Guildpact

by Cory Herndon

  “I am Teysa Karlov, baroness of Utvara and the leaseholder for this business,” Teysa said formally. “Your landlord. This tenant has violated at least seventeen sections of the Guildpact Statutes and stands in violation of pending laws to be enacted in the coming months. If he wishes to avoid costly and extensive legal action, he must show himself immediately to accept this subpoena.” She snapped her fingers, and a small scroll appeared in her hand. She held it out to the djinn as the weird actually seemed to snicker.

  If a snickering elemental was the worst that happened in the next minute, Teysa would count herself very lucky. “You’ll find this document has been authorized, notarized, and sealed by the senior legal authority in Utvara,” she said. “Me.”

  The djinn burst out laughing. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you said you were hear to serve a—what was it? Subpoena?”

  Teysa sighed with practiced impatience. “Yes, a subpoena,” she reiterated. “If Zomaj Hauc does not present himself in the next five minutes to receive this document personally, I and this duly appointed posse will deliver it ourselves. Will you bring him out? I’ll ask you one last time.”

  “Do you have any idea what Hauc would do to us if we let you in? He strung up the last four in the nest,” the djinn said. “Look, I’m sure you and that piece of parchment there think you’re very important. But do yourself a favor and turn that dromad around. Go home. Things are going to get really hot around here soon, and I don’t think you or any of your pathetic friends out there—hey, Dreka-Tooth, long time, no see—are going to want to be around for it.”

  “Pathetic?” Teysa said. “Is that your last word?”

  “You heard him,” the pyrohydric said in a bubbly voice. “Go home. You don’t wanna die early, do you?”

  “I was afraid of that,” Teysa said. “Barkfeather?”

  The hawk launched himself from her shoulder and flashed between the pair of surprised guards, who jerked back instinctively as the shapeshifting elf screeched. He kept screeching as he changed in midair back to an elf then in another half second grew ten times his normal size. By the time the second transformation was complete the screech was a bellowing trumpet from an elephant’s trunk, and Barkfeather landed with a boom and kept on charging. The elephant ducked his head and aimed for the gate. Barkfeather struck it at full speed, shattered the latch, and effortlessly knocked the heavy iron aside.

  The moment the hawk left Teysa’s shoulder, several other things happened around her all at once. At Barkfeather’s high-pitched call, the sniper shadewalker loosed a single bamshot that struck the sleeping drake in its open eye to emerge from the back of its scaly head in a small cloud of grayish scarlet. The blood-red reptile didn’t even have a chance to make a sound before the single concentrated projectile carried most of its brain along with it.

  The drake toppled over backward against the Cauldron’s dome and bent a quarter of its surface inward with a crash. Simultaneously, the other two shadewalkers stationed on top of the water reservoirs triggered the jury-rigged bombs they’d constructed out of ammo globes. Twin explosions ignited the magically compacted liftspheres that kept the reservoirs improbably in the air, and the enormous, open-topped basins tipped over slowly, picking up speed as the water shifted within. Thousands of gallons of artificial rain fell in an instant deluge amidst the smoke and flame, dousing the two guards and the Cauldron itself.

  The pyrohydric weird disappeared into the water, absorbed in a thousand-gallon rush. Meanwhile, the djinn melted like a wax candle under the downpour. A great explosion of steam shot out of the top of the Cauldron and Teysa reared back on the dromad as it fought instinctive panic. She guided it away from the roiling steam and the flood that washed over its ankles and into the tunnel ahead.

  She turned back to Nayine Shonn, who to her credit had kept her forces from charging early, just as Teysa heard a trumpeting call from within the Cauldron. Barkfeather had made first contact with those inside. Teysa held up her hand and beckoned the first wave to follow.

  “Charge!” Teysa called hoarsely at the top of her lungs.

  When the spearhead of the strike had reached her, she dug heels into her dromad’s flanks and it bolted forward. The air—clearer now than it had been even a few minutes earlier—was filled with the roars of Teysa’s army and the splash of heavy feet on steaming, wet metal.

  She had almost managed to stay atop her mount when a ball of black leather with wings slammed into her, screaming in terror. Pivlic struck Teysa squarely in the chest, and the two of them tumbled off the back of the dromad in a ball before she’d even made it much past the entryway.

  Teysa pushed herself to her feet and managed to wrest her cane free from the panicked dromad as all three of them tried to avoid the virusoids and zombies who followed.

  “Pivlic?” she demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

  “My baroness,” the gasping imp said, “You’re—you’re here?”

  “Of course,” Teysa said. “Utvara is my responsibility.”

  “Then you know—”

  “The dragons? You saw them?”

  “In a way. They have not yet hatched. But the magelord isn’t just looking to hatch those things.”

  “What else?” Teysa demanded.

  “He’s going to take direct control of them,” Pivlic said. “And he seems to think he can do it.” The imp looked nervous. No doubt he expected her to send him back into the fray, but, eyeing his wings, she had a better idea.

  “Take this,” she said, handing Pivlic one of the precious green tubes. “Press one end against your neck—it’s the plague cure,” she said. “That’s enough for several hundred people, but I need you to get it to anyone left in town or the flats who hasn’t gotten it yet.”

  “That’s all?” Pivlic said. “Good. I thought you wanted something impossible.”

  “Just do it, Pivlic,” she said.

  “How will curing the plague stop those dragons?” Pivlic asked.

  “You’d be surprised, but there’s no time to explain,” Teysa said. “Don’t worry about the dragons. We’ll take care of them.”

  Or they’ll take care of us, she failed to add aloud.

  * * * * *

  Kos watched Pivlic spiral downward, dodging potshots from guards and Zomaj Hauc himself, then disappear somewhere below the old ’jek’s feet. He hoped the imp made it out and managed to get help from town. He wasn’t sure what else they could hope for at this point.

  Considering all he had seen in more than one hundred twenty years on Ravnica, Kos half-expected something to disrupt the action. Surely a brave soul would step forward, or the cavalry—some kind of cavalry, he wasn’t picky—would step up soon. Pivlic could fly quickly. Still, Kos was fairly surprised by the form the interruption took and how quickly it came. He doubted this was Pivlic’s doing, quick as the imp was.

  A dead drake slid over the edge of the blood-slicked dome atop the Cauldron, dropped through the opening, and crashed onto the landing platform.

  Hauc bellowed in a pure rage as he threw himself to one side, narrowly avoided the plummeting reptilian corpse. The landing platform shook and shrieked under the weight of the drake and sent a ringing hum through the entire nested framework and, by extension, Kos’s skeleton. Support cables snapped, and the platform dropped with a clang on one side, rising just as much on the other. The magelord had to hook his fingers into a grate to keep from sliding over the edge, but his transparent flight sphere stayed hovering in more or less the same place, suspended by magical fields.

  Kos pulled hard against the clamps pinning his arms, but the collision had not broken anything on his rack, unfortunately. He could only watch. He’d completely lost sight of Crix, who he thought had stopped just short of hitting a lava pit, and saw Golozar was no better off than he was.

  If the dead drake was a mild surprise to an experienced former wojek like Kos, the deluge that followed really did take him completely off guard. A pair of metallic thunks shook the entir
e Cauldron again, followed by at least a reservoir’s worth of water. The flood struck the flight sphere and flowed around it—the magic field was tough—and washed over the surface like a sudden and improbable storm. Hauc, Kos could see, managed to keep his grip, but the flood was too much for the already precariously perched corpse of the drake, and it slid down the platform at the head of thousands of gallons of now-brackish liquid and dropped down into the chaotic network of tubes, wires, and glass below. On the way it took out two more of the platform’s support cables, which triggered a slow chain reaction.

  Unable to hold the rest of the platform’s weight, the cables snapped one by one. Each broken sound jarred Hauc and forced him to dig in for dear life as the platform dropped. The drake continued its postmortem plummet through the nest of tubes and wires, sending sparks and flame shooting out in all directions and over the screaming heads of dozens of panicked goblins, all of whom had quite wisely stopped working when the chaos erupted. It cleared a rough swath directly below Kos and allowed a wave of heat to blast him from below. He bounced and twisted in the rack frame as the Cauldron shook and jolted.

  The water chased the corpse and reached the bottom long before the drake did. Moments later everything below Kos save the tops of the eggs and the rapidly dropping platform was consumed by billowing steam—the deluge had reached the lava pits and finally come to the end of the line, but now he had no idea what was happening down there. From the heat, Kos guessed that had they been anywhere below the platform at this moment they’d have all been completely cooked.

  The drake’s fall finally ended atop a power plant with three heavy steamcores running at full capacity. The power plant began to whine and groan, as if preparing to burst.

  * * * * *

  Crix came to on her back. The sound of snapping cables echoed in an underwater cave, then metal grinding against metal, and a tremendous crash followed by hundreds of little splashes.

  The goblin lay on the rim of the open-topped generator. The heat of the lava inside wasn’t as fierce as it should have been, and the goblin soon saw why. It was the same reason she was soaked to the bone and hundreds of goblins were splashing and screaming instead of working and shouting. Goblins were terrible swimmers, and she hoped the workers could get to high ground.

  A small lake of foul water filled with chunks of twisted metal and broken glass sent waves washing back and forth across the Cauldron from one inner wall to the other. The drake—dead, to Crix’s chagrin—lay atop a crushed but still functioning power plant, billowing steam and smoke. A crusty, cooling stalactite of fresh, rapidly congealing lava clung to the edge, frozen by the water in the act of mindless escape.

  Crix coughed as the smoke and heat finally got to her lungs in earnest. Her skin felt like it was roasting. The goblin rolled carefully onto her feet with what was left of her native agility and almost jumped into the lava when she again heard the snapping sound that had awakened her several times in rapid succession. She gaped as the edge of the flight platform dropped incrementally through the rising, blistering-hot steam clouds in jolting clangs.

  The water wouldn’t last long. Already it drained through the exit tunnels and onto the dry floor itself. What didn’t run out would soon be vaporized by volcanism that was making breathing ever more difficult. The lava pits didn’t stop producing lava just because the upper layer had hit water—they just produced a lot of blinding, hissing steam and required supervision and tending. The Cauldron would be bone-dry again within hours, Crix guessed, and if the labor left the place would probably be consumed by fire not long after that.

  By some kind of fortuitous luck, or magic—who knew what kind of protective enchantments safeguarded a dragon egg laid in magma and incubated for thousands of years?—the platform stopped dropping before it hit the central nest. There it swung on couple of sturdy remaining cables and lazily collided with the wall and the mathematically aligned power tubes, destroying the artistic creations of hundreds of goblins. The collision released crackling static discharges that shot through the steam clouds like tiny lightning bolts.

  Crix hoped the destruction of the sigils impaired the dragons somehow, but she couldn’t count on it.

  The platform had arrived at a forty-five-degree angle, almost a perfect one to Crix’s eye, and to her surprise she saw the lower half of Zomaj Hauc dangling through the fog. His legs kicked for purchase and disappeared into the haze.

  Crix pulled back her sleeve and studied the glowing figures on her arm. As a safety measure, a courier was forbidden to learn the text they carried. But she’d been given a gift from the magelord. She knew what the message was and what it would do.

  For the first time, Crix entertained the thought of just thrusting her arm into the lava crust. That would end the threat, wouldn’t it? Everyone was assuming that the dragons would destroy the world if loosed upon it, but what was the proof of that, really? Crix wasn’t so sure. Niv-Mizzet hadn’t destroyed Ravnica.

  It made Crix’s insides squirm to force the idea through her loyalty-wired brain: The magelord couldn’t be allowed to control the new dragons. She had worshiped Zomaj Hauc for as long as she could remember, but no one should have that kind of power except those born with it. Or, as the case might be, hatched with it.

  She could easily make out the three towering dragon eggs through the fog and the screams. They, too, smoldered in the humidity.

  “Be free, new ones,” she said solemnly, kneeling. She raised her message arm over the lava generator’s side.

  “Don’t do that,” said Zomaj Hauc as he dropped from the smog above to land on the generator’s rim behind his goblin courier. He clamped his hand around Crix’s wrist and hauled her into the air with one arm.

  “No, master,” she said. “The dragons can’t be controlled by mortals. Not even—It’s not—it’s not right.” It felt strange to say. “Rightness” was not a particularly Izzet concern in most cases, but Crix was not just an Izzet. She was a goblin who lived in Utvara—for now—on the plane of Ravnica. Zomaj Hauc had given her a sharp, powerful mind, too brilliant for the magelord’s own good. Crix was a citizen of this world, and she meant to defend it as best she could. Not that her best seemed to be doing particularly well.

  “‘No’ is the wrong answer,” the magelord said. With a snap of his shoulder he twisted Crix’s arm and sent her spinning in an agonizing circle in midair. The spin snapped the adhesive clamps along the stump of her shoulder, and the arm detached from its courier, delivered at last. The goblin landed hard on her side, unable to get her remaining arm under her body before the metal cap at the shoulder joint smacked painfully into the stone. The jolt felt like it momentarily knocked her entire skeleton out of her body.

  Crix pushed herself onto her knees at a popping sound from the center of the Cauldron and peered through the haze at the eggs. The one with the purple spots started to crack.

  “Now that’s timing, Crix,” Hauc said. “Why don’t you stay here and watch this. If you survive the next hour I may have a spot for you on the labor crews.” The magelord smiled cruelly. “Then again, everyone will have a spot on my labor crews when Ravnica is mine.”

  Riding a blast of appropriately hot air he shaped from the steam, Zomaj Hauc shot straight up and into the haze on an arc that, Crix calculated quickly, would end at the still-hovering Pyraquin. The goblin coughed a bit of blood into her remaining hand. She still lived. She could still try to stop him. And she could follow him, if she did what no courier was ever supposed to do unless ordered to do so by her magelord. Crix hadn’t even done it on her long journey to the Cauldron. Hauc had not thought to authorize it. She was supposed to be on a low-profile ride in with the Orzhov. The others were still bound, assuming they’d survived the flood, and the imp had gone. There was no other way. Her voice atremble, she spoke the nine-digit failsafe code that gave her the power to use her full abilities.

  Crix’s body flooded with cold, exhilarating fire.

  She shrugged off her robe so
it wouldn’t ignite, gritted her teeth, and sent the mental launch command that activated one of the many functions Hauc had built into her solid mizzium legs during the operations she’d endured for most of her early childhood.

  Crix wasn’t half the goblin she used to be, but it would be the nongoblin half that saved her today. If anything could.

  Mubb the Hapless: Where did the great Niv-Mizzet come from, Magelord?

  Magelord: You cannot create a dragon, insolent cretin! You will be served at the feast of the great Niv-Mizzet himself! Weirds! Seize the cretin!

  Mubb the Hapless: Hooray! May I borrow some flameproof formal wear?

  —Rembic Wezescu, Mubb the Hapless Attends a Feast

  3 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.

  The rack wrenched Kos’s limbs anew as it bent under the strain of the platform’s rumbling descent. The thing’s arms drooped even further, apparently unable to do much else unless Hauc commanded it, and the magelord was busy holding on to the shifting architecture inside the Cauldron. The rack swung Kos’s upper half down so that he was perpendicular to the tilted surface, his head pointed squarely at the hovering flight sphere in the center, with the dead drake still directly below him.

  Another cable snapped nearby and whipped out at Kos, sparking with raw magic. He tried to duck but the rack wouldn’t give, so he closed his eyes and waited for his luck to finally run out as the thing lashed toward him. There was a whistle overhead followed by a loud crack.

  The mizzium cable sliced easily through the pipe-guardian’s freakish metallic arms, somehow missing the dangerously explosive power node at the center, and all at once his arms were free. Sort of. Kos dangled upside down over the corpse of the drake, held in place only by the clamps around his ankles, or more accurately around his boots. The rack’s severed “hands” still encased Kos’s own, like monstrous lockrings designed by a sadist.