Gatecrash: The Secretist, Part Two

by Doug Beyer

  Jace checked that the mage-assassins were still behind him. They were, no doubt with a bevy of spells ready to destroy Jace if he made a move. He looked back at Calomir. “What are you?”

  “It is time we met formally,” said the elf. “I am Lazav.”

  What had been the figure of Calomir melted, dripping away like a sped-up wax candle, and then reformed again into a new shape. This new man wore a hooded cloak, like Jace’s, except it was worn and threadbare with age. Jace could only see the bottom half of the man’s face. His skin was as worn as his cloak, wrinkled and thin.

  Jace didn’t know if he should know the name Lazav. He had the feeling few did.

  “The dragon’s little announcement is unfortunate,” said the man Lazav. “We’ll have a bit more competition now. But we’ll have to adapt, won’t we?” The man’s voice was hollow, and yet full of menace. It was too close, too knowing, too possessed of a stillness that signified confidence in his own power. “But the fact that they’ve opened up the maze to all the guilds also means that the Izzet haven’t been able to solve it by themselves yet.”

  Jace’s brain flew, putting together the pieces. “You’re Dimir,” he said. “A shapeshifter of some kind, with enough mind magic to keep me from spying.”

  “Correct.”

  “You sent the vampire.”

  “And I had to put him away for a long time, because he failed to take from you what I wanted. But you’ve done well, haven’t you? You’ve recovered that which you lost.”

  Lazav took a half-step toward Jace. His presence was stifling. Though the man was no larger than Jace, Jace felt a wall of pressure emanating from him, pushing into him, tipping him back on the stool.

  Jace wasted no more time. He threw his psychic senses at Lazav’s mind. But Jace found no ingress. Lazav’s mind remained unreachable as when he had been Calomir, locked away from him, impenetrable.

  “You’re Calomir,” said Jace.

  “Oh, you’re just putting that together?” A grin spread across Lazav’s cracked lips. “To be entirely precise, poor Calomir’s been dead for some months now. He was a good soldier to the Conclave, and a wise advisor. I am merely his replacement.” He bowed theatrically. “Not a worthy one, I’m afraid. But the Selesnya, especially the lovely Emmara, seem to have accepted the performance.”

  “You’ve been advising Trostani. Goading the Conclave into attacking the Rakdos. You had them declare war on another guild as retribution—for a kidnapping you engineered.”

  Lazav shrugged. “I appreciate the recognition of my work, but of course that’s only part of it. To the Orzhov I’m a wealthy pontiff with the ear of the Grand Envoy of the Syndicate. To the Golgari, an advisor in Jarad’s inner circle. The Boros know me as a scout on a griffin, who always happens to deliver alarming news of the other guilds. And her irascible commanding officers always listen.”

  “So you spread misinformation to the guilds.”

  “The districts run on information. Secrets are the lifeblood of the world. I provide a valuable service to those in need.”

  “You traffic in lies.”

  “It gives you comfort to believe that, I know. But I am hardly to blame. I may spread information selectively, but people hear what they wish to hear. If my message finds a place in one’s heart, then it’s the heart that’s false, not the message.” Lazav spread out his hands, encompassing the chamber, the sleeves of his cloak hanging heavy from his arms. The mortar of the ancient bricks in the wall behind him traced a network of lines, twisting and spreading up into the ceiling, up toward the surface of Ravnica.

  “I see it now,” Jace said. “It’s all for the maze. Infiltrating the Selesnya. Setting up the Rakdos. Warmongering to spark a guild war. It’s all cover for your plan to take what’s behind the Implicit Maze.”

  Lazav’s grin flashed a remnant of yellowish teeth, a sight that Jace wished he hadn’t seen. “The maze is merely a means to my ends. It’s a delightful diversion for the guilds, while I grind away at the foundations of society under them. When I hold all the pieces, nothing will remain—no Guildpact, no peace, no law. No guilds! And therefore no competition for my ultimate command of all life and thought. It is simple, you see? I am a being of quite simple tastes. I only desire the annihilation of everything that is not under my power.” Lazav tapped a finger on Jace’s forehead. “Can you grasp that, mind mage?”

  “I’ll kill you,” said Jace.

  “Ah, then you do grasp it. Good. That means it’s time for you, finally, to divulge all you know about the maze.”

  “I’ll tell you nothing.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find you have little choice in the matter. There’s someone waiting just below us who’ll be very anxious to redeem himself.”

  Jace looked at his feet. There was nothing but solid stone floor beneath them.

  Lazav’s form trembled, liquefied, and rearranged itself. He took on the persona of the Selesnya elf Calomir again. But Lazav’s grin remained on the elf’s face.

  “And if you still don’t cooperate, well,” he said, now with Calomir’s elvish voice, “I’ll just have to apply more pressure. Perhaps I’ll have a conversation with a mutual acquaintance.”

  “You’ll leave Emmara out of this.”

  Lazav, in the guise of Calomir, nodded to the Dimir mages who stood behind Jace. They dragged him to his feet, then flipped him over and shoved him face-first onto the floor, pressing his chest down onto the stone. Their hands pressed on his back, and somehow they pushed him through the stone, his body falling through solidity, merging and slipping down through layers of earth like a ghost. Then he fell into air again, and collapsed onto a cold, hard floor. All was dark and quiet.

  “Jace,” said Emmara’s voice in his mind.

  Jace struggled to turn over. His body complained, but he maintained the mental connection with Emmara.

  “I’m here.”

  “I need you to come to me now. I’m at the Conclave. They’ve imprisoned me. Please come.”

  “I’m sorry,” he thought to her. “I can’t be there just now. Just keep listening to my voice. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid I must tell you that Calomir—the actual Calomir—is gone.”

  “What?”

  “The man we’ve seen is an impostor. A shapeshifter set on infiltrating the Selesnya. Calomir is dead. I’m very sorry.”

  Silence. Emmara’s thoughts did not form words that Jace could hear.

  “So if you see someone posing as Calomir,” Jace went on, “stay away from him, if you can. If you can’t, do whatever you have to do to stay safe. Stall him. Don’t let on that you know his secret. I’ll be there soon.”

  Another silence. When he again heard her thoughts, there was a certain strained vibration to them, like an earthquake held to a slight tremor by sheer will. “This is true, isn’t it.”

  “I’m afraid so. Emmara, I’m so sorry.”

  “All right. I understand.”

  There was another pause. Jace sat there in the darkness, waiting.

  “Jace?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t lose contact with me.”

  “I’ll be right here.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “I won’t.”

  The blackness around him was so complete that it felt useless having eyes at all. He smelled chilly, dank stone, and dust. He reached up and put his hand to the ceiling he had melded through, and touched the wall next to him. Both were solid, cold, and slightly rough, like cut granite. His breathing quickened. He may have been blindfolded during his journey down here, but he knew he was deep, far from sunlight—perhaps even far from a source of air.

  He heard something move in the darkness, a shuffling against stone—something nearby.

  “Is someone there?” he muttered.

  “We’re glad he’s brought you to our little prison,” said a male voice. “Mirko and I are very glad you’re here indeed.”

  Ja
ce blinked in the darkness. He used a whiff of mana to conjure a globe of bluish light, and his surroundings emerged.

  He was in a small stone room with a low ceiling and no apertures. Two figures appeared in the light before him: the vampire Mirko Vosk, his fangs bared, and the vedalken man who had been Jace’s research compatriot, Kavin.

  “Kavin!” gasped Jace.

  Kavin also bared a set of fangs. That was new.

  “I owe this one a debt of pain,” said Kavin. “Let us share him.”

  “What’s in his skull is mine,” said Vosk, his voice hoarse with malice. “The rest you may do with as you wish.”

  Jace watched the two vampires approach him, glints in their eyes reflecting his sphere of light. His back was pressed against the wall.

  “Emmara,” he thought.

  “Yes?”

  “Stay safe.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I have to leave you.”

  TO BE CONCLUDED

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Doug Beyer started out as a MAGIC: THE GATHERING® fan, then became a web developer for magicthegathering.com, then a prolific flavor text writer, and eventually, a writer and creative designer for the Magic™ R&D creative team. He resides in Seattle, Washington.

  Read on for a sample chapter of Ari Marmell’s Agents of Artifice, featuring planeswalker Jace Beleren in earlier adventures in Ravnica. Available now from your favorite bookseller. Visit www.wizards.com/magicnovels for more information.

  AGENTS OF ARTIFICE

  Ari Marmell

  PROLOGUE

  Through a place that wasn’t, where time held no meaning, the figure walked.

  Winds blew, and they were not winds. Without source, without direction, they tossed the outsider’s hair one way, clothes another. They were the hot gusts of an arid desert, the frigid breath of the whirling blizzard. They bore the perfume of growing things, the rancid tang of death, and scents unknown to any sane world.

  The ground rolled, and it was not ground. Shifting grays and black—not a color so much as a lack of color—formed a surface scarcely less treacherous than quicksand. Through it, deep beneath it, high above it in what could hardly be called a sky, snaked rivers of fire, of lightning, of liquid earth and jagged water, of raw mana. Colors unseen by human eyes flew overhead, refusing to congeal, soaring on wings of forgotten truths, borne aloft by stray gusts. Mountains of once and future worlds wept tears of sorrow for realities that never were, unchosen futures that no other would ever mourn.

  Chaos. Impossibility. Insanity.

  The Blind Eternities.

  Far behind, and falling ever farther, a curtain of viscous light separated the maddening expanse of raw creation from one of the many worlds of the near-infinite Multiverse that existed within. There was nothing special about this world, at least not when viewed from without, save that this was whence the figure had come, and where it must soon return.

  The figure. Here, in this realm beyond worlds, that was all it was. Was she male? Was he female? Short or tall? Human or elf or goblin, angel or demon or djinn? All and none, perhaps, and none of it of any import. Any normal mortal would already have been lost, body and mind and soul torn apart and absorbed into the twisting maelstrom of what was, is, and could be.

  Not this one. Anchored by a spark of the Blind Eternities itself that burned within the figure’s soul, a planeswalker strode through the tide, and the maddened chaos between worlds was just another obstacle on a road that few would ever walk.

  Danger and distaste aside, the figure persevered, continuing ever onward for who knew how long. Finally, when perhaps a whole heartbeat and perhaps a mere century had passed, another curtain of light loomed from the roiling instability. The traveler passed through and was born into a new reality, standing once more on the solid ground of a real world.

  It had no name, this world, for it had long since died. No winds blew, the stale and nigh-poisonous air sitting heavy on the earth. No trees or mountains broke the featureless contours, and nothing but a fine dust coated the world’s skin. Long dead, lifeless, desolate …

  Private.

  And there the planeswalker stood, and waited, and paced, and waited longer still, until the Other finally appeared.

  The figure’s first thought was not relief that the wait was over. That would come shortly. No, that first thought was, instead, Next time, I choose the meeting place!

  That would not, of course, be the most political thing to say. So the figure bowed, deeply enough to show respect, shallow enough to say I do not fear you. “Have you decided?”

  The Other gazed unblinking for long moments. “I have. Perhaps a better question would be, ‘Are you still certain?’ ”

  The walker shrugged, a strangely mundane gesture in so peculiar a discussion. “I’ve put too much time into this, and I’ve too much riding on it to back out now. You know that.”

  “This is a complex scheme you bring me. Convoluted; labyrinthine, even. A great many things must go precisely right if you’re to deliver me what’s mine.

  Another shrug. “My bargain comes due before too much longer. It’s not as though I’ve much left to lose.”

  “There is that, yes,” the Other conceded.

  “And this way, I’m protected. If I were to go after it myself, and I were discovered—”

  “Yes, yes. So you’ve explained.

  The walker lapsed into silence, a silence that stretched horribly across the entire world.

  Then, “You know what must happen now?” the Other asked. “To ensure the mind-speaker cannot just pull the truth from you?”

  One deep breath, a second, and a third, to calm a suddenly racing heart. “I do.”

  “Then do not move.”

  And then there was only the scream, breathless, endless, a scream that would have drowned even the roaring of the Blind Eternities … as the Other stretched forth inhuman fingers, reached into the planeswalker’s mind and soul, and began, oh so carefully, to fold.

  CHAPTER ONE

  As it turned out, the district of Avaric wasn’t any more appealing when one was drunk than when one was sober. The fog of irrimberry wine didn’t make the filthy cobblestones, the half-decayed roofs, or the sludge coating the roadways any more attractive; and the sweet aroma of that libation didn’t remain in the nose long enough to muffle the stagnant rot and the eye-watering miasma that passed for air. The rows of squat houses and shops leaned over the road like tottering old men, and the wide spaces between them resembled gaps left by missing teeth. Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the entire evening was the surprising lack of mosquitoes. Normally the rains brought plague-like swarms up from the swamps and sewers that were Avaric’s unsteady foundation, but apparently even they were taking the night off for the Thralldom’s End celebration.

  Kallist Rhoka, who had spent a considerable amount of coin on the journey to his current state of moderate inebriation, glared bitterly at his surroundings and felt that the world’s refusal to reshape itself into a passingly tolerable form was the height of discourtesy.

  Then again, the Avaric District wasn’t alone in its refusal to change its nature to suit Kallist’s desires or his drunken perceptions—and between the stubbornness of a whole neighborhood, and that of a certain raven-haired mage, he was pretty certain that the district would break first.

  At the thought of the woman he’d left at the Bitter End Tavern and Restaurant, Kallist’s stomach knotted so painfully it doubled him over. For long moments he crouched, waiting as the knot worked its way up to become a lump in his throat. With shaking hands—a shake that he attributed to the multiple glasses of wine, and not to any deeper emotions—he wiped the pained expression from his face.

  Not for the first time, Kallist spat curses at the man who’d driven him to such a sorry state. Less than a year gone by, he’d dwelt in the shadows of Ravnica’s highest spires. And now? Now the structures around him were barely high enough to cast shadows at all. Now he’d have ha
d to actually live down in the sewers or the under-cities of the larger districts to sink any lower.

  It was enough to make even a forgiving man as bitter as fresh wormwood, and Kallist had never been all that forgiving.

  Still, it would all have been worth it, if she’d just said yes …

  Kallist, his wine-besotted mind swiftly running out of curses, stared down at his feet. He couldn’t even see the normal color of his basilisk-skin boots, one of the few luxuries he still owned, so coated were they in the swamp sludge that always oozed up from between the cobblestones after the rain. The boots kept swimming in and out of focus, too. He wondered if he might vomit, and was angered that he might waste the expensive irrimberry wine he’d drunk. The notion of falling to hands and knees on the roadway was enough to steady him, however. He could still hear, ever so faintly, the singing and dancing of the Thralldom’s End festival, back in the direction of the Bitter End, and he’d be damned thrice over if he’d let anyone from the tavern find him pasting a dinner collage all over the road. With a rigid, yet swaying gait that made him appear sober to nobody but himself, he resumed his trek.

  Avaric wasn’t really that large a place; none of the local neighborhoods were. It was a backwater district, surrounded by other backwater districts save for those few spots where the underground swamps pooled to the surface, ugly and malodorous cysts on Ravnica’s aging face. Those who dwelt here did so only because anyplace else they could afford to move was even worse, and a few small fungus gardens were more than enough to feed the lot of them. Thus, even though the Bitter End was at the far end of Avaric from the house Kallist shared with the woman on whom he currently blamed his inebriated state, it should normally have taken only about twenty minutes to walk from one to the other.

  “Normally,” of course, allowed neither for Kallist’s current shuffling gate nor the fact that he’d already taken the same wrong turn twice. It had now been well over half an hour, he could still hear the faint strains of singing off in the distance; his eyes were beginning to water and to sting …