Guildpact

by Cory Herndon

  “Fine, a few hours,” the mask replied. “Now tell me what you’ve lost.”

  * * * * *

  “Are you sure we’re not lost?” Crix asked the burly leader of the small band. The party of five Gruul and one nervous Izzet courier picked their way around a rotted, rusting tower that had fallen over at some point—recently, from the look of the cracks in the caked rust—and now effectively blocked what little path she’d been able to find.

  “Of course I’m not lost,” Golozar said in his accented Ravi, then barked to the others in Gruul. “Find a way around this. Now.”

  “I can understand you, you know,” Crix said, sitting down on a hunk of rubble that seemed to be the least dangerous element of the surrounding landscape. “Was this unexpected? It looks fresh.”

  “What makes you say that?” the Gruul bandit said.

  “Just look at it,” Crix said, “It looks like a tree blown over in the wind. I thought you knew this country around the Husk. Maybe that nephilim of yours is still after us. You said yourself it was not dead.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still my prisoner until we deliver you to the Cauldron,” Golozar said with finality. “The nephilim will do what the nephilim do, and if they do it I will deal with it. Just sit there, would you?” He directed the two viashino in the party around the “root ball” of the toppled structure to see if they could find a safe path, then sent the other two—both big, ogrelike humans like him—to see if there was any way to clear the other side by walking under the gap between it and what passed for ground in these hills. Golozar himself scanned the higher hills behind them, looking for something but giving no indication to Crix exactly what.

  She settled in to wait. The goblin was surprised that they had not encountered any large wildlife in the Husk yet. She’d heard that many creatures made their homes here and had hoped to catch a look at a saurian or two—from a distance, if possible. So far there had been only tiny lizards, dog-sized beetles, a few scraggly birds, and of course the Gruul themselves. The lack of large game did explain the general thinness of the Utvar Gruul. Golozar was big, but he had a wiriness to him that made him look poorly fed. The fires she’d seen had not been cooking anything large—game birds, rabbits, even a few rats. These people were in bad shape, and Crix couldn’t help but feel sympathy for them even after the way she’d been treated.

  Crix coughed, something that had become more frequent since they’d left the camp. Her inoculation seemed to be holding, but with raw exposure to the kuga she wasn’t sure how long it would be before she began to develop symptoms. The fungus that clung to the Gruul was not something she was quite ready to try out, but if they continued to make excruciatingly slow progress she might have to.

  Crix caught Golozar scanning the hills again and finally asked, “What are you looking for?”

  Golozar scowled at her and shrugged. “You understand our language, so you can probably guess. No, it is not the nephilim, before you suggest it. But I think there may be another group tracking us.”

  “Would that be this Aun Yom character I heard you and that old centaur fellow talking about?” Crix said. She wasn’t particularly nervous, but the look that passed over Golozar’s lantern-jawed face when she said the name of the other bandit raider made her reconsider whether she should be a bit more nervous.

  “It may be,” Golozar said. “Though to track another raiding party, one from your own clan, is unheard of.”

  “Forgive me, I’m a mere courier. Why is that unheard of?”

  “You ask questions like an ambitious Haazda,” Golozar replied.

  “A curious courier,” the goblin said. “I’m not going to be delivering messages my whole life, you know.”

  “Curious courier, you’re not afraid of me, are you?” Golozar said, switching gears. Crix considered the question. The hulking human, scarlet-skinned and adorned with ritual marks, was indeed intimidating. The loaded bam-stick slung on his back and the heavy, hooked blade sword on his waist made it clear he could and would kill, if he wished. And yet….

  “No, not really,” Crix said. “I think you are a—” she searched for the right words, and finally settled on two simple ones. “I think you are a good man. I think you’re cautious. I know you’re more educated than the rest of them, though I’m not sure how. And I am glad you agreed to get me to the Cauldron. I don’t think you’re out here just to kill me. Why else would you all be working on finding a path? If you meant me harm, you could slaughter me here and tell your zuriv—that’s some kind of priest-chieftain, right?—you could tell your zuriv I fell through a rusted hole. Seems to be a common enough occurrence. But you haven’t done that. So no, I don’t fear you.”

  “Figures,” the Gruul said, and his scowl remained despite a creeping smirk threatening to break on one side of his mouth. “You should learn to fear more, goblin. A healthy sense of terror is the only way you’ll survive in the Husk.”

  “I don’t exactly intend to settle down here,” Crix said. “The goblins in your clan didn’t seem to want anything to do with me.”

  “I doubt they even recognized you as a goblin,” Golozar said. He turned over his shoulder to shout in Gruul at the men getting ready to knock aside a stone pillar that blocked the easiest path under the leaning tower. “Not that one! That’s load-bearing, you idiots!” The two Gruul backed off from the pillar and exchanged mutually accusatory looks.

  Crix looked down at her own body, her arms and legs, and wondered whether Golozar was right. Hauc had taken her as an infant, and his experiments had given her greater intelligence than the average goblin, along with other hidden powers—the ones that she still didn’t have Hauc’s permission to use. But did she really look that different?

  It was a discomfiting idea, so she focused on the matter at hand.

  “Golozar, no offense, but you are what they’d call ‘well-spoken’ in the city. Is that where you were schooled? Your Ravi is sharp.”

  “And your Gruul is already starting to bother me,” Golozar said. His eyes stopped tracking along the skyline, and he squinted against the light. “It’s Aun Yom, all right. Strange, it’s hard to make him out against the sun.”

  Crix stood and looked in the same direction, but all she got was a ray of sunlight in both eyes for her trouble. She blinked and cocked her ears and thought she could make out the clack of a piece of gravel rolling down a slope and a couple of shuffling footsteps where Golozar said this Aun Yom—the one who had apparently launched the attack on the Orzhov lokopede, sending Crix into Golozar’s clutches—stood. As she tried to focus her eyes despite the glare, her ears picked up another distant noise that soon drowned out whatever sounds Aun Yom’s group was making. It was a harmonic whistling sound, increasing in pitch every millisecond and growing in volume just as quickly. It was a sound Crix recognized immediately, and she smiled even as she had to put a palm before either ear to prevent the noise from causing her physical pain.

  Zomaj Hauc’s personal flight sphere, the Pyraquin, shot over the crest of the Husk and, for the briefest of moments, blocked out the sun. Just as the vessel cleared the ridge, Crix saw movement when the sun was blotted out—at least a dozen Gruul, pale and hungry looking. They ducked in surprise. A few scattered. They were perhaps a half mile away. The one that had to be Aun Yom never moved except to incline his head slightly and look straight at Crix. She took an involuntary step backward.

  Golozar tensed but did not run, nor did his underlings, but like Crix, they followed the streaking Pyraquin as it left a glowing vapor trail in the sky overhead. It was a wondrous sight, and for the Gruul it was obviously rare. Crix wasn’t much of an alchemical engineering enthusiast—her studies tended more toward the sociological, symbolic kinds of fire and ice—yet she still marveled at the magelord’s personal coach. Unlike the smaller observospheres upon which the design was based, the Pyraquin’s entire frame and triple hull was pure, dragon-forged invizomizzium, which gave Zomaj Hauc a clear view at any time he wished.
The sphere, which had an inner diameter of twenty-five paces and an outer diameter of thirty, carried a sextet of underslung, lift-providing belly-bursters and Hauc-designed megapyromanic flame-pods, just one of which could have moved a single observosphere around Ravnica five times without needing additional fuel.

  The Pyraquin disappeared into a fog bank that had yet to burn off of the flats this morning. Before it occurred to Crix that perhaps she should have tried to signal the magelord, the vessel cracked the sound barrier and sent a staggering shockwave that shook the rusted, leaning tower that blocked their way with a palpable fist of sonic energy.

  “Hey, get out of there!” Crix shouted at the two Gruul still trying to clear a path beneath the tower. “That tower can’t take the—”

  “They can’t understand you!” Golozar shouted and started to run toward the Gruul, waving them back. “Get back, all of you!” the bandit shouted in Gruul. The two viashino on the other side had their hands full getting away from a rapidly widening gap in the ground at the tower’s tilted base, but they were agile, and Crix couldn’t get to them anyway. She charged after Golozar. She whispered as loudly as she could in Gruul and did her best to say, “Quiet! It’s not fallen yet! Not too much shouting! No heavy footsteps!”

  It must have been close enough because all the Gruul shut their mouths and Golozar slowed, then stopped. The tower was still humming and creaking like a listing sailing ship, and small fractures were appearing in the rust and calcified growth that had kept it precariously in place. The two Gruul beneath it looked upward, then at Golozar. The raid captain raised a hand, palm out. Stop. Two fingers up, then a slash. Index finger up, then crooked toward palm. Not two. One at a time.

  They might have made it if one of the viashino hadn’t been forced to leap over the new fissure. The reptilian kicked a hunk of metallic stone against the tower’s rusted metal frame, and it rang like a gong.

  That was all it took for the fractured mishmash keeping the leaning structure in place to crumble away, and it collapsed with a final, resounding crunch that knocked Crix and Golozar onto their backs. Before the goblin went over she had a nauseatingly good look at the two humans crushed to a pulp beneath the tower, and once she struck the iron ground her ears could make out the rapidly descending screeches of both viashino plummeting into an underground cavern that had opened to the sky. In seconds, their group of six had been cut to two.

  Despite a lifetime of service and devotion to Zomaj Hauc, an angry and rebellious voice in the back of her head—an ancient goblin voice—wanted to find the magelord and burn his skin off. She wondered if the plague was beginning to dig into her mind, for such thoughts were punishable by immolation.

  * * * * *

  Teysa awoke with the peculiar sensation she’d been engulfed, ever so briefly, in flames. When it passed, she realized with sudden dread that it had been more of an icy feeling of numbness. She’d had another spell and had fallen in a position that made her legs more useless than usual, one arm pinned beneath her side, and her neck wouldn’t feel right for weeks.

  At least she’d been alone. Or had she? With her one useful limb she pulled herself up by the edge of the table, then remained leaning there, willing her circulation to return. What had she been doing before it happened?

  She’d been talking to Melisk, making arrangements to go personally meet a few of the local guild reps who hadn’t seen fit to accept her gracious invitation in a timely manner—the first acolyte, who had stormed out after being put off the day before; the centaur who was supposed to be the local leader of a beggars collective (which probably meant Gruul connections); and Zomaj Hauc, who’d dared to send an underling instead of coming to meet her himself. Along the way she intended to check in on the site where her new mansion was to be and perhaps make some surprise appearances just to let townsfolk know she didn’t intend to stay in the Imp Wing permanently.

  Then … Melisk had gone, hadn’t he? And the mirror, it had been moved to the adjoining antechamber in what was rapidly becoming her floor of the Imp Wing. Yes. They’d gone. No one had been here. No one had seen her. She was alone, because….

  Teysa could have kicked herself if her legs had been operational. While going over recent events, she’d been staring at her toppled bowl of soup as it dried on the table and just hadn’t brought it into focus. Yes. She’d been eating when another of her less-than-endearing “gifts” of the Orzhov blood had kicked in. Or more precisely, knocked her out.

  Back in the city, Teysa had possessed access to a steady supply of pharmacological agents prescribed by her personal Simic physicians. There’d been a huge supply on the lokopede, but the lokopede and everything on it had been burned. They’d made their escape on foot.

  Yes. They’d walked the rest of the way. All the way to the Imp Wing. That was what she remembered.

  So why didn’t that feel any truer than the idea she’d been alone eating soup?

  It had to be the missing medication. She’d been taking it to stem the narcolepsy for years. Obviously, her body had become acclimated to it. The lack of it was making her distrust her own memory.

  All right, add a visit to that Simic doctor too. Should have brought that up yesterday. Surely he’ll have something to replace what was lost.

  Lost. The lokopede had been lost. Of course it had. She remembered it going up in flames and the Gruul tearing apart what was left as they fled.

  Teysa shook her head, which helped straighten out her neck a bit. She stood unsteadily and leaned one hip against the table as she tapped one of the black stones set in her wrist. A few seconds later a door swung aside and Melisk ducked into the room. The tall attendant was not having an easy time with the imp’s doorframes and had a bruise over one eye to prove it.

  “Yes, Baroness,” Melisk said. “Shall I have the imp send up someone to tidy the room? Bring you some more food?”

  “You don’t seem surprised to see this mess,” Teysa said. “Why?”

  “This is the third spell you’ve suffered since our arrival, my lady,” Melisk said. “It seemed apparent what had happened. I’m sorry. Are you injured?”

  “No, I’m just—No,” Teysa said.

  “It is fortuitous you summoned me. I was about to request entry,” Melisk said, oblivious to her concerns. “I have received word from Zomaj Hauc.”

  “About time,” Teysa said. “Where’s that magelord been?”

  “In an audience with the dragon, or so he claims,” Melisk said. “He apologizes for not meeting you sooner and wishes to meet you either here or at the Cauldron at your earliest convenience. There is also another small matter he hopes we may be able to assist him with.”

  “He wants my assistance?” Teysa asked incredulously. “He’s pushing the limits of my patience as it is. I assume you turned him down?” Her mind was already feeling sharper, focusing on Hauc.

  “No, my lady,” Melisk said. “I thought you might be interested in helping for different reasons.”

  “Explain,” Teysa said, starting to pace, working the kinks out of her leg.

  “He’s lost a messenger,” Melisk said, “a messenger who, I’m told, carries part of a spell that will bring the Cauldron up to peak efficiency.”

  “Why does this messenger carry this spell? Why doesn’t the magelord have it himself?” Teysa asked. “This defies logic.”

  “Logic is not necessarily the Izzet way,” Melisk said magnanimously. “It is custom, apparently, to use protected couriers in this way to keep secrets from other magelords. It’s their way,” Melisk said. “They are a paranoid, competitive guild. It does not surprise me that ambition drives them this far. Curious, however, that the courier was not better protected.”

  “What do you mean?” Teysa asked.

  “She was traveling alone,” Melisk said. “Hauc said he had no reason to believe she could possibly come to harm on an Orzhov lokopede.”

  “Loko—Oh, no,” Teysa said. “The Gruul nabbed her on the train? After they killed Uncle?”
/>
  “Yes,” Melisk said, “after the Gruul killed Uncle.”

  A moment of dizziness washed over Teysa and she put a palm to her brow.

  “Are you all right, Baroness?” Melisk asked.

  “Fine,” Teysa said. “So you’re saying … you’re saying …”

  “I am saying,” the attendant replied, “that she is still out there, in the hands of the Gruul, and that she holds a crucial component to the entire Cauldron project.”

  “But the Cauldron project is already running!” Teysa said. “Why don’t I trust any of this?”

  “It keeps this township going, but there is not enough to feed the Vitar Yescu or to power the devices that should spread the pollen around the area. If this town is ever to become a new city of Utvara rather than a mere township—there are many more things to do,” Melisk said. “The population here now is largely transient, with few true settlements. But I’m digressing.”

  “You certainly are,” Teysa agreed. “The Vitar Yescu may not be needed if that vedalken doctor manages to come up with something, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. I’d rather the Selesnyans weren’t here at all, but—but—” She felt faint for a moment again, then it passed. “What’s the bottom line?” Damn this dizziness, which was already threatening to become a full-on headache. A spell right now would have been a blessing but none came.

  “We lost the goblin, so Hauc says the goblin is our responsibility.”

  “Is it?”

  “Izzet?”

  “Is. It. The goblin. Is it our responsibility, Melisk?”

  “Surely there could be some way to legally maneuver around it,” the attendant said, “though it might be just as useful to help. We all want the township to become a city, do we not?”

  “Right,” Teysa said, still a little dizzy. “So how do we do it? I’ve already sent for more staff, but they’re at least a week away. Send the brothers?”