by Cory Herndon
The flickering shape crouched and locked Zunich’s cudgel with his coiled legs, then twisted sideways and tore the weapon cleanly from the old man’s grip. The mana in the charged silver weapon sparked and finished off the Devkarin’s hex to reveal the pale elf clearly in the overcast light. The bounty hunter rolled backward in a somersault that took him to the lip of the roof, then hooked his fingertips on the edge and swung himself over. On the way, the elf released Zunich’s pendrek into open space. It plummeted down to the streets below.
Kos hadn’t seen any sign of the elf’s captive, but that was the least of his concerns as Zunich, off-balance, slipped on a loose roof tile and went crashing bellyfirst onto the slippery incline. The older ’jek tried to hang on but only pulled up more rotted ceramic chunks that did little to slow his slide over the edge.
Kos was moving as soon as he saw the lieutenant go down. He dropped his own pendrek, which clattered back down the other side of the roof through the swarm of caltrop bugs, and retrieved the collapsed grappler from his belt with a snap that locked the prongs into place. He jumped forward after his partner, flinging the grappler ahead of him as he went, and saw the hook catch the sleeve of Zunich’s tunic just before the old man disappeared. Kos felt air rush from his lungs when he struck the downward slope face-first. He’d caught Zunich. Now Kos turned to the tricky task of not sliding over the edge himself.
He had mixed success. Just before the young ’jek’s steel-toed boots would have gone over the edge, they came to rest against the stone framework that had kept the old church standing all these years. He cut a pair of furrows through the wood and broken tiles, which joined the insects in tearing his skin apart in places he really wanted to keep intact. If Zunich was still on the end of the line, he had only a second before—
The line went taught, wrenching Kos’s shoulder, but he hunched his back and held on tight with both gloved hands. The lightweight rope was unbelievably strong, but that also meant it could, with enough force, cut through almost anything short of solid rock. Kos’s hands were not made of solid rock, and his leather gloves weren’t much stronger.
Kos almost wept with relief when the pressure on his bloody palms, raw shoulder, and half-eaten feet finally went slack, until it occurred to him that this could mean Zunich had just plummeted to his death. The young ’jek risked a look back over one shoulder and saw a pair of gloved hands clinging to the edge. Then one of the hands, still holding the slack silk rope, stretched toward him and hooked fingers into rotten wood.
“Can you … make it?” Kos managed through gasps for cool air that was nowhere to be found. “Hands are too—”
“One second,” Zunich said, his voice betraying only the slightest hint of exertion. “Brace yourself—Have to use your foot. Only for a second.”
“G … go ahead.”
Kos’s ankles screamed again as the heavier, older wojek used the rookie’s bleeding leg as a brace to heave himself up and over the edge, but as promised the pain was brief. Zunich carefully settled into a seated position next to Kos.
“You look terrible, Constable Kos,” Zunich said. “Can’t loaf around here all day, though. You have ’drops?”
“Yes, but it’s not that bad,” Kos said, regaining control of his breath with effort. “I can make it.”
“That kind of attitude is going to get you dead,” Zunich said, “I hope it impresses somebody because it doesn’t impress me.”
Before Kos could object the veteran pulled a thumb-sized, teardrop-shaped piece of solid mana from the sealed pack on the back of his belt. The ’drop looked a little like a piece of crystal, but that was just because the human eye had no other way to interpret a sliver of raw magic—in this case, a unique healing magic provided exclusively by the Simic to the quartermasters in the League of Wojek. Kos had used them on the injured but never on his own body. He accepted the ’drop and pressed the pointed tip into the wound.
Concentrated time poured directly into the torn flesh. The skin grew closed in an instant as the ’drop magic let his own body heal the wound at a remarkably accelerated rate. After the initial icy feeling faded, both hands were good as new. The rest of the ’drop, which had diminished only slightly in size but melted away a bit more with each use, patched up his shoulder with just enough juice left to restore his bug-bitten feet and ankles too. He even felt he could breathe more easily, no doubt a result of the healing magic getting picked up by his bloodstream. When he was done only an oily blue smear remained on his palm. Kos wiped it on his sleeve.
“I think I’m ready,” Kos said after another few seconds. His injuries had cost them a full minute.
“Come on, then,” Zunich said, treading carefully to the edge of the church roof as timbers groaned beneath his feet. “He can’t have gotten far, not if he’s planning on taking his pri—Oh.”
“What?”
“I see him. There. Damn, he’s fast.” Kos followed the tip of Zunich’s finger one, two, three more buildings west. Sure enough, the Devkarin had not gone to ground after all but was for some reason still fleeing over the rooftops.
“He’s heading for—”
“Grigor’s Canyon. The lifts are there.”
“Yeah, but is he going up or down?” Kos said.
“Let’s ask him,” Zunich grimaced, then froze. “Wait. Did you notice that?”
“The bag,” Kos said. “It’s empty.”
“On the nose. Looks like his captive has gotten loose. I think he’s chasing her or we would already have lost him. It has to be Palla. Loose, probably certifiably insane, and nowhere to be seen.”
“You sure know how to look on the bright side, Mycz.”
“There!” Zunich shouted and pointed at the pale, lanky woman in spiked, black leather who leaped from a bell tower window and landed in a crouch. Her exposed skin was almost brighter than the moon.
“That’s not the bounty hunter,” Zunich growled. “Can you make that leap?”
“Can you?”
“Let’s find out.”
With a running start, Kos easily cleared the gap between the buildings and skidded onto the next roof. He heard a thud behind him and looked back to spy Zunich hanging by his elbows on the edge. It began to crack under his weight. Kos stopped, but Zunich waved him with a nod. “I’m fine. Don’t lose her!”
Kos turned back in time to see Palla’s tangled mass of lichen-coated hair vanish around the base of the tower. The hairs on the back of Kos’s neck stood on end as he reached the corner, somehow without tripping on an upended tile and falling right into what could be a transparent ambush. On the other hand, Palla could still be hiding almost anywhere nearby.
The first heavy raindrops began to fall from the rapidly darkening sky. Within a few seconds, the scattered drops became a downpour. When it rained in Ravnica, the sky didn’t waste time with warnings.
Kos almost screamed when a hand fell lightly on his shoulder, but he managed to choke the sound back. The Rakdos wouldn’t have placed a hand on his shoulder. She would have driven a cleaver through it. He turned and saw Zunich, a finger over his lips, covered in bits of soggy rooftop but otherwise none the worse for wear. Zunich raised a hand to his ear, listening. Kos did the same. All he heard was thunder and the pounding rain.
“I’m not hearing anything. And in this mess …” Zunich said. “We need some backup. Kos, I need you to—” Zunich froze in midsentence, cocked his head, and turned.
“What do you hear?”
“Quiet. Look there, she’s—Wait! She’s backtracking,” Zunich said. “Guess that bounty hunter wasn’t as good as I’d heard.”
An act of intentional homicide against any wojek officer is a capital violation.
—City Ordinances of Ravnica
27 ZUUN 9999 Z.C., MID-MORNING
A little less than six decades later, Kos regained consciousness. He was confused, in pain, and half-blind. For once, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Garulsz’s homemade bumbat. He’d been dreaming, but th
e fleeting images were already gone, leaving only a lingering unease that was no match for the wave of pain that washed over him.
Kos sat propped up in a bed, he could tell that much, but opening his eyes revealed little else. All he saw were shadows in blue light, so he closed them again and concentrated on where exactly all the various pains and aches were stationed on the good ship Agrus Kos. His head felt like a brick, and he had to draw breath slowly to avoid pain. More broken ribs, he guessed. One arm was encased in a white shell of plaster and gauze that rested on his lap in a sling, while the other was bare and covered in small scars, like the rest of his torso.
He tried his nose next, and against all expectations it worked perfectly. The sterile smell of the Leaguehall infirmary was unmistakable. He decided to try his eyes one more time. The wojek blinked and shook his head in an effort to bring the world, and how he’d arrived in this particular part of it, into focus.
The sterile walls reflected bright blue glowspheres set evenly around the ceiling. He was in his own room, which either meant his injuries had been incredibly severe or the ’jek healers thought he was more important than he was. He figured it was the former, with the way he felt. He blinked against the brightness. As his eyes acclimated to the soft lighting, three shadowy forms silhouetted against the spheres took shape and became people—people he knew.
“Lieutenant,” a familiar angelic voice echoed in the cramped room, “how do you feel?”
“Feather? D—did you do this?” Kos asked as the familiar looming form of his friend and two others finally became clear.
“If I had, I would have been more thorough,” Feather said and smiled. “I am glad you survived the blast, my friend.”
That was all it took. Everything that had happened before the explosion came back in a rush, ending with the flash of a burning, flying corpse with the head of an elephant screaming straight at him. Kos drew a sudden breath that made him wince when his separated ribs scraped against each other. “Never mind me. There’s been a—several—homicides. At least three. No, four. There was a girl, Luda. The goblin killed her. And a loxodon, a ledev, and … oh, damn. Borca.”
The angel’s face was an uncharacteristic mask of maternal concern that under normal circumstance Kos would probably have found embarrassing. Next to the angel, and somewhat closer to the ground, stood Captain Phaskin. The short, red-faced man wore his usual scowl turned up a couple of notches, Kos suspected, for his benefit. Closest to his sickbed was a figure roughly midway in size between the first two, a pale vedalken in the red and white robes of the wojek healers. At the moment, the vedalken looked as disdainful as Feather did concerned.
“Kos,” Phaskin growled, “we’ve a lot to talk about.”
“It will wait,” the vedalken nurse lilted. Kos had never been able to figure out how someone with such a gentle, musical voice could manage to fill every syllable with disdain. Nurse Argh, who was technically a member of the Simic and wore their sigil on her breast, ran the infirmary like an academy boot camp. The nurse treated her patients like everything they had suffered was part of some malevolent design to annoy her. She was also the best healer in Ravnica, as far as Kos was concerned. Kos had seen the vedalken resuscitate fellow ’jeks and assault victims at the brink of death more than once.
“Nurse Yaraghiya,” he said, taking care not to use the vedalken’s Leaguehall nickname, “I’ve got work to do. You can’t keep me confined to this—”
The healer raised a long-fingered hand and cut him off with a gesture. The vedalken female considered him for a moment, which made the ’jek feel all the more like a specimen under a scrutiny. “Do not take any deep breaths,” she said.
“Now you tell me,” Kos replied with a weak grin that he hoped against all odds the nurse might find charming. It was an empty hope.
“Nor should you speak any more than necessary,” the vedalken continued. “You have suffered a variety of injuries, including but not limited to extensive skeletal stress fractures, separated and cracked ribs, and severe, but temporary—thanks to swift attention—damage to your optic nerves and corneas. You’re being treated for biomanalogical blood infection, severe burns, and, oh yes, an old-fashioned concussion,” the vedalken said. “Per my oath, I must also inform you that your body suffers from an alarming number of chronic conditions, the most severe of which is—”
“You can skip that part,” Kos snapped. He’d gotten a complete physical examination from the nurse just a few months earlier and had already heard the rundown. He knew his body was wearing out. He didn’t need a reminder of what he’d put it through when it had been recently run through the wringer by someone else. A ’jek didn’t live for a century plus ten years without taking some permanent damage. He was lucky that so far this amounted to aches and pains. How he dealt with the pains, especially the ones that weren’t physical, was nobody else’s business.
“Very well, but I can and will schedule you for a meeting with an alchohol and teardrop abuse specialist,” the vedalken sniffed in an indignant key. “We can discuss specifics later, if you wish.”
“I don’t need a specialist,” Kos said. “I need answers.”
“What do you remember, Lieutenant?” asked Phaskin.
“I think—There was a little girl. And a loxodon. Borca was talking to him. Good gods, it was that ambassador from the Selesnya Conclave.”
“Matter extracted from your wounds matched the loxodon species,” the vedalken continued. “It’s also the likely cause of your blood infection. I hypothesize that the mass of the deceased protected you from his fate.”
“Do you have any idea who the deceased was, Lieutenant?” Phaskin snapped. “There hasn’t been a Rakdos attack like that in a decade. I’ve got the Selesnyans on my back, the market’s a disaster area, and I’m sure the lawmages are just waiting for the dust to settle before swooping in. And who do you think the brass is blaming, Kos? Well, it’s not you. Not yet.”
“Captain, please, I do not wish to have you escorted from the room,” the vedalken said. “This is considered League business, I remind you. You must let me complete my diagnosis or you will leave. Don’t make me order you.”
“Now listen, I—” Phaskin sputtered, then scowled even more darkly than before. The nurse was right, and he knew it. Like every codified system in Ravnica, the infirmary rules could be described as a web of technicalities that grew from the Guildpact and the City Ordinances, and Phaskin had gotten stuck in that web.
“The girl,” Kos asked, “there was nothing they could do for her?”
Phaskin’s anger faded, and he looked at the floor. Feather stepped in. “No, Kos. I’m sorry. The healers reached her as soon as they could.”
The mental picture of the goblin’s first victim flashed in his mind. Kos’s ever-present conscience reared its head. He hadn’t saved her. She was dead. And so was his partner. He was two for two.
“I want to talk to the labmage,” Kos said and sat up far too fast. The room spun for a few seconds and Nurse Yaraghiya gently pushed him back down.
“Dr. Helligan contacted me with the initial results,” she said. “He believed I might be better able to keep you in place if you had information on the victims.” The vedalken cocked her head as if listening to a voice only she could hear. Many vedalken, including the nurse, possessed a memory that seemed supernatural to humans, one of the things that made them the greatest researchers and academics on the plane. There were vedalken who could recite verbatim words spoken by ancestors who had walked for days in the untouched ice and mountains of Ravnica’s polar regions. “In chronological order of death, the first deceased is a human female UV—unidentified victim.”
“I know what ‘UV’ means,” Kos snapped. “And she’s not. Her name is Luda. She lives—lived—at Mrs. Molliya’s orphanage.”
“I’ll make sure she’s notified,” Phaskin offered. “I’m going to—”
“If I may continue,” the vedalken said. “Age estimated at five point four years.
Cause of death, severe chest trauma most likely caused by a serrated blade. Test indicates wound aperture matches a weapon of goblin origin discovered intact within the wreckage of the scene. Necromantic questioning has been unsuccessful and already discontinued.”
Kos shuddered. “Necromantic questioning” was the official phrase used to describe a gruesome process by which labmages reanimated a specific part of a victim’s brain—assuming the brain was available—that would allow the corpse to answer simple questions about the last few seconds or sometimes even minutes of their lives. A part of him was glad Luda had not responded to the treatment. It was an abominable necessity for the work the League did and really only helped in less than a quarter of most cases anyway, even when the brain was completely intact.
“What about the others?” Kos asked.
“Very little remains of either Sergeant Borca or the unidentified goblin assailant who survived the blast,” the nurse said.
“Yeah, they were both at the center of everything. Can’t imagine there’s much left,” Kos said.
“Please do not interrupt. I shall inform you when I am finished,” Nurse Argh said.
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
“What remains exist appear to have become bonded at the subscrutinizable level by extremely high levels of pyromanic exposure. Tests have thus far been inconclusive,” the vedalken continued. “The loxodon victim—”
“Who we’re assuming was the intended target,” Phaskin interjected. “Not that there’s any law against—” The vedalken shot him shining glare that literally froze his mouth open. “Uh,” Phaskin said, ice crystallizing along his lower jaw. Then, with greater urgency, he added, “Uh, uh-uh.”
“The loxodon victim,” Nurse Argh repeated and waved a hand dismissively at Phaskin, whose mouth shut with a clap and, judging from the look on his face, clipped the tip of his tongue in the bargain, “was the so-called ‘Living Saint’ Bayul, ambassador of the Selesnya Conclave. Labmage Helligan has filed repeated official complaints describing perceived Selesnyan interference and intimidation. He is concerned that the Conclave will reclaim the corpse before he is able to perform a necrotopsy.”
