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 Two

©2013 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

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v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Copyright

Title Page

A Wanted Mind

Unfamiliar Depths

Stirring Up the Past

Aid From an Enemy

Changes of Heart

Armies in the Streets

Rough Crowds

Unmasking

About the Author

A WANTED MIND

Jace felt like a stringless marionette, heavy-limbed and uncoordinated, splayed out on damp stone deep under street level. The chamber around him, a high-ceilinged and cavelike space hidden down in the forgotten levels under Ravnica’s Tenth District, echoed his quick, wheezing breaths. Jace had never thought of his life measured as a certain number of breaths before, but it struck him that that number was finite.

Emmara stood nearby, and though her healer’s magic was practiced, every part of his body told him he still shouldn’t move. He felt nothing but a unanimous ache, the kind of pain only the club of a Golgari troll could confer. The tissues were still knitting, fiber by fiber. His muscles felt like mashed pulp.

And then there was the problem of the Dimir vampire who had come to kill them. Mirko Vosk had chosen the perfect moment to appear out of the shadows; the marauding troll had fled, leaving Jace weakened; and Emmara had dismissed the massive elemental she had summoned. Vosk’s muscles were taut, like carvings in cold, dense marble, and yet his movements seemed incredibly light. His feet barely glanced against the ground as he strode forward—as if gravity was optional for him.

“My master only values what you have in your minds, mortals,” said Mirko Vosk. “So your bodies need not be intact for what’s about to happen to you.”

Jace lurched to his feet, wobbly as a calf. He felt something tear in his ribcage, and he winced. He knew he looked far from intimidating, and he knew the interloper would not take him for a threat. Still, Jace mustered all the menace he could. He drew himself up and assumed a battle stance.

“Touch her, and I’ll kill you,” he said.

Vosk grinned, flashing his fangs. He moved with unnatural speed, slamming into Emmara before Jace could react, sending her skidding across the chamber. She slid to a halt against the wall, crumpled and not moving. He turned to Jace.

Jace put up a hand and tried to muster a spell to incapacitate Vosk, but the effort was weak, and Vosk evaporated Jace’s halfhearted magic with a dismissive gesture.

Vosk did not spend words gloating. He grabbed Jace by the shoulders, swiveled him around with vampiric strength, and bit into the nape of Jace’s neck. Twin needles drove right through the base of his skull. Jace could feel more than pain, more than the awful sensation of his blood forcefully exiting his body. He felt an invasive stab into his thoughts, a probing hunger that groped around the inside of his skull.

Jace struggled and flailed, trying to land an elbow or kick an ankle, but Mirko Vosk held him fast as he made his psychic attack. Jace could feel the mental intrusion, like an insidious, predatory version of one of his own mind-reading spells. He had the sense that the vampire was sampling his memories, tasting them one by one as he fed.

Jace craned his neck, his arms pinned. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Emmara, but she wasn’t moving—unconscious, or worse. Jace would have to fend off the vampire himself, but he was outmatched in both speed and strength.

Jace needed mana in order to forge any kind of offense. He reached for his deepest bonds, those connections to distant planes whose lands flowed with mana, but the magical energy only trickled into him, replenishing drop by drop. His blood was being drained out of him far faster than the mana was filling him.

These are my last breaths, he thought.

But without warning, the vampire snarled and released him, sliding his fangs out of Jace’s neck. As the two parted, their mental contact broke. Vosk staggered back, wiping Jace’s blood from his mouth with disgust.

“Impossible,” Vosk said. “You know nothing.”

“You’re too late,” said Jace. “What you’ve come here to take is already gone.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said Vosk. “Now it’s going to be much worse for you. I could have taken the information, returned it to the Secretist, and left you both alone.”

Jace needed something simple, something that wouldn’t demand more than a whiff of mana. He didn’t bother putting up his normal safeguards, his shield of psychic spells. He would simply enter the vampire’s mind and tear with abandon, biting into Vosk’s thoughts as the vampire had bitten into his. Jace would use his consciousness as a blade, slashing at anything and everything he found, trying to ruin the vampire’s entire psyche if he could. But he wasn’t ready.

Vosk backed away slowly, keeping his eyes on Jace, daring him to attack as he let the shadows envelop him. He was gone.

Jace sat cradling Emmara’s head in his lap. She was breathing, but barely, and her body was limp. Blood seeped down her temple, next to her eye. Jace kept his senses alert, ready to lash out if anything happened upon them.

He tried to reach out with his telepathy, to contact someone for help, but they were still deep below ground. Who would he reach out to? He feared any presence he might discover in the undercity. It struck him how few people he really knew on this world, how few people he had relationships with even across the entire Multiverse.

He brushed a lock of hair out of Emmara’s eyes. If there was a way to planeswalk away from here and carry Emmara with him, he would do that. They could flee Ravnica and live in peace somewhere beyond the boundaries of this plane, somewhere without guilds or monsters to stalk them. But she was not a planeswalker. Her nature did not permit her to leave.

For a fleeting moment, Jace considered leaving on his own, and he stifled that thought with shame. He had the power to travel to every dimension he could find, but she was the anchor. She tied him to this life on Ravnica.

He barely knew anything about her. For being able to peer inside others’ minds at will, he knew very little about people.

“Jace,” mumbled Emmara.

“Emmara.” He held her gently, supporting her head.

She craned her neck to look around the chamber, and winced. She lay back again and looked up at Jace through slits. “Tell me you killed him.”

“He almost killed me, but he fled. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Your head is bleeding.”

“I’m fine, I said. You look worse than I do.”

“Well, I’m awfully good at giving you something to heal.”

Jace looked for a smile on Emmara’s face, but none came. She didn’t seem to have it in her. They went through the motions of recovery in silence: healing magic, the patching up of torn cloaks, and an assessment of their surroundings.

“Let’s get these bodies buried,” Emmara said. “They’ll draw attention.”

Jace and Emmara dragged the bodies of the Rakdos warriors into the sludgy puddles of the chamber. Emmara used nature magic to encourage moss and fungus to grow over the corpses. The slain cultists became a decomposing garden.

“Let’s get you back to the Conclave,” said Jace.

She nodded. There wasn’t much hope in her.

Jace looked into a passage that led away into darkness. “We’ll take the low tunnels for a while. It might actually be safer down here. I think a lot of people up there are looking for us.”

When Ral Zarek entered the aerie of his guildmaster, the dragon was looming over his blueprint, a three-dimensional model of Ravnica’s Tenth District that was made of streaks of pulsing light. The model was tiny compared to Niv-Mizzet’s bulk, and it made Ral think of a child peering into a dollhouse, the dragon’s great eye sweeping through the miniature streets, his face lit in purples and pinks by the thin edges of light that defined the space.

“You sent for me, Great Firemind?” said Ral Zarek, in lieu of clearing his throat.

The dragon didn’t budge from the model. His eye twitched, obsessively following threads of light through the map, tracing and retracing route after route.

“Well, I can tell you our status,” said Ral. “The Implicit Maze project is coming along well. We’ve succeeded in tracking down all but a few guildgates, and have even established some reliable connections between them. We only need to delve into the Orzhov territory, and then plumb the grottoes of the Simic. Then we should have performed enough experiments to discern the exact maze route. But we lost many soldiers, and I may have got a cyclops killed. So if I could have another regimen of mages and strongarms …”

The dragon looked up, lifted his mighty neck and spread his wings, but his eyes kept flicking back to the model.

“Guildmage Zarek,” said Niv-Mizzet, a flicker of flame escaping his teeth at the start of Zarek’s name. “You’ve been hard at work on our maze project, yes?”

“Yes, Guildmaster.” Ral stifled a sigh. “By your request, I’ve had teams of Izzet mages canvass the entire district and beyond. We’ve found braids of mana that flow in unusual patterns throughout the Tenth, which has helped us to establish the path between the ancient guildgates. And we’ve recovered a series of artifacts that will help us discern the exact ordering of gates. It won’t be long before we’ll have the answer. We will solve this maze for you.”

I will solve this maze for you, Ral thought.

But Niv-Mizzet had already become distracted. He coiled his tail around the glowing model of the district. “Time grows short,” said the dragon. “I have a new experiment for you to perform. A new venture of personal interest to me.”

“You’re taking me off the maze project?”

“In a sense.”

“But Guildmaster … we’re so close. I’m about to uncover the answer. And it’s so crucial to Izzet power.”

“Until it is solved, the maze remains my top priority. But a mind has opened itself up to me. I believe he can be of use.”

Someone else would intrude on his research, and on Niv-Mizzet’s attention. Ral shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I’m spending all day every day researching them. I will know the maze route in a matter of days, or weeks at the outside.”

“No, you will not know. For you cannot see the patterns. You are blind to the maze’s true nature, and that is why you have not already succeeded in this project. That is understandable, I suppose, as your mind is tiny. But it does make me want to devour you.”

Ral fiddled with one of the cables on his gauntlet. He breathed hard through his nose.

“I do not know his whereabouts, nor his name. But our minds touched briefly, and I know the look of his face. I want you to find him for me.” The dragon twitched his claw, and an illusion of a man appeared, crafted from light in the same manner as the glowing model, looming over Ral with exaggerated size. The illusionary young man wore a blue hooded cloak and had a keen stare, and his eyes seemed almost to move. Though the image was a shimmering trick of the light, Ral had the impression that somehow it was the living one, and that he was the one who was insubstantial and transparent. He stormed out, leaving behind an unintentional flourish of electricity.

The blood-witch Exava dragged a carcass down a banner-draped hallway, humming a helter-skelter tune. Rabid masked cultists, spike-collared imps, and other Rakdos freaks lined the hallway on either side of her, snapping at her and straining at the clinking chains that bound them to the walls. The large dead body, Exava’s burden, squeaked as it slid along the floor, leaking fluids like a sack of rotten vegetables, and Exava matched the haphazard squeaking with her humming. The line of gibbering marauders licked their chops, smelling the body. She could have ordered any one of them to carry the load for her, but she preferred to transport the offering herself. She felt that her master, the demon lord Rakdos after whom her guild was named, preferred his tributes that way. The trail of blood gave the halls of the palace of Rix Maadi that personal touch.

The corpse offering was necessary. The mage in the blue cloak, an insolent illusionist who had called himself Berrim, had escaped her, and that could not stand. The young mind mage would have been such a joy to eviscerate on stage, mewling in such pretty anguish before the cheering degenerates at the Rough Crowd ripped him to scraps—but instead, he had bested her. He had read her mind, tricked her minions, and fled into the Tenth. And worst of all, he had cut short the show without so much as a gory wound or a showy scream of agony. Exava was a blood-witch, the equivalent of a ranking priest among the thrill-killers of the Rakdos guild, and she knew leaving an audience hanging without a satisfyingly lethal finale was the ultimate sin. She needed to put things right. She needed this Berrim to die.

But there was an unfortunate wrinkle. Exava was shrewd enough to know that the mind mage had been able to pierce into her mind, and had stolen information from her. The mind mage had learned of Exava’s connection to the abduction of the Selesnya elf woman, the irritatingly-named Emmara. The lord Rakdos would not be pleased about that.

The body was that of the spike-wearing ogre who had served as the bouncer at the Rough Crowd. The squeaks of his corpse announced her as she entered the sulfurous haze of Rakdos’s throne room.

The demon lord’s face hung in the cavernous room, his eyes and sweeping horns lit by the hellfire of his burning scythe. Nothing else was visible in the smoke.

“The Cult of Rakdos is restless, Exava, and so am I.” The voice was like gravel under a blade, hoarse from long centuries, but with a seductive music all its own.

“I bring an offering, my lord,” said Exava. “We took glee in his anguish.”

“Yes. I can smell it. Bring it here.”

Exava dragged the body and let it come to rest between two lava-filled pits.

“Closer,” came the voice.

Exava hesitated, but she moved it closer, toward the voice and the blazing scythe.

Without warning, an enormous clawed hand seized the body and snatched it away into the smoky gloom. In the red glow of the chamber, Exava saw the demon lord lift the body high above his head, crush it in his claw, and consume the essence that trickled out.

Rakdos tossed the remains into a lava vat, and they sizzled into nothing. “I smell something else on you,” he said. “A scream in your soul. A longing for action.”

“Yes, Lord Rakdos. Things have become … complicated.”

“How do we uncomplicated them?”

“A man must die.”

“Finally some good news.”

“He is formidable.”

“You wield the power of the cult. You wield a shred of my own power. And yet you ask for more than that?”

“For this man to suffer as he must, I need more.”

Rakdos’s face faded back into shadow, so only the tips of his horns and his chin glowed in the light as he spoke. “I like what this man brings out in you, Exava. Your fire burns brightly, more than my other servants.”

“I will honor you with blood and chaos, my lord,” said Exava.

Rakdos’s great claw emerged from the gloom again, and Exava flinched. But the claw handed to her two shining, serrated swords. His face appeared above her, grinning by lava-light.

Exava took them in wonder, trying to appreciate the purpose of this gift. “They must slice through flesh like no other blades ever forged,” said Exava.

“Not at all,” boomed Rakdos.

Exava stuck out her lip and regarded the blades. “Then … they must be enchanted to cause searing pain at the slightest touch.”

“Nothing of the kind.”

“Then … what?”

“Have you no use for swords that cut chains?” asked Rakdos. He waited for an answer.

Exava’s reaction was slow. But then a zigzag smile spread across her face. “Oh, thank you, Master,” she said gaily, and spun on her heels, a sword in each hand.

She appeared in the hallway, and the freaks snapped at her, links of heavy iron chain securing them to the wall.

“Time we start a riot,” she said.

One by one, she sliced through the shackles, releasing the slavering spikers and cultists. One by one, the imps and warriors formed up behind her, grabbing weapons and snarling in sadistic delight. One by one, she enlisted her soldiers of chaos, and their howls sang Berrim’s name.

Jace walked through the tunnels ahead of Emmara, listening to the way her footsteps made little splashes on the dank floor and the wet sound bounced around him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

“For what?”

“When you sought me out, I know you weren’t looking to get in the middle of all this. Trouble just seems to follow me around.”

“Yes, it does,” she said. “You are a vortex of trouble. Always have been, as long as I’ve known you. But it’s not just you. Things are bad up there. I’ve been around for a long time, and the guilds have never been this tense. Kidnappings. Territorial attacks. Killings. And it’s going to get worse.”

“And through it all, you’ve kept me safe.”

“I’m glad you’re safe,” she said. “It was worth it.”

“If I hadn’t ruined my own memories, I could be of more help.”

“No. You were doing the same thing I was. You were taking steps that you thought would keep us safe. Paying the cost.”

“Once we get you back to the Conclave, once Trostani knows you’re alive, maybe we can put an end to all this. Defuse these guild tensions. You’ll be an example for peace. We’ll show them how the Selesnya don’t retaliate, even against the Rakdos.”

Emmara smiled. “That sounds nice.”

They walked through the undercity, climbing staircases when they came upon them, making their way toward sunlight.

“Hey, Emmara?”

“Yes?”

“Remember that carved leaf you gave me? The artifact, to use to contact you?”

“Yes.”

“Did it work?” he asked. He wanted to ask: Did you hear the words, “I need you?”

“Yes. I heard it. I was preoccupied with my Rakdos captors at the time, but I heard it.”

“All right, good,” said Jace. “Just making sure.”

He was walking ahead of her, and he didn’t look back to see her face, to know what, if anything, those words meant to her. But he felt a warmth in his chest, just knowing that she had heard them.

UNFAMILIAR DEPTHS

In print, the words looked formal, inescapable, and undeniably official.

“Notice of Change of Assignment.”

Officer Lavinia’s spirits sagged. The letter seemed to be taunting her in its gleaming blue print. It listed her greatest honor—ultimate responsibility for the enforcement of law for the whole of the Tenth District—under “Previous Position.” Under “New Position” it said merely, “Supervisory Official, New Prahv.”

She knew it was more than a change of assignment. It was a demotion, a punishment for her failure to capture Beleren. For that, she was effectively jailed in her own guildhall, chained to her post by her own strict compliance with guild law. She knew that meanwhile, Beleren walked free.

Before her guildmaster, the sphinx Isperia, assigned her to the towers of New Prahv, Lavinia had never spent much time in her office. The chair and desk were utilitarian but beautiful pieces of furniture, and her pen set gleamed under the luminous sphere that hovered near the vaulted ceiling. Everything around her had been designed to rigid specifications. But to her, nothing was perfect but walking the streets of the Tenth. Nothing could approach the sound of her boots clacking against pavement, the scent of a crisp morning dawning after a night’s patrol, the feeling of a suspect’s cheek mashing against the cobblestones.

The hardest part to take was that she had no way to track down Beleren from inside the towers. Kavin’s visit had given her fresh motivation to capture the mind mage. Kavin had been with the Azorius years ago, and had been as fine a lawmage as any she had encountered—so when he came to her, his mind invaded and altered by this man Beleren, her imprisonment had become too much.

She stood up from the finely-crafted desk and traveled down the flights of equally finely-crafted stairs. She approached the main entrance of the Lyev tower: her would-be doorway out into the bright streets of Ravnica.

“Greetings, Officer Lavinia,” said the head gatekeeper.

“Hello, Samil.” She moved as if by somnambulism, telling herself she only wanted to ask the guards something. Anything. “How goes the shift?”

“Well, the rioters have all passed through. No Azorius casualties. Some property damage.”

He was talking about the Rakdos, of course. She hadn’t done more than scan the reports. She knew it was important, that such a large-scale uprising by the chaotic cult merited more of her attention. But her mind was fixated on finding Beleren. “Any arrests?”

“Many writs filed with the Minister of Territories and Holdings. No arrests.”

“That’s good. I mean, it’s good there weren’t casualties.”

“Right.”

Lavinia looked past the gatekeeper, who was backlit by the bright afternoon out on the street. The marketplace in the plaza nearby would be in full swing by now, pickpockets cutting their way through the crowds, swindlers luring their marks into illegal dice games, agents of the more corrupt guilds eavesdropping and casing the wares. And somewhere out there Beleren, a mage capable of even more devious crimes, walked free, unknown to the populace. While she was in here.

The gatekeeper wasn’t standing in the way of the exit, and didn’t even have his polearm angled to block her path. The way was open. She could simply walk through the doorway and leave New Prahv. She knew the gatekeeper would rely not on force, but on her loyalty to the law, on her devotion to the judgment of her guildmaster, the Supreme Judge Isperia, to prevent her departure. It was a gate made of principle rather than iron. All she had to do was to forget that Azorius loyalty for one moment, to sleepwalk her way through a hole in the wall, and she would be free to pursue Beleren.

“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”

She glanced at the gatekeeper. She could see that the man could read her dilemma, and that it was creating a profoundly embarrassing moment for him. The shame was excruciating—not only to consider violating the direct order of her guildmaster, but to have an underling witness her entertaining the idea.

Nevertheless, she took a step toward the door. It was just one step, no further.

“Ma’am?”

“Just let me do this,” she said quietly, hovering on that one foot.

The poor gatekeeper looked terrified. He didn’t move to bar her way, but he didn’t move aside, either.

But she had pivoted on the ball of her foot and had returned to the heart of the tower, leaving the gatekeeper behind her. The word of the sphinx was law. If she did not live in accordance with that law, she would be no better than the criminals she pursued.

In the spiral staircase, she paused. She produced the sheet of paper again, the official words in tall blue type, the runes of the writ that shackled her to the building. As long as she was part of the Azorius Senate, this was what she must obey. But she thought of the Tenth all around her, just beyond the walls of the tower, the people of the district constantly under siege by the schemes of the other guilds. And she thought of Jace Beleren.

She pulled another piece of paper from her cloak—the hurriedly scrawled notes given to her by Kavin. What a horrifying ordeal, she thought: to lose your memories to some mind-withering spell, and to try to capture them on paper as you lose them.

Kavin and Beleren had been researching a code, according to the notes, and Beleren was convinced that it had to do with the actions of the Izzet guild. This was what drove Beleren. This was the key to understanding who he was, she thought. This was the key to bringing him to justice.

Rather than walk up the stairs to her office, she turned and headed down. She spiraled past the senate offices, past the ministers’ floors, past the entrance gate. She continued spiraling down below where the street would have been, through the tower’s sub-levels, until she reached a new checkpoint. The guards down here wore robes rather than armor, and had owls perched on their shoulders.

“What brings you to the Grand Archives of New Prahv?” asked a guard. The owl on her shoulder swiveled its head around to look at her, and blinked its blue eyes.

“Just a bit of research,” said Lavinia.

“You failed me, Vosk,” said the voice, the syllables echoing from everywhere.

The vampire Mirko Vosk stood in a cavernous corner of the undercity, deep below street level in a structure that had been built centuries before. Vosk had guessed it had probably been a library or archive at some point; the texts were long gone, but the smell of moldering pages soaked the walls. As usual, he could not see his guildmaster, but only cast his answers to the air around him. Not only had Vosk never seen Lazav, ruler of the Dimir guild, with his own eyes, he had never met anyone who had. But Lazav’s omnidirectional voice had a special closeness to it tonight, a hostility that Vosk felt as a chill on his neck.

“Our information was wrong, Master,” Vosk said. “Beleren knew nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Beleren knew everything,” rasped Lazav’s voice. The last word rebounded around the chamber, ringing with accusation. “You dare tell me my information was incorrect? You dare come here without Beleren and without the elf, with nothing but a mealy-mouthed apology? How am I to utilize their secrets if you never deliver them to me?”

A shadow darted along the wall behind a heap of crumbled marble. It was too quick to identify, and it disappeared into the darkness.

“His memories had a hole in them,” Vosk said to the air around him. “He had lost everything he had learned. I don’t know how. Someone … someone else must already have drained him.”

“Someone else? You think there’s some other Dimir-trained psychic vampire stalking Beleren for the secrets of the maze?”

“No, Master.”

Shadows coalesced into the silhouette of a man, a hooded figure that stepped forth. Vosk could not see the face of the man under the dark cloak, but when the figure spoke, it was Lazav’s voice.

“You have failed me, my once-promising agent, and now I must see to matters on my own. But I have devised a fitting punishment for you. I trust you will find it poetic.”

The cloaked figure of Lazav moved silently forward, like a shadow unmoored from its host. Vosk stepped instinctively backward as it approached.

“You will be … forgotten.”

Clawed hands emerged from the sleeves of the cloak, and Lazav pulled down his hood to confront Vosk face to face. Vosk saw Lazav’s face and gasped.

Mirko Vosk saw his own face grinning back at him.

It was himself, down to the last detail. Every line of his forehead, every eyelash, every curve and vein of his neck was repeated in the other’s visage.

“Shapeshifter,” Vosk breathed.

“Take him,” Lazav said.

The rasping voice, the voice he had heard giving him orders for years, sounded so wrong coming out of his own leering face. He was so struck by the incongruity, by the violating horror of seeing his own skin stolen, that he hardly noticed the figures shimmering out of the shadows.

Dimir guildmages emerged through the walls and took hold of his arms and neck, clamping some cold, enchanted metal against his skin. They blindfolded him and dragged him, his heels scraping along the uneven floor, as Lazav, snickered at him. The laugh reverberated around the chamber, scattered by acoustics and illusion magic, sounding sourceless and omnipresent and terrifying. The sound penetrated Vosk’s brain as hands pulled him, blind and helpless, into the undercity.

Where will they take you? asked Lazav’s voice, now spoken in frozen words inside of his mind, feeling even closer than it had felt before. Where will your prison be?

The guildmages pulled him through rancid puddles, down staircases, through curving and sloping tunnels for what felt like days. His captors lifted him over unknown obstacles and carried him through windy, echoing spaces. They escorted him over creaking, unstable boardwalks and dropped him in stinking water. They tied rope around him and lowered him down a pit that felt miles deep, and then dragged him through pipes and tunnels again. At all times, an uncertain number of hands retained their iron grip on him, other agents of House Dimir, just like him.

Finally Vosk’s captors used magic to push him through tunnel walls—and he knew by the duration of the sensation of passing through stone that the walls were thick. He fell against a flat, cold, stony surface, and the hands released him all at once. His bonds dissolved, and he was free to move his arms and head again. He removed the blindfold from his face but he saw nothing. The darkness around him was complete.

He felt around. The boundaries of the floor were quickly apparent, and the ceiling was low. His cell was uncertain in dimension, but featureless other than the smooth stone. Vosk’s sensitive fingers felt nothing in the stone, not a crack, not a ridge, not a single fissure of any kind. He pounded on the walls with his fists, but they were so solid that they barely registered the blows. He was in a black, featureless box in some unknown place far below the district.

The voice in his head laughed, and the sound echoed from one side of Vosk’s head to the other. “I’ve hidden you away,” it said. “And using a technique I learned from my formerly most promising agent, I’ve drained the memories of my mages who’ve brought you there. Now no one but I will ever know where Mirko Vosk is laid to rest. No one.”

Lazav’s voice in his mind said nothing else. All was quiet.

Vosk slumped against the flat, unyielding wall.

After a moment he heard a rustling in the darkness, and the sound of breathing. Someone else was in this cell with him.

“Hello?” said a man’s voice in the void. “Is someone there? My name is Kavin. Please, where am I?”

STIRRING UP THE PAST

The sacred grove of the Selesnya Conclave was new to Jace. It was a manicured temple garden, natural yet sculpted. Trees and creeping ivy were allowed to grow and thrive, but were manicured in pleasing patterns against columns of white marble. Around the edges of the garden, soldiers of Selesnya stood at attention, bowing their heads to Emmara as they passed.

Jace had never seen Emmara take on her guild persona like this. Even with days of travel on her, and the muck and injury of the undercity, her bearing was noble—not the cheap nobility of title or holdings, but originating from somewhere within her. She was a true hero of the Conclave, and all the sentries admired her as she passed through the Selesnya gates.

A group of Selesnya elders greeted them as guests of honor. They adorned Emmara with leaf garlands and bowed to her. Jace’s presence was met with politeness, but tinged with looks of suspicion. When their eyes shot to him, their faces became stern, and their tranquil smiles were strained. Perhaps they knew that Jace had once refused an offer of membership in their guild, or perhaps they blamed him for the Rakdos attack on her.

Still, one of the Selesnya elders, a wizened woman in a white robe inset with wooden elements, put a small gift into Jace’s hand. It was a carved wooden leaf, like the one Emmara had given him before. This one was different in shape, long and tapered, with a slight twist in its edge, but equally delicate and masterfully made—a precious gift of welcoming. Jace bowed to the creator.

A tall elf man, geared in Selesnya soldier dress, stepped out from the ranks and strode toward him and Emmara. He smiled broadly at Emmara, and when she saw him, the two elves seemed to fall toward each other, their movements as symmetrical as partners in a dance. When they met, they took each other’s hands and locked eyes for a significant moment. Then, in a formal gesture but with great tenderness, they touched foreheads together, and it was more intimate than a kiss.

It struck Jace that Emmara had never looked happier. And he had never felt more naïve for thinking that she actually might have had feelings for him.

Of course she had never said anything that specified that her relationship with Jace was in any way romantic. She had come to him as a friend, looking for someone who could help her and her guild. And, as a matter of personal policy, he had never plumbed her mind beyond a wisp of a surface thought. He knew she had said she was not interested in humans. He knew they were only friends. He certainly didn’t know that Emmara was with someone, but that was certainly nothing she was required to volunteer.

Finally the elf man extended his hand. “Jace, is it?”

Jace shook it dazedly, then more firmly, trying to remember the etiquette of the situation. He swallowed his mortification like a stone.

Emmara saw his face. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Captain Calomir, this is my friend Jace Beleren.” Her eyes were trying to apologize to him, but her cheeks were flush with joy. “We’ve been on a bit of an adventure together.”

Jace tried hard not to begin the process of finding flaw with the man. Involuntarily he imagined the man’s skin being cold, cold as a lizard’s scales, as cold as the vampire’s had been—but that was nonsense. Jace felt a dark twinge of intuition about Calomir, a morbid desire to find what lay behind this rival, but that was, after all, what jealousy felt like.

“I’m sorry, Calomir, she didn’t mention you,” he heard himself say. That was childish, he thought. But he took a momentary, mean pleasure in saying it.

Calomir didn’t bite. “Thank you for bringing her back to me,” he said. “But aren’t you the mind mage? Seems like something that’d be hard to miss for someone who can read minds.”

“My magic doesn’t work like that,” Jace mumbled. But that was probably how others thought of him: as an invader of minds, someone who probed into the secrets of everyone he met. It was a wonder Emmara even considered him a friend, if she believed that of him. She had wanted him to join the Selesnya guild—she likely saw him more as a weapon than a friend, a dangerous asset to secure within her own organization rather than letting it fall into the hands of the enemy.

Jace was trying not to descend into petulance, but he was failing, and he didn’t much care. He felt detached, as if he had unbuckled himself from this conversation and was now floating free.

“Are you hurt?” Calomir asked.

“I’m fine,” said Emmara brightly. “I wish everyone would stop asking me that.”

“The Rakdos didn’t count on her, did they, my friend?” Calomir elbowed Jace’s arm. The gesture felt unusually familiar for an elvish captain.

“It wasn’t the Rakdos,” Jace said. “They were set up by the Dimir. Isn’t that right, Emmara?”

Emmara nodded carefully. “We were intercepted by a Dimir agent. A vampire, sent to abduct us. He seemed particularly interested in Jace.”

“What possible value could he serve to the Dimir?” asked Calomir. “No offense meant, of course.”

“Jace was researching something of deep importance, something connected to the history of the guilds,” said Emmara.

“Oh? What is so important?”

“I don’t remember,” Jace said miserably.

Calomir didn’t even have the decency to laugh and get the humiliation over with.

“Jace has purged the research from his mind,” said Emmara.

“Ah, an empty vault,” Calomir said, and clucked with polite disappointment.

Jace felt another twinge of mistrust. He had heard “empty vault” somewhere before.

“A pity you don’t recall,” Calomir went on. “Is that common, for a mind mage to forget something so easily? No matter. In a world without a Guildpact, speculation is worth nothing. This is a time of war, and we must focus on defending ourselves from the other guilds.”

Emmara’s eyebrows rose. “It’s a time to prevent war. Our cause is to avert a guild conflict.”

“You underestimate the esteem this guild has for you, Emmara,” said Calomir. “Your abduction has been felt deeply in the Conclave. Many feel that this incident cannot go unpunished. And if the Dimir may be involved as well, on top of the actions of the Izzet, we would be fools not to be vigilant. But we can talk about that with Trostani. The guildmaster will be anxious to see you.”

The dryads of Trostani towered over Jace. They were unity incarnate, a being melded from three individuals. Their graceful woven shape reminded him of the delicate wooden leaf the Selesnya woman had given to him at the gates, organic patterns interlaced into a single whole. He wondered whether the woodshaping magic that had fashioned the leaf artifact was also responsible for Trostani’s composite form.

“Emmara,” said Trostani. “We are relieved you are safe.”

“Trostani,” said Emmara, “may I present Jace Beleren.”

Jace gave an awkward bow.

The three dryads smiled down at him. “We are glad you’ve delivered our friend Emmara back to us, Jace.” They alternated speaking one after another, rotating between them to complete their sentences. “We believe in the good of the whole over the needs of the individual—no single person is more special than any other. But as you know, Emmara is unique, and very important to us.”

“I do know that,” Jace said.

“Thank you, Trostani,” said Emmara.

“Which is why we trusted her unreservedly when she left on her mission to seek you out,” said Trostani. “I trust endangering her was ultimately worth it?”

“He’d tell you all about it, but he forgot it all,” chuckled Calomir.

“Jace has lost some memories that might have been useful to us,” said Emmara.

“What was it all for, then?” Trostani asked.

“Indeed,” said Calomir. “Is that common, for a mind mage to forget so easily?”

Jace’s embarrassment was a paper-thin distance from physical pain. He didn’t look Calomir in the eyes, for fear that he would be moved to put his knuckles in them.

“Jace’s talents can still be of value,” said Emmara quietly.

“I’m sure they can,” said Calomir. “I’m sure his talents can tell us that the Izzet are undertaking a secret project, and that the Rakdos are openly hostile, and that the Azorius fear unrest as tempers flare among the guilds. But then, we already knew all of that, didn’t we, my friends?”

“There was more,” said Emmara. “But he had his research destroyed.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been that important, then.” Calomir smirked. He squeezed Emmara’s hand. “But if you’ll excuse me, some of us are men of action, not thoughts. The Rakdos are on the move, and my talents are needed. Guildmaster Trostani.” He bowed.

The Trostani triad bowed their heads slightly. “Make our enemies pay,” they said.

Calomir turned to Jace and shook his hand again. “Sir. It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope you recover your memory. I truly do.”

Jace couldn’t help it. As Calomir shook his hand, Jace conjured a quick spell to skim the elf’s mind. He wanted to find something wrong with the man, something to validate Jace’s suspicious gut feelings.

To his surprise, Jace’s spell failed. It was like an arrow bouncing off the walls of an impregnable fortress. His mind magic didn’t even penetrate into the elf’s surface thoughts.

Jace squeezed the man’s hand and pulled him close, chest to chest, looking straight into his eyes. He tried the mind magic again. But there was nothing. The elf’s mind was unreadable, invisible to Jace’s inner senses, a dark space. Jace could not even perceive a stray thought.

Calomir’s lips were a slender line, curving up slightly at the edges.

Only a few beings had ever been able to keep Jace out this completely, and they were beings of immense power. An unreadable mind didn’t happen by accident—it was magic sought out by those who had secrets to hide.

“What are you?” asked Jace.

“Jace,” said Emmara.

Calomir arched an amused eyebrow.

“I can’t read him,” Jace said. “I’m getting nothing from his mind. Why can’t I read him?”

Emmara was incredulous. “Jace, you are a guest here. Stop this at once. I’ve known Calomir for decades, and you’re making an ass of yourself.”

Jace released his grip with Calomir, but didn’t take his eyes off of him. “He is not who he says he is.”

“Jace,” snapped Emmara. “You are as wrong as you’ve ever been.”

“Come, my friend,” Calomir said to him. “You’ve outstayed your welcome. I’ll escort you to the guildgate.”

A thought occurred to Jace like a lightning bolt. “Don’t attack the Rakdos,” he said to Trostani. “Don’t. That’s what they want.”

Trostani’s voices alternated as they condemned Jace. “If you were part of the Selesnya, I might take your advice to guide our policy. As it is, Captain Calomir has been a loyal warrior and advisor to me for years.”

That was it. They were going to attack the Rakdos, at Calomir’s recommendation. This man with the impenetrable mind had the ear of the Selesnya guildmaster, and a relationship with Emmara. Jace could feel something click, but couldn’t see the whole picture—if only he still had those memories. He only knew that Emmara was in the center of a mass of tentacles, and they were tightening their grasp on her.

“I think you’re in danger here,” Jace said. “Come with me.”

“No, Jace,” said Emmara. “My guild needs me. Of course I’m staying here.”

Calomir smiled and shook his head, looking more amused than indignant.

Trostani’s treelike body straightened, and all three of the dryads crossed their arms. “Captain Calomir’s service to the Conclave began long before you were born, human. We will not abide this insult to our guild, nor tolerate your presence in our grove. You may leave the way you came.”

Jace looked to Emmara, but her face was sharp as a blade, severing the threads between them. He reached into his cloak. “Take this,” he said, pressing the carved Selesnya leaf into her hands. “Just in case. In case you need me.”

He didn’t even know if the trinket would do anything. Emmara just looked at him, the leaf in her hands, speechless.

“Let’s go, human,” said Calomir, taking Jace’s arm.

The site was torched to the ground. Ral Zarek pushed over a charred piece of retaining wall with his foot, and it crumbled to dust. The brick corners of the building still stood, like a strange quartet of parentheses around the site, but everything else had burned or collapsed.

If the Great Firemind wanted more information on this mystery man, he was going to be disappointed.

The Izzet goblin Skreeg scratched his head, leaving streaks of ash on his cheek. “Maybe this is the wrong place?” he asked hopefully.

“The neighbors seemed convinced,” said Ral. “This is where our man spent his time.”

“The fire might not have destroyed everything,” said Skreeg. “We could check under the ash, see if anything survived.”

“The Azorius and the Boros have already been over this site looking for clues, too. There’ll be nothing left.”

“Maybe there’s something they missed,” said Skreeg.

Skreeg’s optimism chafed him. But the only alternative Ral could think of was to end his search and return to Niv-Mizzet empty-handed. “I guess we try. We’re looking for written materials: research papers, maps, notes.”

Skreeg shook his fist excitedly. He activated his mizzium gauntlet and dived into a nearby pile of ash to root around for treasures. Ral strolled among the ash piles and broken, charred beams. The floorboards had burned in places, revealing a shallow cellar space under the main floor. Ral leaned down and thrust his hand into the dark gap, letting arcs of lightning play between his fingers to light the space. But there was still nothing. Whoever had destroyed this place had been brutally thorough.

Skreeg came up for air, coughing puffs of ash out of his nose and mouth, squinting through watery eyes. “I’ve cast a battery of detection spells. There is no writing, carving, or runic pattern of any known idiom within the boundaries of this sanctum. It’s all burned away.”

Ral couldn’t face Niv-Mizzet with no leads. Even more than that, he couldn’t admit that this mage Beleren had outwitted him. He touched the tips of his fingers together thoughtfully, creating a web of electric sparks. “It’s all burned away,” he said. He watched the tiny curls of lightning scatter around his hands. “Burned away, yes. It’s burned. But it’s all still here.” He clapped his hands together, dissipating the lightning. “Skreeg. Levitate the ash.”

Skreeg’s head cocked to the side. His eyes scanned around the wreckage. “Levitate it, sir?”

“Yes. Hurry up. Levitate it. All of it.” Ral knew the goblin’s hesitation wouldn’t last.

“Normally that kind of venture would require more than just one goblin, sir—”

“Just do it!”

“Yes, sir!”

Skreeg took a deep breath, summoned up power, and cast his gravity-altering spell. Ash and charred wood hovered into the air, only in thin wisps at first, then in thick clouds. The goblin’s gauntlet lit up with power, and his small hands shook with effort. A sheen of sweat appeared on his brow. Debris floated up all around the goblin, forming a storm of confused wreckage that hovered above the crater that had been the sanctum. Finally, Skreeg floated up into the debris cloud himself, cartwheeling in the air while sustaining the spell. Ral stood at the edge of the cavity that held the ruins, beholding the cloud of debris before him.

“Now, drop out everything that is stone or brick,” said Ral.

“Sir?”

“You heard me. We won’t need anything that was originally stone or brick. Leave the ashes.”

As Skreeg swam through the cloud, quivering with strain, he made alterations to his gauntlet. The mass of debris wobbled, and then some of the wreckage floated down into the pit, separating from the finer particles of ash.

“Aha!” squealed the goblin. “Sir, I think I did it!”

“Now get rid of glass or thicker pieces of wood,” said Ral, stroking his chin.

Skreeg whimpered briefly. “Of course, sir.” He altered his spell once again, and other fragments of the cloud filtered out. All that remained were fine flakes of ash, swimming and rolling on air currents.

Ral wove a matrix of tiny strands of electricity between his palms, stretching and expanding them into ever-finer threads, forming a gauzy mesh of lightning. “Now bring the ash close together. And get out of the way.”

Skreeg was moaning with the complexity of the spell. The ash cloud condensed into a flat sheet, several feet on a side, and Skreeg’s floating body rolled to one side. Ral lashed out at the sheet of ash with strands of electricity. Electricity zigzagged throughout the cloud, bounding from particle to particle like a dense thunderstorm.

“I’m exploring the natural resonances of the materials,” said Ral. “Keep floating.”

Ral sent another web of delicate lightning through the ashes. He studied how the tiny bolts leaped from fragment to fragment, connecting similar substances.

“Ow!” yelped Skreeg as one arc of electricity crackled through him. The floating ashes shuddered as the goblin shook and gritted his teeth with the effort of his spell.

Ral altered a control on his mizzium gauntlet, gathered a strong swell of mana, and electrocuted the floating debris once more. This time his lightning not only danced between the specks of burned materials, but drew a selected collection of them together into a stable, fused lattice. It lingered there, hovering before him, a crackling pattern of electric threads.

“All right, Skreeg. Now drop everything but this.”

Skreeg exhaled in relief, and crashed through the burned floorboards and into the cellar. The ash floated down after him. The goblin and various pieces of debris clunked and clattered in the pit below Ral’s feet.

Ral had what he needed. “Routes,” he said, scrutinizing the puzzle still assembling itself in the air before him. The connected fragments of ash reunited in his electric field, forming readable passages of notes. “Beleren had discovered a series of routes through the maze. They were encoded, but viable. He had almost solved it. Skreeg, where are you?”

A pair of small hands appeared at the edge of the pit. The goblin pulled himself up, and flopped onto the ground by Ral’s feet, huffing and coughing. “Can we find Beleren now, sir?”

Ral grinned. “You know, Skreeg, I don’t think we need Beleren anymore.”

We don’t even need Niv-Mizzet anymore, he thought.

AID FROM AN ENEMY

Jace left the Selesnya grove feeling like a puzzle with its pieces scattered. He pulled his hood up over his head and his cloak around his arms, and stalked off into the metropolis, letting the endless buildings and crowds of pedestrian traffic swallow him.

He was a planeswalker who was once involved in a planar plot—but now that he assessed his circumstances, he had successfully cut himself off from everything about this place. Knowledge of Ravnica’s woes had been excised from his mind. His mage sanctum was ruined. His compatriot Kavin had run off, presumably never wanting to see him again. And Emmara was back with her guild, back in the arms of someone important to her. The exit was open to him, hanging wide like the gates of an abandoned estate. This plane didn’t need him. He was not required here. He could simply step through the veil of reality separating this world from the next, and leave Ravnica behind.

But of course, he couldn’t be sure of that. Certainty was one of the many things that had fallen into the dark hole in his mind. Whatever the guilds were plotting—whatever the Izzet had discovered—whatever the Dimir wanted with Emmara and the knowledge inside his head—it was all gone. And his sense that Emmara was in danger remained. He had thrown open the gate out of Ravnica himself, and had practically put down a fine carpet to ensure total comfort for his departure, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to take the final step and go.

Something was missing. Something wasn’t quite as tidy as it seemed, and it nagged at his mind like an itch inside his skull. It didn’t sit right with him that everything had played out this way.

I need those memories back, he thought.

A patrol of Boros legionnaires turned the corner toward him, even-shouldered and marching in smart precision. By reflex he hid around the other side of a cart of market goods, eyeing the soldiers through the gaps in the rigging, letting them pass by. If he was their target, they didn’t seem to notice him. He wasn’t even sure who was looking for him now, but his impulse was to hide from guild authority figures, and he trusted his impulses.

Jace paused at the edge of a huge thoroughfare, the so-called Transguild Promenade, a pedestrian walkway that passed between many of the guild-held territories. As beings of all races and shapes and guilds passed by him—a Simic biomancer holding the leash of a ten-legged crablike monstrosity, a Golgari trader with a handcart of treasures found in the undercity, an Orzhov aristocrat with an entourage of dutiful thrull servants—he strained to devise some way to recover what he had lost. The hole in his memory was real, to the degree that any absence could be real, and thanks to the fissure he had no way of remembering what he had actually done with his memories during the excision spell.

The promenade branched into multiple directions, some of the roads winding their way toward various guild territories, and others leading out of the Tenth District entirely. He found himself stopping in the middle of the street, letting the pedestrian traffic flow around him.

Jace had created a knotted riddle for himself. The question consisted of the excruciating sense that he had given away the answer. He wracked his brain, trying to think of who might have a shred of a clue about that night at the Cobblestand Inn, and trying to stifle the feeling that if he failed, Emmara would die.

Exava swung her swords in figure eights, slicing through the air with unbridled glee as the towers of the district streamed past her. The Rakdos witch stood atop a war platform, held aloft by four muscular, masked minions, who in turn were surrounded by a massive horde of Rakdos cultists that filled the street from shop front to shop front. A wave of Rakdos flowed through the thoroughfare from Rakdos territory, sending up a chaotic clamor that could be heard for miles. Screams and impish laughter mingled with the clatter of the bone drummers and the hissing of riot demons.

Exava was smiling so hard that blood trickled from between her clenched teeth and down the sides of her mouth. She liked the feeling, so she smiled harder. Exava had a wisp of a plan to find the insolent mind mage; he was the type who would concern himself with the lives of innocents. A soft touch, like the Selesnya elf. She would only have to kick up some chaos, and he would, in time, reveal himself.

She looked down below her at the glorious bedlam she had created. She rode the frenzy and let the riot take her where it wanted. Every once in a while she would give the horde a nudge, guiding the riot toward population centers and guild landmarks. She only needed to lean on her platform, applying her weight in the direction she desired. The man-minions below her would feel the shift in the weight of the platform, and they would compensate, drifting in the direction she leaned. She wondered if her muscle could even see. The spiked leather masks they wore, like all Rakdos gear in general, were designed more for the impact on the viewer than for the comfort of the wearer. No matter. She would see for them.

They approached an Azorius guard station and checkpoint. An archway of elegant white marble stretched across the road, with an intricate triangular guild symbol of the Azorius at its apex. A band of Azorius lawmages raised their swords to the oncoming Rakdos horde, chanting the minutiae of legal protocol as if it were scripture.

“In accordance with public conduct code, section four-two-one, subsection D,” droned one of the officials, “you are requested to reverse your trespass and proceed to the nearest registered guild boundary.”

“Any incursion beyond this point shall be considered warrant for the request of a writ of barred action,” recited another.

A third lawmage just stammered the same phrase over and over. “Entry hereby denied. Entry hereby denied.”

When the snarling Rakdos rioters reached the archway, they smashed through the lawmages like a bull through a curtain. The Azorius officials’ shining swords were more reference material than weapon, their blades etched with runes of law. Some of the lawmages gave way, and Exava laughed and made rude faces at them, knowing they couldn’t stop her horde without days or weeks of intricate bureaucracy.

The rioters proceeded around a turn. The horde flipped horse carts, smashed shop windows, and trampled pedestrians. Exava grinned with all her teeth, stretching the stitches at the edges of her mouth. As the throng of Rakdos cultists marched, she began to chant, and the cultists chanted with her.

Jace leaned against Lavinia’s door frame like a book propped up diagonally. A globe of lamplight, identical to the staid and precise globes throughout the towers of New Prahv, lit only half his features. The rest of his face was still hidden under the hood of his cloak. Between them was Lavinia’s desk, full of tomes, architectural charts, ancient maps—evidence of deep study in the Azorius archives.

“Didn’t expect you,” said Lavinia.

“You should be asking yourself why I would come,” said Jace.

“Would you like some tea? I could send for the hussars. My captain of the New Prahv guard brews a mean pot.”

“You do, and I vanish. I leave and never come back. And your case never goes anywhere.”

“Until I track you down.”

“Believe me. Where I can go, you’ll never be able to follow.”

Lavinia sat back in her chair and sighed. “Well, my ‘case’ is already nowhere. You’ve been handed off to the Boros, did you know that? The Boros, whose idea of a proper investigation these days is barging into random addresses with a fireball spell. But I’m not even sure you’re such a hot property anymore.”

“I’m not. Before I had my hands on something of value, something dangerous—you would have been right to track me down. But I’ve lost it. And I need to get it back.”

“And you thought you’d break into the Azorius guildhall, and ask your arresting officer? That was your plan to get yourself some help on that score? You’re not a very good criminal, are you?”

“You’re after the truth. I think you know I can be of help in finding it.”

“You know what’s sad? It’s that part of me believes you. But I don’t help those who think they’re above the law.”

“I’m not trying to escape justice. I’m using everything in my power to expedite it. You want to solve the case of the kidnapped Selesnya woman? I can tell you which guild is responsible for the abduction.”

“The Rakdos. We already know that.”

“Go deeper.”

“We know Exava was involved. The demon’s most trusted witch.”

“Deeper.”

Lavinia paused. “You think someone put her up to it? Another guild?”

“Think. Who benefits from guild infighting? Who wants to rouse the ranks of the Selesnya, and start a riot with the Rakdos, so that the public sees nothing of their own schemes?”

“The Izzet? We know they’re up to something.”

“But they’re being anything but subtle about it. In fact, the Izzet helping the cause. Helping draw attention away.”

Lavinia’s eyes glazed over. “House Dimir.”

“After setting up Emmara’s kidnapping, a Dimir agent attacked me for something I no longer have. And I need to recover it as soon as possible.”

Lavinia looked up at him. Jace gave her an opportunity to speak, but she said nothing.

“Now’s when you ask, ‘What did you lose?’ ” Jace said. “And I explain the strange situation I’m in.”

A smile of realization spread across Lavinia’s face. “Don’t tell me. You lost your memories.”

“How did you know?”

“And the Dimir were after them? That is a predicament you’ve got yourself into. And now you don’t even know what it is you’ve lost.”

“That’s about the sum of it. Your investigation told you all this?”

“Unfortunately, no. Kavin did.”

“Kavin came to you? When?”

“He gave me something.” Lavinia produced a sheaf of scribbled notes, but she hid them against her chest. “He managed to save some information as you were destroying his memories.”

“May I see that?”

“Sorry. It’s evidence in your case, I’m afraid.”

“Officer Lavinia. Unless I recover what I’ve lost, people will die. Including, I think, Emmara Tandris.”

“As I remind you, you’re a suspect in a crime. Including the abduction of Emmara Tandris. Now it sounds like you’re threatening her.”

Jace took a deep breath. “I seek the same thing you do, Officer Lavinia. We should be on the same side.” Jace nodded at the notes spread out across Lavinia’s desk. “You’ve been doing research of your own. These are from your archives, aren’t they? Can you at least let me in on what you’ve found?”

“Please, make a move for them. Or use your mind tricks—go ahead. You’ll see what kind of magic an Azorius official has in her own office.”

“No one’s forcing. I know your guild’s expertise with wards and safeguards. All I’m doing is asking a favor, and then I’ll be on my way.”

“No, you’re asking me to help you spread lies. I studied the archives. All I found was dusty old architectural plans. Some patterns, sure, if you’re looking for them. But it’s all just a matter of coincidence, unless you’re conspiracy-minded—or are looking to take advantage of those who are. It’s circular logic. You’re using these secrets to convince people to believe in secrets. It’s all for show.”

“And yet I ripped out my own memories to keep safe such secrets.”

“A trick—and a cruel one, when it came to Kavin. I’ve seen your kind before, Beleren. I’ve seen a hundred guild-hating demagogues like you. You use people. You lure them in with promises and lies, and then when they’re no longer useful to you, you dispense with them.”

“We thought it would be safer if he didn’t know.”

“Did you both think that, or just you? But it’s not just him. You’re a danger to this entire district and all the people in it. You sent that two-headed Gruul brute on that wild crusade—do you know how many people he’s injured? How many he’s killed?”

“Ruric Thar?” Jace had been in contact with the Gruul ogre when he was at the Cobblestand. And it was mind-to-mind contact. The ogre could have information related to his lost memories. It was a thin lead.

“He and his Gruul thugs have visited the guildgate of every guild multiple times,” said Lavinia. “Smashed through platoons of guards, shrugging off magic designed especially to stop him. My own Azorius have lost six to his rampage. And he keeps coming back for more. Trails of bodies crisscrossing the district. And it’s ever since you hired him, Beleren.”

“Do you have information on his whereabouts?”

Lavinia sighed. “We’ve lost track of him. He could be anywhere. But as I said, he’s been hitting all the guildgates.” She turned back to the shelf behind her desk and consulted her station book, then whirled back to her desk. “We might know more by tomorrow. I—”

But when she turned back, Jace had made himself gone.

Ral Zarek rode in the back of an enclosed vehicle of mizzium metal, propelled by a combination of elemental energies and one strong, harnessed cyclops. He and his team of Izzet mages, including Skreeg the goblin, had been crisscrossing the Tenth District for days, following the routes they had discovered from Beleren’s sanctum. The inside of the Izzet jalopy was covered with maps of the district, sheets of Ral’s own notes, and the stink of days of travel.

No single solution suggested itself. Beleren’s research had only narrowed down the potential paths to a dozen or so orderings of the guildgates, and Ral’s own study of latent threads of mana had narrowed it down to three paths. “What’s stopping us from trying them all?” he had asked himself. Maybe the fact that the gates were miles apart, in some of the most dangerous areas of the district, many of them actively guarded by horrifying monsters and traps. Maybe that was what was stopping them.

The vehicle came to a halt at the Forum of Azor, a wide, circular public space near the center of the Tenth. According to legend it was established by Azor, the founder of the Azorius Senate, as neutral ground where the guilds could meet and discuss matters of law. A set of kiosks representing each guild encircled a central hub. Guild representatives manned the kiosks, providing information and broadcasting recruitment slogans to unguilded passersby.

Ral and Skreeg got out of their vehicle and looked around the Forum.

“Where does it lead next?” asked Ral.

Skreeg touched a dial on his gauntlet. The gauntlet exploded, blasting the goblin’s arms and face with a fine shrapnel of mizzium metal. He blinked and coughed a puff of smoke. “According to my readings, it ends here,” he croaked.

“What?” said Ral. “This is it? This is the end of the maze?”

“Conclusive,” said Skreeg, knocking the side of his head. Pieces of brassy metal fell from his large ear. “There’s a trove of incredible power here. The braids of mana terminate at the hub of the Forum.”

Ral felt nothing—nothing like the greatness he expected to find. “So, why aren’t I surging with previously untapped mystical power? Why hasn’t great knowledge opened itself up to me? Why aren’t I emperor of Ravnica?”

“Is that what should happen?” asked Skreeg.

“We followed the route!”

“We followed a route.”

“No,” said Ral. “This was the final combination, the third of the three potential paths. One of them should have been the correct route. We should have solved it.”

Skreeg put his hand out. “Well then, congratulations on an experiment well performed!”

Ral scoffed. “We’re not done,” he said “There’s more to this than what we’ve found.”

“Will we be reporting this result to the Firemind, then?” Skreeg asked.

Ral looked at the goblin’s face, all explosion-crisp and cheerful. He scanned around the Forum of Azor, resenting the civilians who milled about the space, and wanting badly to absorb the potential he knew must be lurking here.

When Emmara arrived at home, two centaurs loyal to the Selesnya were posted at her door. A squad of archers patrolled the rooftop garden of her building. It was a waste of effort, she thought. Since Trostani had taken an interest in her and she had begun doing more work for the guild, she barely lived there anymore.

She tried the door, but it was locked. “What’s this?” she asked one of the centaur guardians.

“I can open that for you, ma’am,” said the centaur, producing a set of keys and unlocking the door. “Captain Calomir commanded that all dignitaries of the guild be under constant protection.”

“I’m not even in there.”

“The captain is concerned about security, ma’am.”

“Indeed I am.” Calomir came from around the other side of the house, and caught up to her at the door. He wore his usual charming grin as well as he wore that soldier’s uniform. He held the door open for her. “A moment, Miss Tandris?”

“What’s all this? This was your idea?”

Emmara stepped in, and Calomir closed the door behind them. The house’s familiar smells of wood and herbs were almost covered by the smell of Calomir’s oiled boots and steel sword. She could hear the shuffling of footsteps of the Selesnya sentries on the roof.

“Would you believe it’s Trostani’s?”

Emmara wasn’t sure she did believe him. “Soldiers on my house, Calomir. What are we becoming? It’s giving the guild the wrong message. I’ve only lived here for a short time, and now I’m singled out, treated differently from the rest of the Conclave. Treated like a prisoner.”

“We just want to keep you safe.” He leaned against Emmara’s kitchen table, a solid piece of oak that had been woodshaped by Selesnya mages. “And I think a strong Selesnya army sends a good message.”

“Since when? I don’t like this belligerent streak in you.”

“Emmara, you were taken. You, a Selesnya dignitary, were kidnapped by the Rakdos. We can’t do nothing.”

“Those warriors had no agenda. They were drunk on their obsession with their demon—they would have done anything their superiors told them. And as Jace said, I think the Dimir were behind it somehow.”

Calomir’s condescending smirk irritated her. It was the one he gave before he broke bad news to her. He took her hand in his and patted it. “My dear, you’re a true force for peace. But the world is changing. The Izzet have expanded their experimentation. There have even been squads of Izzet mages threatening our sacred guildgate. The Orzhov have been buying spies and mercenaries from the outer districts. The Simic have been massing an army of their twisted hybrid monsters. A squad of Gruul warriors has been crisscrossing the district, ignoring guild borders. Tensions are high.”

“Which is exactly why we have to reach out to the other guilds—now, before this hysteria goes too far. We have to learn to understand them. You used to say that.”

Calomir released her hand. “So you sought out him.”

“Jace? Yes. My friend. Are we actually going to fight about this?”

“He’s a strange one, that’s all. He’s an unguilded mind mage. Isn’t that dangerous?”

“He has unique gifts, Calomir. He can see through all the bickering, the masks, the walls we put up between our guilds. He can unify us. We came to this guild because we believe in unity, didn’t we? I still believe in that, and I believe in his potential. But I’m starting to believe you don’t believe in mine.”

Calomir snorted. “Do you actually believe the nonsense he was saying? He all but accused me of treason to my own guild.”

Calomir shook his head. “I’m concerned for your safety. Listen, Trostani is waiting for me. I just want to know one thing about this Jace. You sought him out to help our cause. So how much does he know about the … conflict between the guilds? The Izzet’s secret project?”

Emmara sighed. “Well, he knows … he knows nothing, now. He got deeply into it, apparently, but then he took himself out again. He used magic to destroy his own memories about it. That’s what he was doing when the Rakdos attacked us.”

“And he hasn’t been able to learn anything more since? He doesn’t have any other sources of information?”

“Not that I know of. He destroyed all his research. I don’t think he can help us now.”

Calomir nodded. “Stay here. Get some rest. You’ve been through a lot.” He leaned in to kiss her.

She gave him a peck on the lips, and watched him leave between the guards flanking her door.

The Gruul Clans were usually found huddled in the cracks of civilization. They were a guild with a conspicuous and time-whittled chip on its shoulder, seething from their eviction from a long-extinct wilderness, perennially regarded as brutes and uncivilized throwbacks by the other guilds. The Gruul had come under control on Ravnica long ago, cowed by rules and bounded by fences, just as nature had been. But their memories were long and resilient, and a fire raged in their hearts.

Jace caught up with Ruric Thar and a gang of his Gruul cohorts near the Orzhov guildgate. They were camped in a patch of thicket in a city park in view of Orzhov territory, seemingly about to go on the warpath.

Jace hadn’t seen Ruric Thar lead a war party like this; in fact, Jace had never seen, or for that matter smelled, a Gruul war party at all. Their armor was made from animal hides and bones, and their weaponry was heavy pieces of scavenged city rubbish. Their skin was alive with tattoos, etched with a combination of magic, ink, and, Jace supposed, a considerable amount of pain. Each of them was a hulk of muscle, and Ruric Thar was the largest and mightiest of them all.

Jace figured the direct route was best, and approached the war party. “Hail, Ruric.”

Ruric Thar and the Gruul war party turned to him.

“He’s Ruric,” said the leftmost of the ogre’s two heads, tipping toward the right. “I’m Thar.”

So they used different names for their two heads. Jace thought of them as brothers, in a way, but he supposed that wasn’t accurate. They were the same being from the necks down.

“Both of you, then,” said Jace. “I come to ask for your help. Since you worked for me, you’ve been traveling around the district in a certain way. Following a route. Visiting gates.”

“How you know this?” asked Ruric.

“Are you following a pattern of some kind? Some new information that you might have picked up at our last meeting? I think I may have left something in your mind, and I need it back.”

Thar chuckled, a sound that echoed in the ogre’s chest like a barrel. “Can’t, little mage. Ours now.”

“I’m afraid I need it, and I’m afraid it has to be now. It’s vitally important.”

“Answer’s no,” said Ruric, waving the arm that terminated in a large axe. “Now go. We have crook-priests to smash.”

“I’ll do whatever you want,” said Jace.

The Gruul warriors looked at each other, as did the Ruric head and the Thar head.

“All right, then,” said Thar. “You want it, you must take it. Take out your sword.”

Jace spread his palms. “I—what? I have no sword.”

Ruric and Thar nodded understandingly. “Axe, then.”

“What I mean is, I don’t carry weapons.”

“You must have weapon. You are challenger. Challenger has the honor of first hit. Oszika, give him your sword.”

“Isn’t there another way to do this?”

Ruric shook his head. “This is Gruul way.”

A tall female troll presented Jace with the hilt of an enormous, wide-bladed sword. Jace took it, recoiling from the weight of it. He tried to heft the tip of it, and barely managed to pull up the point.

“Swing it,” said Thar.

Jace knew he was far beyond the bounds of his expertise, but he gave the sword a test swing. It was so heavy that he had to use gravity to swing the end of it around, which gave it so much momentum that it nearly spun him around. It took all his body weight to absorb the trajectory of the sword and end his swing.

Ruric spat on the ground in disgust. The Gruul warriors laughed.

“While I’m flattered you want to duel,” said Jace, “I am not going to strike you. I only need a moment to plumb your mind, and I can be on my way.”

The war party laughed again. “Just try it!” one of the warriors shouted.

Thar had the left hand on his chin. “You do spells.”

“Yes,” said Jace. “Spells. Just one spell to scan you two, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Then spells will have to do.” Ruric Thar took the sword back and handed it back to its owner. He squared up opposite Jace and braced for impact. He was empty-handed, but not unarmed: one of his forearms ended at the elbow, and had been fitted with a huge axe.

“As we said, first hit goes to you,” Ruric said. “No death magic, no summoned creatures, no rotting spell. Fire, lightning okay. Hit us.”

This is barbaric, Jace thought. He wasn’t going to attack this ogre with magic, not while he just stood there. That would only invite a counterattack, and would just start a fight, which Jace suspected was exactly what the Gruul ogre wanted. Jace would be agreeing to a fight he couldn’t win. He just wanted to explain himself, but it didn’t look as though things were heading toward a diplomatic resolution.

Plus, there was an even more pressing problem. “I don’t typically use spells that … hit people,” he said.

“Ah,” said Thar, nodding. “Grow claws, slash my face?”

“No, I can’t do that, either.”

“Call down blast of searing light?”

“No.”

“Lift and hurl heavy boulders at great speed?”

“No.”

“Unleash flurry of jagged blades?”

“No …”

“Turn yourself into giant? Shred me with serrated vines and leaves? Sonic scream of rage? What?”

“Listen, Ruric, Thar. I’m not a warrior. I’m not a battlemage. I can’t do any of those things.”

This set the warriors to murmuring.

“What’s your magic do?” asked Ruric, finally.

“You already know that. I’m a mind mage. I alter the mind.”

Ruric and Thar laughed heartily. “A wizard of daydreams. Yes. So you are. So, no hitting. No hitting, no duel. No duel, no prize.”

Jace had no recourse. He had to have what was in the ogre’s mind. If Ruric Thar wanted a blast of Jace’s magic, he would have it. “All right. I will try.”

The ogre nodded doubly, and once again positioned himself to absorb an impact, the faintest smile on both the ogre’s faces. Jace summoned up all his mental strength, and formed his mind into a projectile, firing a blast of mental force at Ruric and Thar simultaneously, hoping to knock the Gruul warrior down in one psychic blow.

The backlash was immediate and blindingly painful. The force he sent at both of the ogre’s minds reflected back on him, and he was hit with the full brunt of his own spell. It knocked him down with a nauseating wave of crushing agony, and he lay there, trying to hold the sides of his head in. The Gruul warriors apparently thought that was the funniest thing they had seen all day.

Savage echoes of pain reverberated through Jace’s skull. It didn’t feel like a protective enchantment or some other kind of reflective spell that had sent back his psychic blast—the ogre hadn’t had to react at all. Ruric Thar’s very nature had rejected the magic somehow.

“Was that your hit?” asked Thar.

“We’ll give you another try if you want,” said Ruric.

“Just a minute,” muttered Jace. “Let me finish throbbing.”

The ogre had something in his nature that absorbed magic and sent it back at its caster, or focused it. It explained why the ogre had been able to smash his way through a series of guild-controlled gates almost singlehandedly. Jace tried to imagine legions of guildmages trying to slow down the rampaging ogre. They probably ended up with more than bad headaches.

When he felt like he wasn’t seeing four heads instead of two, Jace stood and brushed off his cloak. “I can’t beat you with mind magic,” he said slowly, his cranium still pounding. “But I still need what’s in your mind.”

“Have to beat us somehow,” said Ruric.

“Or we can just kill you,” offered Thar.

“Neither of you is ‘the nice head,’ I take it,” said Jace. “There’s nothing I can offer you? Some way to convince you to let me poke around in there?”

“Fight or die, mage. Decide.”

CHANGES OF HEART

Emmara approached the sacred grove where Calomir had an audience with their guildmaster, Trostani. She told herself she wasn’t sneaking up on them—she simply hadn’t announced herself, and her gait was naturally quiet. She couldn’t bend minds or wrap herself in illusions as Jace could, but she had an elf’s subtle step and a good read of body language, and she knew she was not detected. And it wasn’t her intention to eavesdrop, exactly. She would stride into the grove without hiding, as any other audience with Trostani. But she put the slightest delay in her step, because she had the sense that Calomir did not share her desire for peace and unity between the guilds, and wanted to hear how their discussion was going, and how he was advising their guild leader.

It was worse than she feared.

“I recommend we send all available ranks of soldiers, at least thirty cavalry, and a contingent of woodshapers and guildmages,” Calomir was saying. “And if we can call some greater elementals, we should do that too.”

“You believe that that is the proper reaction?” asked the three dryads of Trostani. “Ever since the end of the Guildpact, we have tried to achieve a peace with the Rakdos, and our response to this incident may well determine our relationship for years to come.”

“Exactly. We have tried to achieve a peace. And how well has it worked? Our response to this incident is exactly what is at issue. We must strike back, to prove our mettle to the other guilds. We must demonstrate that we are not willing to sit by while our dignitaries suffer brazen abductions in the middle of the historic Tenth District.”

Emmara stepped into the grove. “Or we can send a dignitary out to meet them,” she said. Calomir and Trostani turned to her. “We send the very same abductee, to show them how deep our commitment to peace goes, and to impress upon this district that the Conclave represents allegiance to unity. We send a symbol of our goodwill. We send me.”

“That’s foolish and you know it,” said Calomir.

“Foolish is the Conclave marching through the streets wielding steel and spell,” she said, “surrendering our argument for peace while the other guilds are already rattling sabers over the Izzet.”

Trostani reared up to her full height, the three dryads addressing Emmara. “We have great hopes for you as an emissary of our guild’s message, Emmara. But Calomir has convinced us that no peace can be brokered with those who would destroy for destruction’s sake.”

Calomir puffed out his chest and crossed his arms.

“That’s not true,” said Emmara. “We haven’t given it a chance, not really, not since the Guildpact. We haven’t let Jace try to reach them …”

“You’ve tried to persuade the mind mage to help in this effort, but as Captain Calomir has said, his loyalties are anything but clear. He will not be part of our response. Do you understand?”

“Yes, guildmaster,” said Emmara.

“On the other hand, we will require you.” The dryads reached their arms out to Emmara. “Your skill with the nature elementals is now required. You will call to them. You will awaken them, to help Captain Calomir assemble the force he needs.”

“No. I won’t. I won’t be party to this. I won’t call a being of nature to an errand of war.”

“The guild is agreed,” said Trostani. “The Conclave has declared it so.”

Emmara started to object, but the words caught in her throat. Her shoulders fell.

“It is the will of all. Are you suggesting that your lone, individual voice should trump those of all the masses?”

“No, Guildmaster. But—”

“Good, then. Proceed. Captain Calomir shall direct your efforts as he sees fit.”

Emmara bowed to her guildmaster. When she turned to Calomir, her teeth were clamped together, as if she were biting words.

“Come with me, Miss Tandris,” said Calomir, offering his hand.

Jace tried to remember the last time he had a relaxing, tranquil day, a day at the end of which he could stretch out, knit his fingers behind his head, and sigh contentedly. Having to best a Gruul ogre warlord in single combat was dire enough, but Jace somehow had to accomplish this feat without the use of spells. If he attacked the ogre’s mind in any way, he would suffer the backlash himself. Jace wasn’t sure he even knew how to sigh contentedly.

Compared to Ruric Thar’s muscle and size, Jace had only wit on his side. He had a keen mind, and he was slow to anger. He would have to turn that into victory.

“All right, then,” Jace couldn’t believe he was saying. “We fight.”

The Gruul warriors roared in a bloodthirsty cheer.

Ruric Thar slashed overhand down at Jace with the axe arm. Jace dodged out of the way, narrowly enough to feel the wind of the cutting blade by his cheek. Ruric Thar immediately followed up with a crushing left fist, impacting with the broad side of Jace’s face. It wasn’t enough to break bone, but it sent Jace rolling across the trimmed grass of the city park.

Jace’s vision was blurred. He climbed to his knees and spat something red onto the grass. He tried to feel that he expected a blow like that, to remember that the ogre would inevitably be able to outdo him in raw strength. He felt like letting fly a torrent of the foulest curses he knew in multiple planar languages; this brawl was plainly insane. But his patient mind took over. He took a breath and blew out his anger. The circumstances were unfair, but he had to abide by the rules at hand, and win within them.

He couldn’t assail the mind—minds—of Ruric Thar, but he could observe the minds of the other Gruul warriors. He could almost read them already. They watched him intently, fists clenched in empathy. The Gruul were the underdogs of Ravnica—they felt for him.

He opened himself to it. He let their thoughts and passions flow through his consciousness, to try to study how they thought. Maybe understanding them could give him an edge against Ruric Thar.

Stop analyzing and react, one of the warriors thought.

Don’t think, you damned fool, thought another. Civilization taught you wrong. Let go of it all! Just hit him!

Their thoughts roared in his mind. They were barely even thoughts. Jace felt overrun by a stampede of unstrategic, impulsive, carnivorous instincts. He needed to understand that, to dissect the secret behind it, and use it.

Jace rushed at Ruric Thar. The ogre swung his axe-arm, but the angle was sloppy, and the blade only glanced off of Jace’s shoulder and tore his cloak. Jace’s knuckles slammed into his target, a sensitive spot in the underarm, and then he aimed for the kidney twice. The ogre reacted with an elbow, sending Jace careening.

Jace sat on the park grass again, his wounds thudding.

Stop holding yourself back, thought one of the warriors. Let the roar come out!

Thinking is getting your face mashed in, thought another. Feel! Uncage yourself!

Jace let it all in, combining the minds of all the warriors into a ring of fury with him as its center. His ribcage pounded and his lungs burned. He could hear the urgings of the warriors in his mind. They thought that in order to beat a Gruul warrior, he needed to think like one—or not think like one. They wanted him to surrender his mind, to let the rage wash over him and overwhelm his logic.

But he had a better idea.

Jace focused on the imagery in the minds of the spectators around him. They weren’t just radiating raw fury and bloodlust—they were imagining how they would attack Ruric Thar if they were in Jace’s place. They were a barrage of combat ideas. Jace let the punches and rolls and throws swirl around him, choreographing an attack plan.

Jace somersaulted at Ruric Thar and grabbed at a leg, clamping onto it. The ogre tried to shake him off, but he bit the thin-skinned area behind the knee, ripping tissue with his teeth. Ruric and Thar roared and kicked Jace off their leg.

More of the Gruul’s battle imagery poured into Jace. He darted back and forth, relying on the warriors’ split-second assessments of the fight to guide him. Ruric Thar swung intermittently with fist and axe, but Jace sensed the impulses of the warriors, and used their unintended warnings to dodge out of the way in time. Ruric Thar was not fighting just Jace, but all of his war party at once. Jace was letting the warriors beat the ogre for him.

When the ogre overcommitted to a lunge, a desperate move flashed in one of the warrior’s minds, and Jace executed what he saw. He leapt onto the ogre’s bowed shoulder and, using a huge tusk for leverage, clambered up onto his back. Jace’s cloak came loose, so he threw the hood over the head of Ruric, the side with the axe. Then, hanging onto Ruric’s head, he beat his fist onto Thar’s cheekbone, as the Gruul’s minds urged—once, twice, three times.

The ogre’s axe flailed, apparently controlled by the head that couldn’t see. The free arm grabbed Jace by the hair, and pulled. But Jace hung on, focused on pummeling Thar’s increasingly bruised and puffy face.

When the axe blade came arcing toward Jace, he didn’t see it, but he felt it through the reactions of the Gruul onlookers. He leapt off of Ruric Thar, landing on his face, but in one piece, on the park lawn.

Jace heard a truncated yelp. Jace recovered and turned back to see the ogre’s own axe blade embedded a few cringe-inducing inches into the top of Thar’s bald head. The ogre held his breath, frozen in uncertainty, both sets of eyes looking up at the axe-arm that had missed Jace and hit Thar.

Thar began to hyperventilate through his teeth.

“You win,” said Ruric, pulling Jace’s cloak away and wincing.

Jace collapsed with relief. The Gruul warriors cheered.

Ruric Thar pulled gingerly with his axe arm, and the blade came free from the left head with a sickening wet sound. He clapped his hand on the wound and slumped heavily to the ground. Both of the ogre’s faces winced as blood trickled out from between his thick fingers, and his breathing was heavy.

Jace broke his connection to the minds of the other Gruul warriors. Their current of battle-obsessed thoughts began to ebb from his mind.

One of the Gruul compatriots, an extensively tattooed man with hair and beard that resembled coarse beaver fur, approached Ruric Thar and began murmuring a shamanic spell. The shaman’s outstretched hands trembled like windblown leaves, and pale light issued from his forearms and swirled around Ruric’s wound. The ogre kept his hand pressed on his head wound, but the bleeding stopped.

“You have some Gruul in you,” said Thar, between heavy breaths.

“Not as much as you might think,” said Jace. “So now, you’ll let your guard down, so I can find what I came for?”

“As you wish,” said Thar.

The ogre took a deep lungful of air, and let it out, closing their eyes. They nodded slightly.

Jace carefully cast his mind out to the ogre, letting his thoughts seep in slowly. He chose Thar first. As his mental senses began to perceive Thar’s thoughts, Jace felt no backlash, so he moved in deeper.

The ogre’s mind was like a museum of prizefights. Thar remembered triumph after triumph in battle, how his axe cleaved through this Gruul upstart or how he wrung the neck of that Orzhov cartel boss. It was an emotional landscape rather than a deliberative one, built on fervor and violence and laughing in the faces of the defeated. This was to be expected, but it made it harder for Jace to locate information about the maze.

He found nothing. Thar had no recollection of anything that Jace might have been researching at the time he lost his memories. Maybe this was all a mistake, a hunch that went nowhere.

He moved over to Ruric instead. Ruric’s mind, under some understandable surface-level shame of the duel with Jace, was also a timeline of clan battles and Azorius head-butts and street brawls with Rakdos hoodlums. Ruric was, if anything, even more savage, more nonverbal and instinctual. Ruric, too, remembered nothing of Jace’s research. Jace’s thoughts must not have transferred into the ogre.

That was it. That was his last lead.

“I don’t understand,” said Ral. “We divined everything. That mage’s research was the last key to the puzzle. We traveled the route, just like the code said to. But there was nothing. Just an old forum.”

“The Forum of Azor,” said Niv-Mizzet, after swallowing the remains of an underling.

When Ral had entered the aerie at Nivix, the dragon guildmaster had been eating a crunchy-sounding Izzet mage, a new recruit who couldn’t seem to comprehend the dynamic properties of mizzium. Ral was so preoccupied with the failure of the maze that he barely noticed one of his Izzet compatriots being devoured.

“Nothing changed,” said Ral. “The mana braids were stable. The atmospheric energy was strong, but remained constant. I expected fireworks.”

“We expected power,” said the dragon. “But there was none. What does this tell you?”

“We didn’t miss anything.”

“Obviously you did.”

“But what?” Ral remembered how little Niv-Mizzet liked to be questioned, and lowered his head. “Great Firemind, what insight do you possess?”

Niv-Mizzet inhaled deeply, and when he exhaled, flames spread out from his jaws, licking around the scales of his muzzle. Even from where he stood, Ral could feel the heat of the dragonfire.

“I have been thinking of the Implicit Maze as a test,” the dragon said. “And a test indeed it is. But it is not a test for one. It is not simply a puzzle of the mind. Do you know why?”

Ral knitted his fingers. Static electricity leaped between his digits. “Of course. Because we have to walk the route. But I did that.”

“And that accomplished nothing. Look deeper. What is the purpose of the Implicit Maze?”

“It protects great power.”

“Indeed it does.”

“And we have to find out what that power is.”

“Of course, but what it is has everything to do with how it is protected. What is missing across Ravnica right now? What conspicuous absence has come about only in recent times?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think of it this way: What existed between the guilds that no longer binds them?”

“The Guildpact?”

“Precisely! Do you not see? Harmony between the guilds was enforced by the magical contract of the Guildpact. But the Guildpact has been sundered, and the guilds are able to clash again—and not just in words, but in violence. In war. Do you find it a coincidence that the maze has surfaced now?”

“The mana braids,” whispered Ral. “The mana paths through the districts. They had never manifested until recently. And that led us to the code in the stonework, which led us to the path through all the guildgates. But what does all of that have to do with the Guildpact?”

Niv-Mizzet blew jets of smoke. “Come now, Zarek! I’ve laid it all out for you! It’s the purpose of the maze that is paramount. It is not a test of discovery. Why test our ability to discover? What would that accomplish?”

Ral protested. “What do you mean? Discovery is everything!”

“Ah, but do not think as an Izzet. Think as its creators did. We have learned the secrets of the maze, and we have tried many routes. But that got us nothing. That is because the maze is not designed to test our explorations, our experiments, our ingenuity. Those who devised it did not value these things as we do. The maze is a test of something else.”

Thoughts swirled in Ral’s mind. He was trying, and failing, to put the pieces together.

Niv-Mizzet bent down suddenly, his head looming before Ral. “Your time is up, Zarek! I told you to find the mage, the mage who touched my mind—and instead you run the maze yourself?”

“W-we don’t need him,” Ral stammered.

“You think we don’t, and yet your puny mind has not even deduced what all of this is for. Perhaps you’re only of use to me as my next meal.”

Bolts of intuition flashed in Ral’s mind. If what Niv-Mizzet was saying was true, then the Implicit Maze was not a way to reward the brightest mage on Ravnica, or its cleverest guild. And yet it was meant to be found, and found only at the proper time.

“The only reason we found evidence of the maze now,” said Ral, “is because it’s related to the Guildpact. It was created to be revealed in case the Guildpact dissolved. So … it’s a device, in some fashion. Activated by a disruption in the Guildpact. It’s a failsafe.”

The dragon’s chest puffed with pride. “That was my conclusion, yes.”

“So … it must be as old as the Guildpact. It traces back to the paruns.”

“Azor, judging by the code you found. The founder of the Azorius Senate.”

The Azorius, Ral thought. The guild of order and logic. Those who believed that law was the foundation of order. And the maze terminated in the Forum of Azor.

“So if it was created by the Azorius … then it wasn’t a way to assess our ingenuity. To truly solve it, we have to do something else. We have to do what Azor would have valued.”

Of course the founder of the Azorius Senate, the ancient Azor, would have tried to foster an atmosphere of peaceful collaboration.

“So … in order to solve the maze, we will have to, what, cooperate with the other guilds?”

The dragon sat back, and his lips pulled away from his teeth in a glistening, draconic smile. “Not exactly.”

An Izzet messenger appeared at the door of Niv-Mizzet’s aerie. “Pardon the intrusion, Great Firemind,” she said.

“Yes? What is it?”

“You wanted to be informed if there were any major guild conflicts.”

“And?”

The messenger looked shaken. “It’s as bad as we’ve ever seen. And potentially about to get much worse.”

Niv-Mizzet drew back his wings and looked down at Ral Zarek. “Let’s depart. It’s time we made a little announcement.”

ARMIES IN THE STREETS

Jace heard what he thought at first was a rumble of distant thunder, but it was too rhythmic and too deep to be thunder. It was the sound of a distant chant, two syllables repeated like drums.

“Berrr-rumm. Berrr-rumm.” The chant sounded like the voices of a vast lynch mob, their shouts merging into a cadenced thump, repeated over and over, layered over the sounds of marching feet. There was something oddly familiar in the chant that made a cold twinge in Jace’s subconscious, but he couldn’t place it.

Jace tried to focus on searching the ogre’s minds. But the sound was getting closer. “Berrr-rumm, Berrr-rumm,” they chanted.

The Gruul war party heard it too. “Someone’s coming,” said Thar.

“A lot of someones,” said Jace.

“War chant,” remarked Ruric, still holding a hand over his head. “Not Gruul.”

At that moment Jace felt a promising echo from Ruric’s mind, a hollow proto-thought that didn’t quite take shape, but that had the contours of what Jace was seeking. It was a wisp of a memory that Jace had passed over at first, because the ogre himself had assimilated it into his own thoughts. But Jace sensed that the cellar of the ogre’s mind echoed with a purpose that was not his own, a subconscious mission that originated with one memory.

The memory was of tearing down the sanctum where Jace had done his research. The ogre had wrecked the entire building, and Jace’s research with it, at the same time that Jace was busy destroying his own memories of it.

It was not enough to go on. Ruric Thar was an ogre of the Gruul Clans—he was not known for his attention to detail, or for his proclivity to stop and study that which he was about to pulverize. Only thin strands of details remained—a glance at a scribbled diagram, or a flash of a sheet of notes, before the memory of setting them aflame and collapsing the building on them. Not enough to get a coherent picture of the research.

“Berrr-rumm. Berrr-rumm.” The voices were getting louder. Whoever it was would round the corner in minutes.

“Time to go,” said one of the Gruul warriors, and they readied their gear to leave.

Ruric Thar got to his feet. “You done?” asked Thar, looking down the street toward the sound.

“Wait a moment,” said Jace. “Almost.”

The detail of the sanctum was lacelike, riddled with holes, but he was only considering one of the ogre’s minds. Jace quickly hastened his inner eye over to Thar’s memories, now looking for similar traces of the sanctum.

He found more. A snippet of a code that Jace and Kavin had deciphered—an old Azorius script. A path through a series of gates—guildgates, the ancient territory markers set up in the guilds’ distant past. He even detected a memory of when Jace first hired the ogre, and when he used mind magic to communicate with him—clues from Jace’s own speech pointed to the need for secrecy, the importance of the information stored in the sanctum, and the urgency of the need for thorough destruction. Jace’s mind assembled the scraps of memory from the ogre’s two brains and lashed them together with leaps of deduction. He saw it now. It was enough. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

“Rakdos!” cried the Gruul war party.

Jace turned. He saw a vast mob of Rakdos-guild rioters, jabbing at the sky with their spiked spears and jagged swords, led by the blood-witch Exava. And at that moment he realized what the crowd was chanting.

It wasn’t “Berrr-rumm.” They were chanting “Berrim,” the alias Jace had given in the Rough Crowd. They were here for him.

“Run,” said Thar. “We’ll slow them down.”

“By breaking some legs,” added Ruric.

“You’ll be overrun in seconds,” said Jace.

“Just go,” said Ruric “We owe the Rakdos a lesson.”

“I’m not just going to leave you—” Jace began, until he was interrupted by Thar grabbing him around the throat with his one meaty hand, and drawing him up to look him in the eyes.

“You learned nothing about the ogre mind?” asked Thar. “We say it? It’s done.”

Ruric only grinned, his tusks gleaming.

The ogre dropped Jace back onto his feet, and the ogre’s axe-arm rose to a battle-ready position, still edged with his own blood. The Gruul warriors gathered around Ruric Thar’s flanks, weapons raised. They roared in defiance, outnumbered dozens to one, as the Rakdos crashed into them.

Jace wiped his bloodied mouth and gathered a tidal wave of mana.

Selesnya troops poured into the streets, emptying the nature temples, wildlife preserves, and other green spaces controlled by the Conclave. The centaurs’ hooves clattered on the cobblestones and the wolf-riders bounded over stone bridges. Human and elf infantry flooded through the arteries of the district, streaming past intersections and flowing around buildings. Griffins and their riders swooped down out of a blanket of low clouds, strafing past the spires.

Emmara struggled to maintain concentration. She rode on the shoulder of a massive creature made of a snarl of marble, wood, and vines, her hand resting on its great head. Two more of the nature behemoths strode ahead of her, swinging their limbs in slow motion, indenting the streets with their footfalls as the other Selesnya troops ran between their legs. She had never controlled this many greater elementals this way. Tendons in her neck were taut. In her vision, the streets before her were overlaid with a constant flow of mana channeling through her and into the three elementals.

Below her, Captain Calomir led the Selesnya army. He rode his white war rhino, driving the Selesnya ranks forward, guiding them through the streets toward the Rakdos horde. Emmara could hear him shouting orders, but she barely made them out over her concentration.

Trostani traveled with them. The three dryads had merged their bodies with one of Emmara’s elementals, over Emmara’s objections, and the great nature beast was carrying them with it into the fray. She could see the three dryads gracefully poised at the top of the elemental’s shoulders, replacing its head, looking down at the troops on the streets below. In all her years Emmara had never seen a Selesnya guild leader go to war. She was the cause of all this. She was the center of this conflict.

This is what it feels like when an entire guild makes a mistake, she thought. This is the flaw of the Conclave, the inability to hear the truth of one voice over the din of all.

The Selesnya army pooled at the entrance of a bridge that spanned a canal. The bridge wasn’t the most direct route to Rakdos territory, but it would take them clear of any other guilds.

But Emmara saw Calomir pulling the reins of his rhino toward another route, up a short flight of steps onto a wide plaza punctuated by a line of stern archways. Above the entrance to the plaza was a sunburst symbol marked with a mighty clenched fist: the sign of the Boros guild. Throughout the plaza, Boros legionnaires stood in plate mail, their backs as straight as the pillars. Sentinels patrolled the ramparts, watching what the Selesnya army would do.

“The bridge, Calomir,” called Emmara. “We must take the bridge.”

“Not the bridge!” Calomir shouted, more to the assembled army than to her. “We travel straight through this plaza, straight to the heart of the Rakdos.”

“Calomir, no!” Emmara yelled.

But the Selesnya army swirled past her to follow Calomir. When the front feet of Calomir’s white rhino stepped across the threshold onto Boros land, trumpeters up on the ramparts blared on their instruments, and the soldiers in the plaza quit their posts and assembled into formation. Legionnaires marched forward, bristling with halberds and swords, backed by archers and pyromancers.

“Conclave, retreat!” yelled Emmara. “We must not involve the Boros as well!”

She saw Calomir glance back over his shoulder at her. If she wasn’t mistaken, he had a slight grin on his face. He kicked his beast and proceeded into the Boros plaza.

Boros soldiers collapsed on the Selesnya front lines. Archers loosed their arrows, and they sailed over Emmara’s head and rained down on the rear ranks. She could hear the screams of those behind her who fell under the assault.

A few of the missiles lodged in the foliage bodies of her elementals. Emmara commanded her minions to spread their great limbs and chests out, to deflect or catch the missiles as best they could. Arrows punched into the bramble-like elementals, most of them simply adding to the wood-beasts’ bulk. One arrow sank deep into the leg of the elemental on which Trostani rode, and exploded with a boom of magical fire. Smoke trailed out of the creature’s limb, and it stumbled.

“Trostani!” Emmara called. “We must turn back!”

“This is our destiny,” said Trostani, all three of the dryads pointing forward into Boros territory, for all the army to see. “The path to harmony is never easy. Lead us, Calomir! Lead the way!”

The Selesnya cavalry crashed into the Boros legionnaires, rending flesh on both sides. Halberdiers pierced centaurs’ flanks. Armored elves slashed through archer battalions. War-priests called down columns of searing light on wolf-riders and woodshapers.

“Senseless,” Emmara said under her breath.

She commanded her elementals to stop, and they came to a slow halt at the periphery of the Boros plaza, even as more Selesnya troops poured past her into the fray. The elementals began to turn their great forms away from the battle, but then they stopped in mid-turn. Emmara willed them to quit the battle once more.

They hesitated, shuddering like oak trees in a strong gale. Then, with a moan of their twisting trunks laden with masonry, the elementals stepped back toward the Boros plaza.

“No,” said Emmara. “No! Stop!”

She was still channeling mana into them, but her control was unraveling. They no longer responded to her commands. She was riding with nature-giants that apparently had plans of their own.

She looked to Trostani. She saw the three dryads undulating, their arms interlacing in a complicated spell. Emmara recognized part of the ritual as Trostani’s signature magic, a spell that replenished the warring Selesnya troops below with a constant stream of living energy; this is what kept every Selesnya commune in the Tenth District relatively protected from harm, and it was powerful magic to cast over an army. But the dryads had merged their signature magic with another spell, one with which Emmara was personally familiar. It was the elemental magic they had taught to Emmara.

That was why the elementals no longer obeyed her. Trostani had taken over command of the elementals, and was forcing them into the thick of the battle. Trostani’s power was far greater than hers, and she couldn’t wrest the creatures away again.

With the power of the great elementals behind them, the Selesnya army plowed ahead, ripping through the Boros defenses. Emmara had to duck as the topiary beast on which she rode passed through a stone archway. The arch wasn’t quite tall enough to accommodate the elemental, and the curved structure scraped a mane of brambles from the elemental’s head, sending a spray of burrs and woody vines at Emmara and nearly knocking her off its shoulder. Trostani continued driving the elementals across the square and through a main thoroughfare, with the Selesnya army massing around them.

Emmara scanned the battle, looking for Calomir, though she didn’t know whether she was looking for the comfort of his face, or looking for someone to blame. She spied his white rhino, and saw it charging ahead after having dispatched a pair of Boros legionnaires—but Calomir was no longer in its saddle. She looked over the bodies of fallen Boros and Selesnya warriors as the army passed through the Boros zone, and more than once she thought she saw him among the dead. But he was gone.

The Selesnya army cut through Boros territory and into a run-down industrial district that billowed with hellish smoke—a region controlled by the Rakdos.

“Onward, soldiers of Selesnya!” cried Trostani, spurring forward the great elementals with her magic. Hooves and boots and claws marched into the Rakdos zone, and wings swooped into the thick smoke above. “There, ahead, is our target!”

Emmara looked into the haze ahead, and saw a private club building marked with the demonic symbol of the Rakdos and the name “The Rough Crowd.”

“Woodshapers! Elementals! Cavalry!” Trostani called. “Shake it to the foundation!”

As the Selesnya army neared, Rakdos warriors began pouring out of the club as if it were a barracks. Emmara balled her fists.

Jace had already fooled the Rakdos with minor illusions. Parlor tricks wouldn’t sway them again. But there was no way he was going to beat an army of demon-worshiping sadists with individual psychic attacks. It was time to unleash major magic.

Ruric Thar and his band of Gruul brutes were already slicing into the Rakdos, and the war party’s savagery was shocking. Bodies of broken cultists went flying as the Gruul slammed into the horde, swinging great blows of blunt might. But the Rakdos horde kept coming, and they surrounded the Gruul in moments, tearing at them with jagged blades and spiked whips.

“Look, my pets!” came a crazed female voice. In the middle of the rampaging Rakdos horde, the blood-witch Exava stood atop a war tower, carried aloft by Rakdos minions. She had spied Jace, and pointed him out. “It’s I-Go-By-Berrim!”

Jace made a show of conjuring a spell. His cloak whipped dramatically, and dark mystical smoke curled off his body as he intoned eldritch syllables. His eyes went black as coal, and he raised his crooked fingers from the ground to the sky, as if dragging up a great weight. The ground split, and great chunks of the street fell away into the hellish light below. Sulfurous fumes emanated from the crack, and a demonic bellow resounded.

“Ancient lord, I call you!” Jace screamed, and obsidian fire blazed from his hands into the sky.

To the amazement of the horde, a demonic monstrosity the size of a building climbed out of the fissure in the pavement. It had a great burning pitchfork and a regal rack of horns, and it breathed fire from its nostrils.

“Lord Rakdos, guide us!” Jace screamed. “Lead us! We do your will!”

The mighty demon stepped out of the fissure and toward the horde, back in the direction they had come: Rakdos guild territory. The Rakdos cultists roared with praise and delight, clearing out of the demon lord’s way, mesmerized by the street-shaking steps and its fiery weapon. The demon parted the horde, and the horde began to follow it in dark adoration.

“That is not Rakdos, you freaks!” called Exava, and from across the battle she shot Jace a chilling look.

Jace knew he was getting some of the details wrong. The massive illusion he was conjuring was a figment drawn from descriptions of the Rakdos leader, influenced by snippets of memories taken from Exava herself. He had never seen the demon guildmaster Rakdos in person—but he wagered that most of the Cult of Rakdos hadn’t, either. As he wove the illusion, he let other illusions of dark mystical energy curl around him for added effect. He had no power to summon demons nor mastery over diabolic magic; he was depending on the general ignorance of the Rakdos rank and file on that score as well.

Exava had seen through the trick, but she was having a hard time overcoming the awe it inspired in her horde. Jace could see her screaming at them, trying to shake their belief in the demonic delusion. But the only authority they respected over Exava was that of the eponymous Rakdos, and they followed it blindly.

The witch tried to lash out at Jace instead. She blasted out a series of pain spells, but he was ready for that tactic, and he countered and unraveled her spells before they could break his concentration. Jace ran forward into the crowd, crowing like an insane dark mage, following his towering illusion back toward the Rakdos-controlled part of the district. Once the Rakdos horde was dispersed in their own territory, perhaps he could face and defeat Exava one-on-one.

Ruric Thar and the other Gruul warriors could only nod in confused respect as he ran past.

ROUGH CROWDS

Jace guided his illusionary demon, and the demon guided the Rakdos horde, back through the quarter of the Rakdos guild. Meanwhile Jace fended off Exava in a personal side combat, her furious bolts of sadistic magic anticipated and deflected. His illusion flickered as the horde marched back toward the Rough Crowd, its credibility wavering.

As they rounded the corner, Jace gasped.

A Selesnya-guild army was assaulting a smattering of Rakdos irregulars. The Rough Crowd was gone, a splintered ruin, its oak beams unraveled by the magic of woodshapers and ripped asunder by huge nature elementals. Swarms of imps flooded out of the carcass of the nightclub, bombarding the streets below them with burning pitch, hitting their own Rakdos warriors as much as the Selesnya.

A contingent of Boros soldiers attacked from the Selesnya flank. A warrior angel screamed commands from the sky, hurling blasts of scorching light. Magic crackled back and forth between guildmages of opposing creeds, searing scars of battle into the cobblestones.

Jace and Emmara made eye contact, she from atop one of the vine-and-marble elementals, and he from down at street level with the Rakdos. They were both among armies they didn’t command but couldn’t ignore.

Jace’s illusion dissipated, but it seemed irrelevant now. Exava’s horde of Rakdos warriors merged with and reinforced the cultists from the Rough Crowd, and chaos reigned. Reinvigorated, the Rakdos surged against the Selesnya.

A pack of hellhounds, skinless and crackling with flames from inside their blackened ribcages, broke free of their Rakdos handlers and sprinted into a squad of Selesnya guildmages. Jace saw Emmara struggling to ply her magic, but the nature elementals didn’t respond to her, and the hellhounds crashed into the Selesnya mages. Jace could hear their screams over the din of battle.

Finally, whether under Emmara’s control or not, the elemental she rode reached down and smothered two of the mongrels with its fist, and grasped two more hellhounds with a mass of ropy green tendrils. It crushed their bodies into a nearby building façade, to a chorus of hellish howls.

Barbed grappling hooks seized onto the elemental, and Rakdos ogres and goblins pulled on the lines. The elemental’s center of gravity tipped, and more lines snagged onto its chest and arms. It angled into an agonizingly slow stumble. Emmara scrambled to maintain balance as it fell.

“Emmara!” Jace yelled, rushing to her through the crowd.

The elemental toppled, dashing against the street. The Rakdos mob swarmed on top of it with swords and axes, hacking it apart like mad lumberjacks. Jace lost sight of her, and couldn’t see whether she had landed safely, or was under attack by the Rakdos on the ground. But he stopped short before he got to her.

In his way stood the blood-witch, wielding two serrated swords and surrounded by a team of Rakdos toughs.

“It’s time to play, Berrim,” said Exava.

Emmara slid down the elemental’s back as it tumbled to the ground, and found herself surrounded by heavily-armed Rakdos lunatics. She tried to revive the shattered nature elemental with all the healing magic she could muster, but the cultists were thoroughly dismantling the great beast; it was only stomped foliage and smashed stones now.

The warriors moved in around her. One masked Rakdos ruffian stabbed at her with a barbed spear, but she grabbed the handle, disarmed him, cracked him on the skull with the blunt end, then spun it around and ran it through the guts of a second warrior. She elbowed the neck of a third and caused the armor of a fourth to bloom into a cage of constricting brambles. But she was outmatched. She leapt over one of her victims and darted through the crowd, trying to make it to Jace, to Trostani, to anyone she recognized.

When she finally broke free of the mass melee, she did see a familiar face. It was Calomir, flanked by his elite guards, seemingly waiting for her. They paused for a moment, combatants clashing behind her, aerial warriors flying overhead, screams of the dying ringing in the air.

“Calomir,” she said. “What have you done?”

Calomir’s voice was even and icy. “Guards, take this traitor back to the Conclave. Keep her secure.”

The Selesnya guards seized Emmara’s arms and began dragging her away.

“What have I done, Calomir?” she snarled. “Have I been a voice of sanity during your warmongering? Have I tried to stop this war you’ve caused? Hundreds have died today because of you, and thousands more will come!”

Calomir said nothing more. She craned her neck to watch him stand there, a look of cold amusement on his face, as the guards brought her through the crowd.

His heart had gone insane, she concluded. Calomir had been her ally in peace, a guardian of the spirit of harmony of the Selesnya, and she had loved him for it. But now the man she loved had become possessed by a thirst for senseless war, and soldiers of her own guild, her extended family, had taken her into custody as a traitor. She felt bitterly alone.

She looked back at the battle receding behind her, to where she had seen another familiar face. “I need you,” she whispered.

Inside the sleeve of her robe, a delicate wooden broach blazed bright and warm against her skin. Its intricately carved veins burned for a moment, then faded, and it crumbled to ash.

Exava’s Rakdos minions were quick, too quick, and too strong. They snatched Jace and bound his arms, winding greasy rope around his wrists, laughing with stinking, hot breath into his ears. He slashed at their minds with psychic attacks, but they were already all insensate madmen; they had little consciousness for him to attack at all.

“Now then,” said Exava. “Shall we begin our game? You play by screaming as loud as you can, and I play by seeing if I can make it even louder.” Using the tip of one of her blades, she razored his tunic from neck to waist, exposing his bare chest. She grinned crookedly and touched the tip of the sword to his bare skin.

The words came to his mind like white fire, echoing with the image of Emmara’s face. I need you. He knew at once that Emmara had used the leaf. She was in danger, and he had to get to her.

He struggled to free his arms, but the Rakdos ruffians held him fast. One of them playfully bit his ear, reminding him how close he was to death—or something worse.

“Where do you think you’re going, I-Go-By-Berrim?” asked Exava. “We’ve just begun our game.”

Jace focused his mind on finding Emmara in the crowd. He launched out with his inner senses, scanning the battle for the characteristic contours of her mind. It was difficult with so many minds in the area, their thoughts intensified by the screaming pain of puncture wounds or the roar of bloodthirst, and his concentration was compromised by the sadistic Rakdos captors and would-be torturer before him. But a single thought, a single phrase, flared brightly for a moment, infused with bitter longing. He wrapped his mind around that phrase, and he followed it like a thread of spider silk, tracking it over the battlefield. It was thin, but he was able to use it to find his way to Emmara’s mind.

“I’m here,” he thought to her.

“Oh, Jace,” came the reply.

“I can’t come to you now, but I want you to listen to my voice. I’m staying with you. I’m not going to leave you.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

“Are you ready?” Exava asked. “It’s your turn.” The blood-witch shoved the sword a half inch into his chest, and Jace yelled.

“Jace?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m here with you. Don’t worry.”

When they heard the shouts of all around them Jace went quiet and Exava withdrew her sword.

“Dragon!”

And then they followed the example of everyone else, and looked to the sky.

At first it seemed that Niv-Mizzet himself had appeared out of the clouds, churning the air with great flaps of his wings, his scales scintillating in the sunlight.

The battle froze as the shape of the dragon descended. But as all eyes turned to behold him, it became clear that it was the not the dragon himself, but a projection, a great simulacrum made of light, impressive to behold but without weight or substance.

Jace spied an Izzet mage positioned on the roof of a nearby building, holding up a small lens of brass and crystal in the direction of the image of Niv-Mizzet. In his other hand, the man held a crackling ball of lightning.

The combatants were unsure whether this was a sign to press on or to halt. The illusionary dragon drifted down as if making an actual landing, but set down his hind claws in the middle of the air, and folded his wings, nestling onto his nonexistent perch. The image hung there, floating over the battle.

“My guildmaster has a message for all the guilds of Ravnica,” called the mage from the nearby rooftop, holding steady the magical lens. “I and others of my guild carry his message to you all across the city. I bid you listen well.”

The projection of Niv-Mizzet swept his great head across the battlefield as most of the Selesnya faithful, Rakdos rioters, and other guilds paused their fighting, but a few of the fighters persisted. The great dragon breathed a sheet of fire that swept through the air above the battle. Though it was only a projection of fire, unable to ignite the buildings it touched, it crackled and roared like real fire. It had the desired effect. The battle stopped.

“Citizens of Ravnica,” the dragon boomed, as loud as if it had been in person. “I have an invitation for you. One I implore you to consider.”

Jace tilted his head. He heard an echo of the dragon’s words as he spoke them. He wondered how many Izzet mages were projecting this message around the city, and how many audiences were being terrified by Niv-Mizzets.

Silence draped the scene for a few more heartbeats, until a Rakdos warrior, twitching with bloodlust, screamed and ran her trident through a nearby Selesnya elf. The elf grunted in surprise, coughed blood, and slumped to the ground.

Other Rakdos warriors began to agitate again, raising their weapons to fight. From his rooftop, the Izzet mage pointed at the offending Rakdos warrior, and a bolt of blue lightning sizzled from the high ledge down across the battlefield. The warrior took the bolt full in the chest. She fell over dead next to her victim. The other Rakdos rioters stopped again.

“This great city of ours hides a deep secret,” the image of Niv-Mizzet went on. “My Izzet mages have discovered an ancient maze that runs throughout the district, whose purpose and power we have only now come to understand. It is an Implicit Maze, winding through and constructed of the very streets and tunnels of the district, and its path is unknown.”

Jace could hardly believe what he was hearing. The secret he had studied, that the Izzet had taken on as their covert project, that he had purged from his memory and laboriously recovered again—it was being broadcast to everyone, in public, by the Izzet guildmaster. But Jace noticed that Niv-Mizzet was carefully leaving out important details, such as the specific route to follow to solve the maze. Jace couldn’t fathom why the dragon would invite all the other guilds to undertake the same project that he and the Izzet had studied for so long.

“But we know that at its end lies great power,” said the dragon, “and that in order for it to be solved, all the guilds must participate at once.”

Murmuring swept through the crowd. The Niv-Mizzet-image spread his wings from his hovering perch, which directed their attention back to him.

“Each guild will send one champion as its delegate in the running of the maze. At the appointed time, our champions will meet at the Transguild Promenade, and embark on a race through the twists and turns of the maze. We shall see who triumphs, who gains the power behind it for their guild, and who falls to its dangers. Until then, I bid you prepare.”

The image of the dragon swept his great head around the battlefield, and Jace wondered whether the real Niv-Mizzet, back in his own aerie, was actually seeing everything that this and other images saw, or whether the dragon was practicing a kind of fearsome, illusionary pantomime. The illusion-dragon spread his wings and took off again, creating the noise of a savage whirlwind, but without actually disturbing the air, and then the illusion shimmered into nothing.

Jace noticed that the Izzet mage who had cast the lightning spell looked directly at him for a moment before moving back from the ledge and disappearing.

With the dragon’s speech concluded, Exava turned back to Jace with a warped smile. “Well, that was quite interesting,” she began.

There was a thud as someone clubbed her across the head from behind. As she collapsed, Jace saw it was Captain Calomir.

“Greetings, Beleren,” he said.

Mages in midnight blue emerged out of nowhere, appearing behind the Rakdos ruffians and efficiently inserting long daggers into the base of the ruffians’ necks. The Rakdos cultists fell dead, and the newly-appearing mages took hold of Jace’s bound arms in turn. A blindfold came down over his face and was fastened behind his head.

“Calomir, wait,” he said.

“Let’s go somewhere where we can talk privately, shall we?” said Calomir, close to Jace’s ear. “Move.”

There was a shove at his back, and he walked. Somehow they walked down stairs that had not been there before, and somehow, within moments, he was being led through the cool, echoing dank of the undercity.

“Jace?”

“I’m here,” he thought to Emmara. “Don’t worry. I’m coming for you.”

UNMASKING

They walked Jace for what must have been several city blocks, down sloping tunnels and over creaking wooden footbridges. He could see nothing through the blackness of the blindfold, but he tried to keep his wits about him. For a while he tried to memorize the route they took, so if he escaped he could retrace his steps. But his Dimir captors led him in spirals, pushing him through shifting walls and over echoing watercourses, over unidentifiable surfaces designed to confuse the senses.

Finally they sat him on a wooden stool. When the blindfold was removed, Calomir stood before him in a misty undercity chamber, incongruous in the bright green and white of his Selesnya soldier’s dress.

Jace checked that the mage-assassins were still behind him. They were, no doubt with a bevy of spells ready to destroy Jace if he made a move. He looked back at Calomir. “What are you?”

“It is time we met formally,” said the elf. “I am Lazav.”

What had been the figure of Calomir melted, dripping away like a sped-up wax candle, and then reformed again into a new shape. This new man wore a hooded cloak, like Jace’s, except it was worn and threadbare with age. Jace could only see the bottom half of the man’s face. His skin was as worn as his cloak, wrinkled and thin.

Jace didn’t know if he should know the name Lazav. He had the feeling few did.

“The dragon’s little announcement is unfortunate,” said the man Lazav. “We’ll have a bit more competition now. But we’ll have to adapt, won’t we?” The man’s voice was hollow, and yet full of menace. It was too close, too knowing, too possessed of a stillness that signified confidence in his own power. “But the fact that they’ve opened up the maze to all the guilds also means that the Izzet haven’t been able to solve it by themselves yet.”

Jace’s brain flew, putting together the pieces. “You’re Dimir,” he said. “A shapeshifter of some kind, with enough mind magic to keep me from spying.”

“Correct.”

“You sent the vampire.”

“And I had to put him away for a long time, because he failed to take from you what I wanted. But you’ve done well, haven’t you? You’ve recovered that which you lost.”

Lazav took a half-step toward Jace. His presence was stifling. Though the man was no larger than Jace, Jace felt a wall of pressure emanating from him, pushing into him, tipping him back on the stool.

Jace wasted no more time. He threw his psychic senses at Lazav’s mind. But Jace found no ingress. Lazav’s mind remained unreachable as when he had been Calomir, locked away from him, impenetrable.

“You’re Calomir,” said Jace.

“Oh, you’re just putting that together?” A grin spread across Lazav’s cracked lips. “To be entirely precise, poor Calomir’s been dead for some months now. He was a good soldier to the Conclave, and a wise advisor. I am merely his replacement.” He bowed theatrically. “Not a worthy one, I’m afraid. But the Selesnya, especially the lovely Emmara, seem to have accepted the performance.”

“You’ve been advising Trostani. Goading the Conclave into attacking the Rakdos. You had them declare war on another guild as retribution—for a kidnapping you engineered.”

Lazav shrugged. “I appreciate the recognition of my work, but of course that’s only part of it. To the Orzhov I’m a wealthy pontiff with the ear of the Grand Envoy of the Syndicate. To the Golgari, an advisor in Jarad’s inner circle. The Boros know me as a scout on a griffin, who always happens to deliver alarming news of the other guilds. And her irascible commanding officers always listen.”

“So you spread misinformation to the guilds.”

“The districts run on information. Secrets are the lifeblood of the world. I provide a valuable service to those in need.”

“You traffic in lies.”

“It gives you comfort to believe that, I know. But I am hardly to blame. I may spread information selectively, but people hear what they wish to hear. If my message finds a place in one’s heart, then it’s the heart that’s false, not the message.” Lazav spread out his hands, encompassing the chamber, the sleeves of his cloak hanging heavy from his arms. The mortar of the ancient bricks in the wall behind him traced a network of lines, twisting and spreading up into the ceiling, up toward the surface of Ravnica.

“I see it now,” Jace said. “It’s all for the maze. Infiltrating the Selesnya. Setting up the Rakdos. Warmongering to spark a guild war. It’s all cover for your plan to take what’s behind the Implicit Maze.”

Lazav’s grin flashed a remnant of yellowish teeth, a sight that Jace wished he hadn’t seen. “The maze is merely a means to my ends. It’s a delightful diversion for the guilds, while I grind away at the foundations of society under them. When I hold all the pieces, nothing will remain—no Guildpact, no peace, no law. No guilds! And therefore no competition for my ultimate command of all life and thought. It is simple, you see? I am a being of quite simple tastes. I only desire the annihilation of everything that is not under my power.” Lazav tapped a finger on Jace’s forehead. “Can you grasp that, mind mage?”

“I’ll kill you,” said Jace.

“Ah, then you do grasp it. Good. That means it’s time for you, finally, to divulge all you know about the maze.”

“I’ll tell you nothing.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find you have little choice in the matter. There’s someone waiting just below us who’ll be very anxious to redeem himself.”

Jace looked at his feet. There was nothing but solid stone floor beneath them.

Lazav’s form trembled, liquefied, and rearranged itself. He took on the persona of the Selesnya elf Calomir again. But Lazav’s grin remained on the elf’s face.

“And if you still don’t cooperate, well,” he said, now with Calomir’s elvish voice, “I’ll just have to apply more pressure. Perhaps I’ll have a conversation with a mutual acquaintance.”

“You’ll leave Emmara out of this.”

Lazav, in the guise of Calomir, nodded to the Dimir mages who stood behind Jace. They dragged him to his feet, then flipped him over and shoved him face-first onto the floor, pressing his chest down onto the stone. Their hands pressed on his back, and somehow they pushed him through the stone, his body falling through solidity, merging and slipping down through layers of earth like a ghost. Then he fell into air again, and collapsed onto a cold, hard floor. All was dark and quiet.

“Jace,” said Emmara’s voice in his mind.

Jace struggled to turn over. His body complained, but he maintained the mental connection with Emmara.

“I’m here.”

“I need you to come to me now. I’m at the Conclave. They’ve imprisoned me. Please come.”

“I’m sorry,” he thought to her. “I can’t be there just now. Just keep listening to my voice. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid I must tell you that Calomir—the actual Calomir—is gone.”

“What?”

“The man we’ve seen is an impostor. A shapeshifter set on infiltrating the Selesnya. Calomir is dead. I’m very sorry.”

Silence. Emmara’s thoughts did not form words that Jace could hear.

“So if you see someone posing as Calomir,” Jace went on, “stay away from him, if you can. If you can’t, do whatever you have to do to stay safe. Stall him. Don’t let on that you know his secret. I’ll be there soon.”

Another silence. When he again heard her thoughts, there was a certain strained vibration to them, like an earthquake held to a slight tremor by sheer will. “This is true, isn’t it.”

“I’m afraid so. Emmara, I’m so sorry.”

“All right. I understand.”

There was another pause. Jace sat there in the darkness, waiting.

“Jace?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t lose contact with me.”

“I’ll be right here.”

“Don’t leave.”

“I won’t.”

The blackness around him was so complete that it felt useless having eyes at all. He smelled chilly, dank stone, and dust. He reached up and put his hand to the ceiling he had melded through, and touched the wall next to him. Both were solid, cold, and slightly rough, like cut granite. His breathing quickened. He may have been blindfolded during his journey down here, but he knew he was deep, far from sunlight—perhaps even far from a source of air.

He heard something move in the darkness, a shuffling against stone—something nearby.

“Is someone there?” he muttered.

“We’re glad he’s brought you to our little prison,” said a male voice. “Mirko and I are very glad you’re here indeed.”

Jace blinked in the darkness. He used a whiff of mana to conjure a globe of bluish light, and his surroundings emerged.

He was in a small stone room with a low ceiling and no apertures. Two figures appeared in the light before him: the vampire Mirko Vosk, his fangs bared, and the vedalken man who had been Jace’s research compatriot, Kavin.

“Kavin!” gasped Jace.

Kavin also bared a set of fangs. That was new.

“I owe this one a debt of pain,” said Kavin. “Let us share him.”

“What’s in his skull is mine,” said Vosk, his voice hoarse with malice. “The rest you may do with as you wish.”

Jace watched the two vampires approach him, glints in their eyes reflecting his sphere of light. His back was pressed against the wall.

“Emmara,” he thought.

“Yes?”

“Stay safe.”

“What’s happening?”

“I have to leave you.”

TO BE CONCLUDED

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 Ari Marmell’s Agents of Artifice, featuring planeswalker Jace Beleren in earlier adventures in Ravnica. Available now from your favorite bookseller. Visit www.wizards.com/magicnovels for more information.

AGENTS OF ARTIFICE

Ari Marmell

PROLOGUE

Through a place that wasn’t, where time held no meaning, the figure walked.

Winds blew, and they were not winds. Without source, without direction, they tossed the outsider’s hair one way, clothes another. They were the hot gusts of an arid desert, the frigid breath of the whirling blizzard. They bore the perfume of growing things, the rancid tang of death, and scents unknown to any sane world.

The ground rolled, and it was not ground. Shifting grays and black—not a color so much as a lack of color—formed a surface scarcely less treacherous than quicksand. Through it, deep beneath it, high above it in what could hardly be called a sky, snaked rivers of fire, of lightning, of liquid earth and jagged water, of raw mana. Colors unseen by human eyes flew overhead, refusing to congeal, soaring on wings of forgotten truths, borne aloft by stray gusts. Mountains of once and future worlds wept tears of sorrow for realities that never were, unchosen futures that no other would ever mourn.

Chaos. Impossibility. Insanity.

The Blind Eternities.

Far behind, and falling ever farther, a curtain of viscous light separated the maddening expanse of raw creation from one of the many worlds of the near-infinite Multiverse that existed within. There was nothing special about this world, at least not when viewed from without, save that this was whence the figure had come, and where it must soon return.

The figure. Here, in this realm beyond worlds, that was all it was. Was she male? Was he female? Short or tall? Human or elf or goblin, angel or demon or djinn? All and none, perhaps, and none of it of any import. Any normal mortal would already have been lost, body and mind and soul torn apart and absorbed into the twisting maelstrom of what was, is, and could be.

Not this one. Anchored by a spark of the Blind Eternities itself that burned within the figure’s soul, a planeswalker strode through the tide, and the maddened chaos between worlds was just another obstacle on a road that few would ever walk.

Danger and distaste aside, the figure persevered, continuing ever onward for who knew how long. Finally, when perhaps a whole heartbeat and perhaps a mere century had passed, another curtain of light loomed from the roiling instability. The traveler passed through and was born into a new reality, standing once more on the solid ground of a real world.

It had no name, this world, for it had long since died. No winds blew, the stale and nigh-poisonous air sitting heavy on the earth. No trees or mountains broke the featureless contours, and nothing but a fine dust coated the world’s skin. Long dead, lifeless, desolate …

Private.

And there the planeswalker stood, and waited, and paced, and waited longer still, until the Other finally appeared.

The figure’s first thought was not relief that the wait was over. That would come shortly. No, that first thought was, instead, Next time, I choose the meeting place!

That would not, of course, be the most political thing to say. So the figure bowed, deeply enough to show respect, shallow enough to say I do not fear you. “Have you decided?”

The Other gazed unblinking for long moments. “I have. Perhaps a better question would be, ‘Are you still certain?’ ”

The walker shrugged, a strangely mundane gesture in so peculiar a discussion. “I’ve put too much time into this, and I’ve too much riding on it to back out now. You know that.”

“This is a complex scheme you bring me. Convoluted; labyrinthine, even. A great many things must go precisely right if you’re to deliver me what’s mine.

Another shrug. “My bargain comes due before too much longer. It’s not as though I’ve much left to lose.”

“There is that, yes,” the Other conceded.

“And this way, I’m protected. If I were to go after it myself, and I were discovered—”

“Yes, yes. So you’ve explained.

The walker lapsed into silence, a silence that stretched horribly across the entire world.

Then, “You know what must happen now?” the Other asked. “To ensure the mind-speaker cannot just pull the truth from you?”

One deep breath, a second, and a third, to calm a suddenly racing heart. “I do.”

“Then do not move.”

And then there was only the scream, breathless, endless, a scream that would have drowned even the roaring of the Blind Eternities … as the Other stretched forth inhuman fingers, reached into the planeswalker’s mind and soul, and began, oh so carefully, to fold.

CHAPTER ONE

As it turned out, the district of Avaric wasn’t any more appealing when one was drunk than when one was sober. The fog of irrimberry wine didn’t make the filthy cobblestones, the half-decayed roofs, or the sludge coating the roadways any more attractive; and the sweet aroma of that libation didn’t remain in the nose long enough to muffle the stagnant rot and the eye-watering miasma that passed for air. The rows of squat houses and shops leaned over the road like tottering old men, and the wide spaces between them resembled gaps left by missing teeth. Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the entire evening was the surprising lack of mosquitoes. Normally the rains brought plague-like swarms up from the swamps and sewers that were Avaric’s unsteady foundation, but apparently even they were taking the night off for the Thralldom’s End celebration.

Kallist Rhoka, who had spent a considerable amount of coin on the journey to his current state of moderate inebriation, glared bitterly at his surroundings and felt that the world’s refusal to reshape itself into a passingly tolerable form was the height of discourtesy.

Then again, the Avaric District wasn’t alone in its refusal to change its nature to suit Kallist’s desires or his drunken perceptions—and between the stubbornness of a whole neighborhood, and that of a certain raven-haired mage, he was pretty certain that the district would break first.

At the thought of the woman he’d left at the Bitter End Tavern and Restaurant, Kallist’s stomach knotted so painfully it doubled him over. For long moments he crouched, waiting as the knot worked its way up to become a lump in his throat. With shaking hands—a shake that he attributed to the multiple glasses of wine, and not to any deeper emotions—he wiped the pained expression from his face.

Not for the first time, Kallist spat curses at the man who’d driven him to such a sorry state. Less than a year gone by, he’d dwelt in the shadows of Ravnica’s highest spires. And now? Now the structures around him were barely high enough to cast shadows at all. Now he’d have had to actually live down in the sewers or the under-cities of the larger districts to sink any lower.

It was enough to make even a forgiving man as bitter as fresh wormwood, and Kallist had never been all that forgiving.

Still, it would all have been worth it, if she’d just said yes …

Kallist, his wine-besotted mind swiftly running out of curses, stared down at his feet. He couldn’t even see the normal color of his basilisk-skin boots, one of the few luxuries he still owned, so coated were they in the swamp sludge that always oozed up from between the cobblestones after the rain. The boots kept swimming in and out of focus, too. He wondered if he might vomit, and was angered that he might waste the expensive irrimberry wine he’d drunk. The notion of falling to hands and knees on the roadway was enough to steady him, however. He could still hear, ever so faintly, the singing and dancing of the Thralldom’s End festival, back in the direction of the Bitter End, and he’d be damned thrice over if he’d let anyone from the tavern find him pasting a dinner collage all over the road. With a rigid, yet swaying gait that made him appear sober to nobody but himself, he resumed his trek.

Avaric wasn’t really that large a place; none of the local neighborhoods were. It was a backwater district, surrounded by other backwater districts save for those few spots where the underground swamps pooled to the surface, ugly and malodorous cysts on Ravnica’s aging face. Those who dwelt here did so only because anyplace else they could afford to move was even worse, and a few small fungus gardens were more than enough to feed the lot of them. Thus, even though the Bitter End was at the far end of Avaric from the house Kallist shared with the woman on whom he currently blamed his inebriated state, it should normally have taken only about twenty minutes to walk from one to the other.

“Normally,” of course, allowed neither for Kallist’s current shuffling gate nor the fact that he’d already taken the same wrong turn twice. It had now been well over half an hour, he could still hear the faint strains of singing off in the distance; his eyes were beginning to water and to sting …

And he really, really had to find somewhere private to release some of that wine back into the wild. Kallist looked down at his feet, looked over at the nearest alley—filled almost ankle deep with a juicy mixture of swamp-water and refuse—muttered a brief “Hell with it,” and strode off the avenue.

He shuddered at the soft squishing beneath his boots, but tonight, the urging of a bladder growing fuller by the moment outweighed Kallist’s concerns for his footwear. Had he been either a little more sober, or a little more drunk, he might’ve worried about encountering sewer goblins, or even Golgari fungus-creatures leftover from the struggles that ended guild rule, but as he wasn’t, he didn’t.

With a deep sigh, Kallist relieved himself against the stained wall that was also the back wall of somebody’s house, and staggered back to the road just in time to all but run into a fellow striding the other way.

“Gariel,” he greeted the newcomer, trying to straighten himself into a semblance of sobriety.

“Who … Kallist? What’re you doing in the alleys this late at night? You’re not worried about gobbers?”

Kallist spun, expecting in his drunken haze to see a gang of the foul creatures behind him. When none appeared, he sank slowly to the muddy road, waiting for yet another surge of nausea to pass.

Irritably, he looked at his friend, who failed to suppress a smirk. Physically, Gariel was everything Kallist wasn’t: dark-skinned to Kallist’s natural pallor; heavily muscled where Kallist was wiry; exceptionally tall where Kallist could have been the standard by which average was measured; and with earthen-colored eyes to contrast with Kallist’s own oceanic blue. Gariel even wore a well trimmed beard, not out of any desire to follow current trends—the styles of Ravnica’s affluent meant little here in the backwaters—but simply because the man had an intense dislike of shaving. “Any knife comes near my face,” he’d told Kallist once, “it damn well better have a sausage on the end of it.” Had their hair not been similar shades of wooden brown, they might as well have been of different species entirely.

Something must have flashed across his face, something Gariel saw even in the feeble moonlight and the glow of the emberstone he held in his left fist. He dropped his hand and lowered himself to the grimy roadway beside his friend.

“This doesn’t look like a celebratory drunk,” he observed, leaning back against the nearest building.

Kallist looked up at him, all but trembling with the effort of keeping his face a stony, emotionless mask. He glared at Gariel as though daring him to say something.

Silence for a few moments, broken only by the call of a spire bat flying low over the few pools of exposed swamp between the wide roadways and cheap row houses.

“She said no, didn’t she?” said Gariel at last.

Kallist’s shoulders slumped. “She said she’d ‘think about it.’ ”

Gariel forced a grin, though he felt the blood pounding in his ears, furious on his friend’s behalf. “Well, at least that’s not a ‘no,’ right?”

“Oh, come on, Gariel!” The smaller fellow punched the mud. “When was the last time you knew Liliana to take her time to think about anything? Everything she does, she does in the moment.” He sighed, and tried to swallow the lump that had climbed once again into his throat and appeared bound and determined to stay there. “You know as well as I do that ‘I’ll think about it’ means ‘I don’t want to hurt you by refusing.’ ”

Gariel wanted to argue the point, but the words clung to the roof of his mouth like a paste. “Well … Look, Kallist. You’ve been together—what? A few months?”

“Yeah. Ever since …” He didn’t finish the sentence. In all the time Gariel had known him, Kallist had never finished that sentence.

“All right, a few months. Give it some more time. I mean, she’s obviously not ending it, or she wouldn’t have bothered to spare you the ‘no,’ right? Maybe in another year or three …”

Kallist couldn’t help but laugh, though the sound was poisonous as hemlock. “Right. Because the one thing Liliana does more often than anything else is to change her mind once it’s made up.”

In fact, in the time Kallist had known her, Liliana had done so precisely once.

And again, Gariel knew them both too well to argue. All that emerged from his mouth, escaping like a fleeing convict before he could think better of it and snap his teeth shut, was, “So maybe you’re better off this way.

“I’m sorry,” he added immediately. “That didn’t come out right.”

“Nothing tonight has.” Kallist rose and set his bleary eyes toward the southeast. “I’m going home.”

“Wait.” Gariel rose, too, and placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Where is she, anyway?”

“Where else would she be during Thralldom’s End?” Gariel actually saw red. “What?” He’d doubtless have awakened half the street with that squawk, if they hadn’t all been out celebrating. “You mean even after your talk …”

Kallist shrugged, and couldn’t help but smile a bit. “She said there was no reason to ruin a perfectly good dance. Even asked me to stay, but—Gariel? Where are you going?”

The larger man was already several yards down the road. “I’m going,” he answered, barely turning his head, “to give your woman a piece of my mind for treating you this way.”

“Gariel, don’t …” But he was already gone around the nearest bend. Were Kallist less exhausted, less depressed, and certainly less drunk, he might have caught Gariel, or at least tried. As Kallist was, he could only drop his chin to his chest and shuffle home, hoping he remembered to get even drunker before he fell asleep.

He did, however, spare a brief thought to hoping that there was still a Bitter End Tavern standing, come tomorrow morning.

Though the guilds were gone, much of Ravnica still celebrated the Festival of the Guildpact, as if remembering the years of prosperity and order might keep them from fading away in these modern, more tumultuous times. Much of Ravnica—but not all. Some of the plane’s districts had suffered rather more than others beneath the guilds, and not a few were just as happy to see them gone. Some such as Avaric, whose families had long labored in all but serfdom to the usurious patriarchs of the Orzhov. So when the so-called Guild of Deals had fallen, it was the best news the citizens here had received in several thousand years.

The walls, the floor, the tables, and the chairs of the Bitter End shook as though in the midst of an earthquake, as the good folk of Avaric celebrated Thralldom’s End. In one corner, a gaggle of performers pounded on drums, plucked the strings on a variety of instruments, blew through various horns, in a veritable frenzy of activity that should have produced nothing but anarchic noise, yet somehow managed to shape itself into actual music. Around the perimeter of the common room, the people not currently caught up in the dance clapped or stomped to the highly charged beat, and the footsteps of the dancers themselves kicked up clouds of sawdust from the floor and brought showers of dust sifting from the rafters. Before the start of business tomorrow, a handful of floorboards, a couple of chairs, and a legion of mugs and plates would need replacing—but the Bitter End was the largest establishment in Avaric to hold a Thralldom’s End gala, and if a bit of ruined furniture and broken crockery was the price for such a huge influx of custom, it was a cost Ishri, barkeep and the tavern’s owner, cheerfully paid.

Liliana Vess was a whirlwind sweeping through the assembled dancers, leaving footprints not merely in the sawdust, but on the hearts of a score of hopeful men. Her midnight-black hair moved about her head like a dark cloud, or perhaps a tainted halo. Her cream-hued gown, which was cut distractingly low, rose and whirled and fell, promising constantly to reveal more than it should, but, like a teasing courtesan, always managing to renege.

She breathed heavily from the exertion of the rapid dance, spinning and twisting through the arms of a dozen of her fellow celebrants. Her smile lit up her features—high and somewhat sharp, forming a face that few would envision when imagining a classic beauty, yet which all would agree was beautiful once they saw it—but that smile failed to reach her eyes. For all that she tried to lose herself in the festivities, in the adoration of those who watched her, who reached out in hopes of a simple fleeting touch, she could not.

Damn him anyway! Guilt was not an emotion with which Liliana was well acquainted, and she found swiftly that it was not at all to her liking.

The bizarre accumulation of notes and beats and rhythms successfully masquerading as a song came to an end, and so did the last of Liliana’s ability to fake any remaining enthusiasm for the celebration. The musicians, bowing to much applause and acclaim, left the stage for a well-earned break, leaving an instrument with enchanted strings to play a slow and lonesome ditty until they returned. Several couples remained in the room’s center, swaying to the somber notes, but most returned to their tables to await a more energetic piece.

Liliana watched them go, marveling at these people among whom she’d made her temporary home. They were all clad in their best and fanciest—which here in Avaric meant tunics with long sleeves instead of short, trousers without obvious patches, and vests that actually boasted some faint color, rather than their normal browns and grays. Nobody here could afford the rich dyes or the fancy buttons and clasps of the rich, yet they wore their “finery” with pride; splurged on lean steaks when they normally subsisted on fungi and the occasional fish or reptile hauled from the swampy pools. And they lived it up as though such ridiculous luxuries actually meant something.

Liliana didn’t understand any of it. She approved of it, even respected it, but she didn’t understand it.

Even as she floated back to her table, hand reaching for a glass of rough beer to quench her thirst, Liliana spotted a figure moving toward her through the crowd. A gruff face, split into what the owner probably thought was a charming smile, leered at her through a thick growth of beard. Two sausage-like thumbs hooked themselves through the pockets of a heavy black vest, perhaps trying to draw attention to the fine garment. The drunkard had been watching her all night, since well before Kallist had ruined the evening and stormed off in a huff. Every night there was always at least one, and she’d wondered how long it would take him to drink enough nerve to approach.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” he slurred in a voice heavy with beer, “that you finally sent your scrawny friend packing. That mean you interested in spending some time with a real man?”

In a better mood, Liliana might’ve engaged in some light flirting before telling the drunk to find his own personal hell and stay there. Not tonight.

Liliana lifted her dinner knife, still stained with remnants of her overcooked steak, from the table. “If you don’t walk away right now,” she said sweetly, “you won’t be a ‘real man’ for very long.”

It took a moment, the battle between common sense and belligerent pride that raged across the fellow’s face—but finally, aided perhaps by the unnatural gleam in Liliana’s eyes, common sense won the field. Grumbling, he turned and shuffled back to his table, where he would tell his friends all about how he’d turned down the woman’s advances.

Liliana sighed once as she lowered herself into her chair, and found herself uncharacteristically wishing that Kallist had been here to see that exchange. Damn it, she thought once more, reaching again for her mug. If it’s not one thing.

“Hey! Bitch!”

It’s another.

Half the tavern turned toward the large, dark-skinned fellow who’d just come stalking through the front door, his boots leaving a trail of castoff mud, but Liliana already knew precisely for whom his call was intended. She rose gracefully and offered her most stunning smile.

“And a joyous Thralldom’s End to you, too, Gariel.”

“Don’t ‘joyous Thralldom’s End’ me, gods damn it!” he growled, pushing his way through a few of the slow-dancing couples to stand before her table. “I want to know what the hell you think you’re—”

They were skilled, Liliana thought later, when she actually had a moment to think; you had to give them that. She hadn’t noticed them at all, until a blade sped toward her from over Gariel’s shoulder.

There was no time even to shout a warning. Liliana brought a knee up sharply into Gariel’s gut—she had just enough respect for him as Kallist’s friend not to hit him any lower—and caught his shoulders as he doubled over, using his own weight to topple them both backwards over her chair. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t graceful, but it took them out of a sword’s sudden arc with half a heartbeat to spare.

The sounds of the chair clattering over, and the pair of them hitting the floor, were just loud enough to penetrate the din. First a couple of faces, and then a handful more, turned away from dinner or dancers to stare at them; a ripple in a still pond, awareness that something was very much not right spread through the Bitter End.

Liliana gasped as the wooden edge of the seat dug painfully into her side, but she didn’t let that stop her from rolling. Their bodies tilted across the chair like a fulcrum, her head striking the hardwood floor, but that, too, she ignored as best she could. Twisting her grip on Gariel as they fell, she kept him from landing squarely atop her. She left him gasping on the floor as she scrabbled swiftly to her feet, trying to keep the table between herself and her attacker.

No. Attackers, plural. Damn.

They were strangers here, certainly. Avaric was small, yes, but not quite tiny enough for everyone to know everyone else by sight. From a distance, then, these two blended perfectly, both of roughly average height, both clad as workers gone out to hoist a few after a long day’s work, before going home to hoist a few more. But up close, their cold, emotionless eyes marked them as something else entirely.

Well, that and the heavy, cleaver-like blades.

They advanced unhurriedly, even casually, one passing to each side of the table. Clearly, despite the speed of Liliana’s evasion, they didn’t expect much in the way of resistance.

And in terms of anyone coming to Liliana’s aid, they were correct. The folk nearest her had only just begun to run, to scream, or to freeze in shock, as best befit their individual temperaments. From behind the bar, Ishri emerged with a heavy cudgel in hand, but hampered as she was by the bulk of the crowd retreating from the coming bloodshed, there was no way she’d reach the table before it was all over. To his credit, the suitor whom Liliana had just rebuffed was also making his way back across the tavern, fists raised, but he was already so drunk that even if he managed to reach the fray, it was unlikely he could meaningfully contribute.

But then, Liliana didn’t require anyone’s help.

Crouching slightly, she shifted the dinner knife—hardly an intimidating weapon, but all she had—into an underhand grip. Beneath her breath, her lips barely moving, she began to utter a low, sonorous chant. Across her neck rose an abstract pattern of tattoos that suggested even more elaborate designs farther down her back, as though burned across her skin from the inside out.

Had they been able to hear it over the ambient noise of a panicking tavern, that sound alone might have given her attackers pause. The tone was surreal, sepulchral, far deeper than Liliana’s voice should ever have produced. The syllables formed no words of any known language, yet they carried a terrible meaning that bypassed the mind entirely, to sink directly into the listener’s soul.

But they could not hear it, those deluded fools who thought themselves predator rather than prey. And even if they had, it would have been far too late to matter. As though biting the end off a leather thong, Liliana spat a word of power into the æther, gestured with her blade. Something moved unseen beneath the table, just one more shadow in the flickering lanterns of the Bitter End, summoned from abyssal gulfs beyond the realms of the dead themselves. With impossibly long fingers it stretched out, farther, farther, and brushed the edges of two of the table’s legs. Rotting away as though aged a hundred years, in single instant, they folded in on themselves, putrefying into soft mulch. The rest of the heavy wood surface toppled to the side, slamming hard into one of the bandit’s calves. He cried out in pain, stumbling and limping away from the unexpected assault, a handful of dishes and a half-eaten loaf of pumpernickel bread clattering around his feet.

At that cry, the second man’s attention flickered away from Liliana for less than a heartbeat—but that was enough. Ducking in low, she drew the edge of her knife across his extended arm. Cloth and flesh tore beneath the serrated steel, and the bandit barely muffled a curse of pain behind clenched teeth.

Blood welled up, beading along his wrist in a narrow bracelet. It was a shallow wound, stinging but harmless, and his grimace of pain turned into a savage grin as he realized just how ineffective his target’s attack had proved.

But then, Liliana’s attack wasn’t intended to cause him harm. It was meant only to draw blood—and the attention of the unseen shadowy thing sliding impossibly across the floor. Invisible to all, darkness against darkness, black on black, it stretched forth its talons once more and dipped them into the welling blood. A foul corruption leeched into the seeping wound, intertwined itself around the muscles and vessels of the man’s arm.

He screamed, then, an inhuman cry of agony, as gangrenous rot shot through his flesh. The blade fell from limp fingers, lodging itself in the wood by his feet, as the skin turned sickly blue, the blood black and viscous. Flesh grew stiff and cracked, splitting to unleash gouts of yellowed pus. Falling to his knees, the sellsword clutched his dying arm to his chest and bawled like an infant.

Liliana spared him not so much as another glance. His suffering would end soon enough—when the spreading necrotic rot reached his heart.

Growing ever more unnerved, the second bandit had nonetheless recovered from the impact of the table against his leg, swiftly closing to within striking range. Snarling, he raised his chopping blade high and brought it down in a vicious stroke that no parry with the fragile dinner knife could have halted.

Liliana didn’t even try to lift her feeble weapon in response. No, lips still moving though she must long since have run out of breath, she raised her left hand and caught the blade as it descended.

The cleaver should have torn through her upraised limb like parchment. Should have, and would have, had it not begun to turn black at the apex of its swing, suddenly cloaked and tugged by wisps of shadow. By the time it should have reached the flesh of Liliana’s hand, it was simply gone, drawn away into the nether between the worlds of the living and the dead. The swordsman was left standing, staring at his empty fist.

With a shrug, Liliana bent two fingers into talons and drove them into his staring eyes. Hardly fatal, but more than enough to take him, screaming, out of the fight.

And just like that, the tavern grew calm once more. The eldritch symbols across Liliana’s back faded as swiftly as they appeared, leaving her skin pristine. Ignoring the slack faces that gaped silently at her from those partygoers who hadn’t already run screaming from the Bitter End, Liliana moved away from the fallen bandit, dismissing the spectral shadow with the merest thought. Only she, of all those present, heard its woeful cry as it spiraled back into the endless dark.

She placed one foot atop the fallen chair and leaned on her knee to gaze meaningfully down at Gariel—who was, himself, staring up at her as though she’d sprouted feathers.

“What … What did … What?”

“All good questions,” Liliana told him. “Are you all right?”

“I—I’ll live.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions just yet.” She reached down to offer the flustered fellow a hand up—then yanked it away as he began leaning on her, allowing him to fall flat on his face once more. The floorboards shook with the impact. “There’s still the little matter,” she said with a predatory smile, “of you stalking through that door, yelling at me, calling me all sorts of ugly names.”

“I—you …” Gariel wiped a hand across his face, smearing rather than removing the blood that now dribbled from his nose. “People are watching, Liliana.”

“That didn’t bother you when you were shouting obscenities at me.”

Gariel could only gape once more, at the gathered audience and at the injured bandits, and wonder exactly how crazy his friend’s girl actually was. He’d actually opened his mouth to ask such a question—only to choke on a spray of splinters as a bolt that appeared roughly as thick as a tree trunk slammed into the floor mere inches from his head.

Liliana heard the whir-and-click of a mechanized crossbow even as she jerked away from the sudden impact, glaring at the figures standing in the doorway.

There were three more, all strongly resembling the pair who had attacked her moments ago. Only these three, Liliana realized as she stared at a trio of self-loading identical weapons, were far better equipped.

“The next one,” the man in the middle told her gruffly, “goes through his head.” His gaze flickered to the two figures on the floor, one breathing his last, one blinded, and his face hardened. “I don’t think you’re fast enough to stop all three of us, witch.”

She scowled in turn. “So shoot him. He means nothing to me, and even with those fancy crossbows, I promise you’ll not have time to reload.”

“Ah,” the man said, voice oily, “but he means something to someone, don’t he?”

Liliana’s scowl grew deeper still—but her shoulders slumped, and she knew that they saw it. “What do you want?”

“What I want is to put a few shafts through you for what you did to my boys,” the bandit told her. “But what’s going to happen is this …”

The ascendance of a new age in the planeswalker mythology: be a part of the book that takes fans deeper than ever into the lives of the Multiverse’s most powerful beings:

Jace Beleren

A powerful mind-mage whose choices now will forever determine his path as a planeswalker.

Liliana Vess

A dangerous necromancer whose beauty belies a dark secret and even darker associations.

Tezzeret

Leader of an inter-planar consortium whose quest for knowledge may be undone by his lust for power.

On Alaroon, among an encalve of like-minded pyromancers, Chandra draws the attention of an ancient faith that sees her as a herald of an apocalypse. Will she control her own destiny, or suffer the will of others?