Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel

by Ari Marmell

  “I know, I know,” he said, his voice calming, “but if we could just get back to—”

  The edge of Jace’s wadded-up cloak fell from his fist, hitting the edge of the board and scattering the pieces across the table. He continued to fidget, utterly oblivious; Kallist could only sigh.

  “Look, Jace,” he said, straightening in his chair, “it could have gone worse.”

  “Really? Short of my dying, name one way.”

  “Well, you could have d—oh. Um, all right, maybe not.”

  “It’s absolutely appalling, Kallist. It—”

  “All right. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’re not the only one to think so.”

  “I …” Jace blinked. “What?”

  “Word in the dining hall—”

  “That would be the hall occupied by people who don’t know a damn thing about off-world operations, and have never heard of planeswalkers?”

  Kallist sighed again. “Fine. Paldor confided in me after you left; I found him drunk in the hall. Apparently this isn’t the first time the Kamigawa cell has failed to confirm information before passing it along to Tezzeret—though this is the first time it was anything of import. If he’d known how big a community you were dealing with, or just how deceptive the prince was being …” He shrugged.

  Jace nodded slowly. “All right. But I’m surprised he’d put up with a cell leader being that careless.”

  “My understanding,” Kallist said carefully, “is that he’s not. When it was just a few minor bungles here and there, that was one thing. But now? Our illustrious leader is not happy with the Kamigawa cell. Or with Baltrice, or with you either, for that matter.”

  “Fantastic. I can’t wait for that conversation.” A pause, then. “But I guess this should at least make negotiations easier for the Kamigawa cell, since they’ve only got about half as many nezumi to deal with.”

  Kallist grinned. “Oh, come on. Half? I understand Baltrice killed a fifth, tops.” Then, when Jace’s glower suggested that he wasn’t finding the situation amusing, the swordsman turned serious.

  “Jace, what’s really bugging you about this?”

  “I—”

  “Skip the part where you deny it.”

  “I—”

  “And skip the part where you claim it’s guilt over the collateral damage. I know that’s bothering you. I also know that’s not the whole of it. We’ve worked together for too long.”

  “You planning to let me finish this time?”

  “Possibly.”

  Jace slumped even deeper into his chair, so bone-lessly that Kallist half expected to find him puddled on the floor. “Have I ever mentioned Alhammarret to you?” Jace asked, his voice distant.

  “Only in passing. A teacher of yours, right?”

  “More than a teacher.” Jace recollected. “I grew up in a village called—well, we called it Silmot’s Crossing, but that’s what we called every village within ten miles. One big community. The name really only applies to the largest. The rest were just—hamlets.

  “Anyway, I grew up in one of the smaller ones. Until one …”

  Jace shook his head. “You don’t need my whole life story. The short version is, my father made me leave when it became pretty damned clear that the townsfolk weren’t taking kindly to some of the abilities I was demonstrating. Alhammarret took me in at my father’s behest. He taught me how to use the magic that came naturally to me and introduced me to a whole slew of spells that didn’t. He also made me feel welcome, which was a pretty nice change of pace after the last few years.

  “I was happy for a few years, with Alhammarret. Then, one day I decided to see if I was strong enough to read his thoughts.”

  Jace smirked, an expression of disdain clearly directed inward. “I’d never done that before—to him, I mean. I’d read plenty of other people’s minds and never thought much of what I found. One of the first lessons I’d learned was that he’d sense it if I tried, and I guess I had too much respect for him, or too much fear of his implied threats, to challenge that. But you know how teenagers get.

  “So I waited until he was distracted, to make sure I’d have at least a few seconds before he could react, and went in. I didn’t mean any harm by it; I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to know if I could.”

  Kallist could see, at least in part, where this was going. “What did you discover?” he asked softly.

  “That I was a planeswalker.” He nodded at Kallist’s shocked look. “My Spark had manifested over a year earlier, but I’d never understood what that meant. I found myself drifting in the Eternities when it happened, but only very briefly, and only the one time. Alhammarret explained it away as some sort of delusion, something to do with my own illusions messing with my mind. And after that, he kept me busy enough learning new magic that it never happened again.

  “I remember … I remember a sensation in his mind that my father knew, that Alhammarret had talked with him about it. I don’t know exactly why they kept it from me; maybe they thought they were doing me a favor somehow.

  “But I was angry, so angry that he’d lied to me for so long. I’d been furious before, Kallist, but I’d never felt betrayed.”

  Jace stood and began to pace, as though the emotion of that moment required an outlet. “I wanted to scream, to throw a tantrum, to lash out … Everything you’d expect from a kid of that age. But I didn’t. I could’ve asked him why, but I didn’t do that either.

  “I just … seethed. For days on end, going over and over it all. And then, the next time we were practicing, I just … snapped. I got inside his mind, and I unleashed all that rage at once.

  “I don’t let myself remember his face, Kallist, even to this day. I’ve used my own magic to keep me from seeing it. Because I know that if I do, I won’t see the face of the man who taught me most of what I know. I’ll see the face of the man I walked away from: bulging eyes, gaping lips, skin slowly turning purple. The face of a mind so broken he’d forgotten who he was, what he was—even how to breathe.”

  Ignoring Kallist’s faint shudder, Jace leaned on the back of the chair. “I’ve been in enough fights before and after I joined the Consortium that I’ve probably killed at least a few folks since then—but it was always in self-defense. I never set out to do it, just to stop them from hurting me, or get them out of my way. I’ve done a lot of ugly things since Tezzeret hired me, but even then, it was always you or Baltrice or whoever who did the actual killing, and most of our targets arguably deserved it. Maybe I was just fooling myself, but I never saw myself as a murderer. And then on Kamigawa, I did the exact same thing I’d done to Alhammaret. Only I did it deliberately.”

  Kallist nodded, thought he understood. “You’re bothered by how killing the nezumi made you feel.”

  But Jace only shook his head. “No, Kallist.” He turned to his friend, and his gaze was empty. “I’m bothered that killing him didn’t bother me at all.”

  A week had passed since Jace’s return from Kamigawa; a week during which Jace slept only rarely and fitfully, plagued by nervous, frustrated dreams to which genuine nightmares might almost have been preferable. He fretted over who he was, what he was becoming. He worried over the state of the Consortium, wondering how a mission like this one could’ve been planned and executed so badly, how and why Tezzeret could’ve made the decisions he’d made.

  But most of all, he worried over the fact that Tezzeret hadn’t yet spoken to him, and with each day that passed, he viewed the inevitable confrontation with mounting dread.

  When a messenger finally pounded on his door that morning, yanking him from another dream-battered sleep and informing him that Tezzeret awaited—not in the training chamber, but in a ruined stretch of the Rubblefield outside—Jace found himself almost relieved.

  He allowed himself five minutes to throw some water on his face, climb into a pair of blue trousers and tunic—forgoing his cloak, since he wasn’t actually planning to go anywher
e—and all but ran through the complex and down the nearest side streets.

  He found the artificer in something of a natural courtyard between four buildings that still lay in shambles, untouched by the district’s slow rebirth. Weeds grew up through the broken cobblestones, and the walls were all but painted in a thick layer of bat, bird, and griffin droppings. Whatever rubble might have lain in the courtyard itself, however, had been cleared away; it was all but empty save for Tezzeret himself, who leaned against a wall over a dozen yards away.

  “Summon something,” he commanded, his voice carrying clearly across the courtyard.

  “What?” Jace, who’d just been opening his mouth to offer some sort of greeting or perhaps an apology, found himself utterly perplexed. “What should I—”

  “Summon something! Now!”

  Shaken by the fury in the artificer’s voice, palpable even from such a distance, Jace asked no more questions. Still uncertain what was happening, he reached into the æther, stretched his will between the worlds. Before him, a pinprick hole opened in the walls of reality, and through it slipped a cloud sprite, riding wisps of vapor that drifted through from the skies of some other realm—one whom Jace had summoned many times before. She smiled briefly at him, nodding her head in greeting, and then turned to survey her surroundings with an ever more puzzled expression.

  Tezzeret lurched away from the ruined structure and hurled something concealed in his etherium fist. An uneven disk of iron, lopsided and bedecked with tiny jagged protrusions, it nonetheless flew straight and true, spinning across the intervening distance until it crashed to the broken stones mere feet from Jace.

  And even as it landed, it shifted and warped, calling upon the energies of other worlds, just as Jace’s own summons had. In less than a second, a field of writhing mechanized tendrils, the underside of some horrible iron jellyfish, thrashed across the earth before him. Where they joined with each other at the ground, tiny spots glowed with the dull heat of a smelting furnace, peering out from between the tendrils like inhuman eyes.

  Faster than a crossbow bolt, one of the thinnest tendrils lashed out. Its needle-sharp tip punched through the faerie’s wings, pinning her to one of the surrounding buildings by what shredded strands remained. The screech of iron on stone wasn’t nearly enough to cloak the cloud sprite’s terrified scream as a second tendril rose; this one edged along one side, a whipping, flexing blade that gently lay itself across her thrashing torso. Jace tried desperately to dismiss the summoning, to send her away, but so stunned was he by the sudden assault that he left it too late, waited just those few seconds too long. The scream ended abruptly as the tendril pushed. The two halves of her body dropped from the wall, fading before they struck the ground and leaving behind only a tiny smear of blood to show that she had ever been.

  Jace turned a furious gaze on Tezzeret. “Why?” he demanded, overwhelmed by a peculiar guilt he’d never before felt at the death of a summoned minion. “There was no reason! There—”

  Metal ground on metal as the iron monstrosity struck again, this time with a squat tentacle lacking any edge at all. At full strength, it would have shattered Jace’s ribs, pulped his organs; instead, it struck just hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. His eyes watered with pain and he staggered back, glancing up as it hit him again, blackening his eye and causing it to instantly swell shut.

  “Summon something else,” Tezzeret commanded darkly.

  “No,” Jace growled, picking himself up from the floor. “There’s no purpose to it.”

  “Oh, there’s a purpose,” Tezzeret all but cooed.

  A shadow fell over him, and Jace looked up, just in time to see another brutal tentacle, practically a log of iron, snaking toward him. It lifted him up, agony flashing through his gut. When he landed once more, Jace couldn’t keep himself from vomiting up a small puddle of bile. He tried to crawl from its reach, hoping, praying that the thing couldn’t actually move from its spot. An impossibly long tendril wrapped about his ankle and dragged him back before he’d gotten even a yard.

  “Why are you attacking me?” Jace gasped, struggling to drag himself out of the construct’s murderous grip.

  “I’m not attacking, Beleren. I’m teaching.”

  And he understood, then. Understood that while Tezzeret wasn’t about to kill or cripple him, while he was holding the golem back, the beating wouldn’t stop until Jace made it stop.

  With a furious cry, Jace called out through the pain and the bitter residue in his mouth—and a fearsome, inhuman screech answered that call. From the sky dropped a great beast, its wings spread wide in the vastness of the courtyard. The bulk of its scales were iridescent blue, its face and horns ivory white, and tendrils of steam rose from its flaring nostrils. For a brief instant it hovered, wings flapping slowly, methodically, as it studied its ferrous foe.

  “Better,” Tezzeret offered from afar. “Not good enough, though.”

  As though to prove him wrong, the drake surged ahead, twisting almost on a wingtip to avoid a series of vicious strokes as it flew through the thicket of tendrils. It dug its claws into two of the largest, ripping them up and hurling them back against the wall with a deafening clatter. Shrieking its anger, the drake soared up toward the clouds, curling back around until it faced the construct once more. As it neared, its great maw gaped wide, unleashing a torrent of steam so impossibly hot that even Baltrice’s fires might have struggled to match it.

  The sharp edges of the iron grew soft and dull, and tiny droplets of liquid metal rained down to the floor around the multitude of tentacles. It reached out once more, but its movements were slow and feeble. Several of the thinner limbs looked ready to give out entirely. The drake circled the yard once more, coming back for another pass that would reduce the construct to slag.

  But as its foe turned in its aerial acrobatics, the wobbling golem reached out and slammed a limb into a broken, weatherworn gate, lying before the entrance to one of the buildings. Instantly the iron crumbled into rusted particles—and just as swiftly, the tentacles straightened, whole and hearty once more, with no trace of their injuries save several sporadic scorch marks.

  More than a dozen of the tendrils lashed clear across the yard, the force of their attack shaking even the cobblestones, to meet the drake halfway. Bladed limbs flew, claws raked across iron, sparks fell to sputter out upon the ground. And Jace could only cringe as the drake plunged, bleeding, into the center of the mass and slowly faded from view. He felt a sob of frustration and fear begin to well up within and mercilessly crushed it down, allowing himself only a faint gasp of pain in its place.

  “Again, Beleren!” Tezzeret shouted over Jace’s shout of denial, of despair. “Summon again!”

  He had almost nothing left. Leaning against a wall, breathing hard, Jace watched with wide eyes as the wriggling limbs reached toward him once more. He’d never summoned anything more potent than the steam-tongued drake; it had always been his ace in the hole, a creature that none of his foes could best. He was exhausted from a week of sporadic sleep, aching from the blows he’d already taken, almost tapped out by the summons he’d already cast. Burning hell, he hadn’t even had breakfast!

  But he knew, as well, that he could not take another pummeling. It wasn’t that he was concerned about physical pain, not anymore: he refused to admit further weakness to the metal-armed bastard across the way.

  Jace sank to the floor, his legs hunched, his back against a wall. In and out he breathed, slowly, ignoring as best he could the metal fiend that drew ever nearer. And he reached, carefully, desperately, for the river that flowed through the heart of Ravnica, past the borders of Dravhoc district. The Rubblefield wasn’t built on the banks of that river, but it wasn’t all that far. Jace’s familiarity with it might just be enough.

  He touched her mind and soul, felt her respond to his call. He’d sensed her before, though he’d never known precisely who or what she was, felt her watching him as he sent his senses into the æther, practice
d the litanies and exercises that, when put together, would comprise summoning spells more potent than any he’d ever tried to cast. This wasn’t how he’d planned to test himself, to try such a powerful summons, but Tezzeret had taken the choice from him.

  Channeling mana from the river as though he himself were nothing but a tributary, Jace threw his power and his will and his need into the void.

  The stone wall of one of the surrounding structures burst outward, reduced to a snowlike powder as something immensely powerful struck it from behind. An enormous leonine body squeezed through the gap, cracking the stone farther as it appeared. The fur that coated her sleek form was an unnaturally deep blue, but multihued wings spread from her back, and her head and face were those of a beautiful, and very angry, woman. Her eyes flickered briefly over Jace’s bloodied form, and then to the metallic limbs that threatened him. She hurled back her head and uttered a roar that wasn’t remotely feminine, and took to the air with a leap of her hind legs, a leap so powerful she scarcely had to spread her wings at all before she landed atop her foe.

  Her great weight and greater strength brought a dozen tendrils crashing to the earth. They thrashed at her, with razor-edged blades and bone-breaking cudgels. Most of its attacks she swatted aside, a cat enjoying the feeble struggling of a dying lizard. Of those that connected, most rebounded from her toughened hide; only once did the golem’s blade cut deep, drawing blood as blue as the sphinx’s fur. She roared once more, reared high, and came crashing down with all her weight, front paws flying faster than the eye could see. And when she finally stopped and stepped away, Tezzeret’s construct was nothing but a pile of shredded strips, for her claws pierced iron as easily as they would have flesh. The courtyard suddenly reeked of strange oils and base metals.

  Jace gave her a smile of deep gratitude, even bowing his head as he dismissed the summons, allowing her to return to her distant home. And then he turned and glared as Tezzeret appeared above him, applauding softly.