where?” Fonn asked—there was little point in whispering in the middle of the busy road—and quickly scanned their surroundings with sharp eyes and sharper ears, a gift from her mother, who had been a Silhana elf as well as a ledev. The low buildings and residential districts that ringed the central city could hold any number of attackers. The goblin selling meatsticks could be an assassin. The young human couple walking toward them, lost in each other’s eyes, might be hiding poison-tipped daggers beneath their colorful cloaks. That trio of riders on pterroback, whose silhouettes briefly covered the moon, could be moving in for the strike, hoping the darkness and haze would keep them hidden until the fatal moment.
No, they were moving in for the strike.
“Get down!” Fonn cried. She leaped from Biracazir’s back and slammed into the bulk of the big loxodon. Bayul, fortunately, didn’t resist and let himself be carried down to the ground by her tackle. If he hadn’t it would have been like diving head-on into a tree trunk. As they hit the stone, the lead pterro rider swooped just over their heads, his ululating shout warning her just how close they had come to taking her charge’s head off. She decided to show the Gruul what happened to thieves who attacked a member of the Selesnya Conclave.
A gloved hand shot straight up and latched around the tip of the creature’s membranous wing. Without moving from her prone position, she let the attacker’s momentum swing it over the fulcrum her weight created. The pterro’s beak shattere
d upon impact with the road, and its own body weight snapped its neck quickly and cleanly. The hard landing launched the rider into the air. He flew a little farther, then slammed into the goblin’s meat cart, where he twitched amid the tangled remains of the vending stall. The goblin launched a string of curses as he fled for his life.
Fonn was on her feet before the second pterro was close enough to force her back down. “Please stay where you are, Holiness,” she said.
“Not a problem,” the loxodon said.
The young half-elf tucked a long lock of blonde hair behind a one ear and clicked her tongue twice against the inside of her cheek. Biracazir the wolf immediately snapped to attention and locked eyes with her. With a snap of her head Fonn indicated the incoming second rider, who was ululating even louder than the first. These guys, she thought, really need to learn to coordinate their attacks. She suspected they were a young gang trying to prove themselves. She didn’t feel like being, or letting her holy charge become, the object lesson they were looking for.
But it would be a lesson, all right, if any of the idiots lived.
“Hey!” Fonn shouted at the rider as she drew her silver long sword. The Gruul, a viashino female, did exactly what the ledev had hoped and turned her reptilian eyes from Bayul to Fonn for a few seconds.
That was all the time Biracazir needed. The wolf launched himself into the air with a roar as soon as the pterro got within leaping range. His open jaws latched around the pterro’s long, spindly neck and clamped down with enough pressure, Fonn knew, to snap a human leg in two. The neck wasn’t as sturdy as that. The big wolf landed in a skid on the slick stone street, a bloody, beaked prize the size of Fonn’s upper torso clutched in its teeth.
The headless pterro crashed. Its screaming rider made a desperate effort to leap free of the saddle only to find herself impaled on the end of Fonn’s blade. Fonn kicked the dying viashino off her sword and whirled to scan the sky. The third flyer was circling, though whether the Gruul sought an opening to attack or not was debatable.
Fonn pulled the longbow from her back, nocked an arrow, and drew a bead on the human rider, a burly-looking Gruul covered in tattoos and ritual scars. That one had to be the leader, letting his subordinates test the waters before closing in for the strike. She doubted the sky pirate had planned on making the last assault himself. Before the Gruul could make up his mind, she let the arrow fly whistling into the sky.
It caught the rider in the midsection. He slumped in the saddle, then slid over sideways and dropped off the pterro’s back. The Gruul struck the sagging, slanted rooftop of a nearby tavern and rolled down the slope, over the awning, and all the way to the ground. Along the way the arrow in his side broke off, leaving a jagged sliver of wood oozing blood into his homespun leather vest. The wheezing man came to rest at Fonn’s feet. His mount wheeled overhead one more time and, with a croaking call tinged with something like relief, flapped away into the evening fog. Within seconds it was heading south and soon disappeared.
The Gruul stared up at Fonn with fury in his eyes, but the magically treated arrow had paralyzed his muscles and would keep him immobile for two, maybe three minutes. Perhaps even a little longer. The fall hadn’t done the bandit any good, judging from the way his left leg was twisted beneath him.
Fonn sighed. She doubted the criminal would live. He didn’t look like the type to confess, and a ledev guardian returned blood with blood if an attacker could not be convinced to see the wisdom of the Selesnyan way.
The half-elf had never been a very good missionary. She placed a boot on the paralyzed rider’s chest and leaned half of her weight onto it, enough to make the arrowhead jab into his abdomen. The Gruul’s mad eyes bulged and his gasps became a barking snarl.
“Hello,” Fonn said pleasantly as she placed the tip of her sword under his beard and against his throat. “You’ve got ten seconds to tell me who you are and why you’ve attacked us. Surprise me, and I’ll let you go back to warn your friends about your foolish decision and to tell them how you’ve seen the light. You see, I worship life. I’ve been told I’m not as devout as I could be though.” A second passed, then another. “You probably think I’m conflicted about whether to kill you. You might think, hey, a ledev. She’s no wojek. She’s Selesnyan. She’s a servant of life.” Six, seven. “You’d be right. My friend here? He is life. You just tried to kill him. So your life doesn’t mean a thing to me.” Nine.
The Gruul opened his jagged mouth to reveal all three of his remaining teeth. “Mat’selesnya was a whore of Cisa—”
“What are you doing?” A man’s voice called from down the street. Fonn looked away from the Gruul just long enough to see a Hazda deputy had chosen that moment to step through the swinging tavern doors nearby and onto the street.
“Help!” the bearded Gruul croaked.
The volunteer lawman drew his short sword in a manner that told Fonn the man hadn’t seen much more training than a first-year ledev recruit. He was bold, she had to give him that—the deputy was just pointing the sword at the wrong person. “Drop your blade, elf, until I can sort this—”
A dagger appeared as if by magic in the deputy’s neck and cut off the Hazda’s warning. His eyes grew wide, and he clutched at the blade for a half second before his legs gave out and he collapsed face-first onto the stone. The deputy’s blood poured into the street from between his clenched fingers.
Fonn tracked the dagger’s flight path to a dark, cloaked shape that emerged from another nearby alley. In her experience, no one up to anything good ever wore a dark cloak, and she soon saw she was right. Another knife blade flashed in the figure’s pale hand. The blurry shape was enchanted with some kind of obscuring magic that made it a smoky, hooded smear against the soot-blackened stone of this industrial suburb. It moved, fast as a cat, to a nearby ladder that hung down into the alley and scampered up the wall.
“The whore of Vitu Ghazi awaits the tender—”
Fonn pulled the Gruul up by the front of his shirt and ended his vile ranting with a solid right hook. She set the unconscious rider down probably more gently than he deserved.
“Holiness, may I ask that you keep an eye on this hairball? Don’t let him go anywhere. I want to ask him a few more questions.”
“As do I,” Bayul said and replaced Fonn’s boot with the end of his walking stick. “Be quick—the other one’s halfway up the wall.”
“Yes, Holiness,” Fonn said and placed a hand on the wolf’s muzzle. “Bir, keep an eye on Bayul.” The wolf blinked once in understanding. He could not speak, and Fonn didn’t think he really understood the common Ravi tongue, but he was so well trained that it was often hard to remember. The wolf walked to Bayul’s side and sat, alert, and gave a low growl when the Gruul on the ground tried to move again.
Fonn was already at the mouth of the alley. She shot a look down into the darkness, but her excellent night vision—only half as sharp as a full-blooded Silhana but much sharper than an average human’s—picked out no immediate threats. Just junk, shanties, and the usual chaff. She crouched beneath the ladder, leaped up to the bottom rung, and clambered after the cloaked assassin.
It wasn’t like the Gruul to use hidden killers. The clans viewed such ambushes as cowardly and beneath their honor. Why was this shadowy figure aiding a seemingly average gang of Gruul pterro riders? Fonn took her eyes off the figure scaling the ladder above—she was keeping pace with him but just barely—to check on Bayul and Biracazir. The loxodon had moved to the fallen Hazda, while the wolf had his jaws hanging open over the Gruul’s face, panting and drooling.
Biracazir would never kill the man arbitrarily, not unless his mistress so ordered, but the fallen pirate wasn’t going anywhere even after the paralyzing effect of the arrow wore off. Fonn hoped Bayul knew what he was doing. She was too far away to get to him if another hidden assassin was on the ground. Speaking of which …
The smoky shape above her made it to the top of the ladder and slipped over the edge of the roof an
d out of sight. She went a little farther, until she was about a body length from the top. There were two ways the assassin was likely to play this. He would either wait for Fonn to climb up the rest of the way and deal with her when she got to the top, or he was already gone, and there was little chance she would be able to track him over the city rooftops at night. Not with that enchantment and the thickening fog.
He’d killed the Hazda, and he hadn’t needed to. The assassin revealed himself for a reason, because he thought Fonn was too young, or maybe just too aggressive, to resist giving chase. If he’d run off, she would hang up her spurs. Her quarry was leading Fonn by the nose. She needed to try something he wasn’t expecting since he seemed to have anticipated her every move so far.
The ledev guardian brought her left leg up and hooked it on one rung of the ladder and braced the other one two rungs down from that. This let Fonn release her grip and use her hands to pull the longbow off her shoulder, followed by an arrow. Abdominal muscles straining with tension as tight as the drawn bowstring, she let her upper body hang almost horizontally, fixed to the wall and ladder with her legs, and waited for the shape to reappear when he realized she wasn’t following him.
After a few seconds, Fonn began to have her doubts. Maybe the assassin was gone. The tension on her stomach muscles and the arms that held the arrow ready made her shake.
Just before she was about to pull herself back to the ladder and climb back down to aid Bayul with the Hazda, she saw a pale, ghostly skull face beneath a black hood appear at the top of the ladder. She shot her arrow and struck it in the left eye, sending blood raining down on Fonn. The figure screamed briefly and died in an instant as the arrow’s flanged head pulped the center of its brain. Before Fonn could sling the bow and pull herself to the ladder, the assassin’s corpse tumbled forward and over the edge, straight for her.
“Oh, dra—” Fonn managed to get out before the cloaked body collided with her chest. The impact knocked the bow from her hand and wrenched her legs free of the ladder, and together the ledev and the corpse of the assassin plummeted into a soggy mound of garbage and refuse with a wet thud. The quiver of arrows on her back crunched painfully beneath her.
