Agents of Artifice

CHAPTER SIX

Lieutenant Albin staggered and limped across the office to slump into his chair. For long moments he simply sat, cursing with every breath as he searched for a position that didn't pull at the bandages on his thigh, didn't send embers flashing through the constant, abominable ache. He cursed the prisoners who'd stabbed him, cursed Semner for getting him involved, cursed the city for not paying him his due and forcing him to accept outside bribes to live the lifestyle he deserved.

He cursed the paperwork on his desk, the forms and requisitions. Hell with 'em; let them wait.

And he cursed the cold draft that wafted beneath the closed door of the office, a draft he felt even through his uniform.

Where in the name of all gods and demons was the draft coming from? His office stood in the heart of the watch-house, far from any exterior exit. Even if every door in the building stood open, no such draft could have wended its way down the passages. And unless some mad deity had reached out and flipped the seasons with the flick of a divine switch, any breeze from outside should've been warm, not this icy breath of winter.

He rose on shaky legs, chair creaking, in time to see the air between him and the door turn black. A swirl of inky fog rose from the stones of the floor, obscuring all vision, all light. The air in the chamber grew colder still, until Albin's terrified gasps steamed in the frigid air, and his teeth chattered like the sound of falling marbles.

Two pinpricks of light, and then two more, formed in the whirling shadows. They glowed sickly yellow, emanating the heat of swift decomposition, as they formed themselves into pairs of eyes that gazed unblinking from opposite ends of the office. Beneath and behind them, the shadows ceased to writhe but instead hung limp, forming the faintest suggestion of long-taloned hands, bulging wings folded close, legs that trailed away into the ethereal birthplace of night.

They drifted forward, impossibly still; Albin could not shake the horrid impression that they hadn't moved at all, that he and the world itself had somehow shifted nearer to them. Fingers that were naught but wisps of deepest darkness reached out, and the corrupt guardsman found himself drawing breath to scream.

"Do not cry out…" A gleaming, jagged chasm of a mouth had opened beneath one pair of eyes, but Albin heard no speech in his ears. He felt it in his gut, remembered it from long-forgotten dreams. Though a low whisper, it was nigh deafening, for it was the voice of a thousand restless dead. "Do not cry out, or we shall raze the house of flesh from around your soul, and leave your five disembodied senses to linger, forever helpless, unknown, and unseen in this wretched room."

Albin bit down on the scream welling up in his throat, and all but choked on the blood he drew from his tongue.

From each side, he felt the fingers of the abyss wrap tight about his upper arms. His flesh burned as with the prolonged touch of ice, his vision blurred, his chest and head pounded as though he suffocated.

And then he was moving! Locked in a grip as unbreakable as death, he felt himself sliding backward through the wall itself. A moment of hideous nausea, as the world turned inside out and he felt the rough texture of the stone passing through his flesh, and they were on the other side. The ground dropped away beneath his feet, as he was borne aloft in the bone-crushing and soul-numbing grasp of the shadow things.

His arms were numb, but the icy burn had spread below to his fingers, upward through his chest and shoulders, until he could scarcely draw breath. Higher and higher the spirits carried him, until a wide swath of Ravnica was nothing but a map of intercrossing bridges and roadways below, until wisps of cloud mingled with the wisps of darkness that carried him.

The thing on his left tilted its head, and Albin could swear he heard an obscene chuckle even as it spoke.

"Now, if you wish, you may scream."

But he no longer had the breath.

As swiftly as they'd risen into the cold night air, they dropped again, plummeting into a neighborhood halfway across the district from the watch-house. With a bruising jolt, they stopped at the precise height of an old warehouse down near the lakeside docks, where the buildings were lower and the rooftops flatter. There they waited, hovering several feet from the roof.

And Albin, who had thought he could never again be surprised by anything, gawked at the pair who awaited them. Kallist stood at the very edge, a watch-issue long sword dangling from his fist. Behind him sat Liliana, legs and arms crossed. Her lips moved constantly in a sonorous mantra, and from beneath her closed eyelids leaked faint traces of the same sickly yellow luminescence that defined the features of the shadow-men.

"How was your trip, Lieutenant?" Kallist asked gruffly.

"I–I…" The words refused to come to him.

"Yes, I thought so. Let's make this is as simple as we can, Albin. We have questions for you. You're going to answer them, quickly and honestly, or things will get very unpleasant."

The guardsman felt a surge of hope, warm enough to melt through the icy lump in his throat. "If I do, will you let me go? Will you let me live?"

Kallist smiled a sad little smile. "I don't think you understand, Albin. The specters already killed you." Slowly, inexorably, he raised the sword, waved it through Albin's arms, his legs, his torso.

The blade touched nothing, nothing at all.

Finally, Albin found the strength to scream. Kallist, tapping the flat of the blade against his leg, waited patiently for him to finish.

"Your body," he said, and his voice was actually gentle, even sympathetic, "is lying on the floor of your office. I imagine it'll be morning before anyone finds it.

"No, Albin, your choice is not whether to help us and live, or refuse us and die. Your choice is to help us and be allowed to pass on-or to refuse, and find your soul given over to the specters for their own amusement."

Twin hisses of lustful pleasure sounded in the dead man's mind, yet they weren't enough to drown out the sound of the necromancer's chant.

And Albin, weeping phantom tears, began to talk.

"You sure you're up to this?" Kallist asked in a concerned whisper, for the third time since they'd reached the alley and at least the eighth since they'd set out that morning.

"Kallist?"

"Yes?"

"It would really be a shame if you made me kill you before Semner's men got a fair crack at it." Yep, Kallist decided. She's up to it.

Summoning two specters from the depths of the void was not, in itself, a difficult feat for her-but sending them to locate Albin and binding his ghost to the physical world for long enough to obtain their answers, that should have been considerably more grueling. Her use of the lieutenant's blood as an anchor and a focus had made all the difference.

Still, she'd spent many of the following hours in rest and meditation. The waters of the lake and nearby shores overflowed with mana, but it was a mana rich with life, ill-suited for her own necromantic magic. She drew what she could from the marshy patches scattered here and there about the shoreline, and even from the fungal patches in Favarial's sewage pipes, and then cast her concentration further still, drawing from Avaric, from other domains much farther distant. She swore it had been enough, but Kallist thought she looked tired even now, though several days had come and gone.

Kallist had pretended to make full use of the time. He'd acquired them new clothes, so they might blend more effectively with the middle-class population.

And then, with that chore done, he'd fretted until Liliana recovered. But however difficult it had been, it had proved absolutely worthwhile.

Semner was indeed using Albin's corrupt guards for more than impeding his rivals; he was using them to conduct his own search. With the aid of Albin's despairing, wailing ghost, Liliana and Kallist had identified most of the lieutenant's crooked operatives, tracking them down at their favorite taverns and gambling halls and brothels. Between their knowledge of the guards' dishonest activities and threats of mystical retribution, they'd convinced the lot of them to continue the hunt, but to report their findings to them, rather than to Semner.

Those findings, delivered by a nervous guard who wasted far too much time begging them not to turn him into something viscous, had finally drawn them to this cramped and malodorous alleyway, across the street from an old tenement building in the district's poorest quarter. The aquamarine walls were cobwebbed with cracks, the arched and peaked windows covered with moldy shutters, the doors bulging from within doorways that had long since shifted several degrees off plumb. For several minutes, now, the pair had watched from the concealing shadows, and had seen nobody-Jace or otherwise-enter or leave the decrepit structure.

"If this isn't just another false sighting," Liliana muttered, "then Jace's standards of living have taken a substantial downturn in the past six months."

Kallist merely shrugged. "Hard to stay unnoticed if you're living it up like a king with no heir."

"Kallist," she asked seriously, "are we even on the right trail? I mean, would Jace even look like himself anymore?"

"I think he would." Kallist furrowed his brow in thought. "Jace is about a hundred times the illusionist I am; he could probably make a mother leonin mistake him for one of her own cubs. But even he can't make himself look like someone else every day, all day. He might use a false image on occasion, if he feels he's in danger, but otherwise-"

A horrible shriek shattered the relative stillness of the evening. From behind the shutters of a top floor window shone a sudden burst of a brilliant and ugly firelight. And then it, and the scream, faded just as swiftly, and the alleyway plunged once more into darkened silence.

"Like now, perhaps." Liliana and Kallist exchanged brief, shocked glances, and then both were charging across the road.

Kallist had just long enough to regret the loss of his broadsword. He missed its solid, comforting weight; the guard-issued longsword with which he'd absconded during their escape just didn't have the same heft. Then there was no time for thinking at all as his shoulder collided with the tenement's outer door. The flimsy planks disintegrated before him, and he found himself pounding up multiple flights of shaky, mold-ridden stairs.

The first story disappeared beneath him, then the second, then more; even the tenements in this damned place were taller than they'd any right to be! The thundering of his footsteps echoed in the stairwell, as though an entire host of trolls followed him up. Doors slammed shut, and he heard the sounds of bolts sliding home, as the people who dwelt within decided it would be wiser to hide from whatever was happening than to step out and investigate it.

As he neared the upper floor, he saw a woman he recognized as one of Semner's thugs. Precisely what had happened to her, Kallist couldn't say, but she lay sprawled across the topmost steps and was only now rousing herself from unconsciousness. Kallist wondered briefly how Semner had tracked Jace here without the aid of the corrupt watchmen, but wasn't about to take the time to inquire. Without so much as breaking stride, he ran his blade through the back of the woman's head as he passed. There would be others to question at a more appropriate time.

At the top of the stairs, Kallist took a heartbeat to orient himself, to determine which of the various doors should lead to the chamber from which he saw the flash of balefire. Then, as with the portal below, Kallist set his shoulder to that door, and the door went away.

And Kallist froze. No matter the urgency, he could not tear his gaze from the room around him. Jace hadn't abandoned his standard of living; he'd simply hidden it.

The chamber beyond occupied a majority of the top floor, someone having knocked out the interior walls that separated one apartment from the next. The remaining walls were pristine, polished to a gleaming oceanic blue; there was no trace inside of the cracks that ran through the old stone without. The carpets were thick, the furniture comfortable and well maintained. A small dining table lay on its side, the tablecloth and dishware scattered about the floor. Even amid the signs of struggle, the scent of incense hung in the air, overpowering the odors of the city.

At the sound of a dull thump, possibly that of a body hitting the floor, Kallist finally shook off his amazement. Striding toward the room from which he had heard that familiar sound, he covered perhaps half the distance when the door was thrown open from within.

For the first time in half a year, Kallist stood face to face with Jace Beleren, the man who had once been his best friend.

They could have been brothers, and in fact had passed as such on one or two occasions during their service with the Infinite Consortium. Less than two inches separated them in height, less than twenty pounds in weight. Perhaps Jace was more clean shaven, Kallist's hair half a shade lighter; not identical, certainly, but very much alike.

Jace, clad in a heavy blue cloak he'd thrown over his bedclothes when first attacked, froze in the doorway, his own eyes as wide as the saucers that had spilled from atop the table.

"You!" Never before had Kallist heard so mundane a word loaded so heavily with bile. "It wasn't enough to steal her from me? Now you want me dead, too?"

Kallist, a small part of whom had briefly been glad to see his old friend, found himself scowling with rekindled rage. "Damn it, Jace, you know better than that! We came to warn you! Not," he added, with a quick glance at the trio of fallen bodies visible through the bedroom doorway, "that you seem to have needed it."

"After all this time, I'm supposed to believe that?" Jace demanded.

"Yes." Kallist squeezed the hilt of his sword until he felt the leather wrappings start to fold. "Now, if you-"

He couldn't breathe; couldn't talk; couldn't think. Kallist froze as though struck by a basilisk's gaze. He felt a fist around his mind, keeping him from moving, from reacting, holding him firmly in place while Jace took the extra few moments he needed. Kallist felt the faintest touch, the legs of skittering spiders across the surface of his dreams.

Kallist gasped in shock and found himself slumped to the floor.

"Damn it, Jace!" Kallist couldn't decide if he wanted to kill or to cry, and settled for an enraged shout.

"You swore never to read-"

"We both of us made promises back then, didn't we?" Jace snapped in turn. But the lines of his face had softened. As though forcing himself through rising water, he stepped slowly across the room and extended a hand to help Kallist off the floor.

"I'm sorry." The words were little more than a mutter, and Jace's mouth twisted as though they'd turned sour on his tongue. But still, he said it. "And I believe you," he added, as Kallist hauled himself to his feet on Jace's arm. "But I had to be sure."

"Fine. Whatever. So what happened here?" Jace shrugged and stepped away, as though even proximity to the man who'd betrayed his trust was painful. "Some men came through my door and window, and tried to kill me."

"And?"

"I didn't let them."

"Was one of them Semner?"

Jace's jaw clenched. "Semner's here?"

"These are his people." Kallist frowned. "If he's not here, there's another attack coming."

"The Consortium send him?"

"I'd imagine so, but I can't be sure. You know Semner's reputation. He'd hire himself out to a warthog if the money was right. We need to get out of here, find someplace a little more secure to figure out our next step."

"And Liliana?" Jace asked softly.

Kallist cried out, cursing himself for ten kinds of idiot. She'd been only a few steps behind him when they left the alleyway. But so distracted had he been by his encounter with Jace, he'd not taken a moment to wonder why she hadn't followed him through the door.

Perfectly on cue, a sudden scream, terrified and clearly feminine, echoed through the stairway.

Months of anger and recrimination vanished. Kallist and Jace stood side by side, the one raising his sword in expert grip, the other focusing his will to deceive the sight or burn the mind of any who would bar his path. Neither could imagine what might draw such a reaction from Liliana, but whatever it was, Kallist intended to visit it thrice over on Semner's beaten corpse.

Kallist reached the open doorway first-and simply folded, falling back into the main room of the apartment, sword tumbling from his fingers. He hadn't seen what hit him, but whatever it was struck hard. His jaw ached, his head pounded, and he could scarcely even see, let alone consider rising to his feet. He spotted a small streak of blood staining the carpet and realized it was his own.

Footsteps behind him, but he could not turn. He saw two pairs of worn and dirty boots, doubtless belonging to more of Semner's thugs, but he couldn't even raise his head. Across the room, he saw Jace retreat several steps, ready to cast any of a score of devastating spells. From the hall beyond the doorway, he heard Liliana's voice cry out his name and then begin to intone another of her dark chants. He gave thanks that she still lived, but still he could not turn.

The pounding in his head grew heavier; the blood rushed in his ears, the lights of the room blinked and flickered. Everything was unfocused, spastic, moving in slow-motion fits and starts.

Semner's men stepped forward, naked blades extended, closing in on Jace.

The first man fell, screaming until his throat bled at the nightmares the mage's spell seared into his conscious mind.

The second was within reach before Jace lashed out. From his outstretched hand, a sky-blue eel wiggled and writhed its way through the air to wrap about the torso and neck of his attacker. Serrated fins sliced into flesh while the beast's jagged maw clamped hard upon the bandit's face, shredding skin and bone, blood and ocular fluids, into a slippery stew that flowed smoothly down its winding throat.

For just a moment, as his vision continued to fade in and out, Kallist dared to hope it might be over.

Jace's eyes grew wide at the sight of some fresh danger in the hall beyond Kallist's fallen form. Kallist saw the mage's mouth moving; saw, as well, a new hesitation, even fear, in his face. Jace took a step back, retreating from whatever was approaching.

The shutters over the window behind him exploded inward at the impact of Semner's boots. Dropping from the roof, the gorillalike mercenary wasn't slowed by the thin planks. He slammed hard into Jace's back, drawing a pained gasp even as the mage fell sprawling.

Kallist struggled to crawl forward, fingers digging into the carpet, but he couldn't make himself move. He heard feet on the floor beside him, recognized Liliana's ankles and her sharp intake of breath.

Jace rolled, coming back to his feet as Semner's dagger cleared its sheath. The first slash barely penetrated Jace's robe. Only the very tip of the blade connected, etching a line of blood across his chest; he gasped and went pale, but his stance never faltered.

Yet in the chaos, Jace allowed the pain of the wound to distract him. Catching Jace off-guard, Semner spun, hauling back his arm as though preparing for another strike, while a second dagger dropped into his left hand from his sleeve. It came up in a short, brutal thrust that his victim never saw coming. Flesh and bone parted, and beneath the merciless edge, a man's heart burst.

For what seemed an infinite instant, silence reigned. Then the room burst with a blinding flash, a blue so blazing it was nearly white. It hovered in the air between the fallen Kallist and the dying Jace, and despite its intensity, it cast no shadow from either.

Kallist screamed; no mere cry of grief or rage, but a terrible, primal yell that drew stunned looks from Semner and Liliana both. Long after his voice should have given out, or his lungs exhausted themselves of breath, he screamed.

He no longer saw the chamber at all. Images, feelings, notions, and dreams that were not his own flooded his mind until it came nigh to bursting, until he could see nothing at all of the world around him. Like an animal driven by pure instinct, he rose from the floor and fled through the gaping doorway, all prior weaknesses and wounds forgotten in a torrent of madness.

How he kept his balance on the unsteady stairs, how many corners he turned, how many passersby he shoved from his path to leave cursing in the streets behind him, he could never have recounted. He ran until the sounds of Favarial subsided, until the walls of another alleyway pinned him from taking one more step.

Still the memories swirled in his head, but finally they began to order themselves, to settle into their proper places, and he could see, and feel, and think-and remember.

Jace Beleren, who had long ago stolen the mind of a man he called friend, who had lived for half a year as Kallist Rhoka, fell to his knees in the refuse of the alley and wept.