by Cory Herndon
At first, there was plenty of food for all concerned, and so all were content. Then things changed.
The four-legged one that looked like a walking mouth and tail was the first to realize that its body was pressing against the inside of the ruins. A few minutes later what remained of the Cauldron walls cracked and split. With a bold snap of its jaws, the tube-tail tore loose the last substantial hunk of dragon flesh and gulped it down whole. It roared into the night sky. The others followed suit with their own terrible cries, and the ground shook as the giant things circled each other, looking for advantages over the corpse. They were hungry, painfully hungry, and each one was both predator and potential prey.
Their bodies grew at an alarming rate, growing even larger as they moved from dragon flesh to dine on freshly caught Utvaran miner on the moonlit flats. The bigger the predator, the bigger the territory, the Gruul said, and the disappearing remains of the crushed dragon were gone. The nephilim would have to expand their territory outward, and they all seemed to realize it at once.
As their gargantuan bodies expanded and mutated, they looked about for something to eat or fight, preferably both. They clashed with each other in brief collisions that shook the ground like thunder, a counter to the terrible shrieks and roars that filled the early morning light. Others turned to the relatively tiny townsfolk and their puny homes, business, and outposts.
Within hours, the whole of Utvara was roiling with panic and chaos. Anything that could burn was burning amid fires that had erupted when the nephilim smashed the old Yorboff forge. The nephilim’s footsteps and roars triggered landslides in the Husk that sent the Utvar Gruul bolting for cover as their wood-and-leather structures toppled. The nephilim snapped them up and devoured them whole, occasionally stopping to fight over the livestock that scattered across the foothills, fleeing the giants. Townsfolk bolted in every direction, driven by a wave of palpable terror that knocked the few vedalken in Utvara to the ground in pain.
In the less and less intact township square, a serpent sat coiled on its tail, its head and neck swaying easily to a rhythm only it could hear. It watched the nephilim turn toward the city and the tiny, shrieking things that infested it. The serpent knew all about infestations. Had any of the screaming people been paying attention, they would have noticed the serpent’s head take on a peculiarly human shape, with the face of a small girl. The face smiled, melted into a writhing mass of bluish worms for the briefest of moments, and became reptilian again. Satisfied, the serpent slithered into the crowd to gather a complete report for its master.
The one person who might have been able to prevent the disaster in Utvara arrived hours too late to help. The goblin rocketed through the sky over the reclamation zone, clearing the cloud cover without the typical sonic boom that accompanied normal observosphere flight protocol. The goblin pilots assigned to observation duty by the Izzet magelords usually reveled in the sound, which more often than not was a precursor to an especially spectacular death.
This goblin had seen enough explosions recently, which made the sight of Utvara’s ongoing ruin that much harder to take. The bubbling scar that stood where the Cauldron had so recently fed power and water into the small boomtown was especially jarring, she admitted to herself.
She was returning from a visit with the guildmaster, the dragon Niv-Mizzet. The dragon had appointed her head of the Cauldron, shattered as it was, but the goblin had plans she was certain would prove successful. Now her best chance for her own colloquy was gone, and a newly adopted home crumbled beneath the feet and tentacles of creatures that the goblin knew very well. Until a few weeks ago, she had been an Izzet courier and spent a great deal of time with the tribal Gruul who inhabited the Husk. She’d almost been killed by the nephilim.
They’d been smaller then.
The observosphere pilot tapped the smooth, faintly glowing, translucent white stones set into the flight panel, and the ley-crystal hummed to life. The shimmering, mirrorlike surface of the viewing pane materialized in thin air above the crystal and almost immediately reflected the features of a bald human woman in her early hundreds. She wore a tattoo in the shape of the Izzet guild sigil on her forehead, and her neutral face hardened into a stern scowl when she saw who was calling.
“This is—” the goblin gulped nervously. Her title was still more than a little grandiose for her mouth. The new, dragon-given syllables of her name felt stranger still. “This is Master Engineer Crixizix,” the goblin said. “I hereby request the assistance of the Emergency Containment Corps. There is a disaster in progress in the Utvara reclamation zone that poses a much wider threat.”
“Where is your magelord, goblin?” the woman said. “You are not authorized to use this ley frequency for frivolous—”
“This is not frivolous,” Crixizix said as calmly as she could. “This is quite serious. And perhaps you did not hear me clearly. This is Master Engineer Crixizix. You will immediately send a containment team to the Utvara reclamation zone. Do you understand?”
Crixizix forced herself away from an impolitic but self-satisfied smirk when the emergency dispatcher’s face displayed the clear fact that she had finally seen the sigil of the Firemind that, from her perspective, glowed clearly beneath Crixizix’s chin.
“Yes,” the dispatcher said. “Right away. How large a team will you need?”
The goblin took another look out of the observosphere’s cockpit and belatedly activated a half-dozen small recording globes before she replied. “Large,” she said, “And tell them to bring out the big bam-sticks. These things could, forgive my impertinence, give the Great Dragon a run for his zinos.”
“How can you be certain that this is an Izzet-caused incident?” the dispatcher said. “This sounds like something you want to refer to the Simic authorities. Giant monsters are their—”
“It’s plain as the tattoo on your forehead, madam,” Crixizix said. “They consumed the remains of Zomaj Hauc’s project. The results are what was always speculated but never attempted, due to concerns about heresies.” Which was a polite way of saying that the first and last magelord to suggest to Niv-Mizzet that the dragon sacrifice so much as a scale from his crimson hide to feed to anyone or anything was reduced to ash and bone.
“Mobilization and deployment will take a few hours,” the dispatcher said.
“A few hours?” the goblin said. “This is an emergency!”
“Then I suggest, Master Engineer,” the woman replied, “that you do the best you can until we arrive.” The floating mirror shimmered and disappeared.
“My best,” Crixizix muttered, applying a braking angle to the flame-pods ringing the ’sphere’s equator to keep from overshooting Utvara. What could she do? In truth, she was barely even an engineer, master or otherwise. The title was something she would be growing into. And an engineer wasn’t a battalion of angels or even a Gruul horde, either of which looked to be necessary to mop up the mess the nephilim were making of Utvara. The reclamation zone was going to need reclaiming.
The Firemind had touched her when the Great Dragon gave her a title within the guild. Once given, that touch never left. Even at this distance, Crixizix could feel the Firemind. If she concentrated, the goblin could hear the low rumbling echoes of the Great Dragon’s thoughts in a deep, dreamless slumber. She had heard the life churchers call the Firemind a form of fellowship like their own “song.” Crixizix didn’t know if that was true, but she did know that it was nothing like a song when you gave yourself over to the dragon’s power. It was direct, baleful contact with an intellect and will that made even the mightiest magelord, let alone a newly entitled master engineer, feel small and obsequious.
Yet the link had been granted to the goblin for a reason. Technically she did have the right to call for his help. The dragon did not have to give it, but certainly a personal interest could bring him.
“There aren’t any bigger bam-sticks than him,” the goblin said out loud. She set the observosphere’s automatic navigation aura f
or a course that should set her down on the most intact and unthreatened part of the remaining thoroughfare, then closed her eyes, seeking contact with that sleeping consciousness and hoping to Krokt that Niv-Mizzet didn’t wake up too grumpy to listen to the details.
Volunteers shall be given the full rights and responsibilities of commissioned wojeks while on duty. Academy training shall not be required for qualified volunteers who have five or more years experience in the approved organizations named in Subsection A.
—Wojek-Ledev Joint Operations Agreement, Section 2
No owl-folk need apply.
—Sign in the window of the Wojek Recruiting Office
30 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
On the shadier, more run-down end of Tin Street—the largest marketway in the densely populated Tenth District that cut a ragged pie wedge from the central metropolis of Ravnica—a small pet shop had closed early for the day. The patrolling wojeks who arrived at the scene immediately saw that Zuza’s Exotic Bestiary would not be opening again any time soon, unless it was under new management.
One of the wojeks had decades of experience on the streets of the city, while the other had more familiarity with the laws of Ravnica’s open roads. Yet it was the older veteran who lost his composure, and a few ounces of his breakfast, when the two stepped through the door. Fortunately for the preservation of the possible crime scene—Zuza was well established with the Orzhov Guild, making this potential murder a punishable violation of commerce laws—the lieutenant had the presence of mind to vomit outside on the rainy street.
“They’re eating her,” Lieutenant Pijha said after he’d composed himself. His leathery face creased into a frown of distaste tinged with horror, and he pulled off his helmet to wipe sweat from his wrinkled brow.
“I can see that,” his partner replied. “The question is, why?”
Nikos Pijha, a barrel-shaped bull of a man in a slightly older cut of wojek armor that no longer quite fit him, arched an eyebrow at the slim, youngish half-elf at his side. She wore both the Boros crest and the cloak pin of the Selesnya Conclave over a gleaming new wojek breastplate bearing a still-shiny ten-pointed star. A green cape contrasted with the red hanging from Pijha’s shoulders, and she wore her golden hair tied in a simple tail that emerged from beneath a helmet that was not wojek regulation—it was the lightweight protective headgear of the Selesnyan ledev guard. The lieutenant’s partner held the rank of auxiliary patrol officer, an “apo” from a division of the League of Wojek that had been formed after the Decamillennial from volunteers. Apos came mostly from the ledev and Azorius bailiffs, and career wojeks called them “half-timers,” at least behind the backs of the apos. Truthfully, the half-elf mused, they probably said much worse.
The wojeks had lost a lot of good people at the Decamillennial, but the members of the League had no time to collectively grieve the losses—Ravnica needed them more than ever after that disaster. Still, veterans looked upon the apos with some resentment. Pijha was one of the welcome exceptions to that rule.
His apo partner’s name was Fonn Zunich, and she didn’t like the way ’jek-reg helmets affected her hearing. She’d had decades to train her softly pointed half-elf’s ears to alert her to almost any danger.
Then again, all she heard at the moment was chewing and whistling. The chewing came from dozens of rats gnawing away at the dead pet-shop proprietor and the whistling from the veteran forensic labmage—a necrotician named Helligan—who used a sharp, pointed scoopknife to take samples from the corpse. He nodded at their approach and returned to delicately removing something half-eaten from the chest cavity of the dead woman.
“Field necrotopsy?” Pijha asked the labmage.
“It seemed more efficient than waiting for the exterminator to clear all of these fellows out,” Helligan said with the grin of one who had long ago lost any sense of gravity around corpses, no matter what shape they were in. “They work fast.” Fonn would not have been surprised to see him snacking on a bag of grubcrisps while he worked.
Fonn suppressed an instinctive shudder at the “fellows” Helligan was talking about. “What’s so exotic about rats?” she asked no one in particular. “Sure, these ones are pretty big, but I’ve seen bigger in Old Rav.”
“Lots of things,” Pijha said. “Smart, rats are. And they have a highly organized society, it’s said by some. My great-uncle Pollondo was an exterminator. Said he once found an entire rat city down in Old Rav. Turns out they’d organized a sort of giant hunting pack—are a lot of rats a pack? A mob, or a flock, or whatever—anyway, they were feeding on the zom—on the undead down there, you know, the slow ones. The shambling types. But thing is, it hadn’t killed them. Everyone knows that anything that eats undead dies.”
“Necrotic flesh is almost universally poisonous,” Helligan agreed absently without looking up.
“But these rats of Uncle Poll’s, they found a way to—”
“I believe you, sir,” Fonn said. “That’s not my point though. What I mean is, I don’t see any other animals. Not everybody has an exterminator in the family. This place is called Zuza’s Exotic Bestiary, right? It’s not a … a rodentorium.”
“Good point,” Pijha said after some consideration. “That doesn’t make much sense. If it was a diner, maybe I could see it. Lots of places serve rat.”
“Really,” Fonn said, feeling her own insides grow queasy. Blood was one thing, but …
“Rats make good eating too. So my uncle always said,” Pijha continued. He shrugged. “How about this? She did sell rats but not exclusively. But then the rats, see, they ate the other pets. Then,” he said, jerking his thumb at the presumed body of Zuza herself, “they caught her napping.”
“Maybe. She must have been sleeping pretty hard if she didn’t notice them biting her. But look around the place,” Fonn said, adding another “sir” as an afterthought. She may have been a centuriad of the Ledev Guard in her “normal” life, but here her rank was well below the ’jek’s. She was free to speak her mind, but some formality was required. “There are dozens of rats here and dozens of cages. All of them open. But the front door is unlocked. There was no reason for her to get cornered by them. She could have outrun rats.”
“I still like my explanation,” Pijha said good-naturedly, his nausea long since over. He was a bit thickheaded at times, but he was not a vindictive or particularly argumentative officer. Fonn got along with him well enough that they worked together often, though the half-elf only served in the League a few months out of the year. She suspected that most, if not all, of the time Pijha’s slow intellect was an act anyway. Nothing lulled witnesses into revealing too much like a “dim” law officer. In the few years she’d served as an apo—first serving one week a month, then longer as the work grew on her—she’d met few like him in the League. Most were veteran street ’jeks. The generally younger, newly promoted officers making up the wojek brass tended to think more combatively, more militaristically, which was understandable after the losses they had suffered more than a decade earlier. Most any wojek who had joined the league in the last ten years—aside from apos, most of whom arrived with an understanding of different methods—thought little of roughing up suspected violators or even witnesses with extreme prejudice.
Still, Fonn suspected that this time the lieutenant was wide of the mark. The place didn’t smell right. The only animal scent in the air was indeed rat. Thick, oily rat. The only blood in the room, her nose told her, was human.
“Where’s the blood then?” Fonn said.
“There,” Pijha said, pointing, “and there. All around her, really. Looks like the rats are helping themselves to that too. It’s enough to make me reconsider lunch.”
“But only around her,” Fonn replied, circling the body and gingerly stepping over the scuttling rodents. A few snapped at her boots but were otherwise intent on fighting their kin for what was left of their meal.
“Watch your step, please,” labmage Helligan said. “I’m still working here.�
��
“Did you contact someone about collecting the rats?” Pijha asked the labmage, who was kneeling over the corpse of the pet-shop owner. “They can’t all be exterminated. We’ll need a few for evidence.”
“Yes,” Helligan said, focused on a wound that several rodents were intently making larger by the second. “And I told them there’s no rush. This is fascinating, don’t you think?”
“Fascinating or not, we need to collect a few, I’d think,” Fonn said. “If they’re responsible—”
“You wish to bring them to justice?” Helligan asked. “If anything, this was accidental. I’m sure I’ll find she died of natural causes.” He had apparently completed one of his delicate incisions and was taking a more active interest in the wojeks’ conversation.
“She barely looks seventy,” Pijha said.
“Indeed,” Helligan agreed. “But I don’t think they’re going anywhere. What’s left of her is. I need to collect enough to determine what killed her.”
“The rats didn’t kill her, Doctor?” Fonn prodded.
“Indeed not. Even if my initial necrotic observations didn’t tell me that, all of this blood would have. See?” He poked it with the surgical tool, and the blood in the pool jiggled. “It’s semicoagulated, but you can still see a faint impression of shape. This blood started to congeal while it was still inside her. Our friends here are the ones that let it out, but this blood—and this woman—were dead before that happened.”
