ALSO BY DOUG BEYER

A Planeswalker’s Guide to Alara

Alara Unbroken

Path of the Planeswalker

Path of the Planeswalker, volume 2

Return to Ravnica: The Secretist, part 1

Gatecrash: The Secretist, part 2

DRAGON’S MAZE

The Secretist, Part Three

©2013 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

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MagicTheGathering.com

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

One Way

Disconnected

The Parun’s Proxy

To Choose A Champion

The Starting Line

Crashing the Gates

The Sting of Justice

Unsafe Passage

Tempest of Lies

For the Sake of the Guild

Maze’s End

From the Ashes

About the Author

Sample Chapterf-8"/>

ONE WAY

Jace’s back slammed against the wall of a sealed stone cell. He was trapped in an exitless Dimir prison, miles below the city with two vampires, the assassin Mirko Vosk and the recently-turned form of his compatriot Kavin. He was bait thrown into a shark tank. The two bloodsuckers approached him to drain him, first of the contents of his mind, and then of his veins.

Jace always had one escape open to him, as long as he had time to muster the will to travel. But it meant breaking his mental connection with Emmara. It meant abandoning her. And she was trapped as well.

“I have to leave you,” Jace projected into Emmara’s mind. “But I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

“Don’t you dare give me a moving final speech,” Emmara’s thoughts came back to him. “Whatever plight you’re in, fight it. I have no desire to be witness to your last words.”

The vampires advanced toward him, their faces painted the color of a garish bruise by his globe of blue light. Jace had a momentary thought that his attackers represented an escape of another kind. They would drain him, take away all the responsibility of handling this Ravnican disaster in progress. They would purge him of the knowledge of the maze again, the need to care, the need to persist or strive. He could slowly drown in oblivion, and let others solve the Implicit Maze, stop Lazav, handle Niv-Mizzet’s schemes … Maybe it didn’t all have to fall on him.

But if he did nothing, the consequences were plain. Jace saw it in flashes, as clearly as if it had already happened. Emmara would be imprisoned by the shapeshifter Lazav, and when she became too problematic, he would kill her. Niv-Mizzet would hold his public race through the maze, and teams from all ten guilds would cut as many throats as they needed to in order to win. Niv-Mizzet would have the advantage of the most information, but Dimir agents would steal what they needed to know, if they hadn’t already. Lazav would use the maze to claim power, and with no Guildpact to stop him, he would succeed.

He needed to concentrate. Emmara needed him. He found that was the simplest thought to focus on: Emmara needed him. Emmara was captured. Emmara would die.

“I am not planning on dying,” Jace thought to her. “Not yet. But I need you to do something. You have to run the maze for the Selesnya. You have to be selected. Do you understand?”

“What? Jace, that’s never going to happen. I’m a traitor to the Conclave.” was, approximately, onadcl

“You have to be chosen. It has to be you.”

“Calomir, Jace. Trostani is going to choose Calomir.”

“Under no circumstances should it be Calomir—or the one who’s taken Calomir’s form. No. Trostani’s going to choose you.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because you will be the only one who knows the route.”

The fangs were bright as the vampires made their move. Vosk leaped forward and wrapped his claws around Jace’s neck, prying him from the wall. Kavin dashed around behind Jace’s back and seized his wrists, twisting with unnatural strength and hyperextending ligaments in his shoulders.

Jace struggled to continue his thoughts. “I’m going to show you what you need to know. Use it. Take his place. You’re the one, Emmara. You have to be the one.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t.”

“Here it comes. Use it. Just keep moving.”

Jace flashed through the maze route in his mind, skipping from landmark to landmark, projecting each location into Emmara’s mind. An intersection on the Transguild Promenade. A long bridge near the Golgari gate. A path up the wide steps to the Azorius gate. A passage through a tunnel that bent and exited near the hellish Rakdos gate. Every twist and turn of the maze. As he rushed through the route, he sent those images to Emmara. He showed her almost the entire path through the Implicit Maze, crystallizing the images in her own memories.

“Jace, I can’t—”

“Now you know most of the route. All but the end. It has to be you, do you understand? Don’t let it be Calomir.”

Fangs sank into Jace’s neck. The air caught in his throat in mid-breath, his muscles locked from panic. He had no trick up his sleeve, no illusionary shell game to play to avoid Vosk’s bite. Blood ebbed out of him, and he could feel the stabbing of Vosk’s teeth in his mind as well, tearing gashes in his memories and letting them begin to drain out. He could feel Vosk sensing inside him, perhaps even tasting his knowledge of the maze or his connection to Emmara.

Jace forced himself to breathe. He let his body go limp, and looked deep inside himself. He visualized a spiraling vortex inside his chest that drew his body inward. He could feel Emmara trying frantically to reach him, but her voice in his mind became faint, fading like sounds from a distant tunnel. He felt suction overwhelming him, pulling his muscles and skin inward to the center of his chest. He gave a final push with his will, and he collapsed in on himself, releasing himself from the plane of Ravnica.

As he planeswalked, everything faded: the fangs in his skin, the stone cell under his feet, the vast city around him, the sound of Emmara’s thoughts. The darkness of the cell was replaced by the nonsensical, roaring dark of the Blind Eternities. There was no sensation of motion, and yet he could feel Ravnica receding behind him, diminishing in importance like a toy he had outgrown. He pulled his consciousness in the direction of another plane and willed himself there. The mad energies of the Blind Eternities tore at him, tried to unmake him as he traveled a symbol of power, from B, but he kept his mind focused, his consciousness whole, and he sizzled through its timeless friction.

From Mirko Vosk’s perspective, Jace Beleren had done the impossible. When the blue-cloaked mage vanished, Vosk assumed it was one of his tricks or illusions, and the new agent Kavin suggested as much. Together they searched the stone cell for all signs and scents of Beleren. But the mage hadn’t concealed himself. He hadn’t used mind magic to alter Vosk’s senses, so that his presence couldn’t be detected. The mage was actually gone. He had escaped the inescapable prison.

Vosk knew that this would somehow be blamed on him.

So hours later, when Lazav slipped down through the ceiling like a shadow, emerging into the cell, Vosk was already madly thinking of reasons he shouldn’t be killed.

“Where is he?” demanded Lazav.

“He’s gone,” was all Vosk could think to say.

Lazav’s face boiled under his hood. He snapped his glance to every corner of the tiny chamber, as if Vosk had hidden him somehow. “What did you do?”

“Nothing, Master. I bit him, and I was taking his memories, as you instructed. He had what you wanted this time. But he …” Vosk glanced at Kavin. “He performed some sort of magic, and he was gone.”

“It’s true, Master,” said Kavin, but Lazav’s snarl cut his corroboration short.

“Enough. What did you learn before the mind mage managed to humiliate you?”

“He knew the route, Master.” Vosk tilted his head, like a snake that had taken interest in a potential kill. “He knew what you wanted to know. I couldn’t drain it from him, but I saw it. I saw enough.”

Vosk felt Lazav’s presence pressing against him, but he saw a spark of interest in his eyes.

“You saw enough,” said the guildmaster to himself. “You have the route.” Lazav let his hood drop forward as he considered this, covering his eyes in shadow.

Kavin looked enthralled to be in the presence of Lazav. The vedalken made a move to step forward and speak up, but Vosk put a hand out to stop him. The idiot didn’t know enough not to provoke his own guildmaster.

Lazav looked up. “Vosk, you will run the maze.”

Vosk ran his tongue along his fangs. He nodded with exaggerated gratitude.

“You’ll use the route you learned from Beleren, and you will participate along with the other guilds. You will not kill any of the others—in fact, you will help them.”

“Master?”

“The maze-runners must live. Any of the others you may kill at will.”

Vosk nodded again.

Lazav hissed a breath out his nostrils and frowned at the floor. “It is not perfect,” he said, “but it will do. Every being not loyal to me shall die, and this city shall be shaken to its knees.”

Kavin pressed past Vosk and bowed. “And what shall I do, Master?”

Lazav cast a withering look at Vosk. “Kill your pet,” said Lazav. “He did not get us in print and digital formats from your favorite booksellerftJV what we needed.”

Kavin’s eyes went wide.

“He may yet be useful to you, Master,” said Vosk hastily. “I drained much from him as I fed. It’s true that he knew little of the maze, thanks to Beleren. But he has contacts that might be valuable.”

“So?”

“He was Azorius once. He has the ear of the sphinx.”

Lazav regarded Kavin with new eyes. “Well, then,” he said. “Is that so?”

Kavin bowed, blinking, not knowing where to look.

“She trusts you?” Lazav asked.

“At one time, I advised her on Azorius scholarship, Master,” said Kavin.

“Then it’s time you fulfilled your purpose.” Lazav reached out his hand, and the hand became a liquid tentacle, extending toward Kavin. The tentacle spread into webbing, stretching and warping. The webbing wrapped itself around Kavin’s face and chest, slithering around his body, cloaking him in a cocoon made of Lazav’s own fluid body. Kavin made a muffled, urgent sound, and Vosk saw the man’s hands clench into fists. Then Lazav smiled, and it was a horrible smile. Lazav flexed his body, twitching his warped muscles, and the netting contracted. He crushed Kavin’s upper body with a muffled scream and a splatter of vampiric blood.

Lazav retracted his limb, and Kavinrset=utf-8"/>

DISCONNECTED

A sliver of failing sun shone through the crack in the boards nailed over one of Emmara’s windows. She did not eat. She didn’t want to walk around the house or put the teapot on or pump water for the desiccated plants. Guards from her own Selesnya guild did circuits around her house, keeping her locked in from the outside. Nothing she touched felt like her own anymore. This house had become her prison.

“Jace,” she thought. “Jace, can you hear me?”

She had tried to call out to Jace in her mind many times. She had never considered before whether thoughts could have volume, but she had learned that she was able to scream thoughts. She also knew, now, that she could whisper them. Her thoughts seemed barely audible to her now, just thin mental words whispered into the aether, their volume shrinking as her confidence grew that no one was hearing them.

She had also tried to call her nature elementals, but she had even less hope that that would work. Trostani had taken that spell from her. It was as if the power to summon the great beings of marble and vine had only been on loan to her and Trostani had revoked it, and with it all hope of magical escape. Even the few nature spells she knew would be useless to for trying to break out, especially with the building under a symbol of power,

A guard looked in at her through the tiny round window in her front door. This time the guard was a white-haired, stern-looking man in chain mail. The man grunted, and his face disappeared as he resumed his rounds circling the house.

They did this every hour on the hour, sticking their face through the gap in her door, checking the locks, and making sure she hadn’t moved. She hadn’t. She sat on the floor and watched the sliver of sun elongate as it crawled across the floorboards. She wished she were attached to that spot, as if her body had sprouted roots that had dug their way into the floor, branching out as they dug down, grasping at the soil. She longed to feel stability. When she walked, her knees betrayed her, as if the floor were unsteady.

Her guild had imprisoned her. Jace’s voice had left her. And then there was Calomir. All the bricks of her foundation had vanished.

Eventually the streak of light climbed onto the wall, and soon thereafter it thinned to nothing. Darkness fell, and sleep did not come. She hadn’t heard Jace’s voice in her mind. As far as she knew the world had disappeared outside her house, and she was the only person left in the world, floating in the void. She wished the thoughts would stop whirling. She tried to quiet her mind, but thoughts intruded anyway—thoughts of Calomir.

Jace had said that Calomir, the real Calomir, was dead, and that the man whom she had been seeing was an impostor. A shapeshifter had killed Calomir and taken his face. She tried not to believe that, to hate Jace for his lie. But she couldn’t, not quite, and a desolate anger surged in her. She grabbed a tin cup and threw it at a window. The glass shattered, and the cup bounced uselessly off of the nailed-in wooden boards. She stood and walked to the shattered window. The points of glass reflected her face in chaotic patterns. She took a triangle of glass, conscious of its sharpness. It comforted her somehow, knowing she had something that could slice flesh. She returned to her place in the middle of the floor, sat, and waited.

Sometime in the night, a guard visited again. This time it was a young human man with a thin red beard. He looked in, checked the door locks, glanced at Emmara, and cast down his eyes. They all averted their eyes like this, as if to prevent the traitor’s visage from contaminating their eyeballs, or to prevent her visage from contaminating their concept of her as a traitor. Even so, Emmara hid the shard of glass behind her.

“You there,” Emmara said. Her voice was dry. She hadn’t spoken in the better part of a day. “Please send for Captain Calomir. I have information for him.”

The guard sniffed, and didn’t raise his eyes to her. “He’s busy.”

“Please, it’s important. He’s to represent Selesnya in the dragon’s maze, and I have information he needs.”

“You’ll see Captain Calomir when Captain Calomir sees you, not before, traitor.”

“Without this information, our guild will fail.”

The Selesnya guard sneered. “You’re trying to trap me.”

“Bring a stunning spell, then, and use it on me if I attempt something. Or do you want me to tell him you were the one who prevented him from knowing what he needed to know in order to prevail in the maze?”

The guard wandered away from the door, mumbling.

That would have to do, she thought.">“Yes,” said Jace., , and

By the time Calomir came to the door, the sun was peeking through the cracks in the window boards again. She stood and held her hands behind her back, concealing the dagger of glass.

“You sent for me?” he asked.

“Come in,” she said.

The statuesque elf, or the being who had taken Calomir’s face, entered and closed the door behind him. He wore his Selesnya soldier’s uniform and sword. “Is everything all right?”

The man was a perfect facsimile of Calomir, to the point that Emmara was questioning herself even now. She couldn’t dismiss the urge to simply embrace him. But even if it were her Calomir, he had branded her a traitor to their guild, turned her home into a jail cell, and guided her guild toward violence and belligerence against the other guilds. Either way, he wasn’t the Calomir she remembered.

“You intend to represent our guild in the maze,” she said. “Perhaps I have information you need.”

“You’ve spoken to Beleren,” Calomir said. He glanced around the house. “He was here?”

“I’ll tell you what you want to know. But first there’s something I want to know from you.” Emmara’s hands trembled behind her back. She hoped she looked calm and cooperative. She cast her eyes down, then up into his. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Do you remember the day we met? In the Ovitzia District?”

“The day we … met?” His eyes darted for a moment, but he never lost his composure. “Of course.”

“You do?”

“You thought I’d forget a moment like that? Just because we’ve quarreled doesn’t mean I’m not the same man.”

Emmara looked straight into his eyes. He held her stare. “You said something to me that day,” she said. “Do you remember? You told me a joke. It was about one of the vendors at the market, or something. I thought it was so clever, so funny coming from a young, uniformed soldier of the Selesnya. Remember that?”

“Of course I remember.”

“Tell it to me again.”

“What, the joke? No, Emmara, not now.”

“Just say what you said.”

“A joke told on command has no humor to it.”

“But it was just so funny, the way you said it. It endeared me to you that day. I could use some of that, after how you’ve left me in here.”

“The dragon’s race is the important thing now.”

A cold shadow passed over Emmara’s heart. There was no such joke on the day they met—Calomir had never been much for verbal humor. And they had met here in the Tenth, not in the Ovitzia District. “You don’t remember that day, do you?”

“Enough of this. If this was all you had to tell me, I have to go. I need to prepare my team and be ready at the start of the maze, first thing tomorrow.”

Emmara remembered what Jace had said—that under no circumstances could Calomir be chosen as the Selesnya maze-runner. “Trostani chose you?”

He tipped his head Styles ===================== */ litra and gave a faint smile. “I recommended myself, and she assented. And once I win the race for our guild, then we can see to your case. I can ask for leniency from the guildmaster. But you’ll have to remain cooperative.”

Emmara bit her lip and fingered the shard of glass. “I’ll be good.”

“I know you can be.”

“Calomir.”

“Yes?”

“Come here.” Emmara held one arm out to him, the other demurely behind her.

Calomir paused. But he went to her, and they wrapped their arms around each other.

Vines snaked out of the floorboards, slowly wrapping themselves around his feet and legs. Emmara clutched him and whispered in his ear. “You. Are not. Calomir.”

Calomir tried to pull away, but Emmara held him fast. She sunk the shard of glass into the center of his back. Calomir pushed her away. He craned his neck, trying to see and reach the shard, but it was just out of reach. He turned back to her.

“You little fool,” he said.

“How did you do it?” she hissed. “How did he die?”

“Shall I tell you you’re delusional now? That that mind mage has fed you lies and sickened your mind?” He tried to step toward her, but his feet wouldn’t move. He looked down and saw the roots and vines twisting around his ankles.

“Was it poison?” Emmara spat. “Did you slit his throat while he slept? Did you wring his neck with your own vile hands?”

Just then a Selesnya guard, the young man with the thin red beard again, looked in through the door. His face opened with surprise to see Captain Calomir under attack.

Emmara needed to keep the shapeshifter talking, and keep his attention on her. “You tell me,” she said. “You tell me how you murdered my Calomir. Tell me where you left his body, you thing.”

The shapeshifter smirked. His legs became like liquid for a moment, easily shedding Emmara’s vine spell, and he stepped toward her. Behind him, the guard’s eyes went wide.

“You’re not necessary,” the doppelganger said. “I was doing you a favor by allowing you to rot in here. You know I can take your form just as easily as I took his. Now I see that I should do you the same way I did him. It was with his own sword, by the way. This sword.” He unsheathed Calomir’s sword.

“You look like him. But you can never be him, Dimir deceiver.” Emmara did not look at the guard at the door for fear of alerting the shapeshifter to his presence, but she pronounced those last two words for his benefit.

The shapeshifter shifted his spine, and tendrils spread out from his back as his flesh rearranged itself. The shard of glass dropped out of his back and shattered on the floor. The shapeshifter stalked toward her, raising Calomir’s sword. She had no power to summon her elementals anymore. She had very little magic that could constrain a being with such a fluid form.

“It’ll look bad if you kill me,” she said.

“I’ll tell them the traitor tried to esc—” the shapeshifter began, but then he toppled forward and collapsed on the floor. Not dead, but not ">“Yes,” said Jace., , and moving.

The red-bearded guard stood there, holding an artifact in the shape of a carved branch, an item designed to hold a spell—a stunning spell. The man looked terrified.

“You’ve done well, fellow soldier of Selesnya,” said Emmara.

The guard blinked at the prone shapeshifter. “That’s not Captain Calomir.”

“No. It’s a shapeshifter. A face-taker. And that spell won’t keep him down long. Give me your sword.”

“I—I don’t know … I can’t …”

“Quickly! He’ll kill us both. He might even steal your face, and kill anyone who learns his secret.”

“I can’t kill a superior officer.”

“He’s not—” Emmara began. She stopped herself, and sighed. “It’s all right. Can you let me out of here? Trostani needs to know.”

The guard unlocked the door and let her out. Emmara slammed the door closed behind her. “I doubt it will do much to lock him in there, but it might slow him down.”

But when she looked back through the window in the door, the shapeshifter was melting into the floorboards, his liquefied body finding fine cracks in the wood and descending out of view. Emmara didn’t even have time to shout—he was gone, and she couldn’t detect which way he had slithered.

The ruddy-bearded Selesnya guard stood agape, taking in the barrage of new truths about Calomir and therefore about her guilt. “I … I’m sorry I doubted you, ma’am,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said.

The guard bowed his head, this time not from disgust, but with respect. “I wish there was some way I could repay this slight against you, Dignitary.”

Emmara brushed house dust from her robes. “I could use a witness when I speak to the guildmaster.”

When Jace opened his eyes, he lay on a pebbled shore by a river. Gray-barked trees flanked the river, admitting a strip of bright gray sky above them. Jace put a hand on his neck, feeling the ragged holes left there. He kept his hand squeezed against the wound, but blood trickled through the gaps between his fingers and down his arm. He tore a strip of cloth from his cloak, wadded it, and pressed it against the wound, and used another strip to tie the bandage fast to his neck.

Jace stood and walked along the riverbank. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had been to Zendikar. It was as good a destination as any, as different from Ravnica as any world he knew, barely touched by the hand of civilization. It was too savage a plane for conspiracies and intrigue, too changeable for permanent nations. There were no guilds, no streets, no scheming guildmasters. Still, the shifting, smooth pebbles under his feet reminded him of a cobblestone street.

It was conspicuously quiet. When he walked along the riverbank, the stones under his feet scraped against each other in an imitation of company, and the river murmured continuously. But these simple nature sounds were not Ravnica’s urban bustle. They were not Emmara’s voice in his head. If there was a way for him to communicate with her from one plane to another, he Styles ===================== */ litra didn’t know it. The link was broken. He was cut off.

The gray trees gave way to a clearing, and the land fell away into a broad valley. The landscape looked like it had been torn by claws. Gorges traced across the valley, like roads of ruin. The soil had turned ashen, brittle, lifeless. Even the stone rubble looked pitted and porous, as if it had been drained.

He didn’t have to return, of course. If he were caged on Ravnica, or if some mystical gravity drew him irresistibly back, then he would be released from the decision. But nothing was forcing him. He adjusted the makeshift bandage on his neck, which was beginning to soak through with a wet red stain. From this serene world, Ravnica seemed unreal, like a collection of vivid paintings he had seen once in a mad dream. He squatted down on the pebbles of the riverbank and used a stick to turn over the bones of whatever he had eaten the last time he was here. He wondered where his own body would eventually rest, and how alien it would seem, his haphazard bones a curiosity on a world without humanoids or perhaps even without bones. It was entirely within his power to do absolutely nothing, and to speak to no one for the rest of his life, and to contribute his alien bones here, to this world, to this stony riverbank.

He thought of Emmara and was immediately tempted to forget her face. He hadn’t intended to abandon her, but perhaps that was how planeswalkers survived. Perhaps that was how they prevented bonds with any one place or with any one person. They kept themselves cleanly separate, isolated, and their nature secret. Knowledge of other worlds would be too difficult for the planebound to understand. The people of Ravnica wouldn’t want to know that their own plane was only one speck in an infinite Multiverse. In a way, Jace was doing Emmara a favor. That was the best way for him to care for her, to keep her at arm’s length. If he allowed himself to want anything more, it would compromise his very identity as a traveler of planes. It would compromise who he was.

Jace watched the opposite shore across the river and tried to listen for evidence of some form of animate life. It was quiet to his ears, but with his mental senses he felt a wisp of thought, like faraway voices almost hidden in the wind.

He told himself to close his mind off, to keep himself isolated from the minds he sensed. But something made him reach out to them, to find their source. He could see no one in the ruined valley. It looked as lifeless as burned sand. He walked along the river and listened with his mind.

As he walked, the thoughts grew stronger. He could hear shreds of intelligent thought, strands of conversation. He spread out his consciousness, and found their source—the thoughts were coming from somewhere deep underground. He focused in on one of the minds, fearing that someone might be trapped below the ruined land. But there was fatigue in the person’s mind, and the dull ache of constant worry, but no panic. She was a woman of Zendikar’s kor race, sharpening a steel sword while talking with her family. They all lived in a dark, grimy cavern under the surface of the land. Her family had been forced to live there as disaster had come to their world. The woman had a determination to her mind, a self-enforced sense of hope that lay behind her constant reassurances to her children. She worried that she could not instill the same hope in her children, that despair would take them.

Jace concentrated, and spread his consciousness out to the rest of the subterranean family. The minds of the son and the two daughters wavered at the edge of despondency, having spent too many weeks without a view of the sun.

Jace hesitated. He was trying to stay disconnected, not to bind himself up with even more people struggling though their lives. But he felt for this woman and her family, and how the children might be able to make it through their plight if they could understand their mother’s force of resolve. He thought back to when he fought Ruric Thar, how he channeled all the minds of the Gruul warriors at once, how he let the communion of their thoughts flow through him. He reached out to all of the family’s minds at one time.

With concentration, he could do it—but it didn’t accomplish anything. He could feel all of their thoughts together, but they couldn’t hear each other. The communication was one way, from them to Jace only. Perhaps if he could get himself out of the way, let their minds flow into one another’s without him in the way. Perhaps if he could become a kind of bridge, and put them in contact with each other directly—

Jace grabbed his head and cried out. It felt as if his mind was coming apart, disintegrating from the inside out, coming unraveled. Concentrating on multiple minds at once was arduous enough, but letting the family’s thoughts channel through him and into each other’s minds shredded his faculties and caused him outright pain. It was worse even than the feeling of planeswalking; it was as if that form of mind magic was shredding his very soul. He snapped back his senses, disconnecting himself from the family and the family from each other, and after a few long heartbeats, the pain subsided.

He stood there with his hands on his knees, alone at the cusp of the devastated valley, heaving breaths. His entire body throbbed, as if every part of him had tried to flee in a different direction all at once. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he felt he had touched something new in himself, and it almost killed him. He had attempted mind magic that was clearly beyond him, or perhaps it was inherently deadly, unable to be mastered. He never wanted to attempt that again.

Still, for a moment he had been that bridge. He had used his own mind as a conduit to let those people reach out to each other, and for a moment, the mother’s defiance flowed into her children in a way she had never been able to express, and their aching admiration of her flowed back. Jace had removed himself from the exchange almost entirely, but it somehow still made him feel intimately close to them.

Jace forced himself to turn his back on the valley. He stalked back upriver, thinking of the black void he had seen inside the mind ofe-page-templat

Azor must have had his reasons. The Guildpact was a force for stability on Ravnica, the mortar that kept its bricks fused together, and he must have feared its loss terribly. He was the founder of the guild of prudence and law—the thought of the senseless chaos of ten short-sighted, clashing guilds would have weighed on him more than any other.

“Thank you,” Jace thought to the being in the rock.

He let his communion with the bailiff fade, but he could still sense the being’s presence there in the stone, waiting. The bailiff, or the magic behind it, felt immensely powerful, like a massive quantity of mana crushed into a singularity and contained there. Maybe it was just his unanswered questions about the verdict, but he felt a sense of dread, as if he were standing on a bomb.

Whatever the nature of this power stored at the Forum of Azor, it was profound, primordial, and plane-altering. If the power of the bailiff was any indication, the verdict was something to be avoided at all costs. Jace needed to find Emmara, but even before that, he needed to know more about what he was getting her into. He thought he knew someone he could ask.

As Jace left the floating stone in the center of the Forum of Azor, a figure who f.org/2007/ops

TO CHOOSE A CHAMPION

Trostani’s grove felt like it was made of eyes. The soldiers of Selesnya posted in the grove stared at Emmara as she approached, and the three interwoven dryads regarded her with quizzical looks. The red-bearded guard walked at her side, looking abashed before the guildmaster.

“What is the meaning of this?” Trostani asked. “Where is Captain Calomir?”

“He fled,” said Emmara. “I’m here to persuade you to choose me as the Selesnya maze-runner in his stead.”

“Of course not. Captain Calomir and I have discussed this at length. We had hope for you once, Emmara, but Calomir has proved himself the true manifestation of the will of us all, the avatar of the Conclave.”

“The one you believe to be Calomir is a Dimir spy.” What use was it to create aonadcl

Trostani’s three faces all recoiled. “Now you sound like your friend Beleren. What gives you the right to make accusations like this? Guards, take this traitor back into custody.”

The young guard at Emmara’s side cut in. “It’s true, Guildmaster Trostani,” he said. “That—thing—wasn’t the captain. I saw it change. It was a doppelganger. A shapeshifter.”

“That’s impossible. Calomir is one of the Conclave’s oldest allies.”

Emmara’s face was steel. “Calomir is dead.”

“Even if that were true, you think that we’re going to send you to represent the Conclave? You, who refused to support us in the battle with the Rakdos? You, who’ve consorted with that mind mage?”

“Yes.”

“Why should we?”

“Because only I know the route.”

Trostani’s faces scowled. The three dryads turned and conferred among each other. Emmara couldn’t hear what they whispered to each other, but she could hear the distress in their voices. There was a new, upsetting sound to their voices, something Emmara couldn’t identify at first. She realized the sound was dissent. Two of the dryads seemed to be disagreeing with the third, breaking their usual harmony. Emmara had never heard anything but unanimity from them—they were a living symbol of many made one. She saw the three faces look back at her frequently, one of them with pained empathy, the other two with withering derision.

She felt the eyes of the Conclave on her again. The glares of the soldiers around the grove bored into her. They, too, were put on edge by Trostani’s dispute, and they knew she was the one who had brought it to the Conclave. They had not seen the shapeshifter melt away, taking Calomir’s visage with him. To them, she was still an enemy of the guild.

The dryads of Trostani finally came to some kind of resolution. They turned and took a long look at Emmara, and their faces were not at peace.

Ral Zarek stung with the humiliation of announcing Niv-Mizzet’s race through the maze, an invitation he sorely lamented having to extend. The other guilds didn’t deserve the barest whiff of information about his project. But at least now he could finally, officially run the maze for his guild, and complete it once and for all. He had a plan to run the routes in unpredictable ways, traversing the ten gates with a series of explosive maneuvers shrouded by a covering fire of storm magic and cyclops brutes. There would be teams of rival runners trying to beat him, and to thwart them he planned for a series of lightning barriers. The lightning barriers would not only protect him, but also hinder others as they tried to progress through the gates. He walked swiftly down into the main boiler lab, where the other experimenter-mages had said he could find his guildmaster.

He elbowed his way past a team of Izzet researchers and found the dragon. All eyes were turned to the device in the center of the room. The drive wheel of a great steam-driven dynamo rotated into a pit set in the floor, and suspended at its center was a weird: a living elemental composed of the fusion of clashing elements. The weird was shaped like a tall and athletic human, and made of electrified ice, a combination Ral had never seen before. Steam rose from its glistening- to deliver the verdict.. smilecold body as the spokes of the dynamo wheel rotated around it, and blue lightning sizzled from its arms and legs. Its head rested on its chest, its eyes blank, and it was naked of any Izzet gauntlets or armor.

Ral rushed over to the dragon’s side. “Guildmaster!” said Ral. “I wanted to go over with you my plans for running the maze. It involves a series of—”

“Ah, good,” puffed Niv-Mizzet, barely glancing at Ral. “Yes. Kindly tell Melek and his handlers all about it.”

“Melek? Who is Melek?”

“Oh, had you not met him?” asked Niv-Mizzet. The dragon waved with his claw at the elemental being suspended in the dynamo. “May I present Melek, the official Izzet maze-runner. My team of elementalists, chemisters, mindcrafters, and energy-binding specialists have manufactured him specifically to run the maze. They’ve taken into account everything you’ve learned, and they’ve built that understanding directly into Melek here.”

Ral laughed nervously. “What? I don’t understand.”

“He’s made via an experimental synthesis of mana-dynamical principles.”

“No, no, I see that,” said Ral, the bright flashes of Melek’s icy body reflecting in his eyes. “I just thought I would be the choice.”

“Oh, no, of course not,” said the dragon. “Do you have a transdynamic mana core? Is your skin made from conductive, self-repairing frost?”

“But you don’t even know all the routes I took. You weren’t there to see all the meticulous research I did.”

“Your associate told me all I needed to know.”

Skreeg the goblin emerged from behind one of the other Izzet mages. He waved sheepishly.

Wine-colored electricity crackled up Ral’s spine. “Great Firemind … please. I am the choice. I am the designated runner for our great Izzet League. I am your resource.” He shook his hands emphatically, not seeing Niv-Mizzet raise his chest and rear back his head. “Any other choice would be misguided, wrongheaded, and entirely idiotic!”

Niv-Mizzet breathed fire in a sweeping arc over the ceiling. A cascade of heat washed down over Ral and the Izzet researchers, and the girders and steam pipes in the ceiling warped, melted, and caught fire.

Ral said nothing. His hands grabbed each other.

“Melek will be representing us in the race for the maze,” said Niv-Mizzet, revealing his teeth on every syllable. “That is final. You may go and clear the promenade, Guildmage Zarek, and ready the starting place for the competitors.

Thank you.”

Lavinia climbed up a stairwell, the highest stairwell in New Prahv, up into sunlight. She emerged on the rooftop of the Lyev Tower, overlooking the whole of the Tenth, and a guard nodded to her. Before her perched the sphinx Isperia, guildmaster of the Azorius, her wings folded and her calm gaze already locked on Lavinia. And beside the sphinx stood the blue-skinned vedalken man, Kavin.

Kavin and Isperia were conferring in hushed tones. Lavinia had no idea that Isperia even knew Kavin, let alone held special roofmost valuable material , , and top meetings with him.

“She’s the only one,” Kavin was saying. “She’s the only choice.”

“It’s out of the question,” said Isperia. “Lavinia’s rank does not qualify her.”

“Then that will have to be rectified,” said Kavin.

Lavinia quickly stepped forward, stamping her feet slightly to announce herself. “Greetings, Your Honor.” She gave the traditional nod-bow.

“Lavinia,” said Kavin. “I’m glad to see you.”

“And I you.”

The city looked toylike beyond Kavin and the sphinx. Cold gusts whipped around them, but when Isperia spoke to her, her voice carried over the wind.

“We were taken by surprise, Officer Lavinia,” said the sphinx. “I don’t like surprises.”

Lavinia realized she meant the dragon’s announcement. “We knew the Izzet were up to something. And the criminal Beleren thought it was significant.” She looked at Kavin, whose expression was just as unreadable as Isperia’s. She couldn’t understand why he would be here, conferring with her guildmaster, apparently about her.

The sphinx’s eyes were like spheres of ice, frozen and unmoving. “We Azorius rely on prudence and preparation. We’re at our best when we have months to prepare, to weigh our options, to adjudicate. And now there’s no time to make a careful assessment. No time to deliberate on a choice of maze-runner.”

“That’s probably deliberate on Izzet’s part,” said Lavinia. “Hurry the schedule for the other guilds, while they’ve probably been training their maze-runner for weeks. But Your Honor, couldn’t this just be a trick on the part of the Izzet? Or another of Beleren’s ruses?”

The sphinx ignored this. “I need someone to run the dragon’s maze, and I need it now,” Isperia said. “It should be someone with knowledge of the district, and knowledge of the research Beleren conducted into the Implicit Maze. Civilian Kavin here has given me counsel on how we might proceed.”

The sphinx regarded Kavin, and he nodded. “If you want the Azorius to have a place alongside the other guilds, it’s the only way,” he said.

“Then I have made my selection.” Isperia stared down at her.

Lavinia hesitated. “You have, Your Honor?”

Isperia’s unnerving stare didn’t budge. She only waited for Lavinia to respond.

Lavinia’s hand flew to her chest. “Me?”

“I would have chosen someone else,” said the sphinx, “but knowledge of the maze is scarce. Kavin convinced me it should be you.”

Lavinia spoke carefully. “My present position as supervisor of the towers does not permit me to venture out into the

Tenth.”

“Your title is now maze-runner of the Azorius.”

“That position doesn’t exist.”

“I have made it so. But you should understand, Lavinia.

This is as important a task as I have ever bestowed on you to deliver the verdict.. smile. You will be representing our entire guild, and playing a part in history.”

Lavinia stood straight, and her face was a stark mask. “I accept.”

“So be it,” said Isperia. “Now, Kavin. You said you had another issue to bring to our attention?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Kavin. “Do either of you know of something called the verdict? The Supreme Verdict of Azor?”

Jace crouched near the ledge of the adjacent Azorius tower, his cloak billowing in the wind. A transparency spell shimmered around him, keeping him concealed from any nearby minds. With his mental senses, he eavesdropped with interest on the conversation that was still going on between Lavinia, the sphinx Isperia, and someone they referred to as Kavin.

He did look like Kavin. But Jace knew it couldn’t be the man he knew; he had left Kavin locked beneath miles of stone, a blood-starved vampire. Besides that, Jace couldn’t see into the mind of this vedalken man with whom they spoke. It was a negative hallmark, a sign of the shapeshifter Lazav that Jace could sense by the absence of perceptible thought.

He listened in on Lavinia’s mind instead. “Never heard of it,” she was saying.

Jace had come to pry secrets from Lavinia about the verdict, but after tracking her down, he found that Lazav was asking questions about the verdict as well. It was a coincidence that Jace didn’t like.

“Where did you hear of this?” asked Isperia.

“In my research with Beleren, we discovered it,” said Lazav, in Kavin’s voice. “I think it may be related to the maze. I need to know how it might be triggered.”

Lazav was lying, at least in part. Jace had never encountered this aspect of the maze until he found the bailiff. Lazav’s interest in the verdict gave Jace a cold, tight feeling in his stomach.

“The verdict is a powerful and ancient Azorius spell of devastating justice,” said Isperia. “It’s used only in times of extreme need. It’s said that the verdict was designed to punish all the guilty across an entire district at a time, if such a time ever came to pass.”

“And what if everyone were deemed guilty?” Kavin asked. “It would destroy the entire district?”

“Destroy it utterly, with a wave of devastating power,” said the sphinx. “That’s the nature of the verdict.”

“That’s terrifying,” said Lavinia. Her words echoed Jace’s thoughts exactly. “But what would cause an entire district to be judged guilty?”

“Of course,” said Isperia. “ll me everythi

THE STARTING LINE

It was the day the dragon had appointed for the maze to begin. Under the curving archways of the Transguild Promenade, Jace surveyed the teams from the sidelines, hiding his location, trying to find one particular woman’s face. He recognized many of the faces, but didn’t see Emmara’s.

There was Exava, effulgent in a new war ensemble featuring shoulder torches and a full spine of shining metal spikes, surrounded by a small horde of burly Rakdos warriors.

There was Ruric Thar, the presumptive Gruul maze-runner, accompanied by the same war party. Ruric and Thar looked bored and impatient, and members of his war party snarled and chest-thumped at anyone who made eye contact with them.

“Move,” growled a guttural voice, and Jace jumped and turned around. A troll lumbered past him, his skin covered in scars and mushroom-like growths. It was Varolz, the Golgari troll he had encountered when tracking down Emmara in the undercity. He was flanked by a trio of dreadlocked elf shamans, all of them wearing a splotchy Golgari guild symbol over their faces in white paint. They moved past him toward the Promenade, scratching their skin and squinting suspiciously at the sun, looking thoroughly uncomfortable to be above ground.

Hovering five feet in the air, concealed in a pocket of shadow under one of the curving columns of the Promenade, was a figure that Jace recognized as Mirko Vosk. He looked to be alone, but Jace didn’t trust that the vampire didn’t have other Dimir agents hidden everywhere. Jace had last left Vosk deep underground, and wondered how he came to be the Dimir maze-runner.

A council of well-armed Azorius lawmages did their best to look composed and nonchalant, but by the way they shifted their feet and constantly sized up the other guild teams, Jace could tell they were out of their element. Jace recognized Lavinia among them, who stood on two feet, immovable as a pillar, one hand on her sword hilt. She barely moved, but Jace could see her eyes scanning the buildings beyond the assembled crowd, possibly even looking for him.

Representing the Orzhov was a tall, well-dressed noblewoman Jace didn’t recognize. The identities of the Orzhov knights around her were concealed by full helmets; instead of faces they bore only the Orzhov’s black sunburst symbol. Small, ugly, gray-skinned servant creatures attended to their black capes. Jace noticed that Orzhov priests were filtering through the crowd, whispering to the other competitors, probably asking, or offering bribes, for information. Jace knew the Izzet had researched the maze heavily, and the Dimir and the Gruul at least had an inkling of what was going on. He wondered how the other guilds would fare, how much they knew of the route.

A brown-bearded, broad-chested man clad in massive-shouldered plate armor led a battalion of soldiers, the symbol of the Boros Legion emblazoned on white cloth draped over their armor. Their soldiers were a variety of races, including humans, a minotaur with a permanent scowl on her face, an impatient-looking gom { margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:0em; font-size:.9em; line-height:1.3em; text-align: left; } n">“If, in the course of the Assessment, one or more of the guilds’ chosen do not appear for the final sentencing, then the Guildpact cannot be actualized.”blin, and even some kind of humanoid fire elemental, whose Boros armor floated in protective positions over its animate flame.

The Simic representative was a stern-looking mage whose parentage appeared to be partly human and partly aquatic, possibly merfolk; he rode astride a creature that seemed the offspring of a giant, blue-carapaced crab and an irate squid. The Simic squad was rounded out by a host of mages clad in scale armor, and improbable hybrid fusions of scaled, finned, and shelled creatures. Jace had not had occasion to encounter the Simic Combine directly, but knew that their vision of progress was in expanding the accepted boundaries of what constituted living things, and their strange menagerie certainly attested to that.

An Izzet mage, the same man who presented the dragon’s announcement at the Rough Crowd battle, stood atop a ten-sided wooden stage in the center of the Promenade, surrounded by a group of other mages. Next to him was an icy, loosely humanoid elemental that looked like a cross between multiple forms of energy. No doubt it was some creation of the Izzet, but whether it was an actual entrant or a companion to the other Izzet guild members, Jace could not discern.

The Izzet mage’s bronze-colored gauntlet crackled with jagged arcs of lightning as he raised it, calling for silence.

“Attention maze-runners and delegations of the guilds,” he said. “I am Ral Zarek, official representative for the Izzet League.” Some of the crowd grunted and groaned. Zarek’s upper lip flared in a sneer of contempt. “You are all here because the Great Firemind Niv-Mizzet has invited you to take part in his grand Izzet experiment, the race of the Implicit Maze.”

The crowd grumbled and catcalled. “It’s not your maze, madman!” yelled a Boros soldier.

“Just start the killing already,” a Rakdos warrior hooted.

Jace scanned the crowd. No Selesnya delegation had arrived. No Emmara.

“You should feel very fortunate that you are being included in this experiment,” continued Zarek. “We have determined that participation of all the guilds is required. In a few moments, the official maze-runners will take their place in the square, and the race will begin. The maze requires that your official runner be present at each maze location. Once your runner has entered, no other being will be considered able to trace the route for your guild.”

“What do we win?” called one of the Boros legionnaires.

“The prize has not been announced,” said Zarek.

“Because you don’t know!” the man jeered.

A crack of thunder rattled the naked sky, and many in the crowd jumped. “You only reveal your own ignorance, soldier,” Zarek said. “Although this may appear to be a game, this maze is very serious, indeed. The route has been a secret since the time of the paruns. Its discovery was only made possible by the death of the Guildpact that once barred the guilds from war. And its completion will prove which guilds shall kneel, and which guild shall rule.”

Even the more orderly guilds shouted their objections to that. The Boros had their weapons in hand, battle faces on. The troll Varolz snarled and beat his chest with his huge club. The Azorius lawmages surrounding Lavinia chanted some kind of protection spell, scribing runes on the air in a circle around their delegation.

“Now approach, runners!” Zarek ca reached out to erJVlled over the crowd. “Tell me your name and guild, and have your champion counted.”

One by one, the chosen runners from all the assembled guilds approached Zarek at the stage. Jace plied the crowd with his mind, trying to identify Emmara’s thoughts, but found nothing.

“Commander Tajic of the Boros Legion.”

“Lavinia of the Tenth District, official delegate for the Azorius Senate.”

“Varolz. Golgari.”

“Ruric Thar. The Gruul will devour this city!” Roars of enthusiasm.

“Vorel of the Hull Clade. Simic Combine.”

“Teysa Karlov, envoy for the ruling council of the Orzhov Syndicate.”

“Eksssss-ava!” cried Exava. “Of the illustrious cult of our demonic lord, Rakdooos!” Her Rakdos warriors yelled and cheered, stabbing the air with a variety of blades, flails, and spiked clubs.

Mirko Vosk floated over to the stage and whispered something.

“I’m sorry?” said Zarek.

“Mirko Vosk,” said Vosk, barely audible.

“What guild?” Zarek said.

“House Dimir.”

Zarek nodded. “Is there a Selesnya delegate?” He looked around. “Selesnya?”

“Start without the tree-lovers,” snorted Tajic, the Boros runner, to a chorus of agreement.

“As much as I would love to,” said Zarek, “we can’t begin without them.”

“I’m here,” came a voice, and the crowd parted to reveal Emmara.

Jace let go of a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding.

All eyes turned to look at her. She looked strange somehow, though nothing was different about her appearance. Jace realized that she had no delegation: no elvish wolf-riders at her sides, no Conclave priests or woodshapers, no Calomir on his white rhino. She was alone, an aberration for the guild founded on the value of community. Hairs stood up on Jace’s neck, but he didn’t know why.

She walked to the stage by herself.

“Emmara Tandris, for the Selesnya Conclave.”

“Very well,” said Zarek, his lips cocked sideways in a half grin as he recorded her name.

From his hiding place among the crowd, Jace reached out to Emmara and touched minds with her. He encountered Emmara’s familiar flow of surface thoughts and emotions, and felt a flood of relief. He realized that for a moment, he wasn’t entirely sure the shapeshifter Lazav hadn’t taken her place.

“Good to see you,” Jace thought into Emmara’s mind.

To her credit, her face did not let on that she had heard him. She stared straight up at Zarek, thinking back, “Jace! Where are you?”

“I’m here, at the promenade, with you. Don’t look for me. But I’m with you.”

“I made it here, thanks to you. And I know the route. Jace—you were right about Calomir reached out to erJV.”

“Oh. You faced him. I’m sorry.”

“That thing that killed Calomir is still at large. But I made it here.”

“Looks like the Conclave didn’t offer you much support.”

“Even knowing the truth about Calomir, it took a lot to convince them to send me. I think I’ve caused a crisis for Trostani, and for the guild. I think they believe I’ll be less trouble running around the city than stuck there in the Conclave.”

“Then she doesn’t know you very well.”

Jace could see her smile a tiny smile.

Next to Ral Zarek, the elemental creature stepped forward, clashing energies swirling within its body. “And I am Melek,” it said, bowing slightly, its voice buzzing and artificial. “I shall be the maze-runner chosen to represent the—” It stopped, interrupted by Zarek, who raised his gauntlet to ask for silence.

“And I am Ral Zarek,” said Zarek, smirking and imitating the elemental’s voice. With sudden violence, Zarek rammed his gauntlet through the back of the elemental creature, causing a jolt of electricity to crackle. The gauntlet absorbed the electric essence from the Izzet elemental, causing it to hunch and shudder. Sparks flowed out of the elemental runner, depleting it of one of its two elements, leaving behind only a skeleton of ice. Zarek gritted his teeth as the Izzet elemental’s power flowed into him, sending jolts of electricity throughout his body.

After a moment, the former Izzet maze-runner fell onto the stage, a heap of lifeless, steaming ice. “I am Ral Zarek, and I will represent the Izzet,” he announced.

Jace scanned the crowd. All the guilds’ delegations were agitated; they knew nothing would be certain in this race. “Get ready,” he thought to Emmara.

“We now have all ten represented,” said Zarek. “All the eyes of Ravnica are on us, the chosen champions of the guilds. And all of history hence will look back to this day. And now, please listen carefully for the rules.”

The rowdier guilds growled in complaint at the mention of rules. Zarek raised his gauntlet high above his head.

Zarek blasted an omnidirectional pulse of lightning out from his gauntlet. A wave of electricity cascaded from his hand, striking the competitors nearest the stage, knocking them flat and leaving them stunned. The stage broke into pieces, erupting with a flurry of small, foxlike lightning elementals. The elementals leaped on anyone and everyone, biting flesh with teeth made of raw static charge.

“There are no rules,” said Zarek.

Chaos. The crowd of guild teams, caught flatfooted, broke into a screaming mob, running in all directions. Competitors dispersed the spark elementals with sword or spell, but the fighting cost them precious moments.

Emmara had been close to Zarek’s lightning spell, and was just looking down at her hands, shuddering. Jace dashed out of hiding, grabbed her shoulders, and led her out of the center of the chaos, throwing dismissal spells to evaporate lightning elementals in their path. Emmara moved stiffly, and wisps of smoke wafted from her collar. The lightning had left a black, charred spot on the front of her robe.0">

“Let’s go, my maze-runner,” he said as soothingly as he could. “Move those legs. One foot after the other.”

Jace glanced around. Zarek and his entourage had already disappeared. This was the beginning of the race, he thought. This was the beginning of Azor’s test.

Mirko Vosk caught his eye, and disappeared into a bank of shadows.

The teams dispersed. The Gruul war party headed in the direction of Gnat Alley, a twisting route through ramshackle dive taverns and thieves’ dens. The Simic mages directed their hybridized beasts into an undercity entrance and disappeared. Several of the guilds headed back in the direction Emmara had come. Jace guessed they were all operating on as much of the route as they knew, and that some guilds might even be navigating blind, choosing gates at random.

Emmara blinked, recovering from Ral Zarek’s electro-shock spell, and Jace let her stand under her own power. She seemed to notice he was supporting her, and she nodded in thanks. She put her arms around his neck.

“So it’s begun,” she said.

Jace tried to look as reassuring and as confident as he could. “It has. And you’re going to win it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” she said. “After you sent me the route, I planned it all out. I had big plans. I was going to come backed by a full force of elementals—towering protectors to help us smash our way through the city.”

Jace raised his eyebrows. “That’s a good plan. I like that plan.”

“But I can’t. Trostani took that power from me.”

“She what? How?”

“She revoked my possession of it. That spell was hers. It belonged to the Conclave. It was just on loan to me.”

Jace kept his hand at her back, preventing her from falling. “No matter. We’ll manage.”

“How, Jace? They’re out for blood. Look at them—they all have teams. They have armies.”

“We’re smarter. More knowledgeable. And a lot better looking.”

“Don’t joke. You heard the Izzet runner—there are no rules. Do you know what the best strategy is in a competition without rules? To kill all the other competitors. They’re going to eat me alive.”

“Not going to happen. We can do this. I sent you the route. You know the first part.”

Emmara took a breath and centered herself with a little shrug. “Back to the Selesnya gate.”

“Yes. That’ll be an easy one.”

Emmara shot him a look. í Lavinia cho

CRASHING THE GATES

“I suppose it keeps us low-profile,” came Emmara’s thoughts in Jace’s mind.

“Exactly,” Jace thought to her. “Comfort is secondary.”

The Golgari longlegs jerked in its gait, its too-numerous knees clicking and popping as it strode. Jace and Emmara clung to the saddle straps on its underbelly. Jace had a curious view of the street, hanging upside-down. Emmara had her eyes closed.

“Secondary?” Emmara thought. “Pretty sure comfort is coming in dead last at this particular moment.”

“How’s your grip? You holding on all right?”

“Stop talking in my skull. I’m concentrating on ways to kill you later.”

“Big step coming up,” thought Jace.

Jace and Emmara’s grip was tested as the longlegs clambered over a snarl of halted traffic. The creature was perfectly adapted to navigating Ravnica’s streets, able to keep three limbs on the ground as two or three more selected new footing a thirty-foot stride away. But it was not designed for traveling luxury. As the creature’s body lurched, Jace and Emmara lurched with it, and the momentum tested their grip. Jace lost his grasp with his legs and swung free from his arms. Emmara let go with one of her hands and grabbed his cloak, in case he fell, but she lost stability in the process, and she let out an involuntary grunt as his weight yanked on her.

Jace clung with his hands, his feet dangling two stories over the street traffic, watching the back of Varolz as he ran ahead, hoping he would not turn around to see them.

“Can you grab my leg?” Jace thought.

“How did I let you talk me into this?”

As Jace hung with his leg hooked into the stilt-walker’s straps, they approached their next destination.

The Selesnya guildgate was built into a massive wall of white marble hung with curtains of soft-leafed ivy. The archway of the gate rose high enough for a nature elemental to pass through it, and so the Golgari longlegs would have no trouble fitting through. But as soon as they crossed into Selesnya territory, archers appeared along the top of the gate. Arrows whistled.

The Golgari creature screeched, bristling with feather-fletched arrow shafts, and lurched the skin of my hands like ">“If, in the course of the Assessment, one or more of the guilds’ chosen do not appear for the final sentencing, then the Guildpact cannot be actualized.” sideways, its knees crumpling. It ricocheted against the side of the arch and fell from its feet, sending Jace, Emmara, and the Golgari elves tumbling. Jace crashed to the ground, but scrambled to his feet. He could see the archers—but something was strange about them. They weren’t in Selesnya uniform. They were of the Simic guild—this was a Simic ambush.

Jace looked up to see Emmara rolling to a halt, facing up at the Simic maze-runner, Vorel.

“Elf,” said Vorel, looking down at Emmara. “An antique specimen. Unmodified. Unevolved. Soon to be obsolete.”

Vorel’s familiar, the enormous crab-beast, pinned her to the ground with a heavy pincer, and Jace heard the hiss of her breath escaping her chest.

“Leave her,” Jace warned, conjuring a spell.

Vorel looked at him. “Human. Unmodified. More untapped potential.”

Jace looked around for some kind of Selesnya force to help. There was no sign of the Selesnya here. It was as Emmara had described—they had abandoned her. They weren’t even participating enough to guard their own gate.

The Simic runner Vorel crouched down to Emmara, tilting his head as if studying an odd insect. “Your life does not fit the Simic vision of the future.” He pressed on the crab’s pincer, pushing it into Emmara’s sternum.

Suddenly, a ring of swords surrounded Vorel. Selesnya soldiers had appeared, encircling the Simic delegation. Even the crab creature had a team of stern-looking Selesnya guards around it.

“Release her,” said one of the soldiers.

Vorel looked down the line of one of the blades, down to the prone form of Emmara. His head shook in a moment of reevaluation. “Let us go,” he said, and the crab-beast disengaged.

Emmara took a breath.

The Selesnya soldiers didn’t touch Vorel or his entourage. They backed away and let the Simic delegation through. Vorel climbed onto the crab-thing’s back and they rode off through Selesnya territory toward the next gate.

When they had gone, Jace exhaled. Emmara stood on her feet and looked around. “Thank you,” she said to the soldiers around her. “That meant a lot to me.”

“Emmara, I’m sorry,” said Jace.

“For what?”

Jace dropped his spell, and the Selesnya soldiers dissolved, unraveling into threads of azure light, and disappeared.

Emmara sighed in disappointment. “Illusions. You conjured an illusionary army.”

“It was all I could think of to drive off the Simic,” said

Jace.

“For a moment there I thought you had changed the minds of everyone in the Selesnya Conclave,” said Emmara.

“Considered it,” said Jace, half under his breath.

Emmara gathered herself and brushed foliage off her robe. She gave Jace a look. “What’s it like to be you,fin?”

Jace let his hood fall across his face. “No one can ever know.” He could feel that she wanted to reach out to him, to connect with him, but he turned back toward the maze path. If she knew what he was capable of is a finite resourceaB, if she knew his true nature, she would never trust him again.

“What does that mean? Do you hide something from me?” Emmara’s voice was playful, but her questions were serious. “What are the secrets of Jace Beleren?”

“We should go. The Golgari await.”

Jace had been here before. It was Varolz’s lair, or his hunting grounds. The gate was a stone archway deep underground, covered in iridescent moss and crawling with beetles. The way the path was laid out, they had to cross a long, decaying stone bridge to reach the Golgari gate.

Jace looked down around the sides of the bridge. The fall was a hundred feet or more onto a solid rock floor that glistened with a tangle of slow-trickling, slimy streams.

Directly ahead was the Simic team, and beyond them were soldiers—it was the legionnaire Tajic and the rest of the Boros delegation. Beyond them, filling up the entire width of the bridge, was the hulking form of the troll Varolz. The troll brandished a sword, which looked longer than Jace’s femur, as if it were a knife. The skulls of humanoids hung from his belt.

The Boros priests chanted, the lyrics of their chant beseeching intervention from the heavens. Jace wondered how that was going to work, given that the heavens were blocked off by dozens of feet of sediment and crushed cobblestone—years of Ravnican urban strata.

But the ceiling burst open, raining bricks, and a shaft of sunlight, bright as fire, shone down on Varolz. He roared, consumed by the light, trying to claw the beam itself. His body caught on fire, sending flames a dozen feet in the air, throwing monstrous shadows onto the chamber walls.

Tajic gestured for his troops to follow, and they darted past Varolz’s crouching form. They ran, and disappeared through the gate and into a side tunnel.

The light faded, leaving Varolz burning and crackling. The Simic delegation advanced.

“Quick!” shouted the Simic runner Vorel. “Through the gate!”

But before they could dash past, the troll recovered and lurched to his feet. Jace could see the flames dying down, engulfed by new, knobby warts and fast-growing fungal growths. Tissue piled on tissue, adding to Varolz’s bulk. He stood before the Simic and bellowed hot breath at them, his skin still smoking, scars rapidly replacing burn wounds.

“We should try to get around them,” said Emmara.

Varolz swung his club, and with a breathy crunch, one of the Simic soldiers tumbled over the side of the bridge. Jace peered over the ledge just in time to see the soldier’s body impact with the ground, bounce once, and come to rest in a pile of limbs. A massive, glossy-black, beetle-like monstrosity reared up out of the debris and skittered over to the corpse, lifted it into its jaws, and devoured it on the spot.

“I could summon something with wings,” said Jace, “but it’d be a risky flight. Besides, the flow of mana crosses directly over the bridge, and we can’t stray too far from the path. I think it’s through or nothing.”

Vorel battled the troll. As Vorel began a spell, the troll fist-bashed him in the gut, sending him crashing against the side of the bridge. Vorel lost his balance, and tipped over the side. He grabbed on with one hand, dangling from the edge. is a finite resourceaB

Jace leaped forward and grabbed the man’s sleeve, and got a better grip on his forearm. Vorel looked up at him, wordless in fear, his legs dangling.

The Simic maze-runner had nothing to cling to, and couldn’t muster a spell. Jace’s grip was the only thing holding him there. It was Jace’s choice—he could try to pull the man up, or he could simply release, and there could be one less competitor between Emmara and winning the maze. Given that they were currently dead last, the correct strategy seemed clear, on top of the fact that this was the man who was about to end Emmara’s chances only an hour before.

Jace didn’t even have to read deeply to sense the man’s mental state. He was already trying to glance down to the cavern floor, to see how his end would come. Vorel was mostly ashamed that this would be the way his guild fell out of the competition, falling to his death on the second gate.

With a heave, Jace pulled him up, dragging him up over the low stone railing. The man’s center of gravity tipped over the ledge and he dropped onto the bridge.

“Thank you,” he said. “I underestimated that troll.” The gills on his neck hissed as he breathed.

“I made the same mistake once,” said Jace.

“Shall we work together to get past him now?” Emmara asked. “Or do you not work with obsolete specimens?”

Varolz was beginning to advance across the bridge, toward them. The remaining Simic soldiers retreated, looking back to the mages for guidance.

“What magic do you possess?” asked Jace.

“I am a biomancer,” said Vorel. “I perfect living things.”

“Can you use that to stop him?” asked Jace.

“I am not accustomed to using magic to harm living things.&#

UNSAFE PASSAGE

The decision was guilty, and the sentence was freedom. Guards escorted Jace to the Azorius guildgate and dispelled his shackles. He needed to catch up to Emmara, and fast.

Jace followed the route through a stretch of Azorius territory, cutting through an alleyway when the route demanded it. He had to climb an old metal ladder up the side of an abandoned building, trying to follow the path as best he could. The route was established thousands of years before; the architecture of the city must have changed around it since then. He climbed through a hole that was once a window frame. It looked like beings much larger than him had already passed through here.

He reached out to feel the reassuring touch of Emmara’s mind again, but she was nowhere to be found. Without Emmara nearby, it would take him hours to reach out to her mind again. He could only move to the next landmark of the maze, and hope she was making progress through the gates.

The next gate was Dimir.

Jace passed out of Azorius territory. With his magical senses he could pem; margin-bottom: -0.4em; margin-left: 0.0em; margin-right: 0.05em; } } onadclerceive the flow of mana that marked the maze’s path, channeling like a midair stream down the center of the Azorius zone. In the Azorius area, the stream of mana followed the shape of the streets closely, and Jace was able to move quickly to follow its path. Up ahead the path led out of Azorius territory through an elaborate checkpoint. Some two dozen people were backed up at the checkpoint as the Azorius guards tried to verify permits. Jace cloaked himself in a blending spell, silently thanking the Azorius for employing guardians who had minds he could easily affect, and slipped through the checkpoint.

The stretch in between was rougher going. The other guild teams had already come this way, and the street quality showed it. The path took a strange diagonal up through empty air, connecting with a raised walkway supported by sturdy stone columns.

The passageway seemed to stretch on to the horizon, darkening as it went.

The path ended in a drab, unmarked brick wall. Jace touched it. Solid, rather like a wall.

Footprints in the dust indicated that the other maze-runners had probably been here recently. But there were no signs of destruction of the wall, or of a way that a secret door could move. Jace patted the wall with his hand again. He thought back to the way Lazav and his Dimir agents used a spell to push him through solid stone and drop him in that subterranean cell. He could use something like that now.

But somehow Jace doubted that the other teams of mages had spontaneously managed to come up with a Dimir spell on the spot. There had to be another answer.

The Dimir guild thrived on deception and manipulation. They relied on illusion magic and mind-altering magic just as Jace did. Perhaps this wall wasn’t as solid as it seemed. Perhaps it took a measure of disbelief to see through the illusion.

He steeled himself, then walked purposefully right at the wall in the spirit of discovery. His nose bent painfully as he flattened himself against the wall’s solidity.

He heard the sound of someone snickering at him. He turned around. An old viashino stood nearby.

“What’s the matter, door doesn’t have enough handles for you?” asked the viashino.

He looked to be the same wry lizardfolk that he had seen when he first headed down into the undercity to pursue Emmara.

“I really thought that would be it,” Jace said.

Jace checked the flow of mana again. It went directly through here.

“The trick with Dimir entrances,” said the viashino, “is that you have to feel what the Dimir feel.”

“What do they feel?”

“What do you think they feel?”

Jace thought for a moment. “Anger.”

The viashino gave a snort through his nostrils. “Rarely.”

“Arrogance.”

“That’s closer. But the arrogant don’t believe they’re arrogant. Think about how they would characterize it.”

“Superiority.”

“Now you’re on to something.”

“I have to feel superior to this wall?”

The viashino shrugged. “Or you could remain strictly inferior to it.”

Jace turned back to the wall. From the bent shape of his nose, he knew he didn’t feel any superiority over this nemesis of brick.

He walked toward it again, belittling the magic of this wall with all his thoughts, scoffing internally at whatever mage bothered to try to keep him out, conjuring up a derisive one-syllable laugh toward the very idea of attempting to negate his will to pass.

He passed.

On the other side of the wall, Jace was somehow much deeper under the ground than his senses told him he should be. The dank echoes of the undercity were becoming familiar music to him, but these tunnels carried unpleasant, whispering voices, half-heard and incomprehensible in meaning, like the stuttered ravings of faraway madmen. These passages were maintained by House Dimir, meant to hide the missions of Dimir agents; Jace traveled where assassins and thieves made their routes under the district. Patterns on Jace’s cloak flared to life. His boots splashed down a flight of stairs.

Jace took turn after twisting turn. The tunnel constricted to a crawlspace for a time, and widened again into a rubble-strewn chamber, then became unfinished cavern drowned with a bone-chilling river, then rejoined a masonry-lined tunnel again. Jace heard nonsensical voices that often sounded as close as his ear, and tried not to think about whether it was the acoustics of the undercity or the nearness of haunting denizens.

When he emerged, he let the subtle gloom of the undercity cling to him. He had several more gates to go to catch up, and he would need all the stealth he could muster.

The plaza around the Orzhov gate looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Stained glass crunched under his feet. Bodies of diminutive, gray-skinned creatures, which Jace knew to be thrulls, littered the streets. Larger-than-life statues of saints or tycoons—Jace had a hard time telling the difference when it came to the Orzhov Syndicate, a guild that was part crime family and part religion—lay toppled and broken.

When he heard the arguing voices, including Emmara’s, Jace approached quickly but quietly, dodging around the rubble and staying hidden.

The Orzhov delegation accosted Emmara. Tall, masked knights, gold-laden priests, and more of the gray-skinned thrulls surrounded her, blocking her exits. The thrulls licked their chops, and Jace could see their vicious little teeth.

“You don’t have to agree to our little business arrangement,” said a woman in an elegant, high-collared dress. She was Teysa Karlov, the maze-runner for the Orzhov guild, a high-ranking aristocrat who spoke for their council of ruling ghosts. “But my servants don’t understand the civilized world of business transactions. They only understand a more primitive form of debt. They’ll take payment in toes, fingers … anything with knuckles.” Around her crawled her thrulls, the gray-skinned servitors, whose upper faces were covered with hammered brass masks, their scowls frozen in metal. The thrulls made clicking noises and licked their teeth. “So. Shall we discuss terms?”

There were too many of them to confront directly. Jace kept the advantage of stealth for the time being.

“Emmara,” he thought into Emmara’s mind.

“You!” she thought back to him. “I’d begun to wonder. How did you slip out?” Jace BelerenerJV

“I was sentenced. Slap on the wrist.”

“Really?”

“In a manner of speaking. I’m here now. I’m going to try something to get you out of this. Try to keep them talking.”

Emmara cleared her throat. “If you think I’d help the Orzhov win the maze,” she said aloud, “then you don’t know me, or think much of me, either.”

One of the masked knights took a huge axe from his back and began testing its weight in his hands. The thrulls jeered and snapped at Emmara’s ankles.

Teysa Karlov leaned on a cane as she paced back and forth, rapping it against the pavement. She studied Emmara. “I understand,” she said. “You’re not one of the rabble. Those like us do not respond well to the stick. Very well. Let us discuss rewards instead. The Orzhov Syndicate is prepared to offer a very handsome compensation to you, should you aid us. You would be assured a quite envious place among the Syndicate hierarchy, complete with a chance at a very long and lucrative afterlife.”

“Not interested.”

“Gaggle of thrull servants? Fawning attendants? What about a favor from one of our cartels? One word from me, and you could have anything you desired.”

Jace prepared a spell to seep into the mind of the axe-wielding Orzhov knight. If he could slip in quickly enough, he could encourage the knight to bring the axe to bear on the next-largest knight before any of the thrulls had the chance to sink their tiny teeth into Emmara.

“Was this how you planned to navigate the maze?” Emmara asked. “By shaking down the better-informed competitors? It’s a wonder your guild still exists after all these years. You fool no one into thinking you’re a religion. You’re nothing more than petty criminals.”

Teysa Karlov laughed mirthlessly, squeezing the knob on her cane.

Jace found the part of the axe-wielder’s mind that governed the man’s thoughts and opinions of his fellow Orzhov compatriots. Jace created an urge, laid the urge over the Orzhov knight’s mind, and pushed the thought in as far as it would go, deep down into the subconscious. He could sense the knight’s views changing, like a dark stain spreading through silk cloth.

But he could tell immediately that attacking the mind of just one of the Orzhov wouldn’t be enough. He would have to disarm or distract them all.

The spell to warp the Orzhov knight’s mind was taking effect. Jace expanded the reach of his mind, letting the spell spread to the minds of the others in the area—to a sweaty priest with a dark sun pattern on his robe, to a spindly, elderly guildmage whose face was covered with a hood, and to a shifty-eyed Orzhov enforcer with a cluster of knives sheathed at her belt. All of them had been devoted to the Orzhov for years, but Jace put a twist in their minds to make them question their allegiance.

Jace felt a twinge of pain as he connected to the Orzhov’s minds, just as he had with the family on Zendikar. But he didn’t need to become the bridge, to let them all see into each other’s thoughts—he only needed to plant a thought in them.

Teysa Karlov nodded sharply to her entourage. “Get her wrists. You, with t the skin of my hands . smilehe axe, get ready to take her hand off.”

“Enough orders from you!” shouted the knight. He lifted his axe high over his head, his body squared directly in front of Teysa Karlov.

The words of the bailiff flashed in Jace’s mind. “If, in the course of the Assessment, one or more of the guilds’ chosen do not appear for the final sentencing, then the Guildpact cannot be actualized.” Teysa Karlov was the Orzhov maze-runner. If she died—if Jace induced this man to kill her—then the verdict would be inevitable.

“No!” Jace dashed from his hiding place and shoved Teysa Karlov out of the way. The knight swung the axe down and the blade smashed into the cobblestones. Jace and Teysa fell sprawled in a heap.

The other Orzhov attendants encircled Teysa and Jace. Their ire was focused on Teysa Karlov. Without their drilled-in sense of obedience, these devotees to the guild were turning on the symbol of authority, the one who occupied a position much higher than their own in the hierarchy of the Orzhov Syndicate.

“What in blazes is going on,” demanded Teysa. She was oblivious to the change of heart of her attendants, and hurled all her indignation at Jace. “Who are you?”

“You’re in danger,” said Jace, looking around at the oncoming Orzhov gang. “We have to get to the next gate.”

“Jace,” said Emmara, backing toward the guildgate. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What is this?” demanded Teysa, standing and brushing off her aristocrat’s raiment. “Seize them. I command it.”

“They’re not going to obey you,” said Jace. “I’ve made a mistake. We have to go. Miss Karlov, come with us, now.”

“We can’t just leave her, can we?” Emmara thought to him with a note of resignation.

“Unfortunately not,” he responded. “She has to make it to the end.”

The Orzhov attendants brandished their weapons and closed in on Teysa Karlov. Her facade of indignation became a sneer of dark fury. “You dare betray me?” She held up her hand to the sky, and a sphere of blackness appeared in the air above her, swelling and swirling with spectral howls. Spears of dark magic exploded out from her spell, lancing through the bodies of her associates. They fell, each of them with an ugly, black hole punched through their chests. Unnaturally dark smoke floated out of their wounds.

“Now,” said Teysa Karlov, eyeing Jace and Emmara, still maintaining the dark sphere of spectral energy over her head. “Tell me why I shouldn’t do the same to you.”

“Let me tell you what you’re going to do,” said Jace. “You are going to watch us walk through that gate, and you are going to wait here for exactly one hour. Then you are going to mehow, some wa

TEMPEST OF LIES

Jace and Emmara had passed through the Simic gate and now approached the zone of alchemical machinery and steam-driven arcana known as Izzet territory. Jace tried to watch the sky for the draconic shape of Niv-Mizzet, but he was oddly focused on how the strands of Emmara’s hair moved. A storm brewed over the Izzet area of the district, with attendant rolls of thunder, and drops had begun to spatter on the streets.

“Where did Vorel get off to?” Jace asked.

It felt strange talking with Emmara out loud. Somehow it was a bit embarrassing after all their mental speech. It was too real, too out in the open.

“I lost Vorel at the Gruul gate,” said Emmara. “Or rather, he lost me. Some of the Gruul seemed to know him. There may have been some bad blood there. But he made it out, I found out later. I saw him pass ahead of me just before running into the Orzhov.”

“And the other gates? How have you fared?”

“I’m in one piece,” she said. “I don’t think I’m winning this thing, though.”

A force of Izzet goblins came around the corner, recognized them, and charged at them with fire-tipped pole weapons. Jace pinpointed their minds as they rushed, and the goblins fell asleep in mid-charge, clanging onto the cobblestones in their bronze-colored metal armor. Jace walked on without breaking his stride.

“I don’t think you need to end up at the Forum of Azor first,” Jace said. “I just have to make sure you’re there, and in one piece. You’ll do the rest. You have a way of uniting people, of bringing them together. And I’m starting to see that that’s the most important thing in this world.”

“Jace,” Emmara said.

The way she said his name made him halt and turn to her.

“Yes?”

Her eyes searched his face, as if she sought for an answer that might be written there. For some reason, Jace thought of Calomir. He realized he had never actually met the man she had loved, that the real Calomir was a memory by the time Jace had met Lazav’s imitation of him. “I know all of this has been hard for you,” he said.

“Tell me you don’t have secrets from me,” she said.

“I …” Jace said, and stopped.

He saw the longing in her face. She had been through so much with Lazav’s deception, and she was still struggling to cope with the fact of Calomir’s death. She had been abandoned by her guild and left to fend for herself. She wanted so badly to put her trust in someone that it made Jace ache to see it.

He knew he kept so much from her, to shield her from the difficult realities of his life. He knew she could never know of his true nature, of the existence of other worlds beyond her own, of how strange and twisted his past was. But he longed to give her the reassurance she sought, to prove to her that she could trust him if only to prove to her that people could be trusted. She wanted to believe in people, and he wanted to give her the gift of one moment where she could feel she wouldn’t be betrayed. And at that moment, he wondered whether that trust wasn’t more important than the truth.

“I’d never keep secrets from you,” he said.

It stung to say, but her relief was his reward. She smiled and grabbed his arm, and for a moment, she pressed her smile into his shoulder.

Thunder pealed as they neared the Izzet gate.

“Let me check up ahead,” said Jace, feeling a tiny bit invincible. “I’ll come back for you when I know it’s safe, and we’ll cross through the Izzet gate together.”

Emmara arched an amused eyebrow.

“I know, I know,” he said. “You’re just as often the one getting me out of scrapes. But humor my protective instincts this time, and grant me this one.”

“Granted,” Emmara said. “But I get to choose how long to wait before I come bail you out.”

“Agreed.”

The sky looked bruised. Unnatural clouds writhed uncomfortably low over the city, concealing the tips of the tallest spires. Ropy lightning danced among the clouds, setting off chains of staccato thunderclaps. Jace could smell the humidity of the storm; under that, the scent of charged air; and under that, the warm, rough smell of rain on brick streets.

Jace found the gate unguarded, but not unprotected. The Izzet guild symbol loomed above, set into the towering wall. The symbol was not just an homage to the guild’s passionate minds, but to a single, vain mind, their draconic guildmaster Niv-Mizzet. The dragon-shaped symbol looked menacing in the storm’s flashes. And of more immediate concern were the jagged pillars of lightning that walled off the gate, like prison bars made of harnessed, frenzied electricity.

As the winds picked up and the clouds spiraled above, Jace sensed a presence nearby, and he called out, “Who’s there? Reveal yourself.”

Ral Zarek walked out of the gate. The lightning bowed apart just at her sidefM7 enough to let Zarek pass through, then sealed itself behind him again as he emerged. Jace was sure that if he attempted the same nonchalant walk, the lightning would treat him quite differently, and the experience would prove abundantly fatal.

“You’re Zarek,” said Jace. “Our host, and the runner for the Izzet.”

“And you are Beleren, the mysterious mind mage, who knew so much about the maze.”

“You’re going to have to move aside, and dismiss your blockade.”

“No one gets through here. The race is over. It’s done.”

“So you’ve solved it?”

“Ten times over. There’s nothing to find. The dragon was wrong.”

“Then you won’t mind if my friend and I pass.”

“I told you. No one gets through here. Certainly not you.”

“You know as much as I do. The power behind the maze—it’s not for just anyone to wield.”

“That’s true,” said Ral with a grin. “It’s for me to wield.”

So Zarek did believe there was something behind the maze, at that. The Izzet mage was hiding something, if only a deep antipathy for Jace. Jace reached into Zarek’s mind with his senses, feeling for an explanation, or at least a weakness he might exploit. What he found surprised him. It was not that Zarek’s mind was a storm of wild thoughts—that he expected. It was the other little fact: Zarek had seen worlds beyond Ravnica.

“I am not your foe, Planeswalker,” said Jace.

“Oho! Another one like me, then, are you? You’ve heard tell of me on other worlds, I take it.”

“I didn’t know until this moment. Your mind is open wide to me.”

“In that case, you know I’m here to see you destroyed, fellow Planeswalker.”

“Your envy is misplaced, Zarek. You cannot have any quarrel with me—you know nothing of me. You know nothing of what I’m capable of, what I’m willing to do. Now, I implore you to step aside, and let me on my way. Please understand that that would be the best course of action for everyone—for the both of us, for your guild, and for this world.”

Ral chuckled. “Whatever you think you understand, you clearly don’t comprehend the danger you’re in right now. You do not make demands of me—not you, not the dragon, not anyone. You do not cross my path. You do not.” He looked up, beyond Jace. “Not you, either.”

Jace turned around. Emmara stood there, her hair darkened and plastered against her face by the rain, her robe gathered around her.

“Jace, what’s going on?”

Ral’s smile blazed. His hands sparked with static electricity, sizzling in the rain. “Your friend doesn’t know, does she?”

“Doesn’t know what?” asked Emmara.

“Leave her out of this,” said Jace.

“That’s the sign of a planeswalker, isn’t it? Condescending to speak for the planebound. Treating them like the ants they are. You’ve seen and meddled in many worldsa grerJV, haven’t you, Beleren? How long until you scamper off and leave this one behind? How long until you find another toy to play with?”

“Jace, what is he talking about?”

“Go on. Tell her I’m lying. Tell her you’re just a frequent traveler, who spends much of his time in far-off districts. Give her your excuses for why you’re gone for long periods, why you don’t have any traceable family history. Tell her why you shut others out. Go on. It’s the usual speech. I’ve given it a dozen times myself, on a dozen planes.”

“What does he mean, planes?”

Jace was tempted to speak into her mind, to tell her that Zarek was lying. He could convince her. He could help her see what an unhinged mind Zarek was.

He could even prevent her from remembering any of this conversation, if he wanted.

Instead, he said, “Emmara, I have to tell you something.”

“No.” Emmara was not physically backing away, but he could feel her psychologically retreating from him. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

“I want you to know.”

“And I want you to tell me. But not this way. Not with him forcing you into it.”

Ral Zarek laughed. “She’s got a point, hasn’t she, Beleren?”

Jace ignored him. “Ravnica is only one of many worlds, and I’m not from here.”

“Stop.”

“I’m one of a few people able to traverse between planes. It’s called planeswalking, and it allows me to disappear from this world and travel to another one.”

“I don’t want to hear this. Stop.”

“It’s true, Emmara.”

“There are others like you? Who live here?” “You’re looking at one, my dear,” said Ral. He was almost purring.

Emmara’s face was hard, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Prove it.”

“I can’t,” said Jace. “There’s no one thing I can show you that will make you believe. I could planeswalk away from Ravnica and return later, but you won’t see it as much more than a disappearing act.”

“Then I don’t believe you. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me, or why you’re trying to make a fool of me with your Izzet friend.”

“But it’s all true.”

“Stop it. It doesn’t make sense. Tell me one other place you’ve been.”

“I’ve been many places. Places very different from Ravnica. The details don’t matter. It’s only important that you understand that this is the truth about me.”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you making everything so hard?”

“Because it’s the truth, and because he’s right. If I didn’t tell you the truth, I’d be holding back. I’d be keeping a wedge between myself and Ravnica. Between myself and you.”

Jace reached out to her with his mind, to explain in thoughts what he was fail the other maze-runners4I iing to in words. But he felt her rebuff him. Her thoughts became a wall, a refusal as tangible as a blow. He saw that she was shaking, but whether from fury, despondency, or cold, he couldn’t tell.

“Is it true?” she asked, and he saw that she was looking at Ral Zarek.

Zarek only raised his eyebrows, like two extra smiles.

“How long?” she asked, back at Jace. “How long have you kept these things from me?”

Jace couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. Her confusion had flared into fury. He just knew he had to tell her everything, to trust her with everything, or he would lose her. “As long as we’ve known each other. Since the beginning.”

There was a long moment, and then she said, “Rakdos, and then the Forum of Azor.” She didn’t ask it as a question, but she waited for confirmation.

His eyes widened, then he gave a barely perceptible nod.

She stalked toward the gate. “Take it down,” she said to Ral.

Ral smiled, and the lightning barrier that protected the gate split open in the middle, parting like a curtain.

“I’m coming with you,” said Jace.

“You do not follow me.”

“I know I’ve lied to you. I know it’s a betrayal. But there are reasons. Don’t go.”

Emmara turned and walked through, and the bars of lightning covered the arch again after she passed.

Ral Zarek clicked his tongue. “A shame,” he said. “But it’s best we not get too close to our planebound pawns, isn’t it?” He floated in the air, lightning crackling from his limbs and eyes. He looked like a thunderstorm taken human form. “We must focus on the true powers, and the true threats of our world—fellow planeswalkers. Savor this moment, Beleren, for now I rid the Multiverse of you.”

Jace drew from all his sources of mana, and poured all of his fury and shame into his magic. The rain lashed down on him, streaming down his body, and thunder crashed all around him. He felt none of it. His body trembled with power, and his cloak billowed in its own winds, which ignored the course of the storm.

“Listen to me very carefully,” said Jace, his voice audible over the thunder. “That woman is going to win this, and you’re not going to stop her.”

“Why should I need to stop her? She’s heading into the demon’s territory. I mean only to stop you.”

A bolt of lightning crashed from the storm to the ground, impacting just after Jace darted to one side, but the force of its shock wave blasted him from his feet.

Jace rolled and sprung up again. He threw back a barrage of mind-crushing spells, but Zarek had raised a battery of mental defenses, and Jace’s assault crashed through the psychic barricades like rocks through endless layers of thick glass. Zarek’s mind was all dazzling shards of countermagic and ingenuity and ferocious ambition. Jace forced his way through it, trying to find the man’s sensitive inner psyche, but his consciousness felt like a windswept kite.

Zarek lashed into Jace with gusts of wind-spiked rain, knocking him back step by step. Then he c&., and adblapped his hands together, and an explosion of thunder knocked Jace into a back flip and onto the pavement.

Jace crashed into the puddles. He spun away from another sizzling torrent of lightning, and fired back another volley of intrusive thoughts into Zarek’s mind, but only broke more of the never-ending mind barriers. He was making no headway, and meanwhile he was spending a lot of his strength on useless attacks.

Zarek had been prepared for this. He had been waiting for Jace to come through the Izzet gate and face him, with full knowledge of Jace’s abilities. Zarek would let Jace exhaust himself with as many mind-puncturing attempts as he wanted, and then would no doubt finish him off with a sky-shattering bolt of lightning.

But that plan had a flaw, thought Jace as he huffed with exhaustion through the rainwater cascading off his hood. It assumed Jace wanted the same thing Zarek wanted—to destroy his foe. As long as

FOR THE SAKE OF THE GUILD

The path had led Emmara to Rix Maadi, the palace that served as the center of the Rakdos guild’s brainsick celebrations. She followed the images that Jace had flashed into her head, taking a turn down an obsidian staircase whose steps sagged in the middle from centuries of use. She passed under a series of grandiose but lurid archways, carved in red stone in the shapes of nightmarish faces and leering, cherubic imps. No one stopped her as she delved deeper, and she caught herself wondering whether any of the arches she passed m a symbol of power, re, and forward ight have been the Rakdos guildgate. Perhaps she might be done already, and could leave this place without seeing a soul. But Jace’s instructions told her the true gate still lay ahead, and her sense of dread told her it was not going to be as simple as she hoped. She marched on, deeper into Rix Maadi, trying not to think about what dark liquid might be dripping down the walls.

When she entered the large chamber, she knew she had arrived. It was a subterranean chamber, but it had more in common with an opulent throne room than a cave. Braziers burned, their flames rising toward the ceiling like lush tapestries. Cords of iron chains were draped from the ceiling, and a hot stench blew up from iron grates in the floor. On the other side of the great hall, up a series of steps, was an enormous arched doorway, crowned with the horned face of the demon Rakdos. That was the Rakdos gate, leading into dark smoke.

And she was not alone.

“Hello, darling,” said Exava the blood-witch. She stepped down the series of shallow stairs. Two Rakdos cultists offered her swords to her by the hilt, and she took them without glancing away from Emmara. “Tandris, isn’t it? I’ve been hoping you’d come to play.” Exava swung her swords in curves, and the metal flashed in the firelight.

“Our quarrel is over,” said Emmara. She walked forward slowly, wrists at her sides. “The Selesnya ends its dispute with the Rakdos. You may let me pass without fear of retribution.”

“Your words contradict your actions, Miss Tandris,” said Exava. “You can’t end this. Not with our blood on your hands. You slaughtered six of my Rakdos cultists.”

Emmara did not raise her voice. “Your cultists showed they were eager to die the day they came to seize me.”

“And will you do the same for your guild? Will you die for Selesnya?”

“My life belongs to my guild.”

“Ah, a fellow fanatic,” said Exava. She strode forward, letting the edges of her two blades sizzle against each other. “We have something in common, elf. We both believe in a higher power. We both know that our hearts only beat at the pleasure of a higher cause.”

“I serve the living Conclave. Not a sadistic horror from a pit.”

“Doesn’t matter, though, does it? Not when the call comes down to surrender your life for what you believe. Not when the guildmaster speaks. Does it, Tandris?” The witch suddenly struck the grating under her feet with her swords, sending up sparks. “Answer! Yes or no, will you die for Selesnya?”

Emmara had no weapons, no spell at the ready. She only had the need to get through that gate. She wondered whether she would die for that guild that had abandoned her, that had left her to run this race alone. “If I must.”

“No!” said Exava, her eyes and her smile opening too wide. “You will die for nothing.”

Exava did not charge with her swords. Instead she sauntered backward, and all around the chamber, horrors erupted. These were not the usual Rakdos cultists, who were just people wearing grotesque masks and blood-streaked armor. These were demon- spawn, hideous creatures of sinew and fangs and stretched-skin wings, clawing their way out of columns of dark flame that rose from the braziers.

Emmara waved a spell to life, encircling& t, and adb herself with floating rings of thorny bramble. As the demonic creatures lunged and clawed at her, the thorn shield took the brunt of the blows, and the thorns tore at their flesh. Still, it wasn’t enough. The demons’ unearthly strength buffeted her back and forth, and in no time her thorn shield was beginning to buckle. One claw raked open a wound from her shoulder blade to her lower back, and a demon’s bite crushed the bones in her elbow.

“Leave no scraps of her!” she heard Exava shouting over the roars of the demons. “Devour her! Let her feel the gift of agony that we shall bring to all the guilds! For you, Lord Rakdos!”

Smoke poured from the dark place beyond the Rakdos gate, and a series of echoing booms grew louder, closer.

Emmara ached to take a moment to heal herself. But the demons’ onslaught was constant. As her orbiting rings splintered, she cast a related spell, focusing on the individual thorns that had become lodged in the demons’ claws, arms, and gums. Each of the thorns became a seed for a burst of new growth. Bright green sprouts lanced out of the demons’ flesh, sending runners and roots wrapping around their limbs. The demons screeched, writhing and scraping away the insistent growths, trying to claw the magical growth out of them before it burst them apart.

It gave Emmara the time she needed. She took a deep breath, and wove a chord of healing magic to soothe and bind her wounds. She glanced up at the blood-witch. She stood in front of the gate, smoke billowing around her. “You’re a resourceful one,” said Exava with a frown of approval. “But you should have let the underspawn destroy you, my dear. Because now you face my master instead.”

“Oh, no,” she said involuntarily. Emmara had the instinct to reach out with her mind to Jace, but she retracted her thoughts again. No, she couldn’t trust him. She could never trust him again.

The demon lord Rakdos emerged from the guildgate, and Emmara stumbled back, overwhelmed by the enormity of the ancient guildmaster. His four horns folded around his face like a twisted crown, framing his thousand-toothed grin. He spread his wings, filling the chamber. He spoke, and to Emmara it sounded like a wind of death, withering her heart.

“You have found me a delicious soul on which to feed, Exava,” said Rakdos.

Emmara’s mouth tried to form the word no but no sound escaped. The demon lord reached for her with a clawed hand as big as a throne, and Emmara felt his hot touch closing around her body. She yelled out, and there was a crash.

“Jace?” she thought in spite of herself.

She imagined that the crash was the sound of her body breaking under Rakdos’s grip, or perhaps her soul tearing to pieces. But a shaft of blinding light had broken through the ceiling, crumbling the stone. Through the gaping hole thrust a huge fist, lancing down like the light.

More chunks of the ceiling fell, widening the breach, and more light poured in. A huge entity dropped down out of the light and landed with a boom. It was a nature elemental, like the ones Emmara had been able to call. It crouched below the rent in the ceiling, its lush vines coiling around a solid skeleton of marble.

“No!” roared Rakdos, his voice hoarse with hatred.

Emmara was released. Rakdos retracted his grasp and turned to face the elemental. The other demon creatures retreated slightly from the indent { margin-bottom: 0.0em; margin-top: 0.0em; text-align: justify; text-litralight, shielding their eyes, and the seedlings that Emmara had planted in their bodies accelerated their growth.

Exava only sneered and spat on the floor.

From behind the elemental poured a cavalcade of Selesnya troops. Guildmages, woodshapers, wolf-riders, and centaurs in gleaming armor leaped down onto the elemental and rushed down its back into the chamber of Rix Maadi. There were so many of them, flowing out of the light like a stampede, swords drawn and spells ready. Finally, another great elemental made its way down from the breach, and on its back it carried the three dryads of Trostani.

“My guildmaster,” Emmara said. “Thank you.”

“Go, Emmara,” said Trostani. “Your Conclave shall protect you.”

“You came back for me,” Emmara said.

“You showed the path for us all. Now go.”

The battle rung out in the chamber. Spell-weavers and priests hurled binding spells at the demonic guildmaster as he backhanded the onrushing wolf-riders. The demon spawn slashed at armored soldiers as enchanted steel sizzled against their flesh. The great nature elementals brawled with the demon lord, their mighty limbs swinging in time to Trostani’s commands.

Emmara scrambled for the gate, dodging through the battle to get a clear run. Exava saw her, and moved to block her way, a smile spreading on her face.

Emmara did not slow down. She charged straight at the blood-witch, imagining her as just another obstacle to getting what she wanted, just another lie to smash her way through. She would knock the woman down bodily if she had to.

Exava grinned at her, poised and waiting for the right moment. When Emmara bounded up the stairs, the blood-witch swung her sword, and it was timed perfectly to cleave into Emmara’s neck.

Emmara had nothing to deflect the blow but her own arm. The sword sank through the skin and into bone as she collided with the blood-witch. The two of them rolled to the ground, and Emmara ended up on top, kneeling astride Exava’s hips and pinning her down.

The sword was lodged in Emmara’s arm, almost clear through it. She took hold of the sword’s hilt. She gritted her teeth, a savage yell rumbling in her chest. Exava looked up at her, horrified fascination gleaming in her eyes.

Emmara ripped the sword free and groaned, and warm blood sprayed. She held the arm above her, sword in the other hand, and screamed through her teeth as the bone and muscle and sinew knitted itself whole again, thread by excruciating thread, sealing and merging with the near-severed limb. Her vision swam, and the sounds of the battle faded into the louder and louder pumping of blood in her ears, but she fought to stay conscious.

Emmara’s spell held, but there was still a storm of pain as she flexed the fingers at the end of the injured arm. She looked down at the blood-witch, who was speechless with sadistic enjoyment.

That gave Emmara the chance to jam the blood-witch’s sword into her shoulder. As Exava screeched and writhed in pain, Emmara stood, heaved a few breaths, then took hold of the blood-witch’s free arm. She hauled the woman up onto her shoulder, and as the battle raged behind her, she carried her enemy through the Rakdos gate.

Jace followed the route, trying not to think of what he’d find. hat does that mean?erJVRal Zarek eluded him, but the storm still roiled above, and the rain soaked the streets of the Tenth. Sputtering fires told him he had entered the territory of the Rakdos, and his footsteps splashed as he descended alone.

When he came upon a pitched battle in Rix Maadi he feared the worst. But Trostani pointed him on, telling him that Emmara had already proceeded on to the Forum of Azor.

When Jace arrived at the Forum, all ten maze-runners were there, and all ten of them were threatening the others with spell and sword. The Golgari troll Varolz had new, disc-shaped scars all over his body, presumably from battling the tentacled leviathan, and was trading hammer-like blows with Ruric Thar. Vorel and the Boros runner Tajic each had the other’s throat in his grip. Lavinia and Teysa Karlov took turns offending each other, questioning each other’s jurisdiction, and testing each other with restraining spells. Mirko Vosk, Ral Zarek, and Exava were all circling and sizing each other up, ready to unleash violence at any moment.

Emmara stood by herself. Jace saw her glance at him, but she turned her face away. She looked up into the sky, her arms crossed, watching the rain come down.

Something in the center of the forum caught Jace’s eye. He saw that the flow of mana that had described the path through the maze was becoming visible. It was hard to make out in the storm, but Jace could see the power channeling into the floating monolith in the center of the forum. From the central monolith the mana then radiated out in soft rays, contacting the stone pillars around the forum’s perimeter and setting them aglow, one for each guild.

Something was happening, and all of the assembled maze-runners seemed to be missing it.

“Listen!” Jace shouted. “Halt your fighting, now. This place is activating. You all have to find a way to make peace now, or we’ll all be destroyed.”

“How dare you,” said Teysa Karlov. “You have no right to speak to the speaker of the Obzedat this way.”

“I was here first, Beleren, you con artist,” said Ral Zarek, bristling with electricity. “The Izzet lay claim to all that’s about to happen here.”

“All of you forget that this forum was created by the Azorius,” said Lavinia. “Our maze has led you here, and what results is ours and ours alone. And I will defend our legal right to it if I have to.”

“Varolz see nothing but meat,” said Varolz, peering around at the other maze-runners.

“In the name of Lord Rakdos, I’ll kill you all!” screeched Exava.

“No one gets to kill anyone,” said Jace. “None of you will make any claims. You’ve all assembled, finally. This is the moment that the maze wanted to produce.”

“So why haven’t we unlocked it?” asked Ral. “Where is my prize?”

From the edge of the forum, a cloaked figure approached, and all eyes turned to him. The man stepped forth and threw off his robe. He was a wizened elf dressed in Simic garb, someone Jace didn’t recognize.

“Advisor,” said the Simic mage Vorel, who clearly recognized the newcomer. “How is it that you’ve come here?”

“Have you dispensed with the obsolete specimens yet?” the newcomer asked.

Vorel’s face hardened a symbol of power, t, and adb. “No, I—no. You’re right, Advisor. I’m sorry. I was distracted from my duties. I shall carry out the plan immediately, and bring the Simic to a bright future.” Vorel unsheathed a dagger and began preparing a spell.

The newcomer then walked to the legionnaire Tajic. The newcomer’s form melted, turning into formless liquid for a moment in a manner that made Jace’s stomach go cold. The liquid flesh then took the form of a young legionnaire in Boros armor. She wore a braid of dark hair down her back.

“You,” Tajic gasped.

“Tajic, Blade of the Legion,” said the young woman. “I told you that your charge was to destroy all of the Warleader’s enemies. Yet I see many of her enemies still breathe. Have you admitted defeat, Commander?”

Tajic blinked for a moment, then recovered and snapped his boots together. “Absolutely not.” Tajic had his sword out in a flash, and thrust it into the sky. “For the Warleader!”

“No,” whispered Jace. He peered into the mind of the shapeshifting figure, even as her form began to melt and rearrange itself yet again. Just as he suspected, the newcomer’s mind was an impenetrable blank.

Lazav.

“Don’t listen to this person!” Jace shouted. “Don’t obey him! He’s deceiving you! He’s fed you lies!”

Lazav, now in the form of an Orzhov high priest, laughed and spread his hands as if handing out candy. “It’s no use, Jace. They all know me. They’ve all had their visits from me, and their minds have all made a place for me. And you’ll see that they’ve all devoured the lies I prepared for them.”

His form wobbled and changed again, inverting on itself and emerging out of itself like twisted dough. His new form was that of a burly, tattooed troll with a Gruul insignia on his forehead.

Ruric grunted. “You told us maze would lead us to weapon.” Thar stuck out his chin. “Great weapon that could tear down city.”

“Stop listening to him!” said Jace. “Block him out! Can’t you see that he’s a shapeshifter?”

Lazav grinned, showing tusk. “Yes, true warrior,” he said to Ruric Thar. “Kill all the weak, and the weapon is yours.” He turned to Jace. “They can only blame themselves for what has transpired, of course. They were the ones who invited me in, the ones who opened their ears to my whispers and rumors. They welcomed the suspicion, the blame, the mistrust into their hearts. They made room for me, and now they can hear nothing else. And once they all kill each other, I’ll finally get my prize.”

Lazav’s lips curled into a smile, and everything around that smile became Calomir.

Jace looked to Emmara. He could see her struggling, her eyes drawn to Calomir’s face, even though she knew the real Calomir had been killed by the same shapeshifter. He could see the conflict tearing her apart inside.

Meanwhile the maze-runners were all at each other’s throats again, about to make the first kill, about to bring death to the Forum of Azor.

The flow of mana intensified, and the beams of power grew stronger. The guild symbols on each of the pillars flared to life, each signet ablaze in tinted light. An ethereal figure materialized above the monolith. He had to make them see, , and . It was the bailiff, the manifestation of the Implicit Maze, his runic body a beacon of light floating in the storm. The bailiff’s empty eyes regarded all those gathered in the forum. The Assessment was beginning.

“You haven’t failed yet!” said Jace. “Emmara! Emmara, you can bring them together. You have to help them. You have to show them how to become one.”

Lazav reached out to her, and her hand rose, slowly but inexorably, toward his. He clenched his hand into a fist, and Jace saw Emmara’s fingers trembling, curving, tightening. She clenched her jaw and squeezed her fist, and Jace could feel her summoning mana, focusing all her feelings of betrayal and pain and rage for some act of woeful spellcraft.

She shot a look at Mirko Vosk, and her fist began to luminesce, growing as bright as sunlight. She began to walkhe shoulders o

MAZE’S END

Jace thrust forth with his mind, taking hold of the minds of all ten runners. He saw the impact Lazav had had on their minds. But even without the Dimir’s influence, each mind was a tangle of rage, blame, and frustration, each one shaped by its own set of experiences, informed by its own unique perspective on the world.

That was their strength and their weakness. Each of them viewed the world through their own lens, their own skewed perspective. He had to make them see each other. He had to make them see each other as he saw them—from the inside of their minds.

Jace used his own mind as a conduit, connecting all ten minds to each other. He used himself as a bridge just as he had with the family on Zendikar, demolishing the barriers between them, letting them see directly into one another’s souls. Varolz could sense the hotheaded frustration of Exava, who could directly perceive the militant zeal of Tajic, who could share the belligerent rebellion of Ruric Thar, who could see the passion for order and law in the heart of Lavinia. Each guild champion was flooded with the simultaneous thoughts and emotions of every other. They formed a ring of minds, a ring of hopes and beliefs and ways of life, a ring of lives.

The pain rose in Jace’s skull. Jace cried out, and the scream spiraled in on itself, shattering into a thousand pieces and crushing him from every direction. He had merged their minds, let them peer directly into each other, but it was unraveling his own mind in the process. He couldn’t perceive boundaries anymore, as he had broken them all. He had broken himself. He had fused all into one, but the cost was his own identity.

He heard an echoing voice, the voice of someone he knew, as if from a distance of years and a period of miles. The voice was saying a word, over and over again, a word that had meaning to him, but one he couldn’t remember.

It was the voice of the bailiff. The word he was saying was his name.

Jace opened his eyes. It was dark, except that the bailiff was looking down on him, his runes aglow.

Light erupted from the bailiff, and Jace’s body was scoured. He felt the light as a physical force pressing against him, pushing into him like a gale of wind—and then it pierced into him, penetrating his skin, ricocheting inside the boundaries of his body, tracing a skein of light inside him. It filled him, and consumed his vision, and the forum and the maze-runners faded away as the world flooded with light. The opaque whiteness was not blinding but soft, like diffused sunlight shining through a bank of fog. A low, composite roar suffused the air around him, like the sounds of thousands of overlapping conversations that were muffled almost to inaudibility. Jace floated, his skin tingling like the feeling just before his hair stood on end. He felt one with the distance, as though he could see as far as infinity, and reach out and touch the horizon with his finger.

Jace felt a presence at his side, and without turning he knew it was the shimmering form of the bailiff.

“Bailiff,” said Jace. Jace’s voice sounded strange, coming to his ears after a tiny delay, as if he were hearing his voice only in echo and not inside his own head. “I feel different.”

“You are different,” said the bailiff, as he rose.

“What has happened? Didn’t you deliver the verdict?”

“The verdict will not be necessary now.” The bailiff stood next to Jace, facing into the luminous fog, as if measuring the breadth of infinity. “The Guildpact has taken form.”

“It has? The Guildpact is in effect again?”

“The Guildpact has been realized.”

“Something’s different. It’s not the same this time.” a symbol of power, ederJV

“The Guildpact of old was a spell, a spell designed to govern the interactions of the ten guilds. It was a powerful and far-reaching spell, but Azor speculated that it might one day fail. He created the Assessment to determine whether the Guildpact could take a new form. And it has.”

“The Guildpact has taken form—what does that mean?”

“It means you.”

Jace’s hair follicles contracted all over his body. He blinked several times. He took a long time to muster enough breath to form his next word.

“What?”

“You, Jace Beleren, are the living manifestation of the pact between the guilds. You are the Guildpact.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are the one who has proven himself the mediator, the one who can understand the perspectives of the ten guilds. So, like before, when the guilds clash, a code of law will arbitrate between them. The difference is that now, you are that law.”

“I can’t be.”

“Nevertheless, you are.”

“But I am not … I am not from this world.”

“Neither, as it happens, was Azor. But that criterion was not important to his Assessment.”

“It’s important to me! How can I leave again? How can I uphold—how can I be the Guildpact, here on Ravnica?”

“You have proven that you are the one capable of embodying the Guildpact. Your methods are up to you.”

Jace thought of all the maze-runners around him, back at the Forum of Azor, wherever that was from here. Of Emmara. “What happens if I die?”

“Then the Guildpact will be broken once again.”

“But if the Guildpact is a person, then it will be more fragile than before. All ten guilds will curry that person’s favor—my favor—or worse, they’ll try to kill me. They’ll send the plane back into brinksmanship and chaos.”

“Azor furnished me with a recommendation for the one who became the Living Guildpact.”

“What’s that?”

“The ability that earned you this prize is the one you must employ to maintain it.”

With that, the bailiff faded away into the diffuse light. Jace felt his presence fade.

And before he had time to take a deep, revelation-assessing breath, the light, too, began to fade, and the forum appeared around him once again. Jace lay on the central dais, physically unchanged but bestowed with a new status.

He was staring up into the eyes of a dragon.

Jace scrambled to his feet. Niv-Mizzet was perched just outside the forum, his enormous bulk settled on a nearby building. The maze-runners all looked up to see the encounter between Jace and the dragon. Lazav was nowhere to be seen.

The dragon craned his neck and angled his head to aim a squinting, uncertain eye directly at Jace, its vertical pupil takingive you the w

FROM THE ASHES

Jace stood in the building’s new skeleton, among the bare joists and timber rafters, looking out at the Tenth District. The traffic patterns in this formerly sleepy neighborhood would have to be redrawn, the streets widened. The unfinished embassy stood like the beginnings of a grand sculpture, not yet shaped into its final form but showing its majesty already. In order to build its foundation, the crews had had to clear out mountains of ash and charred wood. The sign outside read in official-looking, newly-painted letters: EMBASSY OF THE GUILDPACT.

Someone was climbing the makeshift stairs from below. Officer Lavinia made her way up to the floor where Jace stood.

Jace tipped his head to her. “Now’s your chance to arrest me, Officer.”

“You’re safe from me for now, Living Guildpact,” said Lavinia. She took in the panorama of the city around them. “Quite a view you have from up here, the site of your old sanctum.”

Jace shrugged. “They asked me where I wanted this place to be. Seemed fitting.”

“Makes sense. I suppose you’ll be making a lot of decisions now.”

“I intend to have a lot of help. That’s why I asked you here.” Lavinia inspected him. at her side a, and forward “To make a show of sharing the power?”

“No. Because I actually need your help. I’m not an emperor. I don’t lead the guilds. I just have the privilege of trying to keep them from devouring each other. Besides, I won’t be able to adjudicate all the time. I’ll need advice.”

“An advisory council.”

“Yes.”

“You thought of who’ll be on it?”

“Yes. Representatives from all the guilds, of course. People I can trust.”

“Sounds wise. So what do you need from me?”

Jace couldn’t tell if she was being coy, or if she really didn’t know what he was offering. “I think you actually want me to ask.”

Lavinia paced around the unfinished floor, not facing him, but Jace could see she wore a slim smile. She looked through the rafters, through the half-completed roof, to the sky, sheltering her eyes with her hand. “Looks like it will be a fitting edifice. So this will be the official embassy? The headquarters?”

“Well, this is where people will see the sign. This is where we’ll conduct official meetings that we want the public to know about.”

“This is the place that’ll go on maps.”

“Exactly.”

“Who gets to know where the real one is located?”

“Let me put it this way,” said Jace. “You’re not one of them. Not yet.”

Another set of footsteps came up the makeshift stairs. Emmara appeared without a word. Her gown indicated some new important station within the Selesnya Conclave.

“Can I talk to you later, Councilor?” Jace asked Lavinia.

Lavinia nodded, and smirked at the mention of the title. She tilted her head at Emmara, and made her way down the stairs.

Jace didn’t look at Emmara for a long time. He leaned his hands against one open windowsill, looking out onto Ravnica. He let her explore the nascent building, and gave her time to come up with the words she wanted to say. It was her place to speak, he knew.

“Have you heard any cases yet?” Emmara asked finally. Her tone was light, casual. That was good.

“A few,” Jace said. “A dispute over recruiting rights. A destruction of property claim. Nothing world-shattering.”

“And you’re able to mediate between the guilds? They abide by your judgment?”

“It seems they have to.”

Emmara wore a small smile, which brought rose to her cheeks. “You did it. You brought them together.”

Jace didn’t know where to look, so he inspected his palms. “We’ll see. There’s a lot to do yet, and you know I have to take care of some things … elsewhere.”

He saw Emmara’s smile falter, and he thought he saw her eyes unfocus for a moment. The talk of other worlds, of his planeswalker nature, had stripped away the lies between them. He didn’t know how she was taking it, but he had wanted to include her, to reveal the walls he put up around his life and let her inside. He wanted his secret to bind them together, as he had bound of my self-creation. aB together the minds of the maze-runners.

“And then there’s you,” he went on. “I don’t know that I can ever express to you how sorry I am for the various ways I’ve hurt you. I think I have a list written down somewhere.”

Emmara fell against him abruptly, and her mouth found his, and she pressed against his lips like making an impression in clay. His eyes fell closed and his body froze, as if to contain the feeling of her skin this close to his, and to hold it inside him for as long as he could. But when she broke the connection and pulled away, and she smiled with her lips together like a courteous houseguest, he knew. He knew that it had been a gesture of gratitude, a one-way gift to show her appreciation, hardly more than a missive from her guild. He opened his eyes and composed himself, pulling his cloak around him. Her smile grew into her cheeks as she looked at him, but he saw a coiled-up pain in her eyes as they retreated from him and she looked anywhere else but his face. A politeness had frosted over them.

“Jace …” she began.

“Well, thanks for coming to see the place,” Jace said. His voice sounded too loud, too pedestrian. “I hope that we see each other again.” That was the wrong thing to say, too, as if he expected them to become total strangers. But he couldn’t unsay it, and it hung there in the air.

“We will,” she said, mending the awkwardness with two words. She was a healer in all ways. “But Jace, before I go, I need something from you.”

“Name it.”

Her lip trembled slightly. “In order for me to do my duty to my guild, I need to be able to share everything with them. I need to be able to commune with Trostani, with the woodshapers and guildmages, with every soul in the Conclave. That is my charge and my guild oath. Do you see?”

Jace’s heart thumped. “You want to tell them what I’ve told you. About my travel beyond Ravnica, about the other worlds. But you can’t tell them that—it’s not something they’d be able to understand. They can’t know.”

“That is not what I’m asking,” she said, pressing her hands together. “You are correct that I can’t tell them that, Jace. They can never know. It would kill them to know. Just as it’s been killing me.”

Jace flinched and glanced away. The meaning of what she said took its time working its way through the walls of his mind. She had kept his secret close, but it was causing her pain. Of course it was. She was not meant to brood on secrets and conceal them with lies. His revelation dug into her like a splinter, and he was the one who had imposed it on her. His attempt to bare himself to her had only been another cruelty.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“That’s why you have to help me,” she said.

When she said no more, he glanced back at her. Her face pleaded.

He realized what she wanted. “Absolutely not,” he said.

“You have to erase it from me, Jace. You don’t know what it’s like, keeping this from them. I can’t let them know it, and I don’t want to know it.”

“I’m not touching your memories.”

“You must. I can’t live this way. It of my self-creation. aB’s too big to do nothing about. But I can’t do anything about it. It’s just there, in my mind.”

“But it’s the truth,” he said, the pleading tone creeping into his own voice. It was the truth, but it was more than that. It was his attempt to reach out to her. It was his gift to her that she had come to return, and in doing so she was showing him how unwelcome a gesture it had been.

“You have to put me back,” she said. “Back to where I didn’t know. As long as I know, I’ll never be able to be open with them. I’ll never be able to be Selesnya.”

"indent" aid="E9OFR">Jace grabbed the hair on the back of his head, shielding his face with his elbows. He took a series of deliberate breaths, clenching his teeth against the urge to shout. He saw why she wanted this. He saw the good sense of preventing the spread of Multiverse knowledge among the planebound denizens of Ravnica, and he saw how the knowledge would eat away at her connection to her guild. But the thought of tearing into Emmara’s mind, excising the words he had told

her only took a few minutes away from her, it would be a kind of goodbye. It would kill something that, right now, was a little bit alive.

“Please, Jace,” she said.

He nodded heavily. The spell wasn’t even that difficult to muster. He had such proficiency with it, like a rehearsed piece of music. He was present in her mind in the span of a few breaths, searching through flickering memories of Trostani and Exava and Calomir, brushing through her thoughts of him in his patterned blue cloak. Finally he narrowed the spell to focus on a moment in a storm when he showed her the truth of the man he really was.

He hovered there, with that memory cradled in his consciousness like a sip of water cupped in his hands.

She looked at him as he held the mind magic there, and her face was serene. “This is in case you need me,even if he

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Doug Beyer started out as a Magic: The Gathering® fan, then became a web developer for magicthegathering.com, then a prolific flavor text writer, and eventually, a writer and creative designer for the Magic™ R&D creative team. He resides in Seattle, Washington.

Read on for a sample chapter of Mattew Stover’s Test of Metal, featuring planeswalkers Tezzeret, Jace Beleren, and Nicol Bolas- in earlier adventures. Available now in print and digital formats from your favorite bookseller.

Visit www.wizards.com/magicnovels for more information.

sample

TEST OF METAL

by Matthew Stover

A MAN OF PARTS

Being alive meant I was in trouble.

I remembered dying. Your own murder is not something that slips your mind.

That vicious little gutter-monkey Jace Beleren had reached inside my skull with the invisible fingers of his mind, and scrambled my brain into … What? An omelet didn’t seem right—too orderly. Too intentional. A chopped salad? Not meaty enough. My brain felt like something sliced, or scooped, fried in bacon grease … Yes.

Head cheese.

But having a brainpan filled with head cheese would leave me incapable of iterating concepts such as brain pan and head cheese, and likely lacking the mental resources to recall my death and formulate a metaphor to describe it. This recursive self-realization developed slowly, because having a functioning brain, which I did, didn’t mean it was functioning very well, which it wasn’t.

I passed some indeterminate interval speculating that perhaps I was not in fact alive, but that my corpse had been re-animated by some ambitious mage—perhaps that tasty little necromancer Jace Beleren had been so fond of … Vess. Something Vess. Lolita? Lilith? Something like that.

I also, for thoroughness’s sake, considered the possibility that my undead essence had been conjured by an embattled wizard on some nearby plane, either to win a duel or to prepare for his next one. But despite my diminished intellectual capacity, I knew that either of these possibilities was unlikely to result in a seemingly interminable span with nothing to do but chew my mental cud.

Further: I was mostly sure that being dead wouldn’t hurt this much.

I seemed to be lying on a pile of jagged rocks. Apparently, I had been lying on these jagged rocks for some significant amount of time. Time enough for every single edge and point to work as deeply into my flesh as was possible short of drawing blood. I lay there experiencing the discomfort without attempting to ease it; I was not yet ready to move.

As an artificer by inclination as well as vocation, I have always known that anything worth doing is best accomplished in a deliberate, structured, and meticulous fashion. Feelings and dreams are useless, and imagination is worse; reality doesnce pressing against him’n">“If, in the course of the Assessment, one or more of the guilds’ chosen do not appear for the final sentencing, then the Guildpact cannot be actualized.”’t care how you think it ought to be, or what you fantasize it might be. Effective action is achieved only by the intelligent application of what is.

An unsentimental perspective on the “what is” of my current situation offered no good news. To have healed and reconstructed my brain, after Beleren puréed it, was itself a feat of impressive power; to have done so after (or in the process of) raising me from the dead expanded the power requirement from impressive to astonishing. This premise led to a grim twohorned conclusion. I’d been returned to life and placed here by a being of astonishing power, who was either (1) unconcerned with my personal welfare, or (2) actively my enemy.

There was no third possibility. I don’t have friends.

Worse: my right arm.

It ached as though it might be nothing more than simple flesh over simple bone. Which was overwhelmingly wrong. So powerfully wrong that when I opened my eyes, I looked only to my left.

Not because I was kidding myself; I did not waste mental energy fantasizing that my good right arm—my precious arm, the only feature of my existence in which I can truly take pride—might be intact. Instead, my refusal to look at it arose from a similarly unsentimental understanding of my own psychology. There is a difference between knowing the abstract, and seeing the specific.

There was a difference between knowing my mother was dead, and finding her battered corpse trampled and crushed into the muck of a Lower Vectis byway.

By looking only to my left, I kept the comprehension of my maiming safely abstract. My prison appeared to be a natural cavern cloaked in a dully bloody gloom, as though the light came from hot iron. The jagged rock on which I lay, the floor, the walls and ceiling were all some sort of crystalline mineral I did not recognize, darker than ruby quartz, shading toward carnelian—and the light in the cavern was apparently the product of a crimson glow from the deeper deposits of this crystal. From somewhere nearby came the liquid pitter of what I allowed myself to believe might be water.

There was neither sight nor smell of anything to eat, nor of any bedding, clothing, or fabric of any kind with which I might cover myself. The strongest odor in the cavern was of unwashed human armpit, likely my own. I found no indication of anything that might be fashioned into tools, only ever-deeper deposits of glowing red crystal.

This did not mean I was helpless. I fastened my mind upon the grey waves that crash against the cliffs below Vectis, and began to pull mana; at the very least I might fashion temporary covering for my body and protection for my feet, both of which would be useful while exploring the further extents of the cavern.

I discovered, however, that my effort to gather mana resulted only in a barely perceptible brightening of one large crystal in my immediate line of vision. This was not in itself dismaying, as I had not expected to succeed. There are a number of constructs and magics that can deny mana to even the most powerful mage; I’ve designed several myself. But the attempt had to be made.

Everything at which I’ve ever succeeded has been accomplished by exacting attention to detail. A full commitment to exhaustive investigation. To have left a possibility unexplored would be like, well …

Like cutting off my own hand.

And so then, finally, I had to look.

My reactce pressing against himer, , and ion was largely what I had anticipated it might be: a rush of rage and denial so intense I could only lie there and scream, followed by a flood of nauseous horror so overpowering that I vomited blood-laced saliva and green bile, and then passed out cold.

I began constructing my right arm when I was roughly nine years of age. Though my arm’s completion would require more than a decade, and I would continue to refine it for some years after, the process of acquisition, design and construction actually began when I finally found myself clever enough to steal from my father, which was, approximately, age nine.

My age has always been approximate.

My birth had been no occasion to celebrate, and so neither were my birthdays; my parents never bothered to share with me the date, if they even remembered. I calculated my approximate age by my size and development relative to the other Tidehollow cave-brats.

My parents were scrappers. Scrappers sift the garbage, runoff and sewage of the city of Vectis, hoping that with careful and patient work they might gather bits of copper, silver, gold, or even the occasional sliver of mislaid etherium. Scrapping is, in Vectis, a less honorable profession than is begging, and ranked far, far below whoring. This I understood despite my age; my mother had once been a whore, as she often bitterly reminded my father whenever money ran short, or when the hearthfire sputtered, or the sun rose, or the moon set. When the winds blew, or when they fell silent.

Before her health and looks failed and she was forced to stoop so low as to share a hovel with my father, she would not even have spit on a scrapper in the street; to do so would have meant acknowledging the scrapper’s miserable existence.

I was seven years old when she was killed.

Approximately.

The news of her death arrived in the company of taunting and jeers from the ragged pack of cave-brats with whom I commonly associated—children in Tidehollow are not only unsentimental, but are largely incapable of even understanding the concept of empathy, much less exhibiting any. One of their fathers had been begging on the same street in Lower Vectis as had my mother, and had seen the incident. By his report, she had pressed too close to a passing guildsmaster’s carriage while supplicating alms. The blow of a whip from the carriage driver had knocked her down, and she had fallen under the wheels. The merchant-lord had rolled on without so much as pausing to determine what he had crushed.

My father’s face at first had flushed, and angry color rose toward his eyes—but after only an instant all color drained away. I never saw it return. He became as expressionless as a statue, and when he spoke to me, his voice had no more life or emotion than the sound of gravel rolling off a slate roof.

“Boy. Come folla. We has to git yer mother.”

He always called me boy. I am uncertain whether he and my mother had given me a name. Tezzeret is how I was called among the cave-brats; a tezzeret is, in Tidehollow cant, the word for any small, improvised or homemade weapon kept concealed on one’s body. Knives made from beach-glass wrapped in packing twine; slings and garrotes woven of one’s own hair, a carriage spring bent to protect the knuckles of one’s fist. The cave-brats had dubbed me Tezzeret after I had used one to butt-shank an older boy who had pushed me down into a muck puddle.

M&w, and adly father gathered three or four potato sacks, told me to bring the sheets off his bed, and we went to get my mother.

My father and I did not speak on the long trudge upslope from Tidehollow to Lower Vectis. We didn’t speak while we threaded through the murky lanes and alleys. The sum total of our conversation took place beside my mother’s broken corpse, just before we dug her body out of the greasy muck in the middle of the lane.

“Even this,” my father had said softly, in a bitterly sullen murmur as though reminding himself how angry he should be. “Even this, theyz tooken from me.”

When I asked whom he meant, he sullenly nodded upslope. “Bankers ’n’ merchants. Guildsfolk. Them as lives up the city.”

I could not imagine why anyone rich enough to live upslope would want anything of ours, and I said so.

“Futter want. They don’ has to want for them to take. Take is what they do. Take is their whole life. Us downslopers myz well be buttrags. One swipe ’crost some arsehole and down the shitter.”

When I told him I felt this wasn’t right, he cuffed me on the side of the head hard enough to send me staggering. “Right, nothin’,” he said. “Ain’ right I whap ye on the ear, but I do. Cuz I can. Cuz ye ain’ big enow to stop me.”

I didn’t care about the smack; his heart hadn’t been in it, and so I’d barely noticed. I cared only for discovering who might be big enough to stop them. When I asked, my father only shook his head.

“Nobody,” he said. “They owns the whole world, boy.”

At seven, my political instincts were already developing; I pointed out that somebody had to be in charge, or nothing would ever get done.

“Dunno ’bout bein’ in charge. Only folks as scares guildsfolk ’ud be mages. When them mages talk, best believe them guildsbuggers chew their tongues ’cept for yessir.”

“Mages?” I’m fairly certain that this was the first time in my life that I’d heard that word. It’s certainly the first I remember. “What’s mages?”

“Sumpin as ye need not know, boy. You’ll never see one.”

This was the longest conversation my father and I ever had.

So this was my lesson:

The strong—the wealthy, the powerful, the influential—take. The weak are taken from. The strong do to the weak whatever the weak can’t stop them from doing. The strong could run my mother down in the street without even thinking about it.

This did not strike me as injustice. I’m from Tidehollow; I didn’t know what injustice meant until years later, when I came across the word in the course of my self-education. The concepts of justice and injustice struck me at that time as inherently suspect, and nothing in my life has since moved me to alter that opinion. To complain of injustice seems as useful as complaining that the sun shines or that the winds blow.

No: the casual destruction of my mother’s life struck me instead as a reason to make myself strong. She was taken from me because I could not stop them from taking her. I understoodce pressing against himWe, and adl that if I remained as I was—a scrapper’s boy in Tidehollow—anything in my life could be taken from me … And everything that could be taken would be taken.

The most reasonable solution, to my young mind, was to make of myself a stronger man. But even if I did, I could be robbed by folk stronger still. How could I stop them?

The answer seemed obvious. The experience that had earned me my nickname left me with an enduring appreciation for the power of precisely applied violence. By the second or third time some other people’s mothers were found dead in the street—the mothers of, say, individuals who had attempted to take from me—I was confident that the warning would be generally understood.

The power to revenge injury a thousandfold was my fondest boyhood dream. No one would dare take what is mine. Ever.

And the word my father taught me that evening, the word that means the strongest, was mage.

I undertook my own investigation into the nature of mages, and how one achieves that title. To ask anyone in Tidehollow would have been futile; I would have gotten more useful answers from my reflection in a mud puddle.

Over the course of some weeks, my investigation took me on surreptitious scouting expeditions into Upper Vectis. There, I discovered for the first time what the slivers and oddments of pale metal that my father gathered were actually used for. I came to understand why a week’s food could be purchased with an amount of etherium that might barely equal the weight of my fingernail parings.

I learned that an individual’s wealth can be calculated to a nicety by observing how much etherium that individual exhibited in jewelry, articles of clothing, slaves and vehicles. The wealthiest had etherium magically melded to their flesh, and mages—whether human or vedalken or even the great sphinxes of the distant islands—shared one distinguishing feature: a limb, or a body part or several, wholly replaced by a structure of etherium, enchanted to duplicate (and often exceed) the function of the part it replaced.

I also learned I could work as a scrapper for my entire life and never save enough to buy so much as an etherium nose-ring.

I was very taken with the esthetics of the etherium enhancements, as well. With indestructible metal for structure and magic for muscles and nerves, the clean lines and curves, their elegant purity of operation, made them irresistible. Having spent some hours on that street in Lower Vectis, gathering up the filthy shreds of meat and bone that had been my mother, I was—I am—entirely too familiar with the muck restrained by human skin.

I know the color of raw human liver. I know the texture of ripped-open human lung. I saw gobbets of my mother’s brain, and the undigested remnants of a breakfast we had shared in a stew of blood and bile within her torn stomach. And I knew even then that the organs I helped my father scoop back into my mother’s abdominal cavity were no different than what lurked in my own guts, and that the foul stench of corruption lived inside me too. To this day, I see and smell them again, fully as vivid as they were to my seven-year-old self, in the nightmares that overtake me when I must sleep.

Someone more interested in human psychology than I am might find something ironic in this; I do not think in such literary terms. I am what I am. The key to successful artificing has nothing to do with why; what is the relevant issue. Combined with a properlyce pressing against himmoerJV structured how, one can unlock the Multiverse.

Relevant facts change as circumstances develop, but still …

I’ve known what I am since the night my mother died; I knew what I intended to make of myself, and how to achieve it.

The next day, I entered the family business at my father’s side. I undertook to learn every detail of how one finds and gathers cast off shreds of etherium. The activity is surprisingly technical, and requires considerable expertise, as the value of the metal makes it very much sought after. One must learn to search where others won’t, and learn to retrieve where others can’t.

I very shortly discovered that I surpassed my father in this work, though he’d been a scrapper since he was my age. For a time, I arrogantly assumed that it was due to some innate superiority of intellect or character; there were untapped caches of a gram or less etherium in any number of places, and I assumed my success in finding them where my father could not, meant I was smarter than he was. I discovered I was wrong when my father decided he no longer needed to work at all, beyond assessing what I had found, calculating a price, and trekking upslope to Vectis to sell it.

He knew as well as I did that I was a better scrapper than he was, and—unlike my ignorant self—he knew why. I chance to have a talent that the vedalken call rhabdomancy; in plain terms, when I have a sample of a particular material, I have a sort of intuition that leads me to wherever I can find more. As rhabdomants go, I was not—nor am I now—especially gifted. My talent enabled me to find etherium because it’s an intense substance, one that casts a vivid shadow upon reality.

One might say that it’s loud.

If gold, for example, were to be counted equivalent to the sound of a man snapping his fingers across the street, etherium would be the sound an angry sphinx hammering upon a gong larger than a rich man’s house.

My skill had nothing to do with superiority; it was simply an artifact of heredity, like my height, or the color of my eyes. Or, for that matter, my intellect.

Where I did find myself superior was in the diligence I was willing to exercise in the pursuit of my goal. My father watched me every second; he had learned all too well to read my face—over which I had little control. If he even suspected I might have located a piece and had not told him, I would endure a memorable beating and would spend the next night, or several, chained to the main ceiling post in the room that served us as both kitchen and bedroom. I never gave over trying, and eventually I hit upon a workable tactic.

As a scrapper, the skin of my hands and feet was in a state of continual disrepair. My work involved wading through sewage-drenched cesspools and piles of rotting garbage, pulling out any item that might have come in contact with any etherium—even a smudge of the metal was valuable in its own right. I had no shoes or boots, and my hands were always scratched and torn, and usually infected. Every so often, I would discover slivers of etherium, almost like splinters of glass; the smallest—rarely more than a tenth of a gram—I could conceal by sticking them under the skin of my hands or my feet, and later, after my father was safely snoring in his drug-addled stupor, I could cut these splinters from my flesh and hide them away again.

At that age, I was already an experienced contingency planner. I had secreted four cover-stashes in our hovel, each more difficult to uncover than the last. T&w, and adlhese were used when my father actually caught me stealing—which I took pains that he did, every few months; it made him confident in his vigilance, and enabled me to steal all the more. On these occasions, after the customary beating, he would force me to reveal the location of my treasure … which, after absorbing enough physical abuse to make it believable, I would tearfully direct him to the next cover-stash.

What my father never caught onto was that my real stash was on—in—my own body. The rank tangles of my hair helped conceal the forty-five grams of etherium splinters I had shoved under my scalp; another thirty grams were in my upper groin, at the tops of and between my thighs; by the time I was ready to leave Tidehollow forever, my permanently grimy flesh concealed two hundred grams of etherium—a princely sum that was enough, with judicious trading up the sloping streets of Lower Vectis, to purchase me clothing, bathing, and adequate food, as well as what I desired most in the world: an apprenticeship in an artificer’s workshop, where I began to learn the ways that metal, glass, and stone can be worked, manipulated, and bent to the tasks my will might require of them.

To this day there are slivers and tiny fragments of etherium lodged in a number of variously private places upon my body. To remove them would be laborious and time-consuming—and, after all, they are my last remaining link to my father, to my childhood, and to the harsh realities of life in Tidehollow.

Keeping them is a symptom of an unfortunate sentimentality. I admit to being sentimental, though perhaps less so than most; because I acknowledge this, I am able to compensate for the influence this flaw might have on my judgment. I don’t conceal this particular trait—it’s more useful on display, as it often leads others to misread my intentions, and to underestimate my capabilities.

I left Tidehollow without saying good-bye. I did look back, but only to ensure that my father was not in pursuit. I was, approximately, eleven years old.

My apprenticeship to the artificer was to span the standard term of seven years; after three, when I had determined to my satisfaction that I had learned all that my master could teach, I departed his service in the late hours of a moonless night. Fear of my father’s vengeance had led me to enter my apprenticeship under an assumed name; deciding on a new one was no burden, and carried no risk of exposure, even by vedalken truthsayers or suspicious sphinxes. Having been given none of my own, whatever word I might choose to call myself in any given moment is my real name.

I have known since a very young age that I am not like other people, be they human, vedalken, viashino, or elf. I have sometimes wondered if the root of that difference might lie in my concept of self, which seems distinctly at variance with those of others. Ask a man who he is, and he will tell you his name. Ask me who I am … and if I wish to give an honest answer, it will come only after a certain amount of detailed self-reflection. I am not a name, and no word truly names me. Who I am is a fluid concept.

It can make social encounters awkward.

I immediately went in search of a new situation—a particular position, for which a great deal of wealth would be required. The position that I sought was far removed from the humble workshop that I had fled; it was beyond the means of all but scions of the wealthiest families of Vectis. Being largely penniless save for my few remaining grams of etherium, I undertook to supplement my personal financial resources with somce pressing against himmoerJVe judicious prospecting.

There is a particular type of individual—again, species is irrelevant—who is constitutionally incapable of trusting others. (Some say I am one such, but they are mistaken. Unfortunately. The expanding roster of catastrophic betrayals inflicted upon me speaks all too clearly of my trusting nature.)

In Vectis, the inability to trust can lead to some unfortunate behavior; for example, distrusting the reliability of counting houses ends with concealing one’s wealth on one’s person, or on one’s property. When one seeks to conceal wealth, it’s often done by converting said wealth into the most valuable material available, thus lowering the volume and sturdiness required of the hiding place. In Vectis—on the whole of Esper—the most valuable material is etherium, so a rhabdomant might find it in unlikely places.

Buried in someone’s garden, for example.

It was possible to find caches that are so old the people whostashed them away have either forgotten them, or perished without leaving a record of their locations; these were ideal, as one is far less likely to encounter outraged misers who might be armed with any given variety of lethal weapon. Bandits—and worse, rippers—were an issue, especially beyond the city limits, but my time at the artificer’s shop had provided me with the materials for, and the means of, constructing several varieties of lethal weapons of my own. More than one overly optimistic ripper ended up decomposing in the sluice pools of Tidehollow.

It amused me to think of my father investing hours or days in the painstaking dissection of these rotting carcasses. Especially because by the time I was through with them, none of these corpses had so much as a microgram of etherium between them.

My unfortunate sentimentality is balanced, I believe, against an elegantly precise capacity for maintaining a grudge.

When I had accumulated three kilos of etherium, I was finally ready to begin my new life. One kilo was the fee for a year’s study in the Right Ancient Order of Mystic Constructionist Masters—the Mechanists’ Guild.

A mechanist is as far beyond an artificer as a dragon is beyond a goose. At the artificer’s workshop, I had learned how ordinary metal, glass and stone can be shaped to useful ends. In the Mechanists’ Guild, a student is taught the working of magical materials—and how magic can be used to work one’s materials—as well as how devices, machinery and automata can be imbued with mana, to give them wholly extraordinary capabilities. After one achieves elevation to journeyman of the Guild, one begins to learn the working of etherium. Then, eventually, as a master, one undertakes the construction of etherium devices—devices with literally life of their own.

Mana is, functionally, only power. Energy. The capacity to accomplish work. A device of etherium does not require mana to operate; etherium is, itself, a source of mana—and, as I learned in my tenure at the Guild, it is a conduit that channels power from outside the universe.

In the service of the artificer, I had been taught that energy and matter are fundamentally one and the same, regardless of the form of either, and that energy can neither be created or destroyed; the only change we can force is to alter its form. Even mana is a finite resource. Etherium, on the other hand …

Well, etherium itself is a finite resource—but the power it channels is not.

The Mechce pressing against himmoerJVanists’ Guild teaches that etherium is the stuff of reality itself, and that by working etherium one can touch directly the mind of god. It is, however, exceedingly bad manners to enquire “Which god?” They prefer to keep the nature of their purported diety carefully abstract; he sometimes is said to reside in etherium, sometimes in ourselves; sometimes he is said to actually be etherium itself … and sometimes etherium is said to be a channel for his grace.

The being who supposedly introduced etherium to Esper—who was reputed to have personally created, in fact, all the etherium that exists—is known there as Crucius the Mad Sphinx. Crucius is a figure of some renown, and of considerable dispute. He is considered by the Mechanists to be not a Sphinx at all, for example, but rather an incarnation of the will of their abstract god. This peculiar conviction was certainly sparked by the vast list of the Mad Sphinx’s gnomic utterances about “atonement with the æther,” and by his dramatic disappearance some decades past.

Matters certainly aren’t helped by the fact that no one actually saw Crucius, with the possible exception of the Hegemon of Esper; he’s a figure one learns of only by repute, and tales grow in the telling. This bizarre cult of the Vanished Mad Sphinx is maintained and evangelized to this day by a vast and increasingly influential rabble of insufferable fanatics who name themselves the Ethersworn.

These demented pebbleheads decided—based on no actual evidence whatsoever—that the key to the “redemption” of the entire plane of Esper is to infuse every living creature with etherium. They have never been able to explicitly define what it is Esper needs to be redeemed from; again, pointing this out to them is excruciatingly bad manners. Given that the supply of etherium is finite, and already fully exploited—its supposed creator may have been mad, but it seemed he was not mad enough to scatter deposits of etherium underground or at the bottom of the Sea of Unknowing—the activities of these simpletons have actually accomplished nothing other than driving the price of etherium to preposterous heights.

The normal progress through the Mechanist’s Guild from student to master is seventeen years; seven years as a student—essentially an apprentice, save that one must pay for the privilege—and ten years as a journeyman.

I was a master in five.

My rapid ascension was due, in part, to the same obsessive diligence that enabled me to escape my father and the slums of my birth, but it was also due to my experience as both scrapper and artificer. Sons and daughters of the rich cannot comprehend the actual value of an object. Nothing real is useless to a scrapper, and the limits of available finance and material are, to an artificer, absolute. If you can’t afford steel gears, you make your own, of whatever happens to be available in your shop—or if you are possessed of a mind like mine, you design your device to work without gears at all.

The pampered children of privilege who were my schoolmates had no concept of the tension between waste and elegance. Assigned to design and build a particular style of chronometer, for example, my supposed peers amassed truly baffling arrays of springs and chains, wires, gears, pendula, ratchets, precious woods and baroquely filigreed decorative elements. Many of their designs encompassed several hundred parts; the most efficiently elegant of their designs had no less than seventy-three.

Mine had nine.ce pressing against him">When erJV

On nearly every assignment, I completed my work far ahead of my fellows. To amuse myself while waiting for them to finish, I would gather their debris and cast-off materials from the shop’s dustbin and use them to create oddments—children’s toys, tiny automata, the sorts of fanciful devices that have no actual purpose other than to delight by their design and action—which I then sold in the Lower Vectis Grand Bazaar for what eventually became a tidy sum, to help finance my education.

It was not long until my schoolmates lost the habit of throwing away anything at all; they would, however, sell their leftover materials and discarded parts to me for pocket change, and so for a time I ran a thriving little trade. This lasted until our supervising Master noted that every dustbin was as clean after our shop hours as it had been before them. The explanation—that they were selling their scraps to me, and I was peddling devices I made from them—earned me a visit from the three Governing Masters.

The Masters looked over my impeccably organized workspace—I had built a variety of storage devices to keep my materials clean, separate, and easy to locate at need—and one of them asked me why my bench was stuffed with trash.

“What trash?” said I. He indicated my multitudinous cabinets and arrays of drawers, which were stocked with everything from crumpled scraps of gold foil to tailings of badly-tanned sluice serpent hide.

“With apologies for daring to disagree with my betters, Masters,” I said, “none of these contain trash; their contents are simply materials I have not yet found a use for.”

They elevated me to journeyman on the spot.

The position of journeyman was the only reason I’d come to the Guild in the first place; I did not plan to spend my life flattering the vanity of the wealthy and powerful by providing them with self-powered trinkets and enhanced body parts. I was there to learn to work etherium, and nothing else.

I was ready to build my right arm.

I had known what I was to build—I had dreamed it a decade before, and spent every intervening day of my life in refining its design until I knew it would make of me the man I had decided to be. My right arm was why I taught myself the art of scrapping for etherium, why I had trained myself to steal from my father, why I’d apprenticed as an artificer, and why I had become a sneak thief and a killer of bandits and rippers. Why I had devoted my life to the study of all conceivable elements of design and construction.

When my father had been in one of his occasional expansive moods—merely intoxicated by the drugs he craved, rather than unconscious and prostrate—he liked to say that there were only two things in all creation that he knew would never fail him: death, and his right arm. Fool that he was.

His right arm was nothing. Flesh and bone. As corrupt and rotten as his filthy heart.

My right arm is none of these things.

There are some who have spoken of my arm, and claimed it to be psychological compensation for my lowly birth.

Others have called it the badge of my self-creation. Still others have named it a symbol of power, a fetish, a talisman against self-doubt. All these people have one defining trait in common.

They’re idiots.

The circumstances of my birth are irrelevant. I have no ce pressing against him">When erJVneed for a “badge” of any kind; I am the proof of my self-creation. And my arm is not, nor has it ever been, a symbol of power, nor of anything else. It’s not a symbol.

It is power.

Most “etherium enhancements” barely warrant the name. Etherium in its unworked state is a soft metal, and almost infinitely ductile; even the rich, and most mages, use baser metals that are stronger, and a great deal easier to come by, such as titanium, or cobalt. They build their enhancements of these, and merely thread the structure through with infinitesimal strands of etherium, only enough to power the enchantments that enable the prosthesis to mimic the function of the part it replaces.

I delved deeply the mysteries of mana-quenching and ætheric tempering, and invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana-sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles; it is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures—but not for long.

I went days at a time without sleep, learning to use mana to keep myself alert and focused, for my nights were passed risking my life against bandits and my freedom against thief-takers, to search out new and ever larger caches of etherium.

I learned to make my new arm do not only all the work of my old one, but everything else my imagination could devise. Though I am no more gifted a mage than I am a rhabdomant, I again found ways to exploit my minimal talents to accomplish maximal results. When my arm was completed, it was comprised of over ten kilos of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip; merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage—and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.

One black midnight, I alone, without witness, assistant, or aid, performed the ritual that severed my arm of useless flesh, and permanently attached the arm that would make a scruffy, ill-fed scrapper’s boy into a man to be reckoned with—a man with the power to revenge injury a thousandfold.

A mage.

When morning came and the Masters saw what I had achieved, they elected to elevate me to Mastery, and immediately began preparations for the weeklong ceremony. I thanked them, and walked out from the Guild Hall that same morning, never to return. This time, I did not look back.

I had what I’d wanted from them. “Master” is just a name. Names are nothing.

Power is everything.

>When I awoke in that red-crystal cave to find attached to my right shoulder an arm of mere flesh, already corrupt and rotting, that’s exactly what had been taken from me.

Everything.

When I regained consciousness, I undertook to examine my new appendage. It appeared, in every functional sense, identical to the one I had severn years before; missing were only an array of minor scars across my knuckles and into the palm of my hand—souvenirs of a particularly tricky midnight etherium retrieval—and a much larger scar along my biceps, a knife woundce pressing against himbuterJV. This scar, while I had still used my flesh arm, had been a useful reminder to never assume I had killed the last bandied some fiftee