by Doug Beyer
Rakka snarled at an attacker that had crept up from behind. Its tongue oscillated in its mouth; its teeth were a hundred barbs. Rakka put her back to the rest of the clan, protecting her satchel of spell components, and brandished her hiking staff. The lizard man tested her with a quick snap of its axe. She deflected the blow and returned it with a sharp crack to the creature’s forward leg. It shuffled back along the strip of land between the tar pools.
Behind her she heard screams, clangs, and ugly wet crunching sounds. She pressed forward, intending to buy herself some space to summon a minion to give her a little advantage. Instead the viashino let her come, and another one grabbed her leg from the tar. Rakka gritted her teeth as her skin sizzled. “All right then,” she muttered. “No time to do this fancy. Let’s just bring the pain.”
IGNITE YOUR SPARK.
DISCOVER THE PLANESWALKERS IN
THEIR ADVENTURES THROUGH THE
ENDLESS PLANES OF REALITY…
AGENTS OF ARTIFICE
by Ari Marmell
THE PURIFYING FIRE
by Laura Resnick
July 2009
ARTIFACTS CYCLE I
THE THRAN
by J. Robert King
THE BROTHERS’ WAR
by Jeff Grub
June 2009
ARTIFACTS CYCLE II
PLANESWALKER
by Lynn Abbey
BLOODLINES
by Loren L. Coleman
TIME STREAMS
by J. Robert King
September 2009
For Melanie
Whose life I’m glad to have touched
And whose touch I’m glad to have lived
PART
ONE
GRIXIS
Nicol Bolas stretched his wings, and the sounds he heard were unpleasant. Ligaments creaked, and joints popped. The membranes between his wing bones made dry sounds of friction as they stretched. For decades he had felt his age catching up to him; his age was an imposing enough figure that he felt deeply invested in eluding the arithmetic. But at least he could stretch. The chamber, deep under the Necropolis at Kederekt, was finally complete. The last of the dead soil had been scraped out from around his bulk, and the tomb had become a proper lair.
The impact of the damnable Mending had left him broken. His omnipotence was mutilated, and his mind felt like a sieve. He was truly an elderly dragon. He had fled Dominaria, hoping the Mending wouldn’t reach him—but its effects had caught up to him indeed, like thunder catches up after a crack of lightning. He had felt his power drain. He had felt the millennia of knowledge seep away. He had felt the tattered edges of his own wings for the first time.
“But if nothing else, am I not a survivor?”
“What’s that, Master?” came the response, unexpectedly.
So what if he said it aloud? “Am I not a survivor?” Bolas snarled.
His second-in-command, the unholy creature Malfegor, only stared at him. Half demon and half dragon, Malfegor had come into being centuries before under circumstances too horrible for many to contemplate. His rage at being trapped on festering Grixis was amusing—and useful as a fulcrum for Bolas’s control over him. Bolas’s web of power and influence spanned worlds and eons, a perfect prize to dangle before a demon who had once terrorized all of Alara.
“Twenty thousand years!” Bolas roared. “Never mind. Bring in the … visitors.”
“Yes, Master.”
Malfegor left the chamber. Bolas didn’t like the way his henchman’s tail twitched as he walked away. It wasn’t right for a dragon to carry himself that way. His second-in-command was an abomination. But at least he was a useful one.
When Malfegor returned, he brought with him two human beings, males dressed in robes, adults judging by their size.
One human stepped forward. It was shaking. It was probably terrified.
“Well? What’s so important?” asked Bolas.
“Master, I—I and m—my colleagues have read the signs,” said the lead human.
“Yes? And?”
“Master, I don’t know how to say this—”
“Promptly, if you value your life.”
“It’s the shards, Master. The other four worlds, and Grixis too. They’re … converging.”
That was interesting. Had one of the little rodents finally figured it out?
“Oh?”
“Yes. I’m afraid … I’m afraid they’re going to … intersect. Collide. And soon.”
Bolas’s lips pulled away from his teeth. The amusement he felt was genuine. “How soon?”
The two humans looked at each other. They didn’t seem to know what to make of his expression. “Months?” said the first. “Yes. Less than a year, we think.”
Bolas stretched his wings out again. He still heard the poppings of age, but they felt better. Maybe in a little while, he could fly free of the blasted bunker and flex his true muscle once more. He would have to meet with his agents on the other four worlds. Planeswalking took a lot of effort for him, but he had to make sure everything would come out exactly right.
“Master?” ventured the human. “This is … what you wanted?”
“I’m very proud of you, human,” said Bolas. “This is an excellent leap for your little mind.”
“Thank you, Master! But won’t that—”
“I feel I need to reward you.”
Both the humans fell prostrate.
“I will tell you now that you have done well to discover the goal of all our efforts here on your world of Grixis. You’ve all worked long and hard, with complex magics and lengthy excavations. And now you are beginning to see the fruits of all your labors.”
The speaking human couldn’t help itself. It raised its head and said, “Master, I hate to interrupt—”
“Then don’t!” bellowed Bolas.
The humans cowered.
“This project, and the preparations surrounding it, have taken decades to complete. The effort has been intricate and many layered. And now you’re starting to see it all come together. The devastation it will wreak is, no doubt, the source of your concern. Even your decaying world will suffer, and at this you must object. I admire your courage in coming to my inner chamber to confirm that this cataclysm is indeed the end toward which you all have labored. And for that, your reward! You, stand up.”
The speaker looked up, and stood on wobbly legs. It blinked rapidly and held the clasp of its robe in its hands.
Bolas leaned down and put his claw over the human’s head, resting his palm there gently, careful not to break the human’s neck.
Malfegor spoke up. “Master, don’t tax yourself,” he said.
Bolas ignored him. It took some concentration, but he summoned up the old magics. Tidal forces of mana washed over his mind. Bolas willed them into the form of a spell, a dark spear of magic that pierced the human’s little skull and disappeared, scouring away at its sanity from the inside. The human screamed under Bolas’s palm, a ragged, repeated sound bereft of logic or order. Then the human fell silent and still. Bolas completed the spell and lifted his claw.
The human’s expression was limp. It stared at nothing, and its head lolled slightly to the side.
“There you are, my minion,” said Bolas, breathing heavily. “There is your reward.”
The other human regarded its colleague with wide eyes. It stood and gathered the man in its arms. A combination of drool and blood ran down the side of the man’s jaw, its thinking mind utterly destroyed.
“You there,” said Bolas to the other human, the one who still possessed its faculties. “You can go now, and take that one with you. Remember its reward, always. Should any of the rest of you show such excellence in powers of deduction, you shall receive the same.”
Bolas turned to his second-in-command, the demonic dragon-creature. “That’s enough. If you trouble me with the concerns of the mortals again, Malfegor, I will kill you. After your body has died, I will banish your soul to some wretched, zombified husk in the bowels of Grixis, where you will toil away in the service of the whims of a third-rate human necromancer. Now, will that be all?”
Bolas was alone again.
Once the five worlds of Alara collided, he would have his vitality back. The Multiverse owed him that much—and it had seen fit to provide him with the five little planes, ripe for the picking. He’d crash their worlds into one another and lick the sap from the wounds. And then, finally, he’d be ready to take his revenge.
NAYA
It had not been a good idea, thought Ajani. He should turn around and go before the beast saw or smelled him in his hiding place. But it was too late for that. His axe was already in his hand.
The gargantuan before him had legs like tree trunks, and shaggy moss grew on its back and flanks. Its most salient features were its tusks: four enormous prongs that swept down from its mouth and up into the air in front of it, each ending in a point tapered nough to punch clean through Ajani’s chest. The beast’s tusks swung back and forth as it bent and grazed on whole trees. It enveloped the foliage of a few trees in its mouth, then pulled back its head, stripping a mass of juicy branches with scraping teeth. The crunching sound as it chewed was deafening. Occasionally it bellowed contentedly, tilting its massive head from side to side, and the sound made the lianas around Ajani’s hiding place shudder.
Ajani had been the hunted himself, once, although he hadn’t been an oblivious target like this. He had been pursued through the jungles and fields of Naya like a wild pig. Humans didn’t usually hunt his kind, but they had seemed to single him out. He had been special to them, somehow—special in that they had wanted him dead.
Maybe he was just as bad for singling out the behemoth. Ajani could think of plenty of reasons to leave. But he knew it had to happen, so it was probably best not to think too hard about what he was about to do. Ajani had tracked the beast since morning, shadowing it at a distance for hours after encountering it, keeping careful track of the wind direction so as not to alert the beast of his scent. His patience had paid off; the gargantuan hadn’t discovered him, and in fact had managed to tuck itself into a dead end of sorts, a sky-exposed clearing surrounded by a glade of thick trunks too massive for it to smash. Ajani could press the attack, and the behemoth would have nowhere to run. Although its size would be less of an advantage in the clearing, facing a gargantuan of Naya solo was still likely to be suicide. Yet again, Ajani questioned what he was doing and why.
He picked a burr out of his stark white fur. That was why. Either he earned his pride’s esteem by the monumental hunt, or he would leave his pride behind forever.
The white fur that covered Ajani’s lionlike body was his distinction and his curse. Where most of the nacatl race bore fur of mottled and striped gold, ochre, black, and gray, Ajani’s fur was pure, luminous white. He glowed against the dappled foliage of the Naya jungle, and like a brilliant torch in crowds of his fellow nacatl.
The scorn of his kin had been immediate and was never-ending. Ajani’s pride was a community of warriors, the proudest and fiercest pride of nacatl in all of Naya, But to him they were a community of tormentors. Like the day when the humans had hunted him: when the furless ones had given chase, his pridemates had left him behind. The humans didn’t pursue the others—only him.
It seemed everyone wanted to single out the white-furred cat.
His brother Jazal—the pride’s leader, thank the spirits—had saved him that day, and on many other occasions. As the kha of their pride, Jazal was the only one Ajani looked up to. If it weren’t for him, Ajani would have left the pride, and struck out on his own a long time before. That’s what his tormentors wanted, he wondered, why not just give it to them? But that would bring even more shame on his poor brother, who had shown him nothing but respect and love. Ajani owed it to Jazal, the kha and his only kin, to show the others in the pride the determination he carried under his shameful hide. He would show them that the hunted white cat could become a worthy hunter in his own right. In fact, he would show them that he could be the greatest nacatl warrior since the hero Marisi himself.
The breeze changed, and Ajani felt the fur on his back rustle as he faced the behemoth. Ajani had no time to move with the wind; the beast had fallen suddenly silent, its massive jaws frozen in mid-mastication. It huffed and sniffed as Ajani’s scent wafted toward it. He was about to be discovered. If he was going to do it, the time had come.
Ajani sprang from the foliage and sliced at the meat of the beast’s thigh with his axe, intending to impair it right away. The blow cut cleanly, but he only sliced through the wiry moss that clung to the gargantuan’s fur—he didn’t even pierce its hide. Before he could get in a second blow, the beast lurched around to face him, its feet crushing the earth, and its long tusks swinging in a dangerous arc. Ajani staggered backward just enough to avoid having his feet swept out from under him—or his legs broken.
Ajani recovered his warrior’s stance, brought his axe back, and thrust the weapon into the beast’s shoulder as its tusks whizzed by. The graze broke the rubbery skin, but the beast’s hide was so thick, he saw only the pinkish white of blubber. Again, he had drawn no real blood—only its ire.
With a snap of its head, the gargantuan brought its tusks back around toward him. Ajani retreated frantically to his hiding place, but with two sharp swings of its tusks, the beast shredded the stand of small trees. Ajani’s back bumped into a thick trunk. He charged at the broad head before him with his axe, but the behemoth butted its head directly into the blow, tangling the shaft of the weapon amid its tusks and ripping it from Ajani’s grasp. Both beast and hunter shifted back with the new development, and Ajani saw that the handle of the weapon was caught fast in the beast. Empty-handed and lacking the next strategy, he froze.
The behemoth grunted and shook its head violently, trying to free the object from its tusks. It succeeded, flinging the axe almost straight up, the blade turning end over end. Ajani’s prized weapon became snarled high in the foliage above.
The beast roared and squared off facing Ajani. Its mouth was open wide, and Ajani could feel its hot, rank breath on his face. As it reared up, Ajani knew he could be trampled or gored with equal facility. He bore no more defense than the shrubs the beast ate for lunch. As it lunged down at him, he instinctively leaped up high enough to dig his claws into the gargantuan’s muzzle. He scrambled up onto its head, grabbing great handfuls of bristle as he climbed, and tucked himself into the shaggy moss around its neck.
The gargantuan let out a bellow that rattled Ajani’s bones, a bellow he was sure could be heard all the way back at his pride’s den. The beast thrashed its head, but at the nape of its neck, Ajani was safe from its tusks, and he clung on.
What was he supposed to do? Ajani knew if he could just land a good blow in one of the beast’s eyes, or maybe hit a sensitive vein, he could weaken it just enough to fell it for good. But he had no way to get through. The little bone knife at his side wouldn’t do anything to the creature’s hide, nor would his teeth or claws. He needed the cutting power of his axe. He scanned the canopy above and found the axe resting in the crook of a tree branch. It was too high to reach, even with a leap, and he wouldn’t be able to get a good jump for it with the gargantuan thrashing. Dying all alone on the back of a shaggy behemoth seemed no way to earn the pride’s respect.
The beast was insane with rage. It thrashed, crashing through a stand of tree trunks that broke like kindling. “So much for a dead end,” Ajani muttered, hanging on. The behemoth tried a new strategy: slamming its front haunches into the ground in an attempt to buck Ajani off.
Ajani felt the rhythm of the rearing beast. Something click
ed—that was the solution. If he could time it right …
The beast bucked with all its might as Ajani let go, sending him flying up in the same direction as his axe had flown before. He hurtled toward the canopy and crashed into the branch that held his axe, just managing to grab on to something. But he hadn’t grabbed the branch—he had grabbed the axe handle, the head dangerously toward him, and the end snagged between two heavy limbs. When his weight lurched down on it, the wooden handle bowed between the branches. There was a sickening crack, and the axe handle snapped.
With the splintered axe in his hand, Ajani fell.
BANT
Too easy,” muttered Gwafa Hazid, as he shined an enchanted dagger with his hanky. It was as if his prey wanted to become trapped. Do they seek me out? he wondered. Does a spider stay fat on flies that are slow, or that are suicidal? It must be an attempt at pride, if only pride in death, he decided, admiring the reflection of his beard in the dagger. The weak of mind must know that, in some sense, they deserve to be deceived and defeated, and they seek out whomever can speed that destiny along. He couldn’t blame them. Were he that pathetic, he’d want it to be over quickly too.
Hazid’s caravan had stopped just shy of the border of Akrasa, Bant’s proudest agricultural country, ostensibly to conduct trade. “Trade” was Hazid’s favorite word. You get something, I get something, he thought. We’re both happy, except that you’ve lost something precious, and I’ve lost nothing, and by the time you realize your mistake I’m a countryside away. His dagger, for example, had come from a smithy on the Jhessian coast who had wanted out of his lowly laborer’s caste. Hazid didn’t blame him for that, not in the slightest. The man had thought that a proper Akrasan sigil would earn him the status he desired, as well as passage out of the bandit-ridden town to which his station condemned him. Instead, the piece of tin Hazid traded him had earned the man a month in jail for fraud, caste infringement, and possession of a counterfeit sigil. The dagger was a work of art, though. It fit the part precisely—an assassin’s dagger, concealable and deadly sharp, made for nothing but killing a man.
