by Cory Herndon
“This is remarkable,” the wojek commander-general said softly. “What did you find?”
“We learned that there is a great … nothingness out there,” Feather said. “At a certain distance, existence ends. The universe that we know simply stops.”
“This is nothing new. This is common natural philosophy,” Saint Kel said. “What does this have to do with this so-called ghost city?”
“Much, Holiness,” Feather said.
“But all of this happened before the Guildpact,” Nodov said, “didn’t it?”
“Yes,” the angel replied. “The preface is necessary to explain what Razia believed Agyrem was. What it is, in fact. Razia believed that the sky—that existence itself—stops out there because this world is isolated. Contained. No energy or matter ever leaves or arrives. A closed system. If not for this phenomenon, the Guildpact’s magic would not have been able to establish relative peace for so long. But the seal isn’t perfect. It overlaps and folds in on itself, like a blister on the skin. Agyrem is, to put it less than delicately, that blister. Souls can’t escape Ravnica, you see. There is no beyond for them to reach. That is why the dead linger, and when they depart the realm that humans occupy they are caught in the fold of Agyrem like fish in a net.” The angel turned to the Grand Arbiter. “As you know, your honor,” she added, “Razia did not figure this out until after the Parhelion had run aground, so to speak, in Agyrem.”
Teysa had to suppress a grin. The other two didn’t trust Augustin now and weren’t even thinking about how to punish her client. They were too awestruck at the implications of what Feather described.
She knew she risked the Grand Arbiter’s wrath for revealing a secret that the Boros angels and the Azorius judiciary had apparently shared for millennia. It was worth it.
There really was a place you went when you died. Assuming ectomancy, necromancy, a Boros grounder, or the Selesnyan “song” didn’t bind you to the physical world of Ravnica, you would eventually turn up in Agyrem. And that was a fact that carried the potential to confirm or change a lot of belief systems around the entire world.
“Let the record show that I, Augustin IV, do confirm reliable theories pertaining to the existence of a place like the one described,” the Grand Arbiter said. “But I admit my own curiosity gets the better of me, Legionary,” he added. “How did you—did you say ‘run aground’?”
“Yes,” Feather said. “Are you all familiar with the phenomenon over the Utvara reclamation zone known as the Schism?”
“I am,” Teysa murmured.
The others, too, knew of it.
“The Schism, it seems, twisted the fabric of Agyrem,” Feather said, “knotted it up, so to speak.”
“How so?” Saint Kel asked. “I have heard of the phenomenon, but I thought it was just a trick of the light, residue from some Izzet magic.”
“It is more than that,” the Grand Arbiter cut in. “It was an unnatural experiment, created with Orzhov magic and zinos, if I’m not mistaken, Counselor.”
Teysa grimaced. The Grand Arbiter, not surprisingly, had very good sources of information. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, your honor,” she said. Advokists were under no obligations to the verity circle. “However, I question the relevance—”
“Relax, Counselor. The Orzhov fulfill their part of the Guildpact, just as we all do,” Augustin replied. “You’re not on trial.”
When a few moments of silence had passed, Teysa nodded. “Go ahead, Legionary.”
“Agyrem became—‘snagged’ is the best word—on the Schism.”
“You’re saying Agyrem floats around in the sky?” Nodov asked incredulously. “Just a big, invisible ghost city, plying the heavens like a leaf on the wind, mocking our great religions?”
“I do not say that the city of ghosts mocks anyone’s great religions, or which religions might qualify as such,” Feather said calmly. “I am a sworn protector of justice, vengeance, and the law. Those are not gods. They are ideals. Nor do I claim to understand how the fabric of existence behaves in relation to our realm. I know only what my guildmaster told me, and I believe it is the truth.”
“You must or you would not be able to say it,” the Grand Arbiter said. “Legionary, how did the Parhelion find its way into this ‘fold in existence.’ I admit I can not quite fathom it myself.”
“My lord, the Parhelion was built to find the ends of our—of our reality,” Feather said. “The mana that powers her does so by bending our reality ever so slightly, as I understand it. It stays aloft not because of the floatspheres, not entirely, but also because a small part of it is in a slightly different place and stays there. Forgive the clumsiness of this explanation. I am no engineer. This small part of the Parhelion, this reality engine, is what allowed the vessel to slip into Agyrem after it snagged on the Schism,” Feather explained. “The Parhelion punctured the veil and went through to the other side. Razia was not immediately sure how to return. And after a short time, she chose to stay long enough to explore the place.”
“A noble sentiment,” the Grand Arbiter said. “The quest for knowledge. Not very angelic. Nor was abandoning her responsibility to protect Ravnica.”
“That is difficult to dispute,” Feather said, “except to point out that the guildmaster was anything but a typical angel. She chose to investigate a possible threat on the chance that this world could get by without angels for a time. Nor do I dispute the fact that in retrospect, I believe it was the wrong decision to make.” For the first time since her testimony had begun, emotion—sadness, deep sadness—crept into the angel’s voice. “The Parhelion had only been in Agyrem a short while when I found them. I admit I don’t remember much of my own journey except that it was not easy.”
“Yet you crossed this veil you speak of on your own?” Augustin IV asked. Teysa wasn’t sure she liked the intrigued look in his eye.
“I did but only with the help of my kin on the other side,” Feather said. “They guided me there.”
“What is it—What is this place like?” Nodov said. “What does the great hereafter look like?”
“Everything,” Feather said. “Agyrem is every place that ever was, all at once. Unfortunately, I had little time to explore it.”
“Why?” the Grand Arbiter asked.
“Because the ghosts of Agyrem had gone to war with the angels.”
* * * * *
Wenslauv decided to load up on everything she could. No point in going out without a fight. From the position of a few different corpses she surmised that the angels had tried to get to the weapons but had not made it in time. Wenslauv stepped quietly from the armory, a pair of loaded bam-sticks slung over her back, a third loaded and held in her right hand, a pair of short swords, and a net slung on her drooping weapons belt—you never knew when a net might come in handy. Twin bandoliers of the small, orange spheres goblins called bangpops crisscrossed her breastplate.
Air Marshal Wenslauv flicked the safety catch off of the bam-stick’s firing stud, clutched the weapon before her like a shield, and marched on to the command floor.
The tilting floor forced Wenslauv to keep one hand on the wall to avoid slipping. Adorned as she was with explosives and weaponry, one misstep and a fall at the wrong angle would have left pieces of air marshal all over the bulkheads.
A few minutes later, she emerged on the command floor, and her heart sank. It was completely empty. No corpses, though bloodstains covered the floor. No apparent foes, but the place was a shambles, and all of the other entrances and exits appeared closed. The great wheel was off its post, broken into four pieces. The various control stations were in no better shape: Two were still burning with low, green flame that looked both magical and electrical. Only the front-facing invizomizzium windscreen of the Parhelion remained intact and largely unharmed.
Someone behind her coughed. She spun around, her bam-stick charged and her thumb on the release.
Wenslauv had been wrong. There was still one angel here. The an
gel was alive and didn’t look like she’d be that way for long.
* * * * *
Lieutenant Flang was not the only goblin skyjek in the League, but he was the only one assigned to the elite Centerfort squadron. He also had a well-deserved reputation for bad luck amongst his skyjek squad mates, bad luck that Flang hoped had changed when he transferred to a flight group that called wojek headquarters home base.
Flang’s luck had to turn around sometime, the goblin was certain of it. Three out of the five fortune-tellers he’d consulted had told him so. Flang was a great believer in luck, and three to five was a winning percentage.
The transfer turned out to be just another visit from Krokt, the goblin god of misfortune for Flang. Flang the Unlucky was his nickname. He coined it himself, which was unfortunate.
Who always seemed to be the last one back to the landing platform and therefore responsible for getting the platform swabbed clean? Flang. Who showed up just a few minutes too late to sit in at the card table? Flang. Who sometimes got to the card table and lost a month’s wages in the first five minutes? It had to be Flang.
Who, while flying as fast as ever he could for home base with a message of the utmost importance became so distracted thinking about Flang’s bad luck that he veered too close to the underside of an aerial walkway, was knocked clear from the saddle, and dropped like a stone before coming to an abrupt and deadly stop on the roof of—as misfortune would have it—Flang’s favorite goblin restaurant?
Flang.
Look, I don’t have any idea where they went. I don’t know what they did with the vampire, either. Yes, I know the wolf. I’m sure he’s going to do fine. On second thought, why don’t you make all of that ‘No comment.’
—Lieutenant Agrus Kos, quoted in the Ravnican
Guildpact-Journal, 2 Seleszni 10000 Z.C.
22 Seleszni 10002 Z.C.
Feather—she had long ago stopped thinking of herself as Pierakor Az Vinrenn D’rav—emerged into the city of ghosts with a chill that cut to her bones. During her tenure with the wojeks, she’d been bound to the surface of the world. After two years of searching Ravnica, pursuing lead after lead about the Parhelion’s disappearance, she had grown completely accustomed once more to the palpable feeling of wind flowing over and under her wings. The gusts, the updrafts, the clouds, the palpable embrace of the air.
Here there was no wind, no air. Feather did not need to breathe unless she wanted to speak, and she sailed through open space, but it was not true flight. It felt more like willing herself forward into a cluttered nothing.
Things worked differently here. They certainly looked different. She had lived for a very, very long time and had never seen anything like Agyrem.
The world of Ravnica had disappeared. Feather floated low over a haphazard, patchwork town that might have been contrived by mad gods with a terrible sense of humor and a worse sense of aesthetics. Something like an inverted Rakdos warren sat atop a bulbous, deformed Selesnyan outpost tree. Roads left the surface and curved along impossible arcs with no respect for logic or gravity. Translucent denizens were everywhere, moving to and fro, a ghostly population that made the world shimmer and change as they passed.
Of greater interest was the vessel that had called her here. The Parhelion floated with its great sails sullenly limp and no wind to fill them.
She had found her missing kin at last. Had she been able to take her eyes off this glorious sight, she might have noticed that the Parhelion wasn’t all she had found. A swarm of glowing, white shapes was moving up from the patchwork city to meet the flying fortress, flickering in her peripheral vision. She ignored them.
The host. She had missed them.
The angel had been able to hear them calling out in every magical fiber of her being, their absence an ache that beckoned to her from a great distance. The golden parapets of the Parhelion gleamed in a sunless sky, white sails flashing in greeting, all flight decks open, floatspheres glowing like fire.
The shapes left her peripheral vision and entered her direct line of sight. The angels were under attack.
The host emerged from the landing decks, rising to meet the chaotic swarm of flitting, ghostly shapes that rose from Agyrem in an unending river of ectoplasmic energy. Trios of angelic wing guards cut through them like spears, scattering the spectral energies forever in little white flashes of energy, but the enemy had the angels horribly outnumbered. Feather could tell that the angels’ maneuvers were being improvised and hastily coordinated on the wing. A thousand angels, give or take, had dwelt in the Parhelion, but even as Feather watched, one of those thousand fell from the strange and distorted sky under a swarm of screaming, amorphous shapes. The doomed angel disappeared into what looked like a lake of oil, part of the ever-shifting landscape of this strange place.
There was no turning back now, not after what she’d gone through to get here. Feather did the only thing she could do—she drew her sword and charged into the fray.
A pack of wailing ghosts rose to meet her. The ghosts called to her, called her full angelic name. Feather felt fear. No, not just fear. Terror. She realized why the ghosts looked familiar.
The quietmen.
She tucked her wings and dived. If she could break clear of the pack of ghosts of the quietmen she could get to Razia, perhaps lead the Parhelion back to the world that needed it. At least, that was the plan. But the ghosts followed at the speed of thought and reappeared in front of her before she realized they’d even moved. The leader of the specters glowed and became opaque. By the time the ghostly quietman’s fist drove into Feather’s jaw, it felt quite solid. She almost dropped her sword in surprise but managed to hold on as she tumbled backward in midairless void. She regained enough control to make a furious slash at the bold phantom that cut the shape neatly in two as if it were a mere puff of smoke.
The ghost of the quietman vanished in a flash of white light.
Could a ghost die? Feather was no philosopher, but she guessed they could be destroyed, at the very least, and that was perhaps what made Agyrem truly different. There was no lingering, just a flash, a pop, and nothingness. Before she could consider the question further, another blow, this one from behind, knocked her helm from her head. Then a fist slammed into her gut. Dizzy, the angel let herself drop. She slashed wildly behind her with her sword, hoping to get under her persistent foes and reach the Parhelion.
She saw more white flashes, then the welcome site of Anezka, first lieutenant of Razia.
“Pierakor?” Anezka asked. The other angel’s face displayed a mix of shock and happy recognition. That allayed Feather’s immediate concern about the voluntary end she’d called to her wojek service. “Pierakor! You heard us! Come quickly. We need every able sword that we can—” Another ghost flew in on a suicide run. The Boros lieutenant flicked her sword and sliced through its translucent face. Another flash, another ghostly quietman gone.
“What is happening?” Feather asked. “How can I serve?”
“Razia will explain,” Anezka said. “We have to get to the Parhelion.”
It had been decades since Feather strode the decks of the Parhelion or soared unfettered through its cavernous gangways. But she could not relish her homecoming. As soon as she and Anezka broke through the swarm of ghosts—not all of them spectral quietmen, to Feather’s dismay, which implied that the danger to the vessel was even greater than she’d initially thought—two stoic members of the guildmaster’s personal guard were there to meet them. They saluted Anezka and greeted Feather with a nod and “Greetings, Legionary.” They turned and marched the new arrivals directly to the command floor.
Feather had not seen the guildmaster since Razia had cast judgment on Pierakor Az Vinrenn D’rav and sent her to work with the mortals as her sentence. The crime was not one that the mortals would probably have understood, and Feather had never found a proper way to explain it to her wojek colleagues, though naturally they were curious and had always found new ways to ask about it. Fortunately
, mortals expected taciturnity from an angel, and few had ever pressed it. Of those, only Kos had ever come close to finding out, and he’d taken his best guess to his grave.
Feather wondered if he was here.
After decades among mortals, Feather felt a strange sensation of … shame? … as she stood before that holiest of beings, the parun and guildmaster of the Boros Legion. That which each of her kind longed to be. The burning flame of Boros. The guildmaster of justice. Vengeance incarnate.
Feather dropped to one knee and lowered her head.
“They tell me the mortals have given you a pet name,” Razia said without preamble. “Do you prefer it to your proper one?”
“Sir?” Feather said, looking up in surprise at the abrupt question. The guildmaster beckoned her to stand, and she did.
“Your name, Constable,” Razia said. “Names have power, and you forsook your own for one from a human. Do you prefer to be called ‘Feather’?”
Of all the things Feather had expected the guildmaster to say first, this was not one of them. “I answer to that name,” she said, compelled to reply. “I answer to my holy one as well. ‘They will know you by deed, not by name.’ ”
“Feather, you’re quoting a book I wrote,” Razia said. She made the moniker sound both ridiculous and utterly demeaning, “Why do you stand on my command floor? We have engaged in a holy war against an enemy who may well be impossible to defeat. This is a job for angels, not the fallen host.”
“Holiest One,” Feather said, “circumstances, at the time, decreed that I act as I did. As you say, I was assigned to serve the League of Wojek—”
“And to set an example, you, an angel, violated the direct command of your guildmaster,” Razia said. “What are the mortals to make of that?”
“If I may speak freely, sir—”
“You may.”
“I was given few outstanding orders,” Feather said, “and the Guildpact itself was threatened.”
