Agents of Artifice

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It was some few days later, as best Jace could tell, when Liliana returned. He'd suffered through only a single "session" with Baltrice in the interim; she must be busy.

"We've less time than I'd hoped," Liliana said to him as the door once more slid shut behind her. "The dreadful duo are conducting some sort of experiment, but I don't know how long that'll keep them occupied."

Jace forced himself to stand, ignoring the pains of his most recent burns, and shuffled across the cell.

"I thought we were waiting until they were off-world again."

Liliana shook her head and placed a large bundle on the floor near the bars. "I don't think we can, Jace. I think they're close to finishing."

He didn't need her to complete the thought, felt himself trembling again at Tezzeret's plans. "Then I guess we'd better hurry," he said, voice quavering.

Despite his frayed nerves, however, he couldn't help but smile as Liliana began to unwrap the bundle, and he recognized the equally frayed blue cloak that served as the bag. She glanced up at his expression and smiled in turn; for just a moment, it was almost enough to make him forget that more than bars now stood between them.

Her movements swift but precise, she laid out an array of odd devices, near the cell but not directly beside it.

"The guards won't miss those?" Jace asked.

Her grin turned nasty. "The guards have bigger problems right now." On cue, the door slid open, and a quartet of Tezzeret's soldiers shambled into the room. Jace barely had to glance their way to see that they were already dead.

"Infinity Globes," she said, not allowing time for further questions. She lifted a pair of small dark orbs. "It's what he used to follow you when you tried your 'tactical withdrawal.' I understand he started work on them after the two of you had trouble escaping from Bolas's berserkers a few years ago."

Jace nodded, remembering how near they'd both come to dying that day.

"As I understand it," she continued, "They're made of an etherium filigree, so tightly packed it's almost fused. It provides a lot of the power you'd normally have to focus from the world around you, so you don't need to spend more than a few seconds in concentration. It's easier for Tezzeret, thanks to his etherium arm, but they should work for us as well."

"Handy."

She nodded, then pushed them aside. Frankly, she still wasn't certain he'd live long enough to need them. She lifted her other prize, a bizarre contraption of tubes and pipes, and set it beside the cell.

"That's it?" he asked. "It looks like an Izzet water pipe."

Liliana chuckled. "Maybe. But yes, that's it. There's enough mana stored in here to help you recover if…" She sighed. "Jace, are you sure this is a good idea? There's a reason I don't summon these things, you know. They're notoriously hard to control."

"I'm sure it's a lousy idea," he told her. "But unless you found something in that arsenal that looks like an antidote to Tezzeret's Stay Where You're Put poison…?"

She shook her head.

"Then it's the only idea I've got," he concluded. "All right," she whispered. "Then let's get it over with."

At her silent command, the four zombies advanced, one producing a heavy chain they had picked up elsewhere in the complex. Because the undead could not place so much as a finger between the bars without falling inert, Liliana passed the end of the chain to Jace, who ran it around two of the bars and fed it back out. The zombies lifted both ends, stepped away, and began to twist.

Jace stepped as far back as the walls of the cell allowed, crouching in a corner and lifting his arms to protect his face from any flying debris. Liliana moved behind the zombies, muttering under her breath, exhorting them to ever greater efforts.

A high-pitched squeal echoed throughout the chamber, and flakes of metal sifted earthward where the chain rubbed against the bars. Tireless and impossibly strong, the zombies continued to twist.

"Are we sure there's no alarm?" Jace asked, shouting over the rising screech.

"Would it matter?" Liliana called back.

I guess not, Jace thought. He could only hope, with Tezzeret and Baltrice occupied in the laboratory and the guards beyond the cell now deceased, that nobody would be in a position to hear it if there was.

A second, equally deafening tone joined the first, as filings sifted from the sockets in which the bars were housed. The bars began, every so faintly, to quiver.

And then the zombies fell back as one of the links in the chain snapped open. Jace and Liliana took just a moment to reposition one of the shorter lengths, and the undead efforts continued.

It took only a few moments more. With a final, ear-piercing rend, the two bars bent inward and tore loose from their sockets. Jace was free.

Sort of.

Pale and perspiring-not from the toxin, for he'd not yet left the cell, but at the notion of what had to happen next-Jace forced himself to stand beside the gap without quite passing through. Carefully he lowered himself into a crouch and stuck his left arm out.

The zombies shuffled to his side, as near as they could get, ready to drag him out.

"Do it," he breathed.

Liliana began to chant, a litany not quite so deep, but somehow far more sinister, than those she used to call her spectral minions. The air beside her clouded over, filled with a faintly luminescent mist, and once again the runic tattoos sprouted across her back and neck. The chamber's still air grew humid and uncomfortably chill.

Between one blink and the next, the mist was gone, and in its place stood a tall man. Dark-haired and cleanshaven, he was clad in formal tunic, vest, and leggings that might have been the height of fashion on Ravnica a century gone by. He turned his piercing stare on Liliana. For a moment they stood locked in what Jace could only assume was a battle of wills, until finally he bowed, mouth twisted in a scornful moue.

The necromancer turned back to Jace, and he recognized the unspoken message. Last chance to back out.

"Do it," he said again, voice steadier.

Liliana nodded, once to him, once to the newcomer. He smiled broadly, showing a mouthful of fangs that lengthened even as she watched.

Jace shuddered violently as the vampire pressed its mouth to his arm and began to drink gluttonously of his contaminated blood.

"Jace?"

He felt himself afloat, swaddled in the softest darkness, far from the pains and the fears of the light. He drifted on the border, not between waking and sleeping, but on the edge of something greater, something deeper than slumber. It sang to him in the voice of a thousand sirens, a call far easier to heed than to resist.

"Damn it, Jace! Stay with me!"

He tried not to hear the words, not to know the voice. But it nagged at him, even over the restful urgings of the dark.

That's right; there was something he was supposed to do.

Jace opened his eyes, and even that was a monumental victory. His entire body was a leaden weight, his thoughts mired in painful lethargy, and even his heartbeat felt slowed. He no longer sensed the horrible creature's lips and teeth on his arm, but when he forced himself to look and make certain, all he could see was the corpse-white pallor of his own skin.

Which made sense, really, given that he was currently rather blood-deficient. For no good reason, Jace found the notion hysterical, but all he could muster was a single giggle.

Liliana frowned, though she couldn't quite mask her relief that he hadn't just died on her. Moving swiftly, she pressed the largest tube of the artifact to his face. Jace coughed once as a strange vapor that wasn't quite steam wafted over him, permeating his lungs. He felt a strength growing within him, a potency he hadn't consciously realized he was missing.

But it was a vigor of the spirit only, not the body. Though the mana infused his soul, the languor in his limbs refused to fade. He was able, barely, to turn his head-and he noticed, for the first time, that the zombies had dragged him from the cell while he was out-but nothing more.

"Oh, yeah, this was a great idea," Liliana grumbled. "As long as Tezzeret accidentally trips and falls on something sharp, we've got him where we want him!"

"I'm so glad… I don't have the strength… to pretend to laugh." Jace closed his eyes.

"Are you sure you-"

"No. Be quiet."

Liliana glared at him-or at least he assumed so, though he didn't open his eyes to check. He let the darkness and the silence roll over him once more, not to fall into it as he had nearly done, but to blot out the distractions, the lingering pain, the sound of his own labored breaths.

Carefully, as though afraid his thoughts might topple if he didn't stack them just so, he cast his mind back to Emmara's home on Ravnica. As he'd done then, he pushed himself to remember the feel of her magics, the warmth that suffused his body at the elfs healing touch, the seemingly endless plains that ran beneath Ovitzia where he'd recently spent so much time. He turned it over in his mind, examining the sensation, delving into it, forcing it to become real, more real than the cold floor beneath him, than the burns that had transformed his body into a map of suffering, than the weakness the vampire had left in place of his stolen blood.

The one and only time Jace had done this before, he'd barely felt a tremor in his wounds before his concentration lapsed. This time, he had to literally haul himself from death's door; to regenerate a loss of blood that should, by all rights, have already killed him.

And then he was going to take on Tezzeret again.

Jace allowed himself to break focus just long enough to wonder if he could cure himself of his obvious insanity while he was at it-and then he bent every last bit of will to a task that he knew he shouldn't be able to perform, but at which he could not afford to fail.