Agents of Artifice

CHAPTER FOUR

Kallist glowered about as though hoping to cow the rain into submission. The rain petulantly refused to be intimidated, however, and he had to settle for running his fingers over his face, flinging another handful of water to the sodden earth.

"At least it keeps the worst of the stench and the mosquitoes out of the air," Liliana told him, her voice cheerful enough that it made Kallist very seriously consider hitting her over the head with the first loose brick he could find.

He glared at her instead. "Maybe if you'd take one of these packs for me, I'd be a tad less miserable."

"I have what I need. It's not my fault you pack like a girl."

"And I suppose that means you pack like a man, then?"

"I, my love," she said, with a seductive twinkle in her eye and just a faint touch of her tongue on her lips, "do not do anything like a man."

Kallist, still not emotionally steady enough to broach certain subjects, kept walking.

The both of them were clad in heavy cloaks, designed not only to keep the elements off but to hide the fact that their clothes were clearly of poor, peasant stock. Though the only routes out of Avaric took them through alleys, sewers, and under-streets that made even that poor district seem classy, they would soon enough be wending their way through neighborhoods of far greater affluence. They could acquire new outfits easily enough, but until then, it wouldn't do to stand out as yokels.

Kallist had topped his outfit with a broad-brimmed hat, Liliana with a deep hood, and neither had done much in the way of keeping the pair dry. Their shoes were all but unsalvageable, the rain-soaked mud of Avaric having been replaced by the much purer garbage and excess sewage of Ravnica's most foul under-streets.

A few more moments of silence, a few hundred more yards. The rains increased marginally, but enough to soak through what few spots of Kallist's outfit were still dry, and he could only shake his head.

"This is not an auspicious start to our journey," he muttered.

"Why, Kallist. You're not superstitious, are you?"

The expression he turned on Liliana was utterly bland. "I'm accompanying a sorcerer who was born on another world, on our way to warn a third that he's about to be assassinated, possibly at the behest of either an inter-planar criminal organization or a spirit-binding rat. As far as I'm concerned, what you call 'superstition,' I call 'paying attention."' "Fair enough. You should try that, then."

Kallist squinted, not entirely certain if he was imagining the insult there or not, but Liliana's smile suggested that she hadn't seriously meant it anyway. At least, he assumed that's what it meant.

Another few moments of silence, save the persistent rain and the squelching of boots.

"Liliana," he began hesitantly, "about our talk last night…"

"No."

"Fine." Kallist couldn't keep the anger or a touch of petulance out of his voice. He began to pull ahead, but a soft hand on his shoulder stopped him.

He turned, and the wide eyes into which he gazed glimmered with more than the rain.

"Kallist," Liliana said gently, "not now. After we're done with this-when we've found Jace and we're done with whatever we're doing in Favarial-if things have changed, ask me then. But not now. There's too much to deal with."

He could only nod, unable to form anything resembling a coherent word, and resumed his pace.

Struggling to keep his voice steady, he asked, "Assuming we can find him, do you think Jace'll be willing even to see us?"

"I doubt it," Lilian a told him seriously. "But I wasn't planning on asking. You said it yourself, Kallist: He's never forgiven either of us. We're going to have to save him despite himself.

"And who knows?" she added, voice far more hopeful than it was certain. "Maybe saving his life one more time will help balance out the books where he's concerned."

Kallist smiled a grim, sad smile. "And when you're through with that delusion, I've got a pristine castle with a mountain view on Dominaria that I can sell you, cheap."

Again they walked in silence. As their footsteps drew them inexorably farther from Avaric, their surroundings grew ever filthier, ever more gloomy. At least the huts and shops in Avaric had no pretensions; these, however, stretched as high as those aspiring to the glory of other, far wealthier neighborhoods. Narrow windows and tall arched doorways provided ingress through walls of stone; but that stone was cracked and encrusted with dirt and droppings, those windows boarded over, those doors rotted away. Cobwebs grew thicker than curtains, and the sounds of what few inhabitants remained within were furtive and scurrying. The cobbles were colored in all manner of molds and mildews that rarely saw the sun, feeding off the runoff and waste.

His attention locked on that nightmare of abandoned, dying buildings, half-blinded by the precipitation that hung in the air like a mist, Kallist all but leaped from his skin as Liliana's fist clenched on his shoulder.

"Holy hell, Liliana! What are-"

"Shush!" The rasped whisper shut him up faster than any shout. "Listen!"

Indeed, he heard it now, cursed himself for missing it. Drums in the sewer tunnels, a dozen or more.

"Sewer goblins," he hissed at Liliana, hand dropping to the hilt of his broadsword.

"I don't understand," she admitted, even as she stepped away, clearing him room to draw. "I thought they didn't come out during the day?"

"They don't." But Kallist's voice was distant, for something else had begun to disturb him, something that tickled at the back of his mind. Something about the drums themselves, about the tale Jace once told him of the Kamigawa ratmen…

"Liliana," he rasped, throat suddenly dry, "I think we have bigger things than goblins to worry about…"

Did the goblin shamans, or the demoniac night-creeps who sometimes ruled them, call it forth from the toxic mire in which they dwelt, shaping mind and body and soul from fungal growths and human wastes and rotting, caustic refuse? Or had their primitive call been heard farther away, worlds away, summoning a vile soul to manifest through what foul materials they had to hand?

Ultimately, it made no difference. The beat of the drums rose, growing ever louder, ever more frenetic, and the worst of the sewers rose with them.

The fetid waft of methane was its herald, vicious gouts of sludge and slurry its outriders. Taller than the house Kallist and Liliana had left behind, it oozed up and through the storm drain, jaws agape in a silent bellow. Thick mud and foul slimes sluiced from its body, and always there remained another layer of corruption beneath, bubbling up to take its place. Its arms were broken boards, its claws bits of stone and rusted nails, the fangs within its cavernous maw ancient and filthy shards of glass. It was the worst of Ravnica's filth, the feces and flotsam and decay, given a terrible, primeval life. And hate.

And hunger.

The sounds within the surrounding structures turned to sudden screams, to pounding feet and slamming doors, as the destitute took what shelter they could from a menace they could not comprehend. In older times, more ordered times, such an abomination would have been met swiftly by the Legion of Wojek, or at least the forces of one of the other great guilds. But today, only those districts that could afford their own defenders, or the exorbitant fees demanded by the Legion's successors, had any such protection. Here, in the dwellings of the poor, the filthy, and the forgotten, no one cared.

Kallist, his waking mind reduced briefly to gibbering horror, reacted without conscious thought. Through instinct alone, he summoned up a shroud of magic even as he charged the abomination, blade held high. Poor a mage as he might be, his desperate illusion should have rendered him briefly invisible. He should have reached the shambling form unseen, gained precious seconds to hack away at it while it remained unaware of his location.

But Kallist was not thinking clearly, and Kallist had never faced a beast such as this. Without eyes within its face, without brain within its skull, the creature possessed no purchase on which his illusions could take hold. Even as he neared, the shambler lashed out with a fist of muck and refuse. Agony flashed across Kallist's body as a dozen jagged edges traced a dozen lines of deep red through his flesh. He barely had time to note the alleyway dropping away beneath his feet before he slammed hard against a wall across the way. Bright lights flashed before him and the breath rushed from his lungs, leaving him gasping as he slid to the base of the house. Only sheer luck prevented his spinning body from landing across the blade of his own brutal weapon.

Nor was the beast through with him. Even as Kallist settled to earth, propped upright only by the wall, the shambler's maw split apart. First like a snake with jaw unhinged, and then farther still, it gaped wider, impossibly, bonelessly wide. And from that portal to some squalid hell, the creature vomited up a putrescent mass of sewage, a deluge that slammed into Kallist as brutally as the fist itself. It clung to him, choked his lungs, hardened about his joints and glued him to the ground.

Liliana, who had far greater experience dealing with such violations of nature, still found herself stunned. Frantically her gaze flitted from the shambling mass to her fallen companion and back again, conflicting needs tearing at her soul.

The horror started toward her, not even bothering to turn its sightless head in her direction, and the time for indecision was past. Mouthing a funereal chant, lower, more somber, more soul-churning even than that she had voiced in the Bitter End, she raised both hands and circled right, forcing the creature to move ever farther from Kallist if it meant to reach her. The runic swirls tattooed across her back began to glow, a sickly bruise-purple, pulsing in time with her heart.

With agonizing sluggishness, light returned to Kallist's eyes, feeling to his limbs. He saw only smatterings of the wall that rose above him, or the cloud-laden skies beyond, for he could scarcely turn his head. His legs and back began to itch, then burn, as the caustic fluids of the sewage seeped through his clothes. The hardened muck held him fast, and he feared he would simply lay there, helpless, until something awful appeared to claim him, or until he suffocated in the waste's poisonous effluvia.

When he felt the muck begin to break away, first from about his wrists and arms, then from around his neck-when he saw the tips of pale and slender fingers-he nearly sobbed in relief.

"Liliana!" he gasped, sucking in great lungfuls of air, "how did you-"

And then Kallist saw precisely what had rescued him. The blood drained from his face until even his lips were fishbelly-pale, and he could not help but wonder what cost Liliana had paid to cast such a summons.

The common folk of a hundred worlds believed angels were the servants of gods, beings of light who dwelt on high, graceful and beautiful, pure and righteous. The common folk here on Ravnica knew angels as their neighbors, dwellers in the same cities where lived humans and vedalken and viashino.

Nowhere on Ravnica, or on any others of those worlds, had anyone imagined an angel such as this.

She straightened the moment Kallist was free enough to extricate himself, revealed in all her nightmarish glory, this angel that certainly came from nowhere near "on high." Wings of midnight feathers, dull and grim as the blackest crow, blotted out what little sunlight had forced its way to the alley's floor. Corpse-pale skin was girded in leather armors harvested from the hides of demonic and mortal foes alike, and a deceptively dainty fist clutched a jagged, rusted shaft, less a spear than a lightning bolt of forged steel. Where she stood, even the stone-coating mildew died, overcome by the angel's essence of desolation. Beetles, rats, and other crawling things emerged from the sewer grates and the cracks between the cobblestones, desperate to flee her deathly presence, only to wither away at her feet.

Eyes, empty of anything but a need for destruction beyond Kallist's imagining, turned away to gaze with naked lust upon the conflict raging down the street. Sitting upright, digging frantically for his blade, Kallist himself did the same.

Liliana was clearly paying for her decision to send her summoned servant to rescue Kallist. She hovered several feet above the roadway, hands crossed before her at the wrists, surrounded once more in an aura of black and shifting mists. Above her the shambling thing rained down blow after blow, only to recoil each time as its murky "flesh" made contact with the life-sapping energies that cocooned the necromancer. But the thing of the sewers was not alive in the truest sense of the word, and with each strike, its denticulate limbs passed farther through those mists before it was forced to draw back. It could be only a matter of seconds before Liliana's protections failed her utterly.

"What are you waiting for?" Kallist demanded of the power that stood before him, motionless as any statue. Only later would he truly think on the fact that he had shouted at and berated an angel of the darkest depths, and then his hands would shake. For now, he saw only the imminent death of the woman he loved. "She called you here! Help her!"

It turned to him, offered him a smile of terrifying, soul-bruising beauty. Kallist's breath lodged again in his chest, as that seductively murderous face sent blood rushing to his loins even while it turned his stomach, caused his limbs to grow palsied and his head to pound. Only then, spurred on not by Kallist's feeble demands but by a silent call from Liliana, did the angel take to the air, a song of battle and blood and death flowing with heart-rending beauty from her throat. Her wings spread wide, wider, impossibly wide, until they spanned the breadth of the alley, until even the blind shambler, one fist raised over its head to strike, could not help but feel the chill of her shadow. And briefly it shuddered, in whatever primeval ember passed for its soul.

Her voice never wavered, her song never faltered, as the angel dropped upon the animate sewer, spear sinking deep into waste and mud and slime. Where it struck, what was green decayed to brown, brown and grey rotted to black. Bubbles rose to the shambler's surface, popped open with the foulest stench, leaving great, gaping abscesses in its viscous hide.

But the elemental spirit called up by the goblin shamans would not fall so easily. With another silent roar, it turned from the exhausted mage and slashed viciously at its raven-winged tormentor. She rose ten feet higher with a single vicious flap, as swiftly as if yanked by invisible strings. Just as swiftly she dropped once more, plunging her spear into the shambler's head.

It rippled, twisting and shifting, the mud and sludge rearranging themselves. From the front of its head, the glass-toothed maw slid upward to split open at the scalp. It snapped shut with a ferocious clack, locking hard onto the rusty blade. The angel yanked back, attempting to free the weapon, but even her great strength and the mighty flap of her wings could not wrench it loose. And in that moment of distraction, the foul heap reached upward and wrapped the angel in an unbreakable embrace of garbage and nails.

The angel's battle song faltered but did not end. In a grotesque dance, an echo of the spinning celebrants at the Bitter End, they twisted across the roadway, scattering cobblestones before them. Skin split and bruised, sludge flowed and rotted away.

Liliana dropped to the earth with a gasp, the aura of darkness disappearing as her feet touched down. Sweat mingled with the rain that covered her brow and plastered her hair to the sides of her face, but she kept her focus locked on the grappling angel, her lips moving in unheard mantras.

Seeing that she was in no immediate danger, Kallist dived into his pack. Leaving his broadsword momentarily untouched, lying half-covered by the hardened sewage, he pulled from the satchel one of the mechanized crossbows they'd taken from their rather ineffective captors.

Clutching the weapon in his left hand, Kallist slipped a bolt from the small quiver. Even as he placed it in the groove, his thumb traced a rune in the air above the projectile's steel head. The shape took on a substance of its own, hovering in the air above the bolt for two full heartbeats before it faded away into the rain.

For long seconds Kallist aimed, literally holding his breath. If he missed, he wasn't sure he had the energy to repeat the spell. Worse, should his bolt pass through the shambler and hit the angel…

The beast turned its back, and Kallist squeezed the trigger, exhaling slowly. The crossbow bucked with a twang, hummed as its enchanted gears ratcheted the cord back to receive another bolt. And the projectile itself flashed through the air to sink, without the slightest visible effect, into the living muck.

Again Kallist held his breath. A better mage could have targeted the spell directly, without the need for the bolt to carry it, but Kallist had barely managed the magic at all. Had he somehow bollixed it up? Had the bolt passed straight through, without striking anything solid? Would it even work on a creature without organs or muscles, bone or blood?

So determined was his stare, his reluctance even to blink that his vision blurred with strain and rainwater. Thus, when his enchantment did begin to take hold, he almost missed it. So gradually that it could easily have been his imagination or a trick of the rain-bent light, the shambler's movements slowed. Each step grew more ponderous than the last, and the beast began to teeter on the verge of collapse as its feet struggled to keep up with its forward momentum. Though its strength had diminished not at all, it could not keep pace with the angel's thrashing, and with a burst of black feathers she erupted from its grasp. Her skin was mottled with gangrenous, festering wounds, her left arm hung limp where the bones had cracked. But her voice rose with power to shame the thunder, and in her one good hand she held her spear aloft, as though to sunder the clouds from the sky.

And as her foe reeled backward, trying desperately to keep its balance, she dived.

Slowed to a dull plodding by Kallist's spell, the shambler might as well have tried to outrun the lightning as to dodge the plummeting angel. So terrible was her stroke, the creature's glutinous hide literally opened up before her. Not merely her spear, but the angel herself plowed through the beast, bursting from its back in a spray of rancid mud and filth.

Perhaps pain finally gave the lumbering construct a voice, or perhaps it was simply the rush of air between its sagging maw and the gaping fissure in its torso, but the shambler howled, a terrible sound of sucking mud and raging winds. Fungi and the bones of rats burst through its skin of muck, thrashing wildly, the legs of some horrible, dying vermin. Still, though it collapsed heavily to the roadside, supporting itself on one of its slimy arms, it stubbornly refused to die.

Liliana, also crouched in the roadway, could only hope that it was near enough to death, for she could maintain her summons no longer. With a gasp she released the energies pent up within, allowed herself to relax her almost inhuman concentration. A death-pale face, now painted in sewage, turned questioningly in her direction for just an instant before the angel disappeared, drawn back to whatever lower realm had spawned her.

Kallist didn't know if the cesspit creature was capable of recovering from such a devastating assault, but he wasn't about to wait and find out. Dropping the crossbow, he hefted his great broadsword and charged back down the alley, fully prepared to hack the thing into so many bite-sized morsels to keep it from rising once more.

But Liliana was faster, or at least a great deal nearer. Though her vision blurred and her footsteps faltered, she stepped toward the thrashing monstrosity. It would be some time before she'd dare attempt so potent a summons, yes, but even at her weakest, Liliana Vess held plenty of spells at her beck and call.

Foul fumes of diseased purple flowed from her hands, roiling against the wind. Where they passed, what few molds and random weeds had survived the struggle fell flat. At its strongest, the shambler's animating spirit could have easily withstood the arcane poisons Liliana now pumped into the soaking air, but now, its innards open to the outside, it lacked all such resilience.

Kallist skidded to a halt, sword still upraised, as the creature spasmed. It bellowed once, its final call, and crumbled into mulch, already washing back into the sewers beneath the slow but steady rain.

The tension finally left his body in a sigh of relief as heavy as the buildings looming over him. His shoulders drooped, the tip of his sword screeched against the cobblestones. Kallist opened his mouth to call to Liliana-

And something heavy, flailing, and gnashing its teeth slammed into him from behind.

Kallist toppled, long and powerful fingers on the back of his neck forcing his face down against the bruising roadway. His hand scrabbled for his sword, but even had he found the hilt, he couldn't possibly have delivered an effective stroke. Bright lights flashed once more before his eyes; his lungs and nostrils burned. Blood pounded in his ears, deafening him to the hissing and snarling of the beast on his back.

It deafened him, also, to the sudden twang of the crossbow he'd dropped. The bolt flew wide, but near enough to make its point. The weight vanished from Kallist's back as abruptly as it had appeared, and he raised his aching head in time to see a small shape scurrying back into open drain.

"What…" he gasped, trying to catch his breath for the fourth time in minutes, "What was…"

"Sewer goblin," Liliana told him, even as she sagged onto the stoop of a nearby home, crossbow dangling from limp fingers. "I don't think they took kindly to us surviving."

Kallist scowled, lowering his head between his knees as he struggled for breath. "What were they doing, anyway? They don't come out in the day, and they certainly don't summon elementals to waylay travelers!"

"Unless they're bribed to," Liliana commented. "Greedy little bastards."

"Semner?"

"Who else? Probably decided to make sure we couldn't follow him, if we managed to get away from his thugs. Even he's not stupid enough to assume we're no threat to him, and it wouldn't have been hard to figure out where we'd pass. It's not like we had a lot of routes to choose from."

Kallist opened his mouth to ask another question, snapped his teeth together when he lifted his head and finally got a good look at the woman beside him. Her flesh was pale and clammy, her entire body drenched. Even sitting slumped over as she was, her hands shook with exhaustion.

"You don't look well," Kallist said brilliantly.

"I need to rest," she admitted, and Kallist knew she didn't just mean physically. A summoning such as the one she'd invoked… Her essence must be dry as parchment. The swampy earth beneath Avaric was reasonably mana-rich and particularly suited to Liliana's style of magic-it was one of the reasons they'd moved there after falling out with Jace-but they were traveling, slowly but surely, away from it as they headed toward Favarial. Her recovery would take time.

Time that the sudden burst of frenetic drumming from deep within the echoing sewers told them they did not have.

Leaning on one another, each gasping for air and struggling for strength, they rose. One step forward, a second…

"Damn it!" Kallist clenched his fists in helpless frustration and failed to notice Liliana's hiss of pain as he squeezed her smaller hand in his. "The little bastards stole the pack!"

Every supply he had brought, every morsel of food, every comfort, had been in the backpack that he left behind after the angel pried him from the clinging sewage. And of that pack, there was no sign at all.

"We could try to get it back," Liliana suggested. "They're just sewer goblins."

It was an empty offer, and they both knew it. Kallist merely shook his head, and the weary couple shuffled their way along the urban chasm, struggling to leave behind the pounding drums, and the foul things that woke to their call.