Ravnica

by Cory Herndon

  “Kos!” Nollikob said. “Sorry, didn’t know it was—”

  “Later, Kob,” Kos said. “Send a bill to Sergeant Ringor, Tenth Leaguehall. Wojek business.”

  The goblin was gone. The ’jek tried to find some sign of his suspect in the market, but the market reacted to the chaos Kos himself had just caused by, as usual, closing in to see the show. It created a wall of people beyond which Kos couldn’t see anything. If the little killer found his way into the Hellhole, it wasn’t going to be easy to drag him back out.

  There. A small, familiar shape popped up above the teeming heads as it leaped over a wooden dividing wall. Goblins were excellent climbers, better than Kos, so he maneuvered around the wall to an archway that should let him intercept the goblin before the creature made it to the other side.

  He’d guessed right. The goblin almost slammed into him, still looking back over its shoulder at the wall it had expected Kos to be scaling right about then. As the creature realized its predicament, Kos brought his right knee up into the goblin’s face. He heard a porcine squeal and felt a crunch of breaking bone and teeth. “That was for Luda,” he growled. The goblin cursed him in its guttural tongue and bounced onto its back before Kos could get hold of him, then tightened its body into a little black ball and rolled onto its feet. “Ha!” it squeaked and waved its right hand in a quick, tiny hex. A small orange ball of energy materialized and hit Kos full in the chest, knocking him back into a stack of barrels that naturally collapsed on his head.

  By the time he freed himself, Kos was sure the goblin would be long gone. But to his surprise, he spotted his quarry clinging to an old stone column ahead. It looked like he was heading to the roof of a nearby eatery, from which Kos knew he’d be able to reach an alley, then a tunnel, that led to the Hellhole. Kos was about to lose him. As he ran toward the column and the climbing goblin, he snapped the pendrek into wand configuration. Or tried to, anyway. The hilt clicked twice, but he could feel that the charge hadn’t activated.

  The battery. He still hadn’t replaced the one he’d given Luda. He fumbled at his belt, clearing a path through the marketplace with his shoulders, and shouted apologies as his fingertips closed around a cold, faceted lump of compressed magic. It slid into the socket on the pendrek’s hilt with a soft click and the weapon hummed to life.

  Kos steadied the pendrek on one forearm and aimed along the length of the baton. He drew a bead on the goblin, and adjusted for distance. “Davatsei.”

  A blast of energy vaulted from the pendrek and sailed for the murderous creature, which, having received ample warning of Kos’s intentions, laughed and released its grip on the column just in time. It dropped into the crowd while Kos’s shot dissipated harmlessly into the stone column in a glitter of blue sparks.

  “Wojek business! Excuse me!” Kos cried, forcing his way through the thick, aromatic crowd. “Out of the way!” A path parted ahead of Kos and he charged through it. The goblin had slowed to scramble up another stone wall that sheltered one of the dozens of specialty cafes that littered Tin Street. A painted sign declared in bright green lettering that the place was Aul House, a loxodon-run vegetarian café.

  “Davatsei!” Kos barked. The baton sent another blast of energy straight and true, but again the goblin reached safety just in time. It tumbled over the top of the wall, its cloak flaring like bat wings to expose a pair of glowing orange orbs strapped to its back. Kos’s shot slammed into the wall and cracked the bricks in a radial pattern that left a small, smoldering patch that glowed briefly and went out with a puff of gray smoke.

  Kos recognized the orbs on the back of the goblin. He hadn’t seen the like in ten years, since the Rakdos revolt. He was lucky he’d missed, and so was everyone in the immediate vicinity. Like Kos’s pendrek, or the ancient bomb that had created the quarry, those orbs were weapons that could be triggered with a code word, but a submission blast could also have set them off. From the glimpse he got, it was hard to guess how much explosive power each of the orbs contained. They might have flattened the entire market, or they might have simply obliterated their wearer. Such magic was tricky stuff.

  Kos clicked the baton hilt and powered it down. He swore and pulled himself over the smoldering wall.

  Kos caught sight of Borca as soon as he’d cleared the wall. His partner was standing at a table, speaking to a loxodon in a white robe. No, not just a loxodon—the loxodon. The triangle tattoo and the gemstone in his forehead marked the elephantine giant as Saint Bayul of the Selesnya Conclave, and the ledev guard seated at his side was a dead giveaway that the Conclave’s holy ambassador to the City of Ravnica was either setting out on or returning from a journey. The ledev’s mount must be hitched outside the café. The loxodon patiently listened to Borca, but the ledev seemed to be looking for someone else while she kept one eye on Borca. Kos couldn’t understand how the Sergeant had gotten there so quickly, or why.

  Kos took in the rest of the crowd with a trained eye. A young couple cuddled over tea in the corner. The table with the loxodon, ledev, and Borca. A family of tourists with a screaming child. Four empty tables, two servers, a cook, and a host. Something flickered in Kos’s vision, and he briefly thought he caught sight of a fourth figure at the loxo’s table. A second later it flickered again and blended into the wall like a smoky blur, but Kos could detect a faintly humanoid outline that moved every few seconds against the decorative wallpaper. Someone was using a chameleon hex, and neither the ledev nor Saint Bayul seemed aware of it.

  “Where is the goblin?” Kos muttered. As if in answer Kos heard the young couple scream as the goblin emerged from the crowd near their table, and the goblin screamed right back. The couple cowered at their corner table. The family soon joined suit in the screaming, then the goblin spotted Kos.

  The lieutenant maneuvered through the tables after the scuttling, bomb-laden creature and shouted at his partner, who was supposed to be looking after a dead girl’s corpse. “Borca! Heads up!”

  The shout was all the distraction the goblin needed to overturn a table and roll it into Kos’s path. The ’jek tried to dodge the rolling café furniture but only succeeded in slipping on spilled food and drink, crashing face-first into the table anyway.

  He felt warm blood flow freely from his left nostril and bottom lip but ignored that and the jarring pain to push himself back onto his knees. The goblin had almost reached Borca and the loxodon’s table, but only the latter seemed to see the goblin approaching. It coiled its trunk in alarm, which brought the ledev to her feet in an instant, but the shadowy chameleon-hexed figure chose that moment to strike, shoving her to the ground. The shadow enveloped the woman like an oily cloud, but it was a cloud that might have—must have—contained a person.

  Before Kos could begin to figure out that bit of strangeness, the Rakdos goblin reached the table. Kos managed to regain his feet and take three steps before the goblin launched itself into the air and onto Borca.

  “Rakdos Kahzak!” the goblin cried.

  Borca and the goblin disappeared in a blinding orange flash. The last thing Kos saw was the loxodon’s shattered corpse flying straight at him, spraying blood that ignited in midair like fireworks on a goblin holiday. Then the loxodon’s broken husk struck Kos, the wojek’s head connected with wet stone, a wave of unbelievable heat washed over him, and he lost the battle for consciousness.

  The Dimir, the so-called ‘Tenth Guild,’ is a fiction concocted to frighten children and those with the minds of children—a useful fiction.

  —First Judge Azorius (47 R.C.–98 Z.C.),

  from the Guildpact Statutes appendixes

  24 ZUUN 9999 Z.C., JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT

  Savra’s mount shrieked. It was hungry and searching for food as its kind always had, with sharp calls and sharper hearing. There was no food to find here, and she willed the beast to resist the hunger. She tugged at the reins and wheeled the giant bat in a slow, descending spiral within the skyscraping walls of Grigor’s Canyon, whispering in its ear, �
��Patience. There is food below.”

  The Devkarin matka let the bat control the descent, the better to avoid the jagged metal outcrops and hidden predators that hunted the foggy depths, while she guided the creature toward their destination with soft mental commands and pressure from her knees. The mount was a little easier to control than her brother, but the methods used were not dissimilar.

  Those who lived in Ravnica proper had long assumed Grigor’s Canyon, the great crack that ran through the city’s densely packed buildings and towers, existed solely to serve as the main shipping route between the Golgari realm of Old Rav and the street dwellers above. Even most Golgari assumed the canyon only extended a little way below the submetropolis. In truth, the canyon was much, much deeper. Beneath the thick fog, the canyon descended to a realm that had been ancient when the ink on the ten-thousand-year-old Guildpact had yet to dry. The roiling mist, much thicker and more imposing than what one could see from street-level Ravnica, prevented any but the most foolhardy and bold from plumbing its secrets. Few Golgari tried.

  Savra was one of them, and she had found something wonderful. Someone wonderful, rather, hidden in a deep, cold place that seethed with dark power unlike anything the high priestess had touched in all her two hundred years. One could not enter this realm without the permission of its master.

  Savra had been found more than worthy. He had found her worthy.

  She and her mount broke through the fog and into cold, lightless night. The darkness felt palpable against her skin, and even her sharp eyes couldn’t pick out more than a few odd shapes—an archway, lit from the side by a distant blue flicker; a toppled statue, its mouth open in a permanent scream; the flicker of a wave on a clear, black pool of blacker water.

  Savra pulled the fur cloak tight around her shoulders and let her mount send out a few inaudible hunting cries. The beast hadn’t fed in hours, and while the bat snapped up a few large, buzzing beetlelike things Savra couldn’t see, she closed her eyes and silently called to her fellow conspirator. Her ally’s home was impossible to find without his direct assistance because, he’d told her, his power of concealment was so great that even those who had been there could not find it again on their own. Occasionally those from above might stray into the depths of the canyon, but even if they survived the other things that lived and hunted down there, they’d never find his palace.

  Savra loved him more than her own life. It was the only word for the feeling she felt for him, but it was not a romantic love. It was more like the relationship, she imagined, between a god and his chosen prophetess, an assessment much more accurate than she realized.

  Here, child, the voice whispered in her mind. It was seductive, terrifying, and more glorious every time Savra heard it. The voice made her want to do anything to help him. The voice cleared the fog from her vision and presented a dimly lit tunnel yawning before her. At the end of the tunnel, tiny at this distance, was her ally’s frozen, albeit palatial, prison.

  He called to her again, and Savra nudged the bat down the softly glowing blue tunnel.

  A few minutes later she exited into a cavernous hall that had once been the junction point for a sewer system that few in Ravnica, let alone Old Rav, knew existed. She led the bat to a perch near the peaked gate and left it to hunt what insects it could find. The bat wouldn’t stray far from his mistress.

  The gates parted before her, and the soft blue glow grew brighter in welcome. She stepped inside and followed her love’s call.

  He was, as always, standing in the empty central hall of the palace. Even beneath the giant stained-glass figures of his long-dead kin and the towers of frozen corpses that provided her ally with sustenance during his long exile, he seemed taller and greater than all the rest combined. He was the last of his kind. He was magnificent.

  “The loxodon is dead, and Jarad is dealt with,” she said without preamble or explanation.

  “Well done,” the tall, hooded figure whispered. He always whispered, even when he only spoke to Savra in her mind. “Sending your own blood to his death takes a special kind of courage. And with it, you have carved out your place. Soon you will take it.”

  “It is time for the next step,” Savra said.

  “It is time for you to challenge the Sisters,” he concurred.

  “I am ready,” Savra said. “But how?”

  The figure regarded her for a few seconds in silence. Finally, he pulled back his black hood with a white, long-fingered hand to reveal an equally pale face. His cascading, silky black hair and a pair of long, silver canines reflected the dim light. “Very well,” he said, and placed his open, elongated palm on Savra’s forehead. Her love’s eyes were mirrors, and she saw herself reflected in each.

  “I feel—”

  “Hush, child. Listen.”

  * * * * *

  The Sisters of the Stone Death were the one uncertain hitch that could tangle Savra’s carefully woven threads and knot them beyond repair. The Sisters, a trio of gorgons with the power to turn a person to stone with a glance, had been mistresses of the Golgari Guild since they’d slain the ancient parun. Now they ruled the Swarm from the heart of an underground labyrinth, the twisted remains of an ancient palace built to the whim of a mad pre-Guildpact king. The Sisters and their minions had coaxed twisted growth into the structure, which made it impenetrable without their aid. The labyrinth was far enough from the depth-plumbing expanse of the Hellhole to remain safe from a surprise Rakdos attack, but close enough to keep an eye on the Golgari’s sister guild.

  Besides their impenetrable pyramid maze, the secret of the Sisters’ rule was simple: those who opposed them became statues. The labyrinth and their magic had kept the bestial races of the teratogens in power for a thousand years. And for the last hundred or so of those years, Savra had been trying to figure out how to get rid of them. Her hidden ally had given her the answer, and she needed to act quickly.

  The gorgons were no good for the guild. Their teratogen subjects lorded their status over the Devkarin elves and all other Golgari, more concerned with status and violent entertainment than keeping the Yards running smoothly. And the matka might have simply resented the bestial races for that reason, but Savra was far too practical. It wasn’t merely attitude; it was the lack of responsibility and care. Centuries of neglect were bad for business. Savra had sworn when she took up the unholy staff of the matka that she would be the last Devkarin high priestess to watch her home lose influence and real power while the Sisters devoured what little was truly left of the old guildmaster’s hoarded wealth.

  Now she had the key to their doom, which as luck would have it came in the shape of an actual silver key, a gift from her beloved conspirator. The lock the key fit was in the base of the roughly pyramid-shaped labyrinth before her.

  The key fit a door hidden by thousands of years of diseased growth. It seemed carved from actual Ravnican bedrock, as many structures were this deep beneath street level. A quick survey of the door’s shape told her there was no way her bat would fit through the entrance, so she sent him off to hunt again but warned him to stay close. She cast a glance around her lightly populated surroundings but only saw a few disinterested zombies going about their business. Non-teratogens rarely got this close to the labyrinth willingly. She didn’t see any guards watching her either, no doubt thanks to the enchantment her ally had placed upon her. It would not last long but should get her into the labyrinth’s base unseen by teratogen eyes.

  She placed the key in the lock and turned it. With effort, the lock rolled over, scraping against rock and rust, then clicked into place. The door swung inward with a light shove, and cold air rushed from the open passage. It smelled of mold, reptile waste, and underneath it all, death.

  When the gorgons seized power from the old guildmaster in a violent and short civil war that pit the Sisters’ teratogen armies against the Devkarin and other humanoid Golgari, there had been five of them. The guildmaster had killed two before the gorgons destroyed him—at least, tha
t’s how most Golgari had heard the story, whether they were Devkarin elves or new members of the walking dead. Savra’s beloved said the story was a lie, and she believed him with the certainty of faith.

  The path downward was slick and uncertain, and this time there would be no one to light her way waiting at the other end. As the thought crossed her mind, a torch sitting in a sconce just ahead of her burst into flame. Savra blinked and let her eyes adjust to the sudden brightness, keeping her staff clutched in a defensive position in case this was an ambush and not one of the fortuitous coincidences her ally had told her to expect. Her beloved had told her that once the door was open, the prisoner inside would most certainly know it. He had warned her that strange coincidences and odd encounters were to be expected. The prisoner had always had a bigger sense of humor than was healthy in a necromancer. Even now, imprisoned for a thousand years and drained of his energy by the Sisters, he still seemed to enjoy making someone jump.

  When nothing leaped from the shadows to take a chunk out of her abdomen, Savra lifted the torch from its scone and said, “Thank you.”

  The matka shrugged and cautiously walked on down the slippery slope. Writhing snake-vines materialized from the shadows as she approached, but hissed and parted before the flames. Along the way, she had come close to making the wrong turn twice and had to backtrack to her starting place and reorient her empathic senses on the prisoner. After ten minutes of twisting passageways and dead ends, and an encounter with a fungus that tossed a cloud of harmless spores in her face when struck by torchlight, her path leveled off. She stood at the head of an ancient culvert that made up this stretch of the route. The tiled walls were crumbling apart, destroyed by patient moss and fungus without the help of magic. The torch revealed that the massive pipe ended up ahead and opened into darkness.