Agents of Artifice p-1

by Ari Marmell

  The older guard rolled his eyes heavenward and cuffed the younger hard across the side of his head.

  "We have solid reports," he told the prisoners, "of the two of you causing all manner of ruckus, disturbing the peace, and even assaulting citizens over the course of the last couple of days. You're both under arrest."

  "We just passed through the bridge gates no more than an hour ago," Kallist protested. "Check with your own damned guards!"

  The commander only shrugged. "They watch hundreds of folk pass in and out every day. Can't be expected to trust their recollections of any specific two, can we?

  "But don't worry. If you're telling the truth, we'll get it all sorted out. Won't take more than, oh, I'd say three or four days. Maybe a week on the outside."

  Everything clicked into place in Kallist's mind, and he cursed himself for an idiot. The timing on this could be no coincidence. It could only be Semner's work.

  But that meant, just maybe, that the guards could point them toward the ugly bastard himself.

  "Go along for now!" he hissed under his breath to Liliana, even as he saw her lips begin to twitch.

  She peered at him as though he'd gone mad, but allowed herself to relax.

  Two of the guards stepped forward to take the broadsword and crossbow. Grumbling, one of them patted down Kallist, searching for other weapons. The other, with a licentious grin, did the same to Liliana. Kallist recognized the brutal gleam in her eyes, and knew that the guard had better make every effort not to run into her again. Then, hands manacled together, surrounded by the entire squad, they found themselves marched down the streets of Favarial.

  "As far as prisons go," Kallist told Liliana some hours later, "I've certainly been in worse."

  She glared at him. "If this is supposed to comfort me, may I suggest that you try some other approach? Perhaps try punching me in the jaw. That would probably work better."

  "I've also escaped from far worse," he protested.

  "That's almost impressive."

  "Well, almost thank you."

  Their current abode was a drab cell, stone-walled on three sides, with a barred gate on the fourth. One of several identical chambers in the watch-house of Favarial, all of which smelled of lingering sweat, fear, and humanoid wastes, it was probably intended to hold no fewer than a dozen prisoners.

  That they were alone in the cell only con firmed that the official reason for their arrest was a sham.

  Kallist and Liliana sat on stone cots that were bolted thoroughly to the floor, and the cell's "chamber pot" was nothing more than a tiny hole, far too small for even the thinnest and most desperate prisoner to squeeze through. At the hall's far end, well beyond reach of anyone within the cells, the only exit was guarded by the biggest viashino Kallist had ever seen. Her scales were a dull tan with a snake-like pattern of red and green rings. She wore a custom-formed breastplate of steel, and leaned on… Kallist wasn't even sure what to call the ugly weapon: perhaps a morningstar with anger management issues. It was a heavy steel bar as long as a man's leg, one end wrapped in leather, the rest of its span covered in a chaotic forest of spikes and spines and blades. She watched every one of the cells, constant, unblinking.

  The prison was, by all normal measures, perfectly designed to provide neither any means of escape nor even the most crude of improvised weaponry.

  "Normal measures," of course, had no meaning to its present occupants. Oh, it had wards and sigils to prevent wizards from escaping-but the prison's builders had never thought to contend with mages, with walkers, of Liliana's power.

  Obviously, Semner's people hadn't told the squad commander much about whom he was dealing with. If they had, he might have taken more precautions.

  If they had, the fact that the mages hadn't escaped already would have warned him that something was very, very wrong.

  Kallist and Liliana sat, continuing on occasion to bicker and silently wondering how long they would have to wait. Finally, as night slowly crept up behind the loitering daylight, cudgel in hand, they heard the heavy oaken door to the prison hallway screech open. They moved as one toward the bars so they could see. The officer who had arrested them stepped past the reptilian guard, grinned broadly at both of them, and strode toward the door of their cell.

  "I'm Lieutenant Albin," he introduced himself. "And you are…?"

  "Not," Kallist answered gruffly.

  "Enjoying the accommodations?" the lieutenant asked, refusing to be put off.

  "Enjoying the bribe Semner paid you?" Liliana retorted.

  Albin's grin didn't falter, but his voice turned hard. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he told them, presumably more for the viashino's benefit than their own. Still, he moved nearer to the cell, so that anything else they might say wouldn't be so easy to overhear.

  "Our 'mutual friend,"' the lieutenant began, "seems to think that you might know something that would help him locate his target. Cooperate and I can make your stay here a lot more comfortable; might even get you out of here faster. If not…"

  "What are you offering?" Kallist asked. Albin smiled once more and stepped closer still so he could whisper, stopping just outside the bars.

  It was precisely what they'd been waiting for. Concealed in his fist, Kallist clutched one of the iron bolts that had held the cot to the floor, a bolt that was supposed to be impossible to remove. Kallist had never mastered more than the most rudimentary spells of telekinesis-even Jace hadn't been an expert there-but chipping away at a bit of mortar? That, even he could manage. With a wolfish grin, he dropped into a crouch, stuck his hand through the bars, and shoved the rusty length of metal into Albin's inner thigh.

  He and the guard fell back from one another even as Albin's scream echoed through the cells. The bolt vanished up Kallist's sleeve, hidden not merely by cloth but a thin layer of illusion. The lieutenant fell writhing to the floor, hands clasped around the jagged, bleeding wound.

  The viashino leaped toward them, weapon raised high, but Kallist and Liliana had already retreated to the back of the cell, beyond her reach. Several long seconds passed as the reptile glared, her tongue flickering in and out, before she knelt and lifted the wounded man as easily as she would a newborn babe.

  For a moment more she hesitated, discomfited at the notion of leaving her post. But she would be only a few moments, and the growing pool of blood suggested rather firmly that time was of the essence. She cast one more furious gaze at the prisoners and then vanished through the hall's only door, slamming and barring it behind her.

  "Is this enough?" Kallist asked, producing the blood-soaked bolt.

  Liliana barely glanced at it. "More than."

  "Good. Then let's get out of here before some guard shows up to take her place and we have to kill someone who doesn't deserve it."

  By the time anyone else entered the hall, the mages were simply gone, with no evidence they'd ever been present save a few scattered iron bars, and tiny bits of dust that had once mortared those bars in place.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lieutenant Albin staggered and limped across the office to slump into his chair. For long moments he simply sat, cursing with every breath as he searched for a position that didn't pull at the bandages on his thigh, didn't send embers flashing through the constant, abominable ache. He cursed the prisoners who'd stabbed him, cursed Semner for getting him involved, cursed the city for not paying him his due and forcing him to accept outside bribes to live the lifestyle he deserved.

  He cursed the paperwork on his desk, the forms and requisitions. Hell with 'em; let them wait.

  And he cursed the cold draft that wafted beneath the closed door of the office, a draft he felt even through his uniform.

  Where in the name of all gods and demons was the draft coming from? His office stood in the heart of the watch-house, far from any exterior exit. Even if every door in the building stood open, no such draft could have wended its way down the passages. And unless some mad deity had reached out and flipped the s
easons with the flick of a divine switch, any breeze from outside should've been warm, not this icy breath of winter.

  He rose on shaky legs, chair creaking, in time to see the air between him and the door turn black. A swirl of inky fog rose from the stones of the floor, obscuring all vision, all light. The air in the chamber grew colder still, until Albin's terrified gasps steamed in the frigid air, and his teeth chattered like the sound of falling marbles.

  Two pinpricks of light, and then two more, formed in the whirling shadows. They glowed sickly yellow, emanating the heat of swift decomposition, as they formed themselves into pairs of eyes that gazed unblinking from opposite ends of the office. Beneath and behind them, the shadows ceased to writhe but instead hung limp, forming the faintest suggestion of long-taloned hands, bulging wings folded close, legs that trailed away into the ethereal birthplace of night.

  They drifted forward, impossibly still; Albin could not shake the horrid impression that they hadn't moved at all, that he and the world itself had somehow shifted nearer to them. Fingers that were naught but wisps of deepest darkness reached out, and the corrupt guardsman found himself drawing breath to scream.

  "Do not cry out…" A gleaming, jagged chasm of a mouth had opened beneath one pair of eyes, but Albin heard no speech in his ears. He felt it in his gut, remembered it from long-forgotten dreams. Though a low whisper, it was nigh deafening, for it was the voice of a thousand restless dead. "Do not cry out, or we shall raze the house of flesh from around your soul, and leave your five disembodied senses to linger, forever helpless, unknown, and unseen in this wretched room."

  Albin bit down on the scream welling up in his throat, and all but choked on the blood he drew from his tongue.

  From each side, he felt the fingers of the abyss wrap tight about his upper arms. His flesh burned as with the prolonged touch of ice, his vision blurred, his chest and head pounded as though he suffocated.

  And then he was moving! Locked in a grip as unbreakable as death, he felt himself sliding backward through the wall itself. A moment of hideous nausea, as the world turned inside out and he felt the rough texture of the stone passing through his flesh, and they were on the other side. The ground dropped away beneath his feet, as he was borne aloft in the bone-crushing and soul-numbing grasp of the shadow things.

  His arms were numb, but the icy burn had spread below to his fingers, upward through his chest and shoulders, until he could scarcely draw breath. Higher and higher the spirits carried him, until a wide swath of Ravnica was nothing but a map of intercrossing bridges and roadways below, until wisps of cloud mingled with the wisps of darkness that carried him.

  The thing on his left tilted its head, and Albin could swear he heard an obscene chuckle even as it spoke.

  "Now, if you wish, you may scream."

  But he no longer had the breath.

  As swiftly as they'd risen into the cold night air, they dropped again, plummeting into a neighborhood halfway across the district from the watch-house. With a bruising jolt, they stopped at the precise height of an old warehouse down near the lakeside docks, where the buildings were lower and the rooftops flatter. There they waited, hovering several feet from the roof.

  And Albin, who had thought he could never again be surprised by anything, gawked at the pair who awaited them. Kallist stood at the very edge, a watch-issue long sword dangling from his fist. Behind him sat Liliana, legs and arms crossed. Her lips moved constantly in a sonorous mantra, and from beneath her closed eyelids leaked faint traces of the same sickly yellow luminescence that defined the features of the shadow-men.

  "How was your trip, Lieutenant?" Kallist asked gruffly.

  "I–I…" The words refused to come to him.

  "Yes, I thought so. Let's make this is as simple as we can, Albin. We have questions for you. You're going to answer them, quickly and honestly, or things will get very unpleasant."

  The guardsman felt a surge of hope, warm enough to melt through the icy lump in his throat. "If I do, will you let me go? Will you let me live?"

  Kallist smiled a sad little smile. "I don't think you understand, Albin. The specters already killed you." Slowly, inexorably, he raised the sword, waved it through Albin's arms, his legs, his torso.

  The blade touched nothing, nothing at all.

  Finally, Albin found the strength to scream. Kallist, tapping the flat of the blade against his leg, waited patiently for him to finish.

  "Your body," he said, and his voice was actually gentle, even sympathetic, "is lying on the floor of your office. I imagine it'll be morning before anyone finds it.

  "No, Albin, your choice is not whether to help us and live, or refuse us and die. Your choice is to help us and be allowed to pass on-or to refuse, and find your soul given over to the specters for their own amusement."

  Twin hisses of lustful pleasure sounded in the dead man's mind, yet they weren't enough to drown out the sound of the necromancer's chant.

  And Albin, weeping phantom tears, began to talk.

  "You sure you're up to this?" Kallist asked in a concerned whisper, for the third time since they'd reached the alley and at least the eighth since they'd set out that morning.

  "Kallist?"

  "Yes?"

  "It would really be a shame if you made me kill you before Semner's men got a fair crack at it." Yep, Kallist decided. She's up to it.

  Summoning two specters from the depths of the void was not, in itself, a difficult feat for her-but sending them to locate Albin and binding his ghost to the physical world for long enough to obtain their answers, that should have been considerably more grueling. Her use of the lieutenant's blood as an anchor and a focus had made all the difference.

  Still, she'd spent many of the following hours in rest and meditation. The waters of the lake and nearby shores overflowed with mana, but it was a mana rich with life, ill-suited for her own necromantic magic. She drew what she could from the marshy patches scattered here and there about the shoreline, and even from the fungal patches in Favarial's sewage pipes, and then cast her concentration further still, drawing from Avaric, from other domains much farther distant. She swore it had been enough, but Kallist thought she looked tired even now, though several days had come and gone.

  Kallist had pretended to make full use of the time. He'd acquired them new clothes, so they might blend more effectively with the middle-class population.

  And then, with that chore done, he'd fretted until Liliana recovered. But however difficult it had been, it had proved absolutely worthwhile.

  Semner was indeed using Albin's corrupt guards for more than impeding his rivals; he was using them to conduct his own search. With the aid of Albin's despairing, wailing ghost, Liliana and Kallist had identified most of the lieutenant's crooked operatives, tracking them down at their favorite taverns and gambling halls and brothels. Between their knowledge of the guards' dishonest activities and threats of mystical retribution, they'd convinced the lot of them to continue the hunt, but to report their findings to them, rather than to Semner.

  Those findings, delivered by a nervous guard who wasted far too much time begging them not to turn him into something viscous, had finally drawn them to this cramped and malodorous alleyway, across the street from an old tenement building in the district's poorest quarter. The aquamarine walls were cobwebbed with cracks, the arched and peaked windows covered with moldy shutters, the doors bulging from within doorways that had long since shifted several degrees off plumb. For several minutes, now, the pair had watched from the concealing shadows, and had seen nobody-Jace or otherwise-enter or leave the decrepit structure.

  "If this isn't just another false sighting," Liliana muttered, "then Jace's standards of living have taken a substantial downturn in the past six months."

  Kallist merely shrugged. "Hard to stay unnoticed if you're living it up like a king with no heir."

  "Kallist," she asked seriously, "are we even on the right trail? I mean, would Jace even look like himself anymore?"r />
  "I think he would." Kallist furrowed his brow in thought. "Jace is about a hundred times the illusionist I am; he could probably make a mother leonin mistake him for one of her own cubs. But even he can't make himself look like someone else every day, all day. He might use a false image on occasion, if he feels he's in danger, but otherwise-"

  A horrible shriek shattered the relative stillness of the evening. From behind the shutters of a top floor window shone a sudden burst of a brilliant and ugly firelight. And then it, and the scream, faded just as swiftly, and the alleyway plunged once more into darkened silence.

  "Like now, perhaps." Liliana and Kallist exchanged brief, shocked glances, and then both were charging across the road.

  Kallist had just long enough to regret the loss of his broadsword. He missed its solid, comforting weight; the guard-issued longsword with which he'd absconded during their escape just didn't have the same heft. Then there was no time for thinking at all as his shoulder collided with the tenement's outer door. The flimsy planks disintegrated before him, and he found himself pounding up multiple flights of shaky, mold-ridden stairs.

  The first story disappeared beneath him, then the second, then more; even the tenements in this damned place were taller than they'd any right to be! The thundering of his footsteps echoed in the stairwell, as though an entire host of trolls followed him up. Doors slammed shut, and he heard the sounds of bolts sliding home, as the people who dwelt within decided it would be wiser to hide from whatever was happening than to step out and investigate it.

  As he neared the upper floor, he saw a woman he recognized as one of Semner's thugs. Precisely what had happened to her, Kallist couldn't say, but she lay sprawled across the topmost steps and was only now rousing herself from unconsciousness. Kallist wondered briefly how Semner had tracked Jace here without the aid of the corrupt watchmen, but wasn't about to take the time to inquire. Without so much as breaking stride, he ran his blade through the back of the woman's head as he passed. There would be others to question at a more appropriate time.