Agents of Artifice p-1

by Ari Marmell

  In the darkest shadows on the "night side" of Gnat Alley, two human men and a goblin woman sat in a poorly lit booth within one of the many nameless taverns along the street of iniquity. The floor was filthy, the table coated with the remnants of past meals. The ale was so watered down that any customer would certainly drown in it before consuming enough to get drunk, the food had never even been in the same general vicinity as a professional cook, and a fresh dose of vomit on the floor would actually have improved the bouquet.

  None of which mattered, since there wasn't a patron in the building who had come here for food or drink.

  Tezzeret, who had wisely chosen not even to touch his mug of whatever-it-was, produced a small leather pouch from a compartment on his belt and slid it across the table. The goblin snatched at it, opening it and examining the gold dust within. She blinked once, sniffed once, and then grumbled an affirmative to her companion.

  Unlike the goblin, and even Tezzeret, who looked as though they belonged here, the other human was impeccably shaved, his red hair slicked back, his black tunic and wine-hued leggings the height of fashion. Even his nails were manicured.

  And since he'd survived more than three minutes in Gnat Alley, dressed in such a fashion, he clearly had just the sort of connections Tezzeret needed.

  He smiled a charming, friendly smile at the goblin's report. "Excellent," he told Tezzeret. "I think we're in business, then. Accidents?"

  The artificer knew precisely what the apparent non sequitur meant. "Absolutely not." His own grin was wolfish. "Knives, fire, spells. Make a show of it. I want a blind man to be able to tell these people were murdered."

  The human and the goblin exchanged startled glances, then shrugged. He was the one paying, after all.

  "Then I think all that remains is to discuss names," the dandy said.

  Tezzeret reached into another pouch and removed a scrap of parchment, treated to burn instantly to ash the moment it came near an open flame. On it was the list Vess had given him; the artificer couldn't help but smirk at the thought of Jace's face when he found out.

  "Rulan Barthaneul, human, a banker in Dravhoc District," Tezzeret read from the list. "Laphiel Kartz, also human, also of Dravhoc. Eshton Navar, human, owns a tavern in Lurias.

  "And Emmara Tandris, elf, of Ovitzia."

  Liliana glanced up from the table, and the cup of fruit tea she'd barely touched, as her host appeared from within the nearest pillar. "How is he?" she demanded.

  Emmara waved a hand and otherwise ignored the question long enough to take a seat-as far down the table as she could without being overtly rude-and requesting a beverage of her own from the tiny construct servants. Only then did she turn again to her guest.

  "He's improving," she said simply.

  "Delighted to hear it," Liliana said, her tone suggesting nothing of the kind. "Of course, that's what you've said every time I've asked you for the past two days! But you still won't let me see him!"

  "That's because when I let you talk to him the first time, you got him so riled up that I think you set him back almost a day," Emmara retorted. "So how about you stop pestering me, and him, and let me do my work?"

  For several breaths they glared at one another, the tension finally breaking only when the construct clumped back into the room with the elfs juice. Emmara took a large sip, and then sighed, shaking her head.

  "He really is doing a lot better, Liliana, but I don't want you going up there just yet. He still needs to rest a while. I've had a hard enough time convincing him that whatever it is you two need to do, it can wait until he's fully recovered. Would you go dashing into his chamber and undo all that work? Get him excited and running about, so he can tear open an internal wound that hasn't had time to mend?"

  Liliana grumbled something unintelligible and slumped back down in the chair. She failed to notice the elfs wince as the slender wood creaked beneath the unexpected impact.

  "You care for him a great deal," Emmara said. It was not a question, yet she sounded unsure.

  "You sound surprised," the other objected.

  "I am," the elf admitted. "I don't tend to think of your sort as being all that compassionate." "My 'sort?'" Liliana asked dangerously. "Human?"

  "Necromancer," Emmara retorted.

  "Yes, I am," she said without shame. "Death, undeath, age, and decay. None of which makes me any less human." She placed just the slightest weight on the last, as though daring the elf to make an issue of it. "Jace is… important to me."

  "To you?" Emmara asked. "Or to what you want?"

  "And what of you?" Liliana demanded, suddenly eager to change the subject. "You're a healer, or so Jace tells me. Why is he not up and around after almost two days?"

  "I could mend his wounds more swiftly," the elf admitted. "But the bolt struck deep, uncomfortably near several organs that he wouldn't do well without. I've chosen to take the more careful route, to ensure the inner damage is repaired before I seal the outer. The magic is at work, even as we speak. He'll be well enough, soon enough."

  "Thank you," Liliana said grudgingly. Both sipped from their respective glasses, examining one another in silence.

  "You and Jace…" she began finally.

  "Berrim. I knew him as Berrim."

  "Whatever. You two weren't together?"

  "Of course not!" Emmara protested, taking her meaning. She actually shuddered. "He's human."

  Liliana couldn't help but grin at the elfs revolted tone.

  "We were friends," Emmara continued. "Or I thought we were. Perhaps I'll know for certain when he tells me precisely who was Berrim and who was Jace. And why I only learned of the latter when a number of very unpleasant people started searching for him. The guilds may be gone, but I still have my sources. It didn't take me long to learn the Consortium was looking for someone who went by both names-and several others, besides.

  "I've lived long enough to understand change,

  Liliana, be it cities, governments, names, or people. And from what I've heard of Jace, I can understand why he might have preferred to become Berrim. But he could have trusted me enough to tell me. Now I don't know who my friend actually was. Do you know who it is you actually care for?"

  The almost-but-not-quite-hostile conversation continued, but Jace ceased listening. With a moment's effort-made only moderately more difficult by his lingering injury-he allowed his senses to recede, pulling away from the table but not dismissing the spell of clairvoyance entirely.

  Sadly, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he dropped his head into his hands. Much as he felt his use of a pseudonym had been justified, he couldn't blame Emmara for her anger. She'd thought him a friend, he'd claimed to be a friend, yet he'd failed to trust her even with his own real name.

  Everything he'd ever done, he'd done for what he thought were the best of reasons. How had he managed to screw it all up so dramatically?

  And how could he know he wasn't doing just as badly even now?

  Yet for all that, she'd taken him in, tended his wounds, even though she owed him nothing, knew that he wasn't who she'd believed him to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found his thoughts of Emmara turning to thoughts of Kallist. Jace Beleren wondered if he'd ever been worthy of a single one of his friends-and he wondered, too, if all of them would have to suffer for him.

  He tried to shake off his self-pity before it consumed him, focusing instead on the immediate. Without either opening his eyes or ending his clairvoyance spell, he concentrated on the room around him. He felt the heavy blankets that lay atop his legs as he sat up in bed, felt the itchy, greasy sensations of his hair, which had soaked up the sweat of his pain and was more than overdue for a wash. He prodded at his bare ribs with a finger, felt a faint divot in the flesh and a deep ache in the muscles of his torso, but nothing that approached the earlier agony. He remarked to himself on just how much he owed his elven host, then cut the thought short before it could drive him right back into the arms of the brooding funk he was struggling to evade.
r />   Gradually, he removed his fingers from the wound, letting his hands flop to the mattress beside him, but continued to poke at the injury with his mind. He dwelled on the sense of warmth that had flowed through him at the healer's touch, the "taste" of her mana flooding over his soul, the sensation of his flesh stitching itself together. For just an instant his spirit quivered on the verge of discovery, an understanding of a new and brighter magic than any he had practiced before. The lingering pain in his wound lessened by a featherweight. And a part of Jace exulted, warmed by a spark of joy not in using the power for his own ends, but with the experience of a magic worth casting purely for its own sake.

  And then the moment was gone, blown away along with Jace's concentration as someone pounded on Emmara's front door with a brutish, heavy fist. Jace fell back against the pillow with a gasp as the sharp sound not only came to him faintly through the floorboards, but directly into his mind via the spell that kept a portion of his senses hovering in the room below.

  Curious and perhaps more than reasonably annoyed at the interruption, he directed the spell to flow outward, moving it past the many pillars that supported Emmara's manor, slipping it through the wood of the heavy portal, allowing him to take a good solid gander at the man outside. He saw nothing of note, just a large, vaguely gorillalike fellow with a crate under one hand. A courier of some sort, obviously.

  But Jace's paranoia was in full bloom, and he took a moment to really concentrate, to scan the surface thoughts of the man outside. It was difficult, reading his mind through a lens of clairvoyance, but that just made it a better test of his recovery.

  And then Jace was out of bed, stumbling and slipping against the lingering pain, careening off the wall as he lost his balance, reaching desperately for the nearest teleportation pillar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Kerstophe shifted foot to foot, burning with nervous energy, as he waited for a response to his knock. In the crook of his left arm, he adjusted the wooden crate, utterly empty. In his right hand he held a thin stiletto, held backward so the blade was hidden up his voluminous sleeve.

  He heard a faint rattling from behind the heavy door, and a small portal-one so expertly blended in with the contours of the wood that he hadn't noticed it was there-slid open, revealing roughly a quarter of a pretty elven face. "Yes? Who is it?" "Delivery for you, m'lady," he said, voice respectful but as bored as any good courier's.

  "What is it?"

  "Couldn't say, m'lady. Nothing written on the outside, and it's certainly not my place to open it or to ask."

  "All right. A minute, please."

  Kerstophe's pulse quickened, and he felt excitement radiating from his chest-to say nothing of places somewhat lower down. It always got him worked up, this moment just before it happened. Especially when his "partner" was a pretty girl.

  He heard the thump-and-clatter of a bolt being drawn and a chain being unhooked, and the door swung wide. He smiled down at the elf with an almost excessively friendly grin.

  "Emmari Tandars?" he asked, dramatically mangling the pronunciation.

  "Close enough," she offered with a smile.

  "Fantastic," he said. With a smooth motion born from years of practice, he reversed his grip on the stiletto, stepped in close until their bodies nearly touched, and sank the blade deep into her flesh, directly beneath the sternum, angled upward.

  They gasped as one, she in stunned agony, he in pleasure. The elf staggered, and he withdrew the blade and shoved, so that her body tumbled backward and out of the doorway, dead before it hit the floor. Just as casually he knelt to lay the empty crate on the floor beside her, then stood, calmly shut the door, and wandered back down the steps to join the traffic on the street below.

  A dozen passersby or more, and nobody had seen a thing.

  Jace, clad only in the leggings he'd worn in bed, dashed out from behind the door and dropped to one knee beside the fallen elf. His hands were already reaching for her, his jaw clenching at the sight of the growing pool of blood, when her eyes snapped open like the jaws of a drake. Jace released a breath he hadn't even realized he was holding.

  "Emmara?" he asked, his voice soft.

  "That really hurt," she grumbled, slowly sitting up. Already the wound in her gut had started to close, the blood to dry. Jace knew that if she hadn't begun the healing spell in advance, the wound would have been lethal; as it was, the ugly bruising around it didn't fade with the wound itself, and he knew that Emmara was likely to be in more than a little pain for days to come.

  "I'm so sorry to put you through that," he told her. "But I didn't have time to set up any sort of illusion-at least not anything he'd believe after sticking a knife into it." He reached a hand out to help the elf rise. "I just-

  Glaring a mixture of anger and pain, Emmara pushed his hand away and rose, albeit shakily, under her own power. Then she turned that heavy gaze directly on him, matched by Liliana's own glare as the necromancer emerged from behind a nearby pillar. Both women stood with arms crossed, scowling darkly, warped and twisted reflections of one another.

  "What?" he asked them.

  "Would you care to explain, 'Berrim'?" Emmara demanded.

  "I figured-" he began.

  "Were you afraid I wouldn't be up to defending myself?" she continued unabated.

  "And you should certainly know better in my case," Liliana added darkly. "Oh, heavens! We're in trouble! Let's wait for the wounded man to come charging in to save us!"

  "I-" he tried again.

  "You have any idea the sort of damage your lunging around could have caused?" the elf demanded. "And I don't just mean to me! There's a reason I had you resting in bed, you idiot!"

  Liliana, Jace thought sourly, is a bad influence on her. "I didn't race down here to save you two!" Jace shouted, clutching his ribs as the dull ache returned. "I did it to save him!"

  That, at least, was sufficient to draw a confused silence. Jace took the opportunity to move from the door and collapse into the nearest chair-a velvet-upholstered monstrosity that might well have been older than the elf who owned it.

  "You," he said, stabbing a finger at Liliana, "would have had one of your specters eat his soul, or maybe rotted his flesh off his bones into a puddle of really smelly goo."

  "Of course," she said.

  "And you," he continued, turning to Emmara, "well, I've never seen you in danger, but I'm betting that your response to a man trying to stick a knife in your gut would be a lot uglier than your healing spells."

  "You'd win that bet," she told him, still puzzled.

  "So," Jace said, trying to lean forward in his chair and failing, "then what?"

  Liliana and Emmara looked at one another.

  "Is there anyone here," Jace asked, "with the slightest doubt that your delivery came courtesy of Tezzeret?"

  Emmara frowned. "It would be quite a coincidence for it to be anyone else, under the circumstances. Unlike some people, I don't have whole swathes of angry enemies clamoring for my head."

  "Exactly!" Jace exclaimed, as though pouncing on a long-sought prize. "Emmara, the only reason Tezzeret could have to come after you is because you're a friend of mine."

  "Might be," the elf corrected under her breath.

  "So if I hadn't talked you into letting the assassin 'kill' you, then what? What happens when the assassin fails to report back, hmm? Who-or what-does Tezzeret send next?"

  Liliana nodded in sudden understanding. "But this way, the assassin goes back and reports the job done, with nobody the wiser."

  Jace smiled. "And of course, without the resources of a Ravnica cell, he's got no way of finding out any time soon that his hired killer was duped."

  Emmara flushed ever so slightly. "You're right, of course. I'm, um, not accustomed to dealing with the assassin's mindset. My apologies, Jace. Thank you for stepping in."

  "You're welcome," he said sincerely. He turned to Liliana, opened his mouth to ask when her apology was forthcoming, and then thought better of it.<
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  "Emmara," he said seriously, "you might be able to count on the deception to hold. I doubt Tezzeret's going to expend what few resources he has remaining on Ravnica following up on a report of a successful kill. But I can't promise that. You may want to consider moving."

  The elf gazed around her at the dozens of columns and groaned softly.

  "In the interim," he said, rising to his feet with a faint groan of his own, "we'll get out of your hair."

  Again he found himself pummeled by a pair of stares, this time unbelieving.

  "Jace-" Liliana began.

  "You're not ready for-" Emmara said at the same time.

  But Jace shook his head, raising a hand to forestall them both. "Kallist is dead," he said, his voice soft. "And now someone's tried to kill Emmara." Both women were startled to see Jace fighting back tears. "I've never been much for heroics; you both know that. But until Tezzeret invited me into his damned Consortium, I never set out to hurt anyone. And now that I've started, it seems I can't make it stop.

  "I can't undo the trouble I've caused you, Emmara." At least not yet, he added mentally, thinking back to Liliana's ambitions. "But I won't put you in any further danger. We're leaving."

  In the end, neither Liliana nor Emmara could offer any argument to change his mind, despite the occasional shudder of pain that wracked his body, or the brief moments of dizziness that threatened to knock him off his feet. Thus, fully clad once more and carrying a pouch of medicinal herbs given to them by their host, Jace and Liliana exchanged their farewells with the elf-along with Jace's promise that some day, when the danger had passed, he would find Emmara and tell her the truth about his life, about who and what he was-and moved once more into Ravnica's bustling streets.

  They walked arm in arm so Liliana could catch Jace when his sporadic weakness overtook him, lest he fall to the earth amid the marching feet of the thick city crowds. His jaw was clenched in a grimace of constant discomfort, and Liliana felt his arm tremble on more than one occasion.

  "When you think about it," she said, hoping to keep his attention focused, "Emmara owes Paldor her life."