by Cory Herndon
“I haven’t hunted one of your kind in decades,” the elf said as he strolled back around to stare into dead creature’s glassy, clouded, lifeless eyes.
The dead centaur didn’t respond.
“Take heart,” Jarad continued. He ran a hand through tangled black dreadlocks and let a few tracking beetles crawl down his wrist. The Devkarin elf sent the insects a silent command and let them drop to the floor, where they skittered off to pinpoint the location of his true prey. When they had its exact location, their primitive nervous systems would guide him there and help him keep the bait on track. “Your death serves more than one purpose,” he continued. “You’ll be put to good use, and you’ve also convinced me that centaurs aren’t worth hunting.” The elf peered into the dead creature’s eyes for a few more seconds, then his upper lip curled into a mild sneer. “I know you’re in there. Come out if you’re going to.”
Under normal circumstances, a ghostly apparition would appear just after death to harmlessly haunt the places it knew in life, and after a few weeks it would simply fade away. Among “normal” ghosts variations in intensity and longevity meant one never quite knew what to expect when someone died of natural or expected causes. But a being that died of violence, especially unexpected violence that the victim didn’t understand, often emerged as a dangerous phantom, crazed and deadly. It could shatter a living mind with the sheer force of its mental anguish. Sometimes such phantoms latched onto a particular living creature they blamed for their death, but mostly the angry dead just lashed out at anything—living, undead, spectral—that they could hurt. And they could hurt almost anything that had a mind.
The centaur’s corpse glowed blue for a moment, then a twisted, translucent replica slowly rose from the shape and floated above it—a spectral parody of the centaur’s body at the exact moment Jarad had broken its neck. The centaur ghost’s head—the apparition of a head its tortured soul had contrived, at least—hung sideways at a ninety-degree angle, and opened its mouth to scream.
“Now!” Jarad barked. A pair of female elves wearing formfitting leather armor and dark green helmets adorned with beast skulls slipped silently from the walls where they’d hidden in the shadows. Each one held a short staff topped with a writhing cluster of wormlike tentacles that crackled and sparked with necromana. The specter let loose a keening wail, and the tentacles atop the twin staves whipped and thrashed violently. The huntresses thrust the ends of the weapons into the ghost. Without a sound, the thrashing tentacles cut into the ethereal form of the centaur woundseeker and ripped apart its ectoplasmic essence, feeding on it, absorbing it. The huntresses chanted softly in the Devkarin dialect of Elvish, willing the centaur’s enraged spirit to abandon the fight.
The huntresses looked to Jarad expectantly, and he nodded. As one, they whipped the writhing, glowing necroclusters against the broken corpse in the street. The tentacles latched onto the body like hungry octopuses and sunk thousands of tiny teeth into the dead hide. The tentacles slithered like snakes over and around the dead thing, ultimately encasing in it a web of blackish-green growth that was equal parts vine and vein. The huntresses pulled the staves free from the centaur’s new skin, and the ropy growths snapped free of the necroclusters with series of tiny pops.
Jarad waved the huntresses back irritably. The centaur’s body remained still for a moment. Then it began to stir. It struggled to its feet like a drunk in a stupor, and Jarad thought the thing’s forelegs might snap in the process, but the web held the centaur’s reanimated bones together. It emitted a low, strangled, agonized rasp of expelled air through its twisted windpipe. The glassy eyes clouded over and locked on Jarad, and the creature staggered fitfully toward him like a newborn foal. A low moan of hunger, or pain, or perhaps just plain misery escaped its blue lips, and the weblike network of necrotissue pulsed. Its open mouth gnawed at the air.
The new zombie needed to feed, but the Devkarin hunter had no intention of letting it have the chance.
“Stop,” Jarad ordered calmly. The centaur zombie stopped in place and wobbled with confusion as the pale elf’s voice compelled it to do what it most certainly did not want to do. Of course, it had no choice. No zombie created by Devkarin magic could resist the voice of a Devkarin elf.
Jarad called his hunting party together. Along with the two statuesque huntresses, a pair of identical male elves dressed much like Jarad emerged from the shadows. Trasz’s right abdomen, shoulder, and back were covered in black and green ceremonial tattoos, while Zurno wore an almost-identical pattern over the upper-left side of his body. Jarad’s own body was largely free of decoration, with the exception of the skull mask that marked him as huntmaster.
The twins simultaneously placed unreleased arrows back into the quivers on their backs and slung long razorbows over their shoulders. Jarad had never warmed to the ancient, highly accurate weapons traditionally used by Devkarin hunters that doubled as deadly melee weapons if it came to close combat. He preferred his kindjal blade and a traditional elven bow passed down to him by his father.
The masked elf stepped before the undead centaur and placed a hand on its shoulder. Jarad wondered if the hidden eyes that filled the ancient structures all around him, the denizens of this particularly run-down section of Old Rav, thought that the two had somehow patched up their differences. Through the physical contact, Jarad willed the undead creature to see the elf’s true quarry, to sense where the leviathan had made its lair. The weak-minded walking corpse absorbed his empathic commands like a sponge. It turned and staggered down the nearest alley. “Follow,” Jarad ordered the twins. “Don’t let him stray. Stick to the walls and remain silent. Follow the plan.” The twins nodded and departed in silence.
“Huntresses,” the pale elf said quietly. “To your mounts. Follow the Gognir Alley route, and take that second shortcut before you get all the way to the Hellhole. You will strike our quarry from the north, but not until you see me engage. Go.”
“In Savra’s name,” the huntresses barked as one, then retreated down the passage opposite the one the twins had taken to their hunting lizards.
“‘Savra’s name,’” he muttered. He wondered if the huntresses chafed at taking orders from someone outside the priesthood and hoped they did. These two, Dainya and Elga, were among Savra’s favorites.
Jarad cast his empathic sense outward, listening with his mind for the minute waves of thought sent from the tiniest members of his hunting pack. The tracking beetles urged him to look up. Hidden in blackness was another route to his prey that his pets had marked for him. The ancient, crumbling stone pipe had once provided ventilation and waste disposal for the ruined, overgrown building. The pipe wound through the structure like an enormous metal snake. Normally, entering such a passage was extremely dangerous. They were prone to cave-ins and contained vile scavengers that made poor prey, for they were poisonous, diseased, or already dead. But Jarad knew every one of the vent passages beneath Ravnica. He’d been slipping, squeezing, and crawling through them since he was a child, and he was nearing his two hundredth year. He feared nothing within them and often made use of them on long hunts to traverse Old Rav quickly and invisibly. Others did too, of course, but no one knew the extensive network like the leader of the Devkarin hunting party.
But first things first. Jarad whispered a few words of a dark, ancient tongue he’d pried from a dark, ancient elf along with elder’s actual tongue. The pale elf held out his forearm as the spell took hold. Jarad watched his arm fade from pale white to a mottled gray—in fact, the exact gray of the cracked passageway floor—as a chameleonic field enveloped his body.
The visible effects were only part of the enchantment. No matter how tricky his path through the old refuse pipe, he would not make another sound until he willed it. He made no vibrations in the rotting stone with his boot steps. He had no scent. And even if the monster he hunted brushed him with a vile tentacle, it wouldn’t notice he was there.
It was a very useful enchantment. Jarad guarded
it jealously and never spoke the words in the presence of others, especially Savra. If she knew he had this knowledge, she would probably have him executed. It was to the garden-variety chameleon hex what Savra herself was to a garden-variety acolyte.
He clambered up the wall and into the pipe. After a crawl of no more than five minutes, he reached the end of the line, where a cave-in at the building’s center had snapped the pipe cleanly. Jarad poked his head over the side and took in the beast’s lair. The roughly circular gap in the massive old structure hadn’t just caved in the building but had smashed through all the way to the sublevels below. Eventually the tumbling rubble had broken through the ceiling of an ancient cave that might once have been a sewer junction in the pre-Guildpact days.
The cave-in had set free the long-buried, long-slumbering leviathan that Jarad hunted. At first, the gorgon Sisters had attempted to control it as they did most of the Golgari teratogens, but the leviathan’s mind wasn’t susceptible to their considerable powers of persuasion, and with no eyes it was immune to their more well-known petrifaction abilities. The leviathan didn’t have a mind so much as a web of individual nerve clusters in a huge, sluglike body. Vast as it was in physical dimensions, the thing was a simpleton, and it had woken up a hungry simpleton. At first it had consumed only chaff, reckless killguilders, and other nuisances, including an entire pioneering (and foolish) village of goblin homesteaders trying to carve a new cluster of hovels outside of Rakdos influence.
When the Sisters’ teratogen kin began to disappear, however, they turned to their huntmaster. If the thing proved edible, it would be sent to a slaughterhouse. If not, Savra had been ordered to attempt a reanimation that he was certain she would be more than happy to carry out. According to the histories, such a thing had been attempted successfully in the distant past, and the current matka had long hungered to join those legendary figures and write her own great deeds into the sacred Matka Scrolls.
Jarad hoped the leviathan proved edible. The undead were useful, as the centaur’s animated corpse would soon prove. But a creature that fought for its life before its death, he believed, deserved the gift of a true demise. Anything that didn’t fight to survive deserved its fate. When Jarad’s time came, he too would go down fighting. The leviathan would fight too. He was sure of it.
Bait, on the other hand, was bait. The centaur’s life had been practically over. Now it served a purpose. The zombie should have thanked him. Jarad watched the softly groaning bait emerge three levels below his position at the end of the pipe. Trasz and Zurno slipped into the lair opposite the centaur, silent as ghosts, and took their positions in the shadows. The twins clung to the walls and flanked the enormous ring of powerful tentacles around the monster’s mouth. With his lieutenants in position, Jarad left his perch and climbed down one level, then made his way around the rubble until he stood directly above the hulking slug-body.
The leviathan stirred. It detected the twins, but its network of synapses could not figure out why one creature was in two places at once. To a primitive nose—so to speak—the brothers had virtually the same scent. Besides, a much stronger, more pungent scent of food was directly in front of it—something on four legs.
This was the difficult part, the variable the Devkarin hunter couldn’t entirely control. Would the massive tentacled worm be able to detect the still-fresh tinge of death on the centaur? Or would it do what its overpowering instincts were demanding? Jarad bet that the leviathan, simple-minded as it was, would not be able to fight instinct.
He bet right.
The zombie stumbled obliviously forward into the leviathan’s tentacles, which became a writhing mass that enveloped the bait in seconds. The zombie centaur disappeared into the monster’s cavernous mouth.
The pungent morsel gone, the great slug returned to the puzzle of the twins Trasz and Zurno, but its confusion didn’t last long. The leviathan began to spasm and flex, its hide twitching like a dromad shooing flies. It roared in confusion, tentacles thrashing. The bait was now a poison pill.
A living victim bitten by a Golgari zombie soon died of necrobiotic infection and became a deadwalker, a zombie that, not being subject to the reclamation magic of the matka and her huntresses, was completely mindless. Most of the zombies that dwelled and worked in Old Rav were Devkarin-created, but deadwalkers lurked wherever shadows gathered. Bite infection was a much simpler way to create zombies than the one the huntresses and Savra used but left you with a zombie that was much more difficult for a Devkarin to command.
A living thing that consumed a zombie, on the other hand, fared worse. Undead flesh was deadly to most living things. Any halfway intelligent predator knew better than to attempt to take a bite out of a zombie, but the centaur had been fresh, and the simple-minded, giant slug was used to eating whatever was within reach. Jarad felt a momentary wave of sympathetic nausea as waves of mental agony blasted from the ancient beast.
He waited another ten seconds as the leviathan writhed in its lair below. He saw Trasz and Zurno both narrowly dodge flailing tentacles as they climbed higher up the crumbling walls, waiting for his signal. He looked one level up and saw the huntresses astride their giant bat mounts, crossbows cocked. They nodded in unison.
The poisonous zombie flesh had weakened the leviathan, but it was not by any means done for. Jarad leaped from his perch. He drew his long, saberlike kindjal in midair and turned his body into a dive that drove all of his momentum into the blade when he struck. The kindjal penetrated deep into the monster’s thick, black hide, and foul-smelling purple gore erupted around the wound. The oily stuff bubbled up and spewed onto Jarad’s forearms. The Devkarin hunter wrenched the blade free and balanced effortlessly on the leviathan’s rolling back. Again and again he swiped the kindjal into the monster’s primitive spine, and with each slash he dug a trench along its peaked back, destroying the nerve network. Over the leviathan’s death roar he could hear nothing, but he saw a flash of steel and a spray of gore as one of the twins severed a flapping tentacle.
With the three hunters in position, the huntresses’ mounts took to the air and opened fire from high above, circling like vultures. Precisely aimed volleys of poison-tipped bolts pinned instantly paralyzed tentacles to the ground, while dozens of others punctured the leviathan’s hide and sank deep into its flesh. Slowly, the monster’s writhing became less violent, its deafening wail more pitiful. All the while, Jarad continued to hack and slice into the middle of the creature’s back, the toes of his boots thrust into soft greenish blubber to maintain balance. After a few more slashes, he finally exposed proverbial pay dirt. With one hand Jarad pulled away sinewy hunks of slug blubber to expose a thick, black and blue cable of raw nerves as big around as his torso—the leviathan’s spinal cord.
“You fought well, old one,” he said, “but you should consider evolving a brain.” The pale elf raised his gore-covered blade overhead and swung down with all his considerable strength. The blade sliced cleanly through the core of the leviathan’s nervous system, showering the elf with black spinal fluid. The leviathan jerked and twitched even more violently than before. Muscles that flexed primitive breathing organs froze in place, and the tentacles it still had left soon stopped flailing entirely and flopped to the bloody stone.
The huntresses’ mounts were already feeding on a feast of severed tentacles. “No gorging, you two,” he told the huntresses. “Pack it up.” Jarad leaped from the leviathan’s back, landed between the two giant bats, and waved their bloody muzzles away from the fresh meat. “Pack it up,” he repeated, looking them each in the eyes. “Now.”
The huntresses reined their mounts away from the fresh kill. Jarad called the twins over and tasked them with organizing the slaughter. The brothers immediately set off for the main camp to bring in the butchers, and the hunt leader took a few steps back to take in the full majesty of the kill. Such beasts were rare. To find one that had lurked so long under their noses was a unique surprise for him.
The massive slug’
s body filled most of the floor of the crumbling structure. Bits of dust and gravel-sized detritus rained down as its skin flicked here and there against the rubble like a fly-bitten horse as the electric discharge of its mass of nerves escaped into the damp air. Best kill in a decade—at least.
“Return to your mistress,” Jarad said over his shoulder to the huntresses. “The butchers will be here soon, and you are no longer needed.”
“You are certain you have slain this prey,” the taller huntress, Elga, said. It was not a question but a challenge. “If you have failed, we must bring her here.”
“It yet moves,” added the second huntress, Dainya, as if Jarad were an idiot child, a manner he was all too used to from the priestly caste. Jarad detected a hint of fear when the huntress gazed at the leviathan’s sluglike corpse. “It’s … twitching.”
“It is dead,” said a familiar and commanding voice from the shadows above. Savra descended astride a great bat, which settled to the ground in a cloud of dust and folded its wings to allow the matka to dismount. “Trust me, my huntresses.”
Jarad returned Savra’s typically imperious gaze with a tight-lipped smile. Despite her rank, second only to the Sisters themselves, she wore a simple leather garment woven together with elaborate jewelry and totemic icons. The motif carried over to her staff, a tangled web of tiny animal skulls, bird feathers, and the slowly writhing, vinelike bulbs of necroclusters.
“What do you want, Matka?” he asked without preamble.
“Certainly not to spoil your fun,” Savra said. “I trust you are finished here?”
“As you said, the beast is dead,” Jarad replied. “It is meat, and the butchers are on the way. And you have not answered me.”
“Always in such a rush,” the matka said, mewling like a tangle-cat. She stepped close to him and ran an index finger down the long scar that ran along his left jawline. “You’re no fun anymore.”
