by Cory Herndon
He passed more Simic along the way, not just mute, hulking guards like the one whose body he wore but vedalken, humans, even a goblin and viashino here and there. All of them wore some kind of cytoplast enhancement. Kos had seen the like out at Nebun’s place in Utvara, freakish deviations from the simple artificial limbs like the one Fonn wore. A vedalken with a translucent crustacean claw half again as long as its other arm brushed him. It took all of his control not to jump in panic and keep on shuffling. Two goblins walked silently past, waving their arms frantically, their lips moving but no words passing between them. The virusoid shared in wordless thought that the bulbous cytoplastic helmets each wore made them short-range telepaths at the cost of their speech centers. A woman in silver robes who appeared relatively normal from the waist up, though her skin was unnaturally blue and pale, scuttled by. Her legs split in four places just below the hips, and she walked on eight insectoid limbs that punctured tiny holes in the leathery floor that seeped reddish sap. She was almost half again as tall as Kos, and a row of unblinking eyes lined either arm.
After the silver widow had passed, Kos caught himself looking at the wounds the crab-woman’s claws had left in the floor. The sap congealed over the tiny holes in seconds. The greenhouse was self-healing, to a certain extent. And for a giant mushroom its sap looked remarkably similar to blood. He didn’t dawdle any longer, but he could have sworn that the sap was already starting to flake as it passed out of sight.
Odd that more Simic didn’t go into construction. Indestructible homes could make a fortune. That reminded him.
Obez, he sent. You and Pivlic doing all right?
So far, we have been ignored. But there is much activity.
What kind of activity? Kos demanded.
Just concentrate on getting into that lab and going after the vampire.
How can you be sure he’s even there? Kos thought, fighting the urge to salute as a pair of virusoids passed wordlessly, one after the other, in a plodding march.
We can’t, Obez said. But even if he’s not there, Vig is your best witness.
The virusoid’s instincts told Kos he was nearing the entrance to the progenitor’s chambers—or at least the entrance to the entrance. The instincts were vague on that point. He saw why when he reached it.
The door was flanked by two silent, immobile virusoids. The door itself was another shade of green, and, as he approached, a small opening appeared in the center and widened as the membrane split open of its own volition. His borrowed feet continued on through, stepping high to clear the lip of the retracted door, and Kos found himself at the bottom of a spiral staircase of sorts. Three other membrane doors lined the spongy, glowing walls, which provided diffuse sunlight without glare. The steps of the staircase were hard, flat bracket fungi growing on a single—not tree trunk, exactly, but it was about as big as a good-sized Silhana oak and had a barky exterior. The stairs that coiled around the trunk went through a floor some fifty feet overhead, probably to another exit. He hoped.
Kos virusoid mounted the stairs to the laboratory, wondering with mild concern at the absence of anyone—or anything—else going the same way.
Pivlic fought the urge to elbow the fat lawmage in the ribs. He would have had to release the reins to do so, and that would be even more trouble than the human’s irritating way of pointing out and explaining everything that went past them in the sky or thundered through the city below. It wasn’t the information—Pivlic always had use for information—but rather the unsettling sensation, bizarre as it might sound, that someone in the greenhouse would overhear them speaking. Someone who wasn’t Kos.
Kos. Pivlic wished he’d had the presence of mind to place a bet on how long it took the old ’jek to find a way back to the world of the living.
So far, the skyjeks had not accosted them, despite the quite clear golden sigil on the roc’s breast that Pivlic had not bothered to remove. Of course, the skyjeks had their hands full. What their hands were full of was still in question. Pivlic suspected that it was not success.
The three nephilim had split up after passing through the gates, though all of them seemed intent on clearing through the clustered towers of Ravnica’s most densely populated metropolis—knocking the towers over as needed—and reaching the Center. Pivlic supposed the monsters might just be passing through, but there was something that told the imp otherwise. The Center was the Center for a reason. Events that had shaped the history of Ravnica, from the formation of the Guildpact ten millennia earlier to its near-end twelve years ago, were always, well, centered there. It could not just be that the nephilim saw something they really wanted on the other side. Pivlic was sure of it. He just wasn’t sure which of the great guildhalls might be their goal.
“There, you see?” Obez said, and again Pivlic had to flick his left wing to free it from the lawmage’s fist. “The creatures have yet to attack each other. They have a definite goal.”
“What I see—the waist, if you please, my friend, my wings are quite delicate appendages—What I see are the best parts of the central city getting knocked to pieces.”
“But it proves what I was saying,” Obez insisted. “This is not random. They’re going somewhere, communicating somehow, cooperating.”
“Should this make me happy?” Pivlic said, banking the roc to the left for another arc of the lazy circle they flew around the greenhouse.
“It means there’s more to this than monsters eating a dead dragon,” Obez said. “No matter what the thief would have had us believe.”
“Perhaps,” Pivlic said, “and perhaps they are simply hungry, and the Center is in their path.” But even as he said it, he didn’t believe it.
The imp struggled briefly with his balance when an updraft caught one wing of their feathered mount. The roc was steering … oddly. Its weight didn’t seem to shift quite right. Of course, the imp’s experience with roc-riding was limited enough that he couldn’t be sure of the hunch, but his experience with his own hunches was such that he felt uneasy.
A trio of roc-riding skyjeks streaked past them, tearing around the greenhouse like their tails were on fire. Pivlic’s borrowed bird called out as they went past, but otherwise they were ignored.
Pivlic followed the skyjeks as they set a vector that took them straight for Stomper’s head, the spherical, statuary head floating over the nephilim’s mountainous back. From this angle it appeared to float on a cushion of golden energy that seeped from the monster’s back, some kind of magic, to be sure, but it appeared to be natural to the nephilim. With a shout, the lead skyjek ordered her squad to take aim, and on the wing leader’s command, three bamshots—they sounded like popping corks at this distance—erupted from the ends of their raised bam-sticks.
The orange pellets bounced harmlessly off of the nephilim’s stony back but must have stung at least. Stomper roared a challenge at the skyjeks and reared up on its spiny stone legs, and then opened its segmented crab-mouth. Before the skyjeks could veer off to make another pass, the nephilim’s maw erupted with a blast of fire—not pure flame like Pivlic had seen so recently belched from a dragon, but more a reddish-orange fluid that ignited on contact with the air and enveloped the roc-riders in an inferno worthy of Niv-Mizzet himself.
Pivlic urged his roc to dive below the leading edge of Stomper’s blast. “Didn’t know he could do that,” Pivlic managed when he was sure they’d made it clear. “Remind me not to shoot at him.”
“Remarkable,” Obez said. Pivlic wasn’t sure he liked the awe in his voice.
“They’re not pets,” Pivlic said. “They are killing people, my friend. Without even taking out a contract, for that matter.”
“But still remarkable,” Obez repeated.
“Why aren’t the stone titans stopping this?” Pivlic asked, not really expecting an answer.
“If they haven’t acted yet, I’m beginning to think they won’t,” Obez said. “Look there.”
Slither, a half mile away, was doing his level best to disma
ntle Centerfort. The snake-thing’s claws lashed at the buttresses of the wojek headquarters, smashing new and old architecture alike in the recently rebuilt structure, which had suffered greatly during the Decamillennial. What had made Obez point was what had already toppled—the central tower, where the brass had their command center in times of crisis.
“How is destroying Szadek going to stop them?” Pivlic said. “How will it save those people?”
“I’m not sure it can,” Obez said sadly. “But Ravnica is more than just this city, and we will rebuild, with a strong Guildpact renewed. I have to believe that.”
“I don’t,” Pivlic said, “but I will, just because the alternative is too depress—”
A shadow fell across the imp and the lawmage, casting the roc into brief darkness beneath a gigantic round shape that blocked out the sun. Pivlic spurred the mount as hard as he could, and the roc bolted forward to avoid a random projectile that Brain hurled in their general direction. The roc didn’t quite clear the nephilim’s shot in time. The ball of nephilim flesh did not strike their mount, but Pivlic felt a jarring lurch as the bird tumbled in the cyclone of displaced air.
Despite his best efforts, Pivlic felt his legs lose their hold on the saddle. The roc struggled to right itself and he tumbled over the bird’s head, still clutching the reins. Obez, of course, was still clutching his wing and went along with him.
By the time the roc did right itself, the bird found itself riderless again but carrying much the same burden as before, imp and lawmage hanging precariously from the reins around its ruffled neck. The confused bird mistook the tugs as Pivlic struggled to maintain his grip for a command to turn, and by lucky coincidence—and as far as luck went Pivlic’s wasn’t doing so great—the roc wheeled back around toward the greenhouse. But Pivlic wasn’t sure how long his luck would last, hanging from a confused giant bird, a rampaging Stomper directly underneath, and a screaming lawmage holding on by the end of the imp’s painfully twisted wing.
A panicked shout caught in Pivlic’s throat when he heard a thumping sound coming from the pavilion, a sound even louder than the stomping nephilim beneath him. A radial crack appeared in the empty square, almost entirely devoid of fleeing citizens, most of whom had long since cleared away from the open space and taken shelter. There was another thump, a crash, and then a small eruption of stone and brick as a huge, horned fist the color of midnight drove through from below.
“What’s that?” Obez shouted, all clerical and clinical reserve gone.
“I think it’s a demon,” Pivlic said. “And please be careful of that wing. If my grip slips, it’s the only thing that’s going to keep us from becoming a pair of stains on the street.”
Pivlic stifled a yelp as the plump human shifted his weight and caught one hand on the imp’s belt, taking some weight off of his wing but making it distinctly difficult to breathe.
“Hurry up, Kos,” Pivlic gasped.
The roc cried out, wobbled a bit, but miraculously stayed more or less on course.
The top of the stairs did indeed open into a sort of vestibule. Here there were guards, two more pairs of virusoids flanking only two of the membrane-doors.
Which one do I take? Kos thought.
There was no reply.
Obez? Kos tried.
Virusoid, the virusoid replied.
Never mind, Kos thought.
Perfect, he thought. Up a fungus stairwell without a guide. Well, the virusoid’s instincts had worked before. He concentrated on instinct, on making the virusoid understand where he wanted to go.
Kos felt his borrowed feet march toward one of the two doors. He forced the virusoid to let him take over the locomotion along the way, and as the membrane door popped open with a release of humid, sickly sweet air, he stepped over the threshold and into Momir Vig’s laboratory under his own power.
Sorry, Obez’s voice finally came. Oddly, though it was only a sound in Kos’s borrowed consciousness, the lawmage sounded out of breath.
Too late, Kos thought. I’m here now.
Look around, Obez said. Tell me what you’re—Excuse me.
Obez? The lawmage was gone again, and Kos felt a distant touch of the lawmage’s panic. He could not tell what it was, however. The link didn’t seem to work the same way for Kos as it did for Obez. The lawmage could see through Kos’s eyes, but Kos could only get feelings and impressions in the other direction.
Still, he knew what he had to do. Find Szadek or, failing that, find where Szadek went by interrogating those that knew. Those who, assuming the verity circle worked and the thief’s word could be trusted, had seen the vampire, and conspired with him just yesterday. The Grand Arbiter, the man who was the ultimate authority on the law, believed it, and Kos, like it or not, had become Augustin’s creature, something he’d been trying not to dwell on but which was inescapable.
If he found Szadek, he was to do everything he could to destroy him, up to and including the loss of the life he was borrowing—in this case a dim virusoid—and, if necessary, anything or anyone that tried to stop him. The judge had been less helpful in how to actually tackle the vampire, but since he was susceptible to Kos and not some specific kind of weapon, it had been decided Kos should improvise.
If he did not find Szadek, Kos would really have to improvise.
Instincts—his own from decades of walking his stretch in the Tenth, not the borrowed instinct of the virusoid—made Kos suspect that the latter was most likely. Verity circle or no, the thief struck him as sketchy.
The laboratory reminded Kos of Nebun’s place, and he wondered if all Simic designed from the same basic floor plan. The floor Kos emerged onto was of the same translucent, leathery, veined stuff as the rest of the place, but its glow was dimmed in many more places by activity. Long tables covered in glass jars and burning beakers, each one attended by a young vedalken student and a half dozen (that Kos could immediately count) older-looking educators who strolled up and down the place, correcting here, praising there. Beyond the experimentation section of the floor, bigger experiments in bigger versions of the beakers and jars nearby were interrupted by the occasional cloud of greenish dust spores or a jet of sterilizing torch-flame. To Kos’s relief, there were also virusoids, most of them standing stock-still, others helping in whatever experiment needed a live subject. To his dismay, a few were in the process of regrowing appendages from charred stumps as a result.
Kos strode through the experiments with a slow but steady purpose, trusting the virusoid’s feet a little more than he would have liked, but it did keep anyone from accosting him for several minutes.
He heard a pop overhead and to his right, then saw one of the membrane-doors open to admit a swarm of large insects, or perhaps small birds. Without a sound, the door reformed into a solid, drumlike sheet. There was a way out, if he needed one.
Kos spotted Momir Vig as he passed what he guessed was about a quarter of the way around the central axis of the greenhouse. The Simic progenitor hung suspended in an operating harness that grew into the neuroboretum cluster, which overshadowed the entire lab like a bizarre bush made of brain tissue and nerve endings. Vig prodded and poked at a prone virusoid lying on a flat metal table set at a slight incline. One silver, bone-thin arm, more like an insect’s than an elf’s, held a small translucent cylinder topped with what looked like a small blade of pure cryomana. The mana scalpel was halfway through the middle of the virusoid’s arm, carving it like a roast. Momir Vig’s other hand was busy with a new cytoplast, which the Simic held casually but expectantly, like a cook preparing to toss a piece of meat on the grill as soon as the temperature was right.
The cytoplast looked disturbingly like a piece of the neuroboretum cluster. Or perhaps the neuroboretum itself was made of the stuff.
There was no sign of Szadek, or of the “zombie priestess” who Kos feared he might encounter and worse, might recognize. The operating area was lit with bright, normal glowspheres of the type that lined the walls of the wojek inf
irmary. Only the guildmaster, his patient, a vedalken researcher preoccupied with glass tubes and open flames, and three other virusoids standing in a ring around Vig’s operation occupied the space. These other three virusoids and the vedalken all wore cytoplastic limbs, headgear, and other augmentation artifacts. Kos had seen such artifacts before, enhancements like the cytoplasts but of metal and magic, worn by the goblin Crixizix. Izzet manufacture, or so he had thought.
As Vig completed his smooth cut through the virusoid’s arm, Kos felt a hand on his.
“Virusoid, stop, I need you,” the vedalken attached to the hand said, a blue female with silver eyes and the lilting accent of high education.
Kos allowed the Simic to lead him to the end of one of the long tables but couldn’t keep himself from stealing a glance over his shoulder. The vedalken placed a bowl of noxious, acrid fluid in his virusoid hands.
“Virusoid, you will hold this bowl over this open flame until it begins to boil. Then you will drink it,” the vedalken said.
“I’ll what?” Kos said. The voice, as before, sounded like him to his own borrowed ears, in part, but more of the sound was a rumbling, raspy groan that must have been the original owner’s. That didn’t change the fact that, unlike every other virusoid he had seen so far, he had just—
You just—
I know, Kos thought.
“Did that virusoid just speak?” Momir Vig said, looking up abruptly from his work.
Saint Kel shouldered through crowded streets that had gone insane. Rubble was everywhere, bodies and parts of bodies, screaming people of every species, and a few desperate wojeks who no longer knew who was their enemy and lashed out at anyone they could. At first the Living Saint had stopped to help the most desparate, but the sheer number of dead and the brutality and carelessness of the destruction eventually overwhelmed even his spirits. Now he simply wanted to be at Vitu Ghazi, to commune with the Conclave and find out what, if anything, he could do to stop this.
