Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel

by Ari Marmell

  It could not simply describe the journey to them, for what good were mere words or even concepts such as direction and distance in the Blind Eternities? But it had possessed the one called Jace Beleren once before, and with his cooperation it would do so again. With a melding of their minds, a sharing of the senses, the joined man-and-ghost could find their way. Ensconced within his flesh and protected by his Spark, their thoughts linked by magics only Beleren could perform, it would use its own sensory impressions and the planeswalker’s powers to retrace its ghostly steps once more.

  Liliana Vess and Jace Beleren would have their guide.

  For even the most powerful and most attentive planes-walker, arriving at a single, specific spot—such as, for instance, Baltrice’s ability to appear in the foundry’s sealed room, or the dead-end hall in the Consortium’s heart—was a matter, not merely of intent, but of regular practice and intimate familiarity.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, possession by a spirit that had made the journey to the world in question precisely once failed to qualify as either. And thus Jace and Liliana had found themselves in the midst of a seemingly endless desert, the sun beating down on them with hammer-heavy blows, and no trace of Tezzeret’s sanctum—or any other signpost of civilization—in sight. Even the various summoned scouts they sent soaring high above them found no sign of the artificer; they had, however, spotted a slow-moving dromad-drawn caravan, trudging through the sands some few miles away.

  Now, their skin already turning red beneath the blazing heat, the planeswalkers sat on simple wooden stools before an older, leather-skinned fellow named Zarifim. Clad in voluminous, sand-hued robes, he appeared almost a part of the desert itself. The rest of his brethren, similarly dressed, waited politely some yards away while their leader conducted his negotiations.

  “… easily spare the clothes you require, my new friends,” he was saying to Jace. “But such things are not easy to make.”

  “I understand,” Jace told him. “How about four jugs of water, then?” He begrudged the mana it would take to summon so much water to this parched environment, but they needed the desert garb—and, more important, the directions Zarifim could offer.

  To his credit, the old nomad didn’t jump on the deal immediately. “Forgive me for doubting your judgment, but you appear so ill-prepared for desert travel. Can you spare such a quantity of water? I would hate for our deal to leave you dying of thirst before you reach your goal.”

  “I appreciate your concern, friend,” Jace told him, ignoring the impatient tapping of Liliana’s foot beside him. “But we’ll make do, I assure you.”

  “Very well. Then we have a bargain.” The nomad gestured and several of his brethren came forward, carrying robes akin to the one he wore. “Not to keep questioning you, my new friends,” he said hesitantly, “but are you certain you wish to approach the Iron Tower? Even we go there only when we have many valuables to trade, and then only reluctantly. It is a bad place.”

  “I don’t doubt that at all,” Jace admitted. “But from your description, yes, it is exactly where we must go.”

  “So be it. I wish you the luck of the heavens. You must start from here, traveling due west for two days. Then …”

  It was, in fact, four days later when Jace Beleren and Liliana Vess strode from the seemingly endless deserts, their skin chapped and wind-burned despite their protective magics and native garb, to finally arrive at the metallic monstrosity that was Tezzeret’s home. Despite the heat, Jace had insisted on wearing his blue cloak, though he did so beneath the nomad’s robe. He knew damn well that he was being superstitious, even silly, but he’d owned it so long, survived with it for so long, he felt naked facing Tezzeret without it. Both were tired from the journey, both were worried that the sands had offered them little in the way of mana suited to their magics. They could only hope to discover some viable source within the sanctum itself, or risk finding themselves truly overmatched.

  It rose from beneath the sands, a shallow hill that gleamed blindingly in the pounding sun. Perfectly smooth, at least from this distance, it might as well have been shaped from a single slab of alloy; only one solitary tower in the structure’s center, stabbing daggerlike at the heavens and boasting numerous spires and protrusions of its own, marred the otherwise pristine surface of the gentle slope. Uneven heaps of sand surrounded it, rising and falling waves constantly reshaped by the desert winds.

  The mages studied it, hands held high to shade their eyes from the brilliance. From their current vantage, it was impossible to say precisely how large the structure might be, for the desert here was flat and featureless, their view obscured by sand-speckled breeze and the haze of rising heat.

  Finally, Jace turned to Liliana and said simply, “How much magic do you suppose it takes to keep the place cool?”

  She snorted, and they trudged their way closer still. As they walked, each summoned a small flock of minions—tiny fey, in Jace’s case, with the power to make themselves invisible, while Liliana called up a handful of translucent spirits—and ordered them on ahead.

  They learned much as they neared the looming structure. It was not, as they had supposed, perfectly circular; rather, they had appeared toward the back of what turned out to be a crescent, shallower on the inner curve than the outer, and at the tips than the rear. The tower emerged from the highest point, at the apex of the crescent’s bend. And it was not, in fact, constructed of a single sheet of metal, though the individual pieces were so perfectly fitted together that it might as well have been.

  But most important and most discouraging, neither the mages nor their unearthly minions could find anything resembling a door. It seemed very much as though the structure had simply been sealed up during its construction and left that way.

  Again and again the fey and the phantoms circled the complex; again and again they came up empty. Crouched behind a sand dune, Jace and Liliana grew ever more frustrated.

  “Is it possible,” Jace finally asked, “that there really isn’t a door? Could Tezzeret be relying solely on teleportation magics?”

  Liliana shook her head. “Obviously, there’s more to this world than desert. Carrying enough material to build this thing from other worlds would have taken centuries.”

  “Right. So?”

  “So the same is true of supplies, Jace. Tezzeret’s got to have people delivering food, building materials, and whatnot. Carrying supplies across a desert means caravans. Dromads or camels, wagons, you name it. You think he’s teleporting entire wagon trains through those walls?”

  “Ah. Fair point. So where’s the damned door?”

  “What, I have to answer everything?”

  Again they lapsed into silence.

  Ultimately, it proved to be a far simpler matter than they were making it out to be. Inspired by their successful efforts to track Baltrice, Liliana finally called up the smallest, weakest, and least offensive phantom she could muster—the better to avoid setting off any alarms or safeguards—and sent it through the walls to wander the structure’s passageways. It took the ghostly entity only a short while to find a hall, occupied by several guards, that appeared to dead-end against the outer wall, and to report back with its location.

  Of course, that still left them without a means of opening said door—but now, at least, Jace was in his element.

  “Ask your phantom,” he said to Liliana, gathering his own concentration and beginning the first stages of a clairvoyance spell, “to point me in the direction of the guards.”

  As it turned out, the “door” was a section of the wall itself, enchanted to fade away at the command of the guards inside. Jace’s and Liliana’s nomad garb wasn’t sufficient to get them to open that door; but the illusion of a Consortium guard uniform beneath that robe, which Jace casually pulled aside, did the trick. One of the guards now lay senseless at Jace’s feet out in the shifting sands, a second dead in the hallway where Liliana’s specter had caught him before he could reach the speaking tube to report their
arrival.

  The whole affair had taken roughly half a minute.

  “You know you might have triggered an alarm sending in that specter!” he snapped at Liliana as he dragged the fallen guard out of sight of the doorway. “There’s a reason we sent the weakest spirit we could to do our scouting, remember?”

  Liliana shrugged. “As opposed to what would’ve happened if I’d let that man report us? We’re invading Tezzeret’s sanctum, Jace! I think we’re past the point of mincing about, don’t you?”

  Jace grumbled, which she took—correctly—as a sign that he knew she was right but didn’t want to say so. “What now?” she asked him.

  “Well,” he said, after taking a moment to calm himself, “nobody’s running to attack us yet, so we’ll assume the alarm’s not capable of detecting phantoms after all.”

  “Or that there is no alarm,” Liliana suggested.

  Jace, remembering the setup on Ravnica, didn’t believe it for a second. “Have your specter drag the body out here,” he ordered.

  “Not sure one of them can do it alone, Jace. They’re not real comfortable manipulating solid objects.”

  “Fine.” Jace grimaced, and the unconscious guard rose unsteadily to his feet. “He’ll help.” Even as the mismatched pair set about dragging the other soldier to join his fellow outside, Jace was shoveling aside heaps of sand, preparing a secret, shallow grave. Once the corpse was outside, Jace raised a second illusion—one that, he hoped, would convince anyone inside that the wall was still closed.

  “Assuming there is an alarm,” Liliana said a moment later, “how do we get in?”

  The guard stood motionless as Jace rifled through his thoughts. “It’s like the alarm on Ravnica,” he confirmed. “It’s designed to detect the presence of unauthorized entrants.”

  “All right. So what do we do?”

  “We have a polite little conversation,” Jace said with a smile, as the soldier strode back into the hallway and lifted the speaking tube from the wall, “with someone who has the power to authorize us.”

  It proved no harder for Jace to overpower the shift commander, a gold-skinned desert elf named Irivan, than it had been any of the others. Carefully he commanded the unconscious fellow to rise, to move to the alarm controls and authorize the planeswalkers to pass. Liliana nodded at Jace and turned away, watching the elf as he spoke into a strange gemstone inlaid into the wall—and thus she missed the darkening of Jace’s gaze as he looked upon her.

  For Jace had learned something within Commander Irivan’s mind, something that worried him far more than any alarm. Surely the Consortium’s ranking officers, if not the average soldier, would have been briefed on the organization’s many enemies. And indeed Irivan knew full well who Jace Beleren was. He knew, too, of Kallist Rhoka; of Nicol Bolas; of the fey Oberilia Zant, who had stolen from Tezzeret’s minions many a valuable artifact; and of half a dozen others whom Tezzeret had deemed a threat to his empire.

  But despite her claims so long ago that she too was hiding from their mutual foe, Jace found no knowledge at all of the sorceress Liliana Vess.

  Commander Irivan strode purposefully down the metal corridors. Following several steps behind came a pair of Consortium soldiers, or so it would appear to any passerby. Trying desperately to behave as their illusory guises suggested they should, Jace and Liliana struggled to neither gawk at the iron-and-steel perdition through which they passed, nor to wince at the perpetual thumps and whistles and hums that echoed through those passageways.

  Walls and ceilings of gleaming metal were lit by recessed globes that glowed without emitting the slightest trace of heat. Some floors boasted tiny patterns in the steel, providing some amount of traction, while others boasted thin layers of carpeting, and still others were nothing but grates that allowed a distorted view of the levels below. Though pristine in appearance, the halls smelled cloyingly of smoke and burning oils.

  Doors that were themselves mere sheets of metal either slid aside or irised open as they moved through, or as other guards and workers passed them by, complete with a faint hissing somewhere inside the walls. Heavy windows allowed occasional glances into chambers full of animated metallic limbs, of precarious platforms that rose and fell of their own accord, of glowing spheres that pulsed in patterns Jace could not begin to comprehend. That there was some method behind the mechanized madness he did not doubt, but he couldn’t hope to guess what it might be.

  Only slowly did it dawn on Jace and Liliana both that, despite their fear and consternation, they were actually feeling better than they had outside. At first Jace attributed it to being out of the desert heat, but no, it was definitely something more. It almost felt as if …

  That was it, then. Mana flowed through the walls, the floors, the essence of the Consortium sanctum. And not just any sort of energy but all sorts, from the soothing auras of the ocean to the burning soul of the mountains to the deathly magics of the swamplands. Something in the building, some ingrained magic or alchemical-mechanical process, transformed the ambient mana of the world into any form imaginable. It was subtle, it was difficult to access—as though the walls themselves sought to keep the power contained within—but it was there. Jace almost slumped in relief as he devoted a portion of his attentions to tapping into that source, as he felt his strength slowly but surely rise once more. He could only imagine Liliana felt much the same.

  And then they passed a great chamber just as the pistons inside began to pump. Any relief Jace had been feeling evaporated into so much mist, and he couldn’t suppress a gasp of unmitigated revulsion.

  He’d known there must be not only mechanical ingenuity but mana driving these machines, but he hadn’t realized what sort. As they passed, he felt the ambient energies in the air turn dark and cold. Just barely, beneath the clatter and the hiss, the rumbling and the rattling, Jace thought he heard faint screams of living essences bound within the machine, providing the pseudo-sentience it needed to follow its master’s commands.

  Never had he hated Tezzeret more than he did in that moment; never did he understand more clearly the nature of the devil to whom he’d nearly sold his soul.

  A low hiss from Liliana snapped his thoughts back to the present. Irivan had stopped in his tracks while Jace’s mind drifted, and it took him a moment to center himself and re-establish control, to set the elf marching ahead once more. And just in time, for as they passed by the next door in the corridor, it slid open and Baltrice herself stepped out into the hall.

  All three guards stepped to the side, standing against the wall that she might go by unhindered. She did so, with scarcely a nod of acknowledgment. Only once she had passed did she briefly turn back to peer directly at Jace; no recognition shown in her expression, but her eyes narrowed ever so minutely, as though she were bothered by something she couldn’t entirely pin down. And then the thought had passed, as had her gaze, and she was gone around the next bend in the hall.

  Jace exhaled loudly, and the group moved on.

  And so they progressed, protected by Jace’s illusions and ignored by workers and guards alike, through the lower levels of the Consortium’s mechanical heart. Guided by the memories and knowledge of the sleepwalker before them, Jace and Liliana inched ever nearer their ultimate goal, and not a soul was aware of their presence.

  Jace knew better than to note, or even to think, that it was going too smoothly; he knew all too well it wouldn’t last.

  Indeed, it did not. They set foot upon a spiral stair, one that wound its way gradually up to a heavy door made not of steel or iron, but of ancient bronze. An array of multicolored stones, similar to those that had served as the controls for the alarm system, adorned the wall beside the ponderous portal.

  Neither mage needed even to ask. They knew this must mark the entrance to the tower itself.

  Though it was utterly unnecessary, thanks to his mental hold over the elven commander, Jace gave the squat soldier a curt nod. Irivan stepped forward, waved a hand over the gems, and th
e door rose into the ceiling with a low rumble and another hiss of steam.

  Never mind their guises now; Jace and Liliana simply stared, utterly rooted to the floor.

  If what they’d seen so far was mechanized chaos, this was mechanized madness. Half a dozen circular platforms of various sizes, held aloft by perfectly smooth cables as thick as tree trunks, rose and fell throughout the tower’s hollow center, perhaps providing access to the areas above. At no point did the spire boast anything resembling an actual story; balconies, rooms, and structures that might even have been small buildings, had they stood on their own, protruded from the wall at various heights. Some were linked to others by more catwalks; others by stairs and smaller lifts that ran along the wall; and still others could be reached only by the central platforms. And those chambers and “partial floors” moved in turn, rotating around the tower’s circumference, slowly sliding up or down, so that none remained at the same height for more than a few moments at a time. Between and around them, great pulleys and more rapidly pulsing orbs of light orchestrated the endless metal ballet that kept the tower in constant motion, yet somehow prevented so much as a single cable from becoming tangled with any other.

  It made no sense, couldn’t possibly make sense. Jace could imagine no purpose to it, no reason for someone to construct such a convoluted structure, unless …

  Unless it wasn’t a structure at all.

  “It’s an artifact,” he whispered.

  “What?” Liliana asked him, tearing her gaze from the slow dance above. “What is?”

  “This. This place. The cables, the rising levels … The whole thing’s an eldritch machine, Liliana. An artifact, not a building. It just happens to also have people in it.”