Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel

by Ari Marmell

  Eyes, empty of anything but a need for destruction beyond Kallist’s imagining, turned away to gaze with naked lust upon the conflict raging down the street. Sitting upright, digging frantically for his blade, Kallist himself did the same.

  Liliana was clearly paying for her decision to send her summoned servant to rescue Kallist. She hovered several feet above the roadway, hands crossed before her at the wrists, surrounded once more in an aura of black and shifting mists. Above her the shambling thing rained down blow after blow, only to recoil each time as its murky “flesh” made contact with the life-sapping energies that cocooned the necromancer. But the thing of the sewers was not alive in the truest sense of the word, and with each strike, its denticulate limbs passed farther through those mists before it was forced to draw back. It could be only a matter of seconds before Liliana’s protections failed her utterly.

  “What are you waiting for?” Kallist demanded of the power that stood before him, motionless as any statue. Only later would he truly think on the fact that he had shouted at and berated an angel of the darkest depths, and then his hands would shake. For now, he saw only the imminent death of the woman he loved. “She called you here! Help her!”

  It turned to him, offered him a smile of terrifying, soul-bruising beauty. Kallist’s breath lodged again in his chest, as that seductively murderous face sent blood rushing to his loins even while it turned his stomach, caused his limbs to grow palsied and his head to pound. Only then, spurred on not by Kallist’s feeble demands but by a silent call from Liliana, did the angel take to the air, a song of battle and blood and death flowing with heart-rending beauty from her throat. Her wings spread wide, wider, impossibly wide, until they spanned the breadth of the alley, until even the blind shambler, one fist raised over its head to strike, could not help but feel the chill of her shadow. And briefly it shuddered, in whatever primeval ember passed for its soul.

  Her voice never wavered, her song never faltered, as the angel dropped upon the animate sewer, spear sinking deep into waste and mud and slime. Where it struck, what was green decayed to brown, brown and grey rotted to black. Bubbles rose to the shambler’s surface, popped open with the foulest stench, leaving great, gaping abscesses in its viscous hide.

  But the elemental spirit called up by the goblin shamans would not fall so easily. With another silent roar, it turned from the exhausted mage and slashed viciously at its raven-winged tormentor. She rose ten feet higher with a single vicious flap, as swiftly as if yanked by invisible strings. Just as swiftly she dropped once more, plunging her spear into the shambler’s head.

  It rippled, twisting and shifting, the mud and sludge rearranging themselves. From the front of its head, the glass-toothed maw slid upward to split open at the scalp. It snapped shut with a ferocious clack, locking hard onto the rusty blade. The angel yanked back, attempting to free the weapon, but even her great strength and the mighty flap of her wings could not wrench it loose. And in that moment of distraction, the foul heap reached upward and wrapped the angel in an unbreakable embrace of garbage and nails.

  The angel’s battle song faltered but did not end. In a grotesque dance, an echo of the spinning celebrants at the Bitter End, they twisted across the roadway, scattering cobblestones before them. Skin split and bruised, sludge flowed and rotted away.

  Liliana dropped to the earth with a gasp, the aura of darkness disappearing as her feet touched down. Sweat mingled with the rain that covered her brow and plastered her hair to the sides of her face, but she kept her focus locked on the grappling angel, her lips moving in unheard mantras.

  Seeing that she was in no immediate danger, Kallist dived into his pack. Leaving his broadsword momentarily untouched, lying half-covered by the hardened sewage, he pulled from the satchel one of the mechanized crossbows they’d taken from their rather ineffective captors.

  Clutching the weapon in his left hand, Kallist slipped a bolt from the small quiver. Even as he placed it in the groove, his thumb traced a rune in the air above the projectile’s steel head. The shape took on a substance of its own, hovering in the air above the bolt for two full heartbeats before it faded away into the rain.

  For long seconds Kallist aimed, literally holding his breath. If he missed, he wasn’t sure he had the energy to repeat the spell. Worse, should his bolt pass through the shambler and hit the angel …

  The beast turned its back, and Kallist squeezed the trigger, exhaling slowly. The crossbow bucked with a twang, hummed as its enchanted gears ratcheted the cord back to receive another bolt. And the projectile itself flashed through the air to sink, without the slightest visible effect, into the living muck.

  Again Kallist held his breath. A better mage could have targeted the spell directly, without the need for the bolt to carry it, but Kallist had barely managed the magic at all. Had he somehow bollixed it up? Had the bolt passed straight through, without striking anything solid? Would it even work on a creature without organs or muscles, bone or blood?

  So determined was his stare, his reluctance even to blink that his vision blurred with strain and rainwater. Thus, when his enchantment did begin to take hold, he almost missed it. So gradually that it could easily have been his imagination or a trick of the rain-bent light, the shambler’s movements slowed. Each step grew more ponderous than the last, and the beast began to teeter on the verge of collapse as its feet struggled to keep up with its forward momentum. Though its strength had diminished not at all, it could not keep pace with the angel’s thrashing, and with a burst of black feathers she erupted from its grasp. Her skin was mottled with gangrenous, festering wounds, her left arm hung limp where the bones had cracked. But her voice rose with power to shame the thunder, and in her one good hand she held her spear aloft, as though to sunder the clouds from the sky.

  And as her foe reeled backward, trying desperately to keep its balance, she dived.

  Slowed to a dull plodding by Kallist’s spell, the shambler might as well have tried to outrun the lightning as to dodge the plummeting angel. So terrible was her stroke, the creature’s glutinous hide literally opened up before her. Not merely her spear, but the angel herself plowed through the beast, bursting from its back in a spray of rancid mud and filth.

  Perhaps pain finally gave the lumbering construct a voice, or perhaps it was simply the rush of air between its sagging maw and the gaping fissure in its torso, but the shambler howled, a terrible sound of sucking mud and raging winds. Fungi and the bones of rats burst through its skin of muck, thrashing wildly, the legs of some horrible, dying vermin. Still, though it collapsed heavily to the roadside, supporting itself on one of its slimy arms, it stubbornly refused to die.

  Liliana, also crouched in the roadway, could only hope that it was near enough to death, for she could maintain her summons no longer. With a gasp she released the energies pent up within, allowed herself to relax her almost inhuman concentration. A death-pale face, now painted in sewage, turned questioningly in her direction for just an instant before the angel disappeared, drawn back to whatever lower realm had spawned her.

  Kallist didn’t know if the cesspit creature was capable of recovering from such a devastating assault, but he wasn’t about to wait and find out. Dropping the crossbow, he hefted his great broadsword and charged back down the alley, fully prepared to hack the thing into so many bite-sized morsels to keep it from rising once more.

  But Liliana was faster, or at least a great deal nearer. Though her vision blurred and her footsteps faltered, she stepped toward the thrashing monstrosity. It would be some time before she’d dare attempt so potent a summons, yes, but even at her weakest, Liliana Vess held plenty of spells at her beck and call.

  Foul fumes of diseased purple flowed from her hands, roiling against the wind. Where they passed, what few molds and random weeds had survived the struggle fell flat. At its strongest, the shambler’s animating spirit could have easily withstood the arcane poisons Liliana now pumped into the soaking air, but now, its innards open to the
outside, it lacked all such resilience.

  Kallist skidded to a halt, sword still upraised, as the creature spasmed. It bellowed once, its final call, and crumbled into mulch, already washing back into the sewers beneath the slow but steady rain.

  The tension finally left his body in a sigh of relief as heavy as the buildings looming over him. His shoulders drooped, the tip of his sword screeched against the cobblestones. Kallist opened his mouth to call to Liliana—

  And something heavy, flailing, and gnashing its teeth slammed into him from behind.

  Kallist toppled, long and powerful fingers on the back of his neck forcing his face down against the bruising roadway. His hand scrabbled for his sword, but even had he found the hilt, he couldn’t possibly have delivered an effective stroke. Bright lights flashed once more before his eyes; his lungs and nostrils burned. Blood pounded in his ears, deafening him to the hissing and snarling of the beast on his back.

  It deafened him, also, to the sudden twang of the crossbow he’d dropped. The bolt flew wide, but near enough to make its point. The weight vanished from Kallist’s back as abruptly as it had appeared, and he raised his aching head in time to see a small shape scurrying back into open drain.

  “What …” he gasped, trying to catch his breath for the fourth time in minutes, “What was …”

  “Sewer goblin,” Liliana told him, even as she sagged onto the stoop of a nearby home, crossbow dangling from limp fingers. “I don’t think they took kindly to us surviving.”

  Kallist scowled, lowering his head between his knees as he struggled for breath. “What were they doing, anyway? They don’t come out in the day, and they certainly don’t summon elementals to waylay travelers!”

  “Unless they’re bribed to,” Liliana commented. “Greedy little bastards.”

  “Semner?”

  “Who else? Probably decided to make sure we couldn’t follow him, if we managed to get away from his thugs. Even he’s not stupid enough to assume we’re no threat to him, and it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out where we’d pass. It’s not like we had a lot of routes to choose from.”

  Kallist opened his mouth to ask another question, snapped his teeth together when he lifted his head and finally got a good look at the woman beside him. Her flesh was pale and clammy, her entire body drenched. Even sitting slumped over as she was, her hands shook with exhaustion.

  “You don’t look well,” Kallist said brilliantly.

  “I need to rest,” she admitted, and Kallist knew she didn’t just mean physically. A summoning such as the one she’d invoked … Her essence must be dry as parchment. The swampy earth beneath Avaric was reasonably mana-rich and particularly suited to Liliana’s style of magic—it was one of the reasons they’d moved there after falling out with Jace—but they were traveling, slowly but surely, away from it as they headed toward Favarial. Her recovery would take time.

  Time that the sudden burst of frenetic drumming from deep within the echoing sewers told them they did not have.

  Leaning on one another, each gasping for air and struggling for strength, they rose. One step forward, a second …

  “Damn it!” Kallist clenched his fists in helpless frustration and failed to notice Liliana’s hiss of pain as he squeezed her smaller hand in his. “The little bastards stole the pack!”

  Every supply he had brought, every morsel of food, every comfort, had been in the backpack that he left behind after the angel pried him from the clinging sewage. And of that pack, there was no sign at all.

  “We could try to get it back,” Liliana suggested. “They’re just sewer goblins.”

  It was an empty offer, and they both knew it. Kallist merely shook his head, and the weary couple shuffled their way along the urban chasm, struggling to leave behind the pounding drums, and the foul things that woke to their call.

  It was hardly one of Ravnica’s richest districts. It lacked the impossibly wide avenues, lit by permanent lanterns of mystic lights. It had none of the towers that reached so high the clouds themselves struggled to climb them, nor the sweeping arches and delicate bridges that formed layer upon layer of city, stacked one atop the next until the ground was invisible from the top.

  But compared to cities on most other worlds, and certainly compared to the poorer districts such as Avaric, Favarial was lavish to the point of extravagance.

  Just as it had done with the hills, the mountains, and the swamps, Ravnica had annexed and absorbed the world’s lakes without so much as a hiccup. Favarial was built above the surface of a deep body of fresh water the size of a small sea. The avenues and plazas stood supported by pylons that dug deep into the lake’s murky floor, the buildings on great spans supported by those avenues and plazas. Unless one stood at the side of a roadway and deliberately looked over the edge, one might never notice the lake at all. Great bridges connected it to the mainland, allowing travelers and commerce to come and go at will.

  Indeed, it was the lake itself that provided most of the region’s commerce. The surrounding municipalities purchased much of their fresh water from Favarial, whose River Guild—not one of the true guilds of the past, by any stretch, but powerful enough in its home territory—charged an arm and a leg to keep the rivers flowing. Let a neighbor fail to make a payment and the dams slammed shut.

  As this made Favarial an economic powerhouse, it was a popular destination for merchants, shoppers, and travelers alike. Thus, as the weary mages drew nearer their destination, as the skies finally cleared and the sun dried the sodden cobblestones, they found themselves joined by travelers from other communities. First a trickle, and then a veritable deluge as road after road joined the main avenue; travelers on foot, in wagons, on horses or great lizards, even the occasional domesticated wolf. Most were human, in this part of Ravnica, though some few were elves or viashino lizard-men, and none gave Kallist or Liliana a second glance as they took their place at the back of the line.

  For two and a half days, the fatigued couple had lived on rainwater and what food was available in the grimy bazaars of the poor neighborhoods through which they’d passed. The gamey taste of ivysnake still clung to Kallist’s mouth, possibly because he still had a thin strand of the stuff stuck between two back teeth. The first night they’d been forced to camp in an alley, huddled together against the rain and the garbage, though they’d thankfully reached an area affluent enough to offer an inn on the second night. Between Liliana’s lingering exhaustion and the fact that they had precisely two crossbow bolts to their names (the others having been in the stolen pack), Kallist could only give thanks they’d suffered no further attacks in their travels.

  And now that they’d finally arrived, as the zeniths of the highest buildings soared into view, Kallist remembered just how woefully unimpressive the district actually was. Yes, the people of the backwaters like Avaric found it imposing, but for a man born to the towering spires of richer neighborhoods, Favarial inspired only a resounding “Eh.”

  The district’s defenses, such as they were, consisted of heavy iron gates at the end of every bridge, and a low wall providing some measure of security from the lake itself. Guards stood post at those gates, jagged halberds and twin-pronged spears ready to repulse an attack that would never come, and otherwise did nothing worthwhile. None bothered to check on or question passing travelers, for what was there to check for?

  Shuffle. Step. Wait. Step. Wait. Shuffle. The line inched forward, and Kallist cursed every wasted minute, every pause. When Liliana leaned close and said, “It might be tough, but I could try to call something up to eat our way to the front of the line,” he could conjure only a wan smile.

  As they neared, the temperature rose, the sun reflecting harshly from the still waters and lingering in an air that showed no interest at all in providing a breeze. It was still preferable to days spent soaking in the mosquito-spawning rain—but not by much. And only as they approached the gate did the din of the inner streets wash over them. Again, not as deafening or oppressive as Ka
llist had felt in other, larger districts, but after so long in Avaric, it was disconcerting enough.

  Hot, loud, bright, and smelly. So self-pityingly miserable was Kallist as he finally passed through the gate, he failed to notice one of the guards staring with abnormal intensity at him and his companion, before the press of the crowd blocked the armored woman from view.

  All that said … It looked like home to him, at least more so than Avaric ever had. Ornate carvings adorned the columns and high arches of the monolithic buildings—many of which were sculpted from a strange, aquatic-blue stone that gleamed like the lake below—and pennants hung limply from minarets of stone or crystal. The people here were dressed in a variety of bright, jovial colors, commonly seen among the middle classes who wanted to show that they could afford such frivolities as rich and cheerful dyes.

  And there were so very, very many of those people, probably at least half as many on this street alone as dwelt in Avaric entire.

  Kallist turned to Liliana, his mouth open to make some disparaging comment that she would doubtless find less pithy than he did, and felt a thrill of panic run through him. His hand lashed out, viper-quick, dragging her to a halt. Before she could so much as squawk a protest, he was walking, casually but quickly, off toward one side of the avenue.

  “What?” she hissed at him, mouth just beside his ear so that he might hear over the noise of the crowd.

  “Probably nothing,” he breathed back at her, though he slackened neither his hold nor his pace. “But one of the things I learned in my years with the Consortium was that when a whole gaggle of armed guards starts moving in your direction, you want to make a quick trip elsewhere.”

  “Is that so?” Liliana tossed her head, as though clearing her hair from her face, and casually glanced back. “So, um … What do you do when they start pointing at you and yelling, then?”