Dissension

by Cory Herndon

  “Don’t you understand, Constable?” Razia said, whirling on one foot, eyes blazing. “You helped break the Guildpact. You and that fool Agrus Kos.”

  “Guildmaster,” Feather said, probably with a bit more challenge in her voice than was wise. “Agrus Kos stopped House Dimir. The vampire was going to destroy Mat’selesnya and had corrupted the Selesnya Conclave. Kos’s solution was simple. He arrested him.”

  “Exactly,” Razia said. “Constable, the Guildpact is—was—a powerful magic, certainly the most powerful this world has ever seen. Without it, that world we protect would have descended into chaos and petty wars thousands of years ago, destroying itself over and over again. Look out that window. What you see is the result of a peaceful history. Can you imagine what it will look like when the Guildpact fades? What kind of power you’ve handed Szadek?”

  “I don’t understand,” Feather said.

  “This war!” Razia shouted. “No angel shies from a just battle. This current fight is no such thing, yet here we sit, trapped and under siege. We are destroying souls, Pierakor! These beings who live and die, they go on, don’t you see? And what is left is something irreplaceable. These abominable acts are your doing!”

  “How—” Feather began, but a blur of motion outside the invizomizzium windscreen cut her short.

  A tidal wave of ghosts barreled toward them. At the head of the massive spectral army, a familiar shape, more shadow than substance but topped by a pale face with black eyes, flew like a monstrous Golgari bat. The Dimir guildmaster’s silver teeth glittered in the weird phantasmal light.

  Razia saw the look of shock on Feather’s face and turned to face the coming onslaught just as Szadek and his ghostly army made contact with the Parhelion’s hull. The vampire moved through the hull as if it weren’t there, and his soldiers followed.

  * * * * *

  If there was one thing an angel was always ready for, it was a fight. Even during her tenure as a wojek constable, Feather had never shied from combat, though the opportunity did not present itself often for a peacekeeper. It was one of the reasons she had enjoyed helping Agrus Kos; her old friend had never been one to shy from a fight, either. He also had a knack for getting into the fights of others.

  Despite the battle readiness that was practically an angel’s natural state, none of them had expected the Parhelion’s confines to be breached so easily. Feather would later reflect with great humility in the Azorius Senate that the angel’s arrogant assumptions concerning their fortress’s supposed impregnability were ultimately their undoing.

  The first to fall—that Feather saw, at least—was Anezka, who had placed herself between the guildmaster and the spectral Dimir vampire. Feather didn’t have time to wonder how Szadek had gotten free, let alone how he had found his way to the city of ghosts. All she knew was that the Dimir guildmaster was here, and his apparently still-potent power to manipulate the spirits of the dead made him probably the most powerful being in this place.

  Anezka met the charging shadow with a holy blade. Before it could find home, a pair of ghosts, moving so quickly they were little more than amorphous blobs of white light, slipped into what should have been harm’s way and wrapped ectoplasmic tendrils around the weapon’s blade. The Boros lieutenant froze in midstrike, eyes flashing with frustration, but the ghosts would not let go. With a crack, the tendrils snapped Anezka’s sword in two.

  The spirits then parted, allowing their vampiric master to step forward. He reached out, grabbed Anezka by the throat, and tossed her like a doll against the bulkhead. The angel’s skull shattered on impact, and the first lieutenant of Boros slumped to the floor beneath a rosette of gray and red.

  Angels, like the nephilim, did not age. They were invulnerable to many forms of magic and were the most skilled warriors on the plane. Only certain weapons and metals could pierce their skin. Their bones were almost impossible to break.

  At least, that was how it worked on Ravnica.

  But Feather wasn’t on Ravnica anymore, and it appeared that in the strange pocket world of Agyrem, angels were only just so immortal.

  Razia might have been entertaining similar thoughts, but if she did the guildmaster did not show it. Instead, the sight of her lieutenant’s dashed brains on the bulkhead sent Razia into a rage. She drew holy steel, and Feather stepped to her side, her own sword in hand.

  Feather had missed much of the drama at the Decamillennial, and by the time she had actually seen Szadek, the vampire had been in a truly sorry state—half-consumed by his own shapeshifting servant, Lupul, and bound by wojek lockrings. Here in Agyrem, Szadek had, apparently, recovered. This new incarnation of the House Dimir guildmaster was half-solid, half-shadow, terrible and pale, with eyes that burned with blue flame. Szadek spread his arms, and the wailing ghosts parted to go after the rest of the angels. They left a clear circle on the Parhelion command floor containing the vampire, Razia, and Feather.

  “Razia, it’s been ages, hasn’t it?” the vampire said with a silvery smile. “I am so glad that you found this place. I was beginning to think that I had not made the trail obvious enough even for you.”

  “What have you done, vampire?” Razia roared. “The Guildpact—”

  “For someone as old as you are, your memory is a trifle spotty,” the vampire replied. His casual, almost conversational tone was unsettling, and Feather began to wonder if that unfamiliar feeling—uncertainty—was the vampire’s work. “I’m doing exactly what your Guildpact dictates.”

  “Silence!” Razia cried and swung her sword directly at the vampire’s neck. This time, no ghosts appeared to block the strike. Szadek did it himself with his open hand.

  “No, I don’t think so,” the vampire said, the wicked smile widening. “I allowed myself to become vulnerable once and with good reason, but you will find I have regained a measure of my old self.” Szadek grasped the blade and yanked it free of Razia’s hand.

  It was the opening Feather had hoped for, and she unleashed her own strike just as Szadek moved. The vampire’s arms were a blur, and with a clang the angel found her sword met with Razia’s own. Szadek whispered a word and a whip of purple energy lashed out and caught Razia in the belly, sending her flying backward across the deck. On the other side he blocked Feather’s strike with the pommel of the guildmaster’s sword and shoved the angel away with an elbow to the chin. The vampire was unbelievably strong, and Feather had to fight to keep her balance.

  Szadek tossed Razia’s sword in the air in a spin and caught it by the hilt. He appraised it like a collector and extended it to point toward Feather.

  “A simple weapon?” Szadek said. “You seek to harm me with a sword? You’re going to have to do better than that. I mastered the blade long before you were incarnated.”

  Feather saw that Razia was still dazed and regained her footing as best she could before Razia made another lunge. Szadek met this one as before, knocked the guildmaster to the deck once more, and turned to Feather. As the wailing ghosts rushed through the Parhelion all around them, their screams mixing with the shouts of the angels who fought them, Szadek and Feather engaged in a one-sided duel. The vampire hardly even considered the angel as one hand fended off every blow, every strike, and covered every opening. All the while, Szadek took step after inexorable step toward Razia, smiling. No matter how she maneuvered, Feather could not place herself between the enemy and her fallen, stunned guildmaster.

  This was not going to work, Feather realized. And so she did something no angel found it easy to do. She broke off from the attack. With a leap, she soared the few feet to the stricken Razia, slung the guildmaster over her shoulder, and bolted for the exit.

  Szadek’s laughter followed her down the poorly lit gangway. So, she saw when she risked a look back, did Szadek himself.

  “Pierakor,” Razia said, her voice straining through what sounded like a great deal of pain, “put me down. We are not going to win, not today. It is my destiny to fall at their side.”

  Feath
er ducked a screaming, ghostly shape and leaped to avoid the body of another fallen angel. The host was being slaughtered left and right.

  “I disagree,” Feather said, “We must live to fight another day.” She hauled the weakened guildmaster deep into the bowels of the Parhelion, where the powerful reality engine drove the floating fortress through the sky. If they could escape from the hatches that opened from there onto the vessel’s underbelly, together the angels might be able to get back to Ravnica to warn the Legion that the fugitive Szadek had been found. There was still hope, Feather was sure.

  The fugitive’s laughter echoed down the hall behind them.

  After almost an hour of constant running through the labyrinthine passageways, the laughter, to her surprise, faded away. “I think we might make it, Holiest,” Feather said. If they had to flee, escape hatches were directly beneath them.

  She set Razia down gingerly at the junction of two of the biggest generators after checking back to ensure Szadek no longer followed. She saw no one—the angels who could sometimes be found down here tending to the engines had obviously charged into the fray, and the distant sounds of fighting between specter and holy warrior were all she could make out.

  The guildmaster was weak. The vampire had caved in her ribs, right through her breastplate. Blood covered Razia’s cracked and dented armor. Feather put a hand to her own shoulder. It came away damp and red. Whether it was her own or Razia’s she wasn’t sure, but Feather didn’t think she herself had been struck.

  “He’s not going to stop,” Razia said. “He will kill me first. That’s what he’s after.”

  “Why now? Why this way?” Feather asked. “Ten thousand years he had to launch an assault. Why lure you—lure us—into this?”

  “Is it not obvious?” Razia said. “This place is a playground for him. The ghosts dance like his puppets, and there is no Boros Legion or Guildpact to stop him.”

  “I can’t leave you here, Holiest.”

  “You can and will,” Razia said. “Help me stand.”

  Feather offered the guildmaster her hand, and pain wracked Razia’s face as she pulled herself to her feet. She pushed Feather back and pressed the other hand to her crushed chest. “He has your sword,” Feather said. “Take mine.”

  “Thank you,” Razia said. “But you must go. Go back and warn them. The Grand Arbiter must be told and the other guild leaders. You are our last emissary.”

  “Holiest?” Feather said. “I stand with you. The angels of Boros—”

  “The angels of Boros won’t survive if you don’t do as I say,” Razia gasped. “I see that you are not to blame. Forgive my anger. This was Szadek’s doing, Legionary. I will fight the Dimir, and I will likely die. You have your orders. You can prepare them for what’s coming, but you have to go. Now.”

  A loud clang of metal on stone resounded throughout the engine decks, and Feather heard a mizzium door clatter against the mizzium floor, the hinges and locking assembly twisted and smoking. Feather took flight, weaponless, and whirled in midair to instinctively protect her guildmaster.

  “This one is persistent, Razia,” Szadek sneered. “You should be proud. When you began shaping these offspring of yours, I was certain they would prove mere shadows of the original. This one is almost as tenacious as you.”

  “Legionary!” Razia called, and screamed as she pulled herself into open space beside Feather. “Go!” The guildmaster slammed into Feather’s shoulder just as Szadek leaped forward, sword extended, sailing down from the upper tier on swirling, tangible shadows. Feather lost control and tumbled back to the deck. The latch of an exit hatch set into the flooring appeared directly in her line of sight just as the angel’s head collided painfully with the mizzium.

  She rolled onto one shoulder and looked up just in time to gape in horror as Szadek impaled the guildmaster upon her own fiery sword.

  The blade of Boros burst into flame as it made contact with Razia’s flesh, driving through her heart and out the other side. A lance of blazing plasma emerged from the guildmaster’s back, sputtered, died out. The sword Feather had given her dropped from her hand.

  Feather flung open the hatch and dropped from the belly of the Parhelion into the phantasmal, blue skies of Agyrem.

  The next ten years played out as an eternity for the last angel. In fact, Feather told the tribunal, she had assumed it had taken her much longer to return—perhaps a century. Years of constant flight through the nightmarish landscape of Agyrem, hiding here, carrying out a few risky counterattacks there, always forced back on the run, again and again. Years that she was hunted through the twisting, ever-changing streets of the city of ghosts every waking minute. If she had actually required sleep, she never would have made it back.

  It was blind luck, she told the tribunal, that she was near the fracture point when the Schism opened a passage between Agyrem and Ravnica. When she’d spotted the open, blessedly solid and normal ground of the real world below, the angel had wept. Then she heard Kos calling her name and bolted to the unfamiliar Utvara reclamation zone. She should have known, Feather said, that the old man would find a way to help guide his old friend back to the world. An angel always heard those that called to her.

  But Kos, it turned out, had been calling to Feather as he lay dying. After a few days of mourning, Feather decided to return to Agyrem one more time before turning herself in to the Boros. If the Schism had let her though, it might let other things through, things like Szadek. She had to know for sure that the ghosts were going to stay in their own realm.

  That had been a mistake. The forces of Szadek’s ghost army, flanked by what looked like the possessed shapes of Feather’s fallen kin, hounded her as soon as she emerged in the ghostly realm. But she did learn that the specters feared the Schism itself for some reason. Feather could think of no other explanation for why the army had not followed her.

  And so, battered and injured, she had returned to the city and turned herself in to the authorities. She had reasoned it was the simplest way to get the warning to the leaders of Ravnica, and helped elaborate many of the specific charges herself in an effort to ensure that her hearing would be before Augustin IV himself, as Razia had wished.

  And that, Feather told the tribunal, was where the angels had gone and why she stood before them.

  Our world is one, ultimately, of diametrically opposed forces in balance with one another. And you may say, ‘Does this not mean perpetual conflict?’ And I would reply, ‘It means perpetual peace.’ To diminish one’s opposite diminishes one’s self.

  —Grand Arbiter Konstantin II, Commentaries

  On the Guildpact, 3209 Z.C.

  31 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.

  Agrus Kos returned to the world in a rush of memory, emotion, and the raw stuff of life. One moment he was a ghostly, mentally neutered spectral guard with a mind like Golgari cheese, full of holes though curiously complete on the subject of laws, and the next moment it was all there, more than 125 years of pain, loss, joy, wonder, heartbreak, and physical experience.

  Kos’s next thought was typical street-’jek suspicion. Kos had been indentured to the Azorius for fifty years. But he’d served, he realized with surprise now that his mind was complete again, only a few weeks. It felt like so much more.

  And here he stood, alive, his entire mind in one piece. Whatever had just happened, Kos suspected it was going to cost him. How, he wasn’t sure, but it would have to. This could not have happened for free.

  Kos could remember now that his body—his body had been burned on a pyre in the town square of Utvara. The body he was in now, a living, breathing body, felt … off, somehow. He took a breath and felt his lungs fill with air. He looked down and saw hands and feet. His hands were pale, and he was wearing loose-fitting blue robes. He was human.

  Otherwise, the body below him did not look remotely familiar and was in stark contrast to the flood of memories that fought for attention inside his head. He knew who he was, and this wasn’t it.

  Th
e hands were pale and pink. His body had a substantial paunch. Kos patted down his own arms, learning quickly that they were somewhat flabby, definitely not the original issue. Kos had died an old man, but he’d been in wiry good shape to the end. Busting heads was a good workout.

  “Krokt,” Kos said. Was he possessing someone? Could he do that? Kos had never had anything in the way of real magical talent, hadn’t wanted it and hadn’t trusted it. He’d seen and fought against the Orzhov’s taj, but they inhabited corpses, something like and unlike zombies in their way. Maybe it wasn’t something you figured out. Maybe it was something you had done to you—far more likely, with his luck.

  So if he wasn’t a zombie and he wasn’t himself—whose head was he in?

  It’s our head now, a voice not unlike the one that Kos had just spoken with murmured in the back of his mind. And you try staying in shape with my schedule, it added defensively. Before Kos could puzzle that one out, the anger set in as one particular memory—his death—came into sharp focus. Kos’s own demise had been a hazy factual recollection out at the Prahv gate, his scattered ghost mind unable to fully focus on the images and memories that now formed into sharp relief.

  “Krokt,” Kos repeated in that odd, nasal voice and this time added, “what a way to go.”

  Kos remembered the desperation that had spurred him into that contraption with the goblin. He recalled how the two had fought a dragon and come out on the short end of the fight. Along the way, something had exploded inside the observosphere, and he’d been impaled on a hunk of wreckage. Two or three times, he couldn’t remember. He’d risked his last teardrop to heal the grievous injury, and a goblin named … Crix. Yes, Crix, the Izzet messenger with the rocket-feet. She had gotten him out of the conveyance and carried him to the ground.

  Kos had gambled and lost. He’d been warned. So many times he’d been warned that one more teardrop might kill him. But what else could he have done?