CRASHING THE GATES

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Big step coming up,” thought Jace.

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

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

“Can you grab my leg?” Jace thought.

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

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

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

The Golgari creature screeched, bristling with feather-fletched arrow shafts, and lurched sideways, its knees crumpling. It ricocheted against the side of the arch and fell from its feet, sending Jace, Emmara, and the Golgari elves tumbling. Jace crashed to the ground, but scrambled to his feet. He could see the archers—but something was strange about them. They weren’t in Selesnya uniform. They were of the Simic guild—this was a Simic ambush.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Release her,” said one of the soldiers.

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

Emmara took a breath.

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

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

“Emmara, I’m sorry,” said Jace.

“For what?”

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

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

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

Jace.

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

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

Emmara gathered herself and brushed foliage off her robe. She gave Jace a look. “What’s it like to be you, Jace? To be able to do what you do? What are your limits?”

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

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

“We should go. The Golgari await.”


***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What magic do you possess?” asked Jace.

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

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

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

“You let your pets do that for you,” said Emmara.

“Yes,” said Jace. “How fast can you summon?”

“Summon what?”

Jace sized up the troll. “Something big. And preferably hungry.”

The biomancer Vorel narrowed his eyes at the troll and clasped his hands tightly together. He pulled his palms apart, making a cage of his fingers, and a tiny sea of turquoise light churned between his hands. As he spread his hands open, the sea of light expanded, growing and shimmering, and a shadow grew within it. A deep, shuddering moan emanated from the center of the spell, and with a blast of wind and sea-spray, a monster of tentacles and carapace emerged, rising as high as the bridge. The leviathan cast one row of its eyes on Varolz, and its tentacles engulfed him, lifting him away. Jace could hear the troll’s roars through the leviathan’s muffling appendages.

Jace and Emmara looked at each other then dashed across the bridge. Vorel and the Simic delegation followed along behind them. They crossed through the Golgari gate and continued down a tunnel. Darkness swallowed them.

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