by Ari Marmell
Jace concentrated briefly as he mounted the first of the steps leading to the chieftain's hut. We're definitely going to have to watch out for the shaman, he sent in warning.
Baltrice froze in mid-stride, her feet on two separate levels of the stair. Her shoulders tightened as though she'd been stretched on a rack, and when she twisted about to glare at Jace, he was certain those muscles must snap.
"I don't give a plague-rat's ass what our situation might be," she hissed at him furiously. "You put your thoughts in my head one more time, I swear I'll put my fire in yours!"
Jace shrugged and tried to pretend he hadn't leaped back off the stairs in reaction to her sudden turn. "Just thought you should know," he said aloud.
Baltrice burst through the doorway of the chieftain's hut, ripping aside the leather curtain that served as his door. She had a bare instant to examine in the room in the flickering firelight from outside. It was unevenly round, a single chamber that filled the entire hut. Numerous bones and skulls hung as trophies upon the walls, as did weapons won in a dozen different battles from a dozen regions of Kamigawa. The entire place reeked, and
Baltrice noted a filth-encrusted hole in the floor across the chamber, opening onto the swamp a few dozen feet below-the closest thing the rat-king had to a privy.
As she scanned the space before her, something slammed into the side of her skull, something that felt like a stone wrapped in velvet. Her vision swam and she sank to one knee, struggling to regain her equilibrium.
The projectile that struck her fell to the floor at her side, revealing itself to be the head of a light-furred nezumi, its expression still slack from surprise.
"This is the vile traitor for whom you would slaughter my brothers and sisters?" To Baltrice, the words were gibberish, utterly incomprehensible; but Jace, who had made his way to the open doorway, understood perfectly.
Baltrice rose to attack, and a three-clawed foot whipped across her face as a spinning back-kick sent her sprawling across the open chamber. Blood poured from her nose and lip, and one of her eyes was already swelling shut.
The figure that emerged from the dark was hunched forward, as were most male nezumi, making him appear far shorter than his true height. Black fur streaked with patches of aging grey covered his body, save for the scaly pink tail, the clawed feet and hands, and the very tip of his twitching nose. Thick whiskers hung beneath night-black eyes that reflected the dancing fires. He wore a segmented breastplate of salamander hide and a wide-brimmed conical hat. The naginata he held was longer than he was tall, with a serrated, cleaving blade.
Baltrice, the world spinning around her as she failed to summon a creature to her aid, found herself desperately wishing she hadn't wasted so much of her strength on her previous spells.
"I am Bonetooth," the ratman continued, advancing slowly across the hut. "Son of Swamp-Eye, the daughter of Moon-Hand the Third. I am leader of the Nezumi-Katsuro gang, as were my fathers and mothers before unto the tenth generation."
He stood above Baltrice's prostrate form, the edge of the naginata pressed against her neck until the skin parted, ever so slightly, and the blood welled up from within. She froze, hoping to forestall his stroke long enough to gather her senses.
"You have conspired against me with my worthless son, whose name I cast out along with his head. He has, perhaps, lied to you, as he has me and so many others, and so, though I know you came to slay me, I was prepared to let you leave.
"And then this!" His twisted, taloned finger quivered with rage as he pointed at the flames that shown through the open doorway. "You came to slay one, yet many have died!
"For such a brutal crime against Nezumi-Katsuro, I can offer no forgiveness."
The naginata rose, a single drop of Baltrice's blood glistening along its edge.
And there it stayed. Heartbeats passed, then long seconds, and Baltrice could only wait, looking up at her would be executioner. What was he waiting for?
Only then did she notice the violent quiver in the rat-king's arms. Turning, she saw Jace in the doorway, one hand raised toward Bonetooth, fingers clenched in a grasp that was not quite a true fist. Sweat beaded his brow, and Baltrice knew it was due to no fire of hers.
Tezzeret had been right. Jace felt the shogun's mind, a presence independent from the physical world. He sensed-he knew-that if he wanted, he could hold it, rearrange it, take it with him, rebuild it or destroy it. He knew that that the power Tezzeret had promised him was indeed within his grasp.
But there was no triumph in that discovery. Jace felt soiled, as though the waters of a thousand rivers could never wash him clean, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. In his mind, he heard the chieftain screaming and shrieking to be free. He swore that he felt, beneath his fingers, the writhing of the nezumi's brain as it kicked and thrashed to escape his hold.
And more than once it almost did just that, almost escaped the paralysis in which Jace held it-not because the shogun was stronger, but because Jace wanted to let him go. Through their mental link he felt every urge, every desire, and every fear, and he yearned for nothing more than to release the ratman's mind.
To say nothing of the fact that Jace felt he could happily watch Baltrice pounded and shredded into a carpet of quivering meat. But somehow, he didn't think Tezzeret would understand.
He could keep his grasp on the shogun's mind, nauseating as it might be, force him to guide them out, hold him as hostage against the nezumi's cooperation. But it took too much concentration, too much attention. He'd be unable to defend them if the rats attacked anyway, or against the shaman's spells, and Baltrice certainly wasn't up to helping. He could let Bonetooth go, but how then to prevent him from killing Baltrice, or from leading the village in pursuit of those who'd attacked them?
Had he taken the time to think about it, to really understand what he was doing, Jace could never have gone through with it. But by the time he consciously acknowledged that he had only one option remaining, he'd already followed through.
Jace adjusted his grip on Bonetooth's mind and commanded the shogun, who had already ceased moving, to cease his breathing as well. The ratman's eyes went briefly wide, his entire body quivered, until finally he dropped dead to the floor of the hut.
Keeping his own mind nearly as empty as the corpse's own, Jace knelt beside Baltrice, who looked at him with a puzzled and, for some reason he wouldn't even try to fathom, vaguely hostile expression. "Can you walk?" he asked her. There was just enough emphasis on the last word to suggest that he wasn't talking about a stroll down the stairs.
"I don't…" The pounding in her head had subsided, but only slightly. "I don't think I…"
Jace placed a hand on her shoulder and concentrated, muttering sounds under his breath that were not words. For an instant, it felt as though something rose from within his chest, tingled its way through his arm, and vanished. His shoulders slumped; he felt- not weak, but certainly weaker than he had a moment before.
"How about now? And I suggest you say 'yes,' because if not, you're damn well stuck here. I'm not wasting any more mana on you."
"I can walk," she snapped at him.
"Good. Go. I'll watch until you're gone; no sense in us both being helpless at once."
"Feeling chivalrous, Beleren?" she asked as she climbed unsteadily to her feet.
"Not even remotely. It's just that I wouldn't trust you to fight off a senile kobold in your current condition."
Baltrice somehow managed to snarl even further without her jaw falling off. "And I'm trying to decide if I'd rather be dead than owe you for this!" She began to concentrate, and Jace turned away to begin his own spell. Again he poked a hole in the skin of the world, reaching into realms of vicious frost. From the gap poured a flock of razor-beaked raptors, their feathers glistening beneath coats of crackling ice.
Jace dispatched them in groups, to cover the door and every window. Not the most potent minions he might have summoned, they would still be sufficient to slow any ne
zumi soldiers who might intrude while he prepared for his own walk between the worlds.
Long moments passed, each more nerve-wracking than the next, until Baltrice finally faded from sight. Jace strode to the center of the room, very deliberately not looking at the fur-covered body on the floor, and concentrated once more, struggling to complete his efforts before some new enemy appeared.
For just an instant, as he neared the end of his ritual, he thought he might not make it.
The enemy didn't come through a door or a window. An entire wall of the hut simply vanished, torn from its roots by a strength Jace could scarcely imagine. Standing in the gap was a nezumi, far more bent and twisted than the chieftain had been. His fur was bone-white, covered in scars and festooned with piercings. He carried a staff that appeared to be made of petrified moss, and he wore nothing but a skirt belted at his waist and a headband of snakeskin.
But it was not the shaman who had torn the wall from the hut. Something loomed behind him, bits of steam still streaming from its mouth where it had eaten Baltrice's fire elemental. Jace had a brief sense of a body made up of multiple cypress trees, with twisted wooden talons and a great gaping maw from which swamp-water fell in a never-ending rain. The shaman shrieked, revealing rows of teeth engraved with mystic runes, and pointed toward him with a quivering paw. The frost raptors swarmed about the intruders, for all the good they would do.
And then the world melted away, a curtain of smoky light parting before him, and Jace could not remember the last time he was so relieved to find himself in the maddening chaos of the Blind Eternities.
"… known some blind goblins who could've planned things out better than that. What sort of brain-damaged monkeys are orchestrating our operations these days?"
Jace hunched in a chair the middle of Kallist's quarters, idly fidgeting with the hem of his cloak, while the chamber's true occupant sat across from him, drinking a cup of fruit tea that had long since gone cold. On the table between them stood an unfinished game of guilds, one on which they had wagered a bottle of elven wine. Kallist, eying the territories on the board, couldn't help but notice once again how many more of them were marked in his colors than Jace's, and wished he'd never brought the subject up.
"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."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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 anywhere-and all but ran through the complex and down the nearest side streets.
