Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel

by Ari Marmell

  Wearing his accustomed black suede outfit and burgundy coat, and his even more accustomed arrogant smirk, Mauriel Pellam swaggered up the steps to the second-floor gallery. It was always his first stop when he returned to his lavish penthouse after more than a few days away from home. Setting eyes on the various portraits and tapestries, the small gold busts of famous men and the great bronze sculpture of Razia—breasts thrust forward in an awkwardly erotic pose that the angel herself would undoubtedly have found both ludicrous and personally offensive—all this reminded him why he did what he did. Why he worked for such people as he did, delivering goods and messages whose import he scarcely understood. It was all worth it, to afford such luxuries as these.

  He had just passed beyond that sculpture when something flashed out from behind it, something that had waltzed past the building’s guards and even its eldritch glyphs and alarms without so much as breaking a sweat. Pellam found himself flat on his back, staring up into a pair of unblinking ice-blue eyes.

  “Let’s talk for a moment,” Jace Beleren said to him, “about the messages you carry on behalf of Nicol Bolas …”

  The chain was a long one, with nearly a dozen links. Pellam received his instructions from this man, who got them from that vedalken, who in turn received them from that other fellow … But each led him one step farther, and none could keep their secrets from him.

  Until finally, near dusk some days later, Jace found himself standing at the gate of a vast estate, located just beyond the borders of Dravhoc District. The surrounding iron fence was high, topped with jutting spikes that each boasted a rune of not insubstantial power. At that gate stood a pair of guards; one merely human, the other loxodon, the gray leathery flesh of his arms and his trunk covered with tribal scars, his tusks capped with iron blades and carved with religious runes. Those tree-thick arms hung crossed over his armored chest, and a flail with a head roughly the size of a small continent hung from his waist. Beyond the guards, the path wound its way through a garden of flowers that should not have been in bloom this time of year, to the home of a man Jace knew to be one of Ravnica’s greatest sorcerers. That he was also Bolas’s chief agent and contact on this world had come as no great surprise.

  “I’d like to see the magus,” Jace told the guards as he came to a halt before them.

  “So would a lot of people,” the loxodon told him. “Not going to happen.”

  Jace, who had spent hours drawing as much mana as he could from the shores of Dravhoc’s slope for just this purpose, sighed dramatically. “I just knew you were going to say that …”

  He found Liliana waiting in the corner of the cold and dusty room they’d rented, adjusting the pull on her stolen crossbow and sitting in a rickety chair that was so close to giving up the ghost that she almost felt she could reanimate it. The glare she aimed at Jace as he stepped into the chamber could have flattened a herd of aurochs.

  “It worked,” he told her, shutting the door behind him.

  She continued to glare. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t appreciate,” she said icily, “being kept in the dark like this.” And I definitely don’t like not knowing what you’re up to! “Especially,” she added, taking note of the holes burned into his tunic, the bits of blackened flesh on his arms and chest, “when you’re obviously walking into danger. We just got you healed up, damn it! I should’ve been with you!”

  “Wouldn’t have been a good idea,” he said, grunting with pain as he removed his cloak and the tatters of his tunic. “The point wasn’t to kill or even mindwipe anyone. I needed information. I did not need to make a new enemy in the process.”

  “What are you talking …?” She trailed off, stunned first at the extent of his wounds, and then at the sight of the bloodstained manablade that he dropped to the table. “Damn, Jace, what have you been doing?”

  “Talking to people. The wizard needed some convincing.” Jace had been reluctant—more than reluctant, almost nauseated—to put the knife to the man’s flesh. He knew the pain it caused. But he’d had to know, and he wasn’t sure he could’ve won without the weapon to aid him, or broken through the wizard’s defenses without weakening the man first.

  “All right,” she said, not sounding mollified at all. “So could you at least explain why you wouldn’t tell me where you were going?”

  Jace offered an embarrassed smile. “Because you’d have tried to stop me, and I didn’t think we had the time to argue about it or to find another option.”

  “Why do I not find that reassuring? Jace, what did you do?”

  “I knew we couldn’t find Tezzeret on our own,” he told her. “So I decided to find someone else who could.”

  “Oh, sure. You bring back an oracle in your pocket?”

  Jace couldn’t help it. “That’s not an oracle,” he told her with a leer.

  “But no,” he continued hastily when her glare very clearly told him that he was not funny, “I was actually talking about Nicol Bolas.”

  Liliana shot from the chair as though it had grown fangs. The expression she turned on him could not have been more incredulous had he actually puked said dragon into existence on the floor.

  “I’m taking you back to Emmara’s,” she insisted. “Obviously, you’re delusional with fever.”

  “Think about it!” he insisted. “He’s got as large a grudge against Tezzeret as we do—well, close, anyway. And with his sort of power …”

  “Then why wouldn’t he have gone after Tezzeret himself?” Liliana challenged.

  Jace just shrugged. “Bolas didn’t get as old as he is by taking unnecessary chances. And even if he doesn’t know where Tezzeret’s sanctum is, he can certainly help us find it.”

  “Assuming he doesn’t just eat us first.”

  “You have a better idea?” Jace asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t go looking for Nicol Bolas. Besides,” she added as Jace opened his mouth to argue, “you’re just trading one wild phoenix chase for another. You’ve a better chance of stumbling into Tezzeret on the street by accident than you do of finding Nicol Bolas.”

  “But that’s just it, Liliana!” Jace crowed. “I did find him!”

  Liliana exhaled sharply, trying to calm her racing heart. It took her a good long moment before she felt steady enough to speak. “And just where is that, exactly?”

  “What do you know,” Jace asked her, “of a world called Grixis?”

  Even from the shifting wastes of the Blind Eternities, viewed through a storm of undreamed thoughts and unseen hues, it was clearly a world like no other. It was different. It was wrong.

  For Grixis was no world at all, but an echo, a shadow, the phantom limb of a dismembered reality. Once, so very long ago, it had been Alara, a world rich in magics. But Alara was sundered, its corpse devolving into five separate shards, each bereft of vital aspects of mana that allowed both the natural and the supernatural to remain in balance.

  Some were places of beauty, having left behind the worst of what they once were. Unnatural, yes, and doomed to eventual dissolution, but beautiful all the same.

  Grixis was not one of these.

  Within the Blind Eternities, the winds that buffeted Jace’s soul without so much as touching his skin grew mighty, howling with a voice far beyond sound itself. They rushed inward as though to fill the void to come, swirling about the fading lands that clawed and tore and orbited one another in their slow spiral of decay. Here, as nowhere else in all the known Multiverse, the curtain of color that demarcated the real from the potential, the finite from the eternal, bulged and writhed—a creature in pain, or a birthing caul from which something unholy sought to rise. It twisted inward as though grasped by great fists, pulled and warped by the unnatural essence of what lay beyond. Nigh inaudible beneath the winds, the distant echoes of Alara’s death cry still lingered in the currents of potential, and even the Blind Eternities themselves faintly recoiled from this most aberrant of realities
.

  Amid the chaos, Jace waited, his shoulders hunched against the storm of forces that would have destroyed lesser beings. Within the curtain the five worlds spun; the colors grew lighter and darker, the thrashings of the border calmed or grew fierce, as the shards rose and fell on eternal tides. Only after three full iterations of the cycle, when the planeswalker was certain he knew which hue and pattern, which ebb and flow, was which—when he knew which of the shards lay most immediately before him—did he press through the walls of the world to find himself on the plains of Grixis.

  Where, he swiftly discovered, things were even worse.

  A shriek, tormented beyond the fragile borders of sanity, pierced the cavern’s depths. It echoed, high and harsh, from broad passages and flying arches, returning again and again, melding into a symphony of tones.

  Few noticed, for it was just another scream.

  The cavern was lit only by a flickering of hellish flame, leaving most of its features submerged in darkness—and for that, any sane observer must have been grateful. What walls could be seen were broken bone, and the ceilings wept tears of blood that smelled of putrescence and formed warm and quivering stalactites of foulest, clotted brown. Windows of fingernail, not individually torn from any hand but naturally grown in broad sheets, allowed a blurred observance of chambers more terrible still, where the walls were stone-stiff scabs over gangrenous wounds in the earth, and the floors were teeth gnashing and eager to grind the unwary.

  In the cavern’s center, a trio of men lay staked to the ground, their hands overlapping to form a starburst of suffering. Their bodies were covered with tiny, infected cuts, and their eyes were wide and staring, unable even to blink. Though their mouths were open in constant wails, they formed no words; like their eyelids, their tongues and teeth had long since been torn free and discarded.

  Walking over and among them were a man and a woman, both unclad save for simple leather kilts and pouches hanging at their waists. Each was horribly deformed—he boasting a grotesque hump above the kidney, forcing him always to lean right; she with no left arm, but a fully functional hand jutting from her shoulder—and both were adorned with a sequence of unholy runes, scarred into the flesh of their upper backs. They walked with heads uplifted and eyes rolled back in their sockets, yet never once tripped or broke the rhythm of their slow, deliberate dance. And with each third step they chanted horrid words, and cast strange powders from their pouches that burned and sliced the flesh of the men beneath them.

  The three men ceased their screams abruptly, thrashing bodily as one, threatening to tear their hands from the iron stakes. Two of them subsided as swiftly as they began, resuming their incomprehensible shrieks, but the third babbled and moaned what might have been words had he still had a tongue to speak them.

  “Master!” the deformed woman shrieked, her eyes reappearing in their sockets. “Master, come quick!” Her cry echoed again and again, carried by magics woven into the array of caverns, reaching beyond these chambers of horror into rooms far more comfortable, far more mundane. With a sigh, the one she called lay down the ancient tome he perused, his great bulk shifting, wings stretching and folding, as he moved to answer.

  “I am here, Caladessa.” The great voice rumbled down from a ledge above the highest arch, near the cavern’s ceiling dozens of feet above her head.

  The witch looked up and bowed. “Hold him,” she ordered, turning to her male counterpart. He shuffled over to the mumbling man and knelt upon his chest, putting an end to what thrashing and writhing the stakes allowed.

  The one called Caladessa knelt beside the pinioned man and stretched out a thumb and forefinger, both tipped with long and jagged nails. She reached in, digging at the corner of his eye, and with a practiced movement stripped away his cornea as easily as she might have peeled a fruit.

  She turned away, ignoring her victim as his mumblings turned once again to hollow screams. Her companion stepped away as well, thankful that this was the subject’s first divination. He always hated the labor involved in replacing a staked vessel once both orbs were expended.

  Caladessa ran the tiny film across her tongue, removing any traces of the man’s tears, any dirt that might have flecked his lidless eye; her own vision must be unblemished, lest she draw the master’s displeasure. Then, once more staring upward, she squeezed her right eye shut and carefully lay the cornea over the left.

  “What see you, soothsayer?” boomed the voice from above.

  “Two have come to Grixis, master,” she replied, falling into a strange, vaguely disturbing cadence. “World-walkers, mana-drinkers. Vital still, they stand amid the rising dead.”

  “Two?” The cavern resounded with shifting scales from above. “Two … Tell me.”

  “Mind-breaker, thought-taker, eye-blinder, dream-raker. He walks the intentions of others as easily as he walks between worlds, but knows not his own.

  “Death-bringer, corpse-talker, spirit-rider. She teeters on the edge of death, and fears to fall in after those she has sent before her. A blossoming of truth that rots around a seed of endless lies.”

  “Ah,” came the voice from above. “Them.”

  For long moments, the great dragon pondered. Then, “Summon Malfegor. Tell him to take over observations here until I return.”

  Not bothering to wait for further acknowledgment, Nicol Bolas unfurled his great wings and vanished into the darkness at the apex of the looming cavern, leaving nothing but scurrying feet and shrieking throats behind.

  From the spiritual winds of the Blind Eternities, Jace stepped through the curtain of reality into the equally fierce physical winds of Grixis’s revolting terrain. Physical—but far, far from natural. They leached the warmth from his body, carried a noxious fume of exhaustion and despair. The hem of Jace’s cloak grew ragged and worn, the leather of his boots supple and thin, as though each had seen years of use in the span of seconds. His flesh ached, his vision blurred; as he cowered against the winds with an arm raised to protect himself, he saw tufts of the hairs on the back of his hand grow brittle and flake away.

  With those winds rose an oily fog, swirling and dancing in a maddened ballet of wretched plague. Thick tendrils of the stuff writhed past his face, coating his lungs with a film of fluid decay. Like murky water, it thickened and thinned, but even at its clearest Jace could see no more than perhaps thirty feet ahead. At its worst, Bolas could have set down from the skies within arm’s reach, and Jace would never have seen him.

  In the midst of it all came the faint pitter-patter of a light rain—a rain not of water, but of teeth.

  “Liliana!” He could all but feel his own words whip past him, carried away by the deadly winds. “Liliana!” He called again and again, between fits of violent coughs, called until his voice grew hoarse, but never heard any response.

  Desperately, he pushed out with all his might. This was no formal spell, no focused and molded effect, but a raw and unpolished burst of mana unshaped. He flung the incorporeal veil before him, a shield between himself and the murderous winds. And for a time, at least, it armored him. The chill in his flesh grew less, and though buffeted still by winds nearly strong enough to knock him sideways, he found himself able to breathe cleanly. The pall of exhaustion refused to fade, but at least it grew no heavier.

  Leaning into the horrible gale, one arm still shielding his face, Jace began to walk—and it was only then, as he took his first step, that his already overwhelmed senses acknowledged that the earth on which he stood was not ground at all.

  Pale as a week-old corpse and just as pliable, an endless plain of flesh sprawled before him, giving way with a grotesque stretching beneath the soles of his boots. Little grew upon that horrid expanse, at least as far as the storm permitted Jace to see: just a flaky lichen that resembled an infection upon the rotting skin. Sporadic hills were great boils rising from the flesh, and tiny hollows where something had punched through that flesh were filled with a pus-like sludge shot through with veins of brackish bloo
d.

  Jace felt his stomach heave, his skin crawl as though it were determined to flee even if he were too foolish to run with it. In that moment, nothing else mattered, not Nicol Bolas, not finding Tezzeret, none of it. Had Liliana stood with him, had he not lost her somewhere in that nightmarish storm, Jace would have turned around and bent all his remaining strength to walking from Grixis, never to return.

  But lost she was, or perhaps it was he who was lost; in either case, Jace allowed his churning innards a moment to settle and pushed on into the winds. His head ached with the sounds, with the strain of searching for any sign of Liliana while still maintaining the all-but-uncontrolled film of magic that shielded him from the worst of the tempest.

  Ten yards, twenty, fifty, and he found himself descending slightly into a bowl-shaped depression, a lesion in the flesh. And there, just as he decided that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, Grixis proved him wrong.

  Beneath him, the quivering earth split, and the hands of the dead reached out to claim him.

  Only three or four initially, but then a dozen, and a dozen more. From graves that had been dug into the flesh and then healed over, from tumorous abscesses where fallen corpses were simply absorbed by the ground, they hauled themselves into the raging storm. Most had once been human, a few were ogres, and many were the twisted remnants of no creature Jace had ever seen. Some were naught but skeletal remnants of the people they once were; others boasted shifting, viscous skin sluicing from rotting muscles and viscera. All clawed and grabbed for him, hauling themselves hand over hand toward this source of the life for which they lusted, which they needed to stoke the smoldering remnants of their own inner embers.

  More than a few collapsed the instant they arose, their remaining life stripped away by the entropic, consuming winds to which not even the undead, apparently, were immune. But others held firm, though they lost flecks of hanging skin and muscle and even bone to the tempest, and advanced upon their prey. Driven by an instinct beyond meager hunger, they were eager to consume from him whatever life they could, to prolong their tortured existence that much longer.