Dissension

by Cory Herndon

  But the buckles were apparently made with broken pieces of human skull. The waistcoats were sewn together from pale, barely cured leather soaked with black, spattered stains. The hides had not come from any animal Myc had ever seen. Their coats and pantaloons were also stained with dried blood, and their buttons and cufflinks were clearly knucklebones. The hats remained atop their heads thanks to a single nail driven through the edge of the brim and some ways into the skull, from the look of it. They juggled flaming, irregularly shaped objects—what they were at this distance Myc couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know—and made attempts at barking banter that was mostly ignored by the rest of the crowd.

  The hideous clowns weren’t the only things that gave a carnival atmosphere to the tortuous affair. Several food sellers wandered among the pilgrims, shouting the names of their wares, and everywhere were fights, brawls, stabbings, happy murder, and gleeful bloodshed amid the musicians, dancers, priests, and thugs.

  The blood witch’s latest chant grew into a low, steady song that pulled his attention back to her. Izolda’s song threatened to lull Myc to sleep despite everything around him, despite the agonizing heat and perhaps aided by the loss of so much blood. He doubted he contained a lot more.

  His blood. It was still in the “mixing bowl,” but the blood witch had tucked the unholy dagger into her belt and held the bowl aloft as she hovered. She floated in a smooth orbit around the effigy tree, all the while gazing at him with her white orbs.

  He realized with a somewhat nauseated feeling that he understood many of the words of Izolda’s new dirge. They were not in some demonic tongue, as he’d first guessed, but heavily accented and stylized Ravi, quite archaic in its construction:

  “Enslaver, the world to take, the world to enslave,

  Defiler, devourer of lives, rise,

  Master of all demons, consume this discord,

  Feast upon the blood of innocents,

  Let your harbingers mark the time.”

  That was just one verse. It went on like that, every pass a new variation on the theme of Rakdos awakening, Rakdos defiling, Rakdos in general and all that the demon-god was and would be. It wasn’t pleasant.

  Izolda extended her empty hand, and her talons slipped from the tips of her fingers with a snap. She dipped her claw tips in the bowl, stirred it three times, then scattered drops of the mixed of blood and mystery liquid over the glowing lava below. The droplets sizzled and hissed as they struck the roiling surface.

  Myc knew exactly who the Defiler was, had been dreading him since he realized they were in Rix Maadi.

  Rakdos the demon-god was in many ways the least attentive of the guildmasters, beings who, if his father’s experience was any indication, spent almost as much time with politics as they did with leadership. But when he paid attention to the events outside his domain, Rakdos and his cult of thrill-killers tended to make up for lost time. The last of their “festivals” that had bled onto the streets of Ravnica, long before Myc was born, cost the city hundreds of wojeks and destroyed entire city blocks before the forces of order quelled the rebellion.

  Myc did not understand why the Guildpact would allow one of the guilds to live for violence and death, but when he’d heard the stories his mother reminded him that violence and death were as much a part of life as friendship, honor, and love. Rakdos miners provided the raw materials from which the world was built. Rakdos mercenaries served their purposes as well.

  Not that her mother was fond of the Rakdos. They were killers, but, as Fonn had told her son, there were plenty of people who thought of his father as little better than a “saprophytic zombie master” who “thrived on death” as one particular newssheet had called him even before Myc’s parents split up. There were even people who hated the noble Selesnya Conclave (and by no small coincidence, many of them were Rakdos cultists). At the time, the intuitive, young Myc had seen the logic and made sense of how the Guildpact brought balance to the world.

  Myc was a smart kid and had a smart kid’s pride in being right, especially since it happened so often. This time, however, being right was cold comfort.

  As Izolda’s shrieking hymn reached a fever pitch, the demon-god Rakdos emerged from the pit.

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  Pivlic plummeted. Pivlic dropped. Pivlic fell and kept on falling. Pivlic came very close to passing out. In a corner of his conscious mind, it occurred to him that he’d probably flown higher than he ever had before, which somehow didn’t make him feel better. Altitude had probably sapped his strength and deprived him of air at least as much as exhaustion.

  Then, the dropping sensation ended with a jolt, replaced by more of an upward, eastward feeling. Pivlic discovered with a mix of alarm and relief that his abrupt halt was not due to the usual reason a fall ended. This was different. For one thing, he was still alive. Better yet, he was moving through the air again.

  Rocs did not have the capacity for speech of the usual kind, and in the imp’s experience they did not think as imps, elves, or even humans did. They were birds, big birds. They thought birdy things. But rocs were very smart for birds, and the well-trained rocs of the skyjeks were perhaps the best trained of all. This one was certainly smart enough to catch Pivlic on her back, but that didn’t explain why the imp had landed on an empty saddle.

  The roc, for her part, was simply trying to get her rider back and had spotted Pivlic falling from the sky. The bird figured the falling imp was about Flang-sized. Smart for a bird, but still just a bird. Pivlic didn’t know this, nor would he have cared, but the roc was relieved in her avian way.

  Landing on the saddle was not the same as being in the saddle, and Pivlic, on his belly, exhausted, and surprised to be alive, realized he was already starting to slide off. He dug into the leather with both hands, his tiny claws catching just enough of a grip to keep him in place. With what remained of his strength, he pulled himself into the seat, careful not to let his own wings catch the wind and carry him free, and grabbed the flapping reins as he sat upright.

  The roc cried out, a sound that battered his sensitive, unprepared ears, and he almost lost his grip again. He could not quite reach the stirrups, so he just clamped on with his legs as best he could. Those muscles, at least, were still fresh.

  Pivlic was a flyer, but he usually flew under his own power. Still, he figured mounted flight, human-style, couldn’t be that complicated. Humiliating, certainly, but needs must when the demon drives, as the saying went.

  Two reins, one on the right of the bird’s head, the other on the left. Just like riding a dromad, which he’d seen close up. He’d been a passenger, but he’d seen it done. Simple.

  “Hello, my new friend,” Pivlic said in what was left of his comforting, welcoming innkeeper’s voice. “I will need your help for a while longer. I am going to try these reins now. Please do not throw me off.” He doubted the bird could understand his words, but the imp’s silky-smooth voice had soothed worse than a roc.

  And, he admitted privately, talking helped stave off panic.

  He gave a short, experimental tug on one of the leather straps, and the roc pulled its head to the right, making no effort to throw the imp. So far, so good. It wheeled in midair, turned from the outskirts and back toward the three gigantic nephilim currently tearing their way toward the city gates. The rocky one he’d dubbed Stomper was in the process of
toppling a water tower. As Pivlic watched in morbid fascination, the tower reached the tipping point. A torrent of water sloshed over the side before the nephilim knocked the last support away and the whole thing came crashing down onto the rooftops. There were fewer bodies here, though bodies there were amid the flash flood, and he chalked that up to the crowds of fleeing people streaming through the outer streets of the skirt districts.

  Slither, the snake-thing, was a bit further ahead of Pivlic, coiled around the base of another tower that was beginning to crumble and crack, plucking terrified occupants from the windows with its clawed hands and thrusting them into the grinding, metallic mouth below its baleful eye. The tentacled “Brain” was the closest to the city, roiling along on its mass of tentacles, now and then tearing off another bulb from its central head and flinging it into a nearby building to irreparable effect. The buildings’ occupants ran headlong into the remains of the mob fleeing in the other direction, and chaos reigned. Here and there he could see desperate wojeks attempting to coordinate the efforts, without much luck.

  The roc settled down as it acclimatized to Pivlic’s weight, and he grew more comfortable with the slow, lazy flapping of her broad golden wings. The roc was made for sustained flight, and Pivlic admired her effortless movement.

  The respite gave him time to think and time to scan the skyline of the central metropolis for the giant sentinel titans. The nine towering statues would surely make short work of the marauding monsters. Pivlic had hoped to warn them, but surely the ’jeks and the Boros were aware of the danger by now.

  The nine remaining titans—the tenth, Zobor, had fallen in the Decamillennial battle—stood where they had for thousands of years. They had not moved at all.

  The imp did spy the tiny shapes of his “fellow” skyjeks, however. Several wing formations were headed out from the center, tiny spots against the disc of the setting sun. He wondered what they could do about the nephilim but saw that the roc-riders were not heading this way—they were headed for the great golden shape of … the Parhelion? Yes, it was the Parhelion. It plummeted toward the white towers of Prahv. Pivlic saw with mounting horror that the riders were not going to make it to the descending fortress before it struck Prahv. Even if they had, what could they have done?

  With a resounding crash the imp heard over the roaring nephilim and the toppling architecture, the flying fortress made landfall. Or more precisely, domefall. The just-visible roof of the Azorius Senate crumpled and collapsed. Along the way, the Parhelion took out three of the six towers of justice. They fell over like massive, stone trees and clouds of glittering dust rose in their stead. An enormous roiling mass of smoke and rubble erupted in slow motion around the crash.

  Pivlic instinctively dug his heels into the roc’s side and aimed his mount for the crash site. He’d headed this way to warn Teysa of the nephilim and now had a rescue on his hands, from the look of it.

  There was still a chance his baroness had survived, and if she hadn’t he was going to need proof for the Obzedat. Already the cloud spread out from the ruined Azorius demesnes, swallowing up the tiny roc-riders flitting around it like flies but revealing the state of Prahv. The Parhelion had come to rest on its face, and what remained of the Senate and the towers appeared to support its weight, at least for now. Pivlic doubted it could stay in that precarious position for long, but its speed had not been enough, it seemed, to completely flatten the structure beneath. There could still be survivors staring up at the front end of the flying fortress. The baroness could well be among them.

  All the while, the sentinel titans remained motionless, their towering stone bodies frozen in time. All the while, the nephilim drew closer to the city. “Why aren’t they doing something?” Pivlic asked the roc.

  If the roc knew, she didn’t say.

  From her view post atop the wojek headquarters of Centerfort, Section Commander Migellic, commanding the League of Wojek in Nodov’s absence, wondered much the same thing.

  “Why are the titans motionless?” she bellowed at the trio of Boros mages who stood around the activation shrine that supposedly brought the sentinel titans to life.

  The leader of the Boros guildmages, a bald, tattooed man of advancing age named Morr, wore an apologetic look as he held his hands palms up with a shrug. “There is nothing we can do, Commander,” the mage said. “The great guardians do not respond. It has been many decades since they have been called into action.”

  “Zobor fought the Golgari horde twelve years ago,” Migellic snapped. “Don’t give me excuses.”

  “The tenth titan hardly had a chance to move,” Morr said calmly, refusing to be drawn into the flames of the commander’s rising temper. “The magic that created the titans is thousands of years old, and we—Well, much of that knowledge has been lost over the years. Sir, I must admit that we do not entirely understand how it works anymore. Not completely. It may be that the loss of Zobor caused the others to go into something like a coma. Perhaps it destroyed the magic entirely. It is more likely, in my opinion, that the cause is the Parhelion.”

  “The Parhelion that just crashed into Prahv on my watch, with the commander of the entire legion sitting in the Senate chamber,” Migellic almost screamed. “What does that have to do with it?”

  “The ancient records indicate that the angels themselves gave of their own power to make the titans the ultimate guardians of Ravnica,” the mage explained, doing his best to sound parochial and succeeding, in Migellic’s opinion, far too well. “It would appear the angels are no longer aboard the Parhelion, since we can assume they would not have just driven it into the dome of the Senate. Therefore, it is logical to assume that the power they gave the titans is also gone.”

  “So they’re—” Migellic had lived her entire life in Ravnica’s central city, like most wojeks. The titans were a constant reminder that theirs was a world of laws, and every child of Ravnica grew up with the unbreakable belief that should disaster ever strike, the titans were there to defend the people. That quite shaken belief was still so strong that it made it difficult for Migellic to finish her sentence. At last, she said, “So they’re just … statues?”

  “At the moment,” Morr replied, “I fear that is a completely accurate statement.”

  Migellic cursed and pounded the central table, jarring the scale model of the central city and toppling three of the miniature towers of Prahv.

  “All right,” she said deliberately, “then we don’t have the titans to fall back on. Time to call up all of our other reserves.” She beckoned a lieutenant and gave the order to mobilize the wojeks of Ravnica into an army of last resort. “Tell them to open the armory,” Migellic said. “Siege weapons and crowd control. Break them into teams. And hurry.”

  * * * * *

  As Fonn and Jarad approached the outside of the hivelike shape of Rix Maadi, the ledev saw why the Devkarin had gone to the trouble of assembling this small teratogen horde. They were the diversion that would let the two bat-riders get inside with the least amount of wasted time. Negotiation with the Rakdos always devolved into fighting anyway. Jarad had decided to skip right to it.

  The teratogens soon had the Rakdos guards tied up in small clusters of violence, and Fonn had to admit that the creatures—which she’d always considered the ugly stepchildren of her ex-husband’s none-too-pretty guild—acquitted themselves nicely against their equally savage and bloodthirsty opponents. The Rakdos had few among their number who could fly but made up for it with pure ferocity. Before she and Jarad had reached the open portcullis leading into the bowels of the hive, she saw a hippogriff brought low by a hurled boulder, and chattering goblins swarmed over the fallen creature brandishing jagged blades and blazing torches. In seconds it had disappeared, and so had its cries of terror and pain.

  Elsewhere, other teratogens were having better luck. A pair of giant ravens were fighting over pieces of an armored troll, having already pecked out the creature’s beady eyes and torn apart its throat. One of the manticores
had landed, but its thrashing tail kept a swarm of chattering Rakdos goblins from getting too close while it swiped at berserkers and ogres with its leonine claws. The lower half of an ogre hung from the manticore’s jaws and disappeared down its gullet in a single gulp.

  “Follow me,” she called to Jarad as they passed over the huge but misshapen outer gate. A few seconds later they found themselves swallowed by the thick, sulfurous atmosphere of the Rakdos domain. The hive appeared to be built in rings. This was just the outer one. They’d still have to get into the structure itself.

  “Do you really know where you’re going?” Jarad called.

  “Toward my son. Keep moving. Don’t stop to fight.”

  “Right behind you,” Jarad called. “It looks like we’re heading for their carnarium. It’s a kind of death temple in the middle of this whole thing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I am a guildmaster. I have been here before.” Fonn heard Jarad draw steel, and she automatically did the same. The Rakdos cultists who flashed past them below were as yet too surprised by their sudden appearance to strike back in any organized fashion, but it was only a matter of time.

  With one eye on the screaming cultists, one hand on the reins, and every remaining bit of her attention on the rising pitch of her son’s lonely note in the song, she guided them into a small vent tube that led into what, if Jarad was correct, was the middle of the hive. The bat landed at the edge of the passage instinctively. Its wings would never fit inside the tube. Fonn dismounted without waiting to see if Jarad was following and was gratified to hear his feet hit the ground. The tube had looked small from the back of the bat, but inside it was roomy enough to allow them both to stand erect, if only just.

  “Do we have a plan?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Fonn replied. “We follow this tube into the temple, kill all the Rakdos inside, and get Myc back.”

  “Good plan,” Jarad said. “I always said you would have made an excellent huntress.”