by Cory Herndon
The moaning from the puzzle-box paused, as if the ghost were drawing breath. Finally the moan returned, but this time the sound formed words.
“Gaaaarrrrrrr,” the ghost said.
“Mr. Gar, I’d—”
“—mmmaaaaaakh,” the ghost finished. Kos heard Zunich stifle a cough.
“Mr. Garmakh,” Kos continued, “That is your name, yes?”
“Yyyyyeeeeessssss,” the ghost hissed.
“Very good,” Kos said. “What happened here?”
“Heeeee haaaaaaappeeeeeened. Heeeee caaaaaalllllls. Reeeeeeleeeease Gaaarrrmmmakh. Gaaaaaarrrmmmaaaakh muuuust fooolllloooow.”
“He? He who? Who calls? Is it the same one who killed all these people?”
“Reeeeelllleeeeaaase Gaaarrrmmmaaaaakh.”
“I will release you,” Kos said, “but if I’m going to find whoever made you the way you are I need more than—”
“Reeeeelllleeeeeaaaaase meeeeeee. Reeeeellllleeeeeease meeeeeeee.”
“Kos,” Zunich interrupted, “I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Kos said, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “I think you’re right. Still. …” The constable tried one more time. “Garmakh, the one who did this—does he call? Where is he now?”
“Heeeee iiiiissss aaaallll. Heeee iiiiissss neeeeeear. Heeee caaaaalls.”
“Did. He. Do this. To you?” Kos said through clenched teeth. He could already see the scroll describing how he’d completely wasted their one ghostly witness.
“Heeeeeeee caaaaaallllls.”
Kos looked over his shoulder at Zunich. “Want to give it a try?”
“No,” Zunich said. “You’re not to get anything more out of him. When they start in with the repetition there’s not much else you can do.”
“But he’s our only witness!”
“Heeeeeeeee waaaaaaaaaits iiiiin shaaaaaadooooow.”
“Look around you. They’re dead, but they’re all witnesses too, in their way. This is a dead end,” Zunich said. “We need to assess this scene before it gets any colder. Let him go, Kos.”
“I’m the lead here,” Kos said, “and I should make that call, Lieutenant.”
“You’re the lead, yes,” Zunich said, “but I’m still your mentor. Drop the ghost, Kos. It’s a waste of time.”
Kos took one last look at the ghost, then shook his head. He was already getting a bad feeling about his first case as lead ’jek. Nothing was going according to plan, not at all. He stooped and tapped the puzzle-box three times, careful not to touch the icy ghost it held in place. The box whirled, spun, and folded in on itself. The ghost had sunk through the floor by the time Kos retrieved the grounder and put it back on his belt. In its wake, the carnage returned with brutal clarity, and Kos felt sick all over again.
“Any more suggestions, Lieutenant?” Kos asked sincerely. Kos was ambitious but not stupid. He knew enough to know there was a lot he didn’t, well, know. Zunich, in a surprising number of situations, did.
“Take that book and stylus of yours, and let’s record the scene,” Zunich said.
“Shouldn’t we send Hul for backup?” Kos asked.
Zunich regarded the red falcon perched on his shoulder, waiting expectantly for a message it could relay to whomever the lieutenant wished, so long as the recipient was another ’jek. “I think we’d better keep him with us for now. I don’t like this. I’m not sure the perpetrator has left.”
“What makes you say that?” Kos asked.
“That ugly fellow that fed you the door was running from something, and I don’t think it was those harmless ghosts. It said, ‘He is near.’ That might be pretty literal. Let’s see what these dead folks have to tell us. You want to begin?”
“Go ahead,” Kos said. “I already picked the wrong ghost. Maybe you should take this case.”
“I’m not taking your case because you think it’s tough,” Zunich said. “I’ve got enough scrollwork to do as it is. I will give you the benefit of my expertise, if the lead investigator wishes.”
“I wish,” Kos said.
“All right then. Get this down. We’ve got multiple victims, all showing signs of complete or partial dismemberment,” Zunich said. “Let’s start at the top of the clock and work our way around.” He picked his way carefully around the pile of death—the labmages had been known to curse ’jeks that stepped in blood or the telltale residue of magic.
“First victim, adult male troll, estimated age at anywhere from fifty to eighty years,” the lieutenant said. “Likely the corpse of Garmakh, as that’s the only troll head I see in the pile. Arms and right leg removed from torso by what appears to be brute force. No visible blade marks evident but considerable epidermal tearing around the sockets indicates the arms and leg were pulled from the victim, who then bled out. Victim was definitely alive and kicking at the time of his death.”
Zunich waited a second for Kos to catch up, then moved on to the next body. “Moving clockwise, we’ve got a pair of half-demons, dismembered at the neck, shoulders, and hips. Like to see the labmages figure out which parts go with which torso. Don’t write that last part down.”
“Right,” Kos said.
They continued to pick their way around the corpse pile which, Kos thought, was more of a parts pile. They confirmed the remains of another four half-demons, recognizable as such only because each one was unique and unlike any other creature on Ravnica. Whatever hideous things the Rakdos did to create half-demons, the result was different in every one. It also made each one easy to identify if they ran into trouble with the ’jeks—as almost every Rakdos that lived to adulthood eventually did. Among the seven half-demons (including the one Zunich had dropped outside) six were known members of Palla’s gang, which confirmed the suspicions of the skyjeks.
The rest of the corpses were human, if you could call them that. Humans in the Rakdos guild were the toughest, meanest, biggest examples of the species on the plane; many could easily be mistaken for trolls or half-demons themselves when wearing spiky killguilder armor. The Hellhole enforced the laws of natural selection with brutal efficiency.
“I think we might have a problem,” Kos said. “I see beards and, er, other indicators on all the humans. No women from the look of it and definitely no one fitting the description of their boss, Palla. So where is she?”
“Right.” Zunich continued to stare into the darkness around them at the body parts and the slick, bloody floor and said, more to himself than to Kos, “Palla, Palla, where did you go?” The veteran ’jek scanned the rafters and gantries above, looking for the gang’s missing leader among the crates of stolen shipments.
“The slaves aren’t here either from the look of it,” Kos noted.
Zunich placed a hand on the crate closest to him and sniffed the air. “I think you might be wrong about that,” he said.
“What?”
“Look around you. I think they’re here, but that they were never meant to be slaves.” Without another word, he drew his short sword and used it to pry open the nearest crate. The lieutenant took one look inside, turned away, and held his hand over his mouth.
Kos cautiously took a look, fought the same fight against nausea, but lost. Lost everything, all over the floor. The labmages weren’t going to like that, but at least he didn’t puke on the evidence.
Packed into soggy, moldering hay, and staring up at them with milky eyes, sat two rows of severed human and elf heads, five males and one female. All had been treated with some kind of necromagic that preserved the terrorized expressions they had worn just before decapitation.
The female had been a wojek, one Kos didn’t know well but recognized, a Constable Vina Macav. Like Kos and Pashak, Vina was part of the new rank and file recruited after the recent Rakdos uprising. She had gone on leave a month earlier and failed to report back for duty. Kos recognized her face from the signs posted throughout the Tenth that read, “WANTED: DESERTER.”
“Guess that desertion charge
probably won’t stick,” Zunich said as Kos wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “And I guess the blood-powder wasn’t wrong after all. They must have been killed here. All right, we can add a new violation to the list. Nobody kills a ’jek in my town and gets away with—”
Someone sneezed a floor above them, and both wojeks froze. Kos focused all his attention on the sound, and a few seconds later thought he heard a sound like a cross between an injured mossdog and a softly crying child.
Zunich gestured to a ladder that led to the second-floor loft. Kos realized just how little of the warehouse they’d actually explored so far. The stacks of crates that loomed all around them, packed with grisly cargo, could be hiding anything. The only light was from a torch that even now was sputtering and growing dim.
But inexperienced though he was, Agrus Kos was still a wojek officer. In the City of Ravnica, one did not attain that rank by accident. He pressed two fingers against the badge on his chest and took a moment to remind himself of that fact, then headed up the ladder. Zunich followed after Kos had made it halfway up.
They found the goblin huddled in a darkened corner. One of the little creature’s ears appeared to have been ripped from his head, and thick blood oozed between the fingers of its right hand and ran down its neck, forearm, and shoulder. Otherwise, the goblin appeared uninjured. Its skin bore several tattoos and ritual brands. The U-shaped symbol of the broken chain burned into its forehead marked it as a freed slave, while the black and scarlet tattoos on its cheeks marked it as a member of the populous Krokt clan, the largest tribe of goblins on Ravnica and members of the Rakdos cult since pre-Guildpact times. According to the Krokt, the demon Rakdos himself carved the tribe from the stone of the mountain whose name they shared.
The goblin’s yellow eyes widened in pure terror when Kos cleared the top of the ladder, and it began to jabber in its own tongue. Unfortunately, Kos had always had a tin ear when it came to goblin languages. His partner, however, had been on the streets of Ravnica long enough to pick up several dialects.
“Mycz, I know this is my case, but—”
“No problem,” Zunich said. “I’ll talk to him.” The older ’jek tugged at his moustache, mulling over phrases that might calm the terrified creature, then tried what Kos assumed must have sounded like the best bet. Whatever Zunich’s barked syllables meant, it didn’t seem to calm the goblin, which looked like it was trying to force itself through the corner and out the other side. Kos had never seen any creature, goblin or human, so completely frightened.
“Yuzir trakini halk halkak Krokt, wojek hrarkar vonk,” Zunich said, tapping his badge.
The goblin screamed.
“Ouzor vafiz halk kalark, Krokt kalark,” the lieutenant tried.
The goblin screamed again, louder and higher-pitched. Kos put a hand over one ear and turned away while Zunich continued to pepper the creature with introductions. Either the goblin didn’t understand any of it or was so terrified it couldn’t answer. Kos suspected the latter.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Zunich finally admitted. The goblin whimpered, its eyes casting left and right—for an escape route, Kos guessed—but there was no way out of the corner the goblin had chosen for a hiding place. The constable watched the goblin’s eyes, watching for the moment when fear of the ’jeks would overcame fear of whatever had butchered its fellow Rakdos.
The goblin’s eyes stopped casting about and widened into dinner plates when they locked onto something behind Kos’s shoulder. The hairs on the constable’s neck stood on end as he and Zunich turned to follow the creature’s dead-eyed stare.
A dark shape moved against the wall behind them. Kos thought he caught a glimpse of a skeletal face. Soon the shape was a uniform dark gray again, the same color as the wall, but now that he knew where to look, the jittery outline of illusory magic was impossible to miss. This was no ghost. This was a solid, living individual.
The shape was the last straw for the panicked goblin. It leaped to its feet while the ’jeks were distracted by the shape, charged between them before either could stop the wailing creature, and with a final yell dived headfirst out the open window. The wet splat of impact followed shortly thereafter, silencing the suicidal goblin for good and robbing them of their second witness in less than five minutes.
Not that ’jeks needed a witness when the killer was standing right in front of them.
Zunich and Kos drew their weapons, and Kos took a single, cautious step toward the crouching, humpbacked shadow. The figure, misshapen and indistinct—a telltale sign of the spells favored by assassins and thieves—didn’t wait for him but padded like a cat to an open window and stood, casting a black silhouette against the waning light of day streaming in from the west. The shape that had driven the goblin to take its own life might have been a slim male or a muscular female—it was impossible to tell from Kos’s vantage point—and stood hunched beneath some kind of large deformity on its back. No, not a deformity. And not just one figure. The second, however, was stuffed into a bag and slung across the other’s shoulder. The shape raised a hand in a quick wave and flew straight upward out of view. Kos hadn’t seen a grapple line, but there must have been one. Best to keep an open mind until someone tries to take your head, as the saying went.
“You think that was Palla?” Kos asked.
“I think one of them was,” Zunich said. “The one in the bag. And she’s mine. Put your stylus away, Constable, we’ve got real work to do. Tonight, we pull a double shift.”
“Fine by me,” Kos said. “I could use the extra pay.”
The League of Wojek, and only the League of Wojek, shall keep the peace within the free City of Ravnica in adherence with the Guildpact Statutes.
—City Ordinances of Ravnica
23 ZUUN 9999 Z.C., AFTERNOON
Fifty-seven years later, give or take a few months, Lieutenant Agrus Kos of the Tenth Leaguehall settled in to watch “the fight that changed the plane of Ravnica forever.” It wasn’t every day a single fight decided the fate of the world. It was every day at noon and again at sunset, and the general public had to pay to watch. The ten-pointed star worn on his faded, leather tunic, its sharp tips long dulled with age, had spared him the cost of admission.
Kos had work to do, but he was in no rush. He hadn’t been on a call this easy in weeks. Might as well take a few minutes to observe the crime in progress. His hangover still hadn’t cleared up, and he was sluggish. He took a glass of something steaming and fermented from a surprised vendor, gave the man a half-zib coin, and leaned against the back wall as the players took to the battlefield.
“Millennia of open war between the ten factions had finally settled, through a series of betrayals and alliances, into two major forces: those whose interests favored the rule of law—and the rest,” the chorus recited. “Now the champions of each side meet in a carefully negotiated final conflict, a single, brutal fight to determine the fate of our world. But little do they know that they are watched from afar. …”
The golden sun was high in the sky and made the two foes shine like gods. Timbers creaked as siege weapons moved into position in a ring around the pair of towering combatants. Above, suspended by the magic of theater—that is, ropes and pulleys—a faceless figure in a long, black cloak hung ready to descend on the action. Kos probably wouldn’t have spotted the “surprise” if he hadn’t been observing the performance as an investigator instead of as an average spectator.
The ground shook, and those gathered to watch the spectacle gasped at the approaching thud of heavy, sandaled feet, just one of which could have crushed a human flat and had room for a goblin or two between its toes. The feet were attached to a towering, bearded cyclops that gripped Skullhammer, the legendary battleaxe infused with the power of the gods, in one hand. Kos had never understood how an axe had gotten the name “Skullhammer,” but he was no historian.
The axe rested almost casually over one shoulder, as if the one-eyed giant had no need to be on guard. The blue
jewel on the cyclops’s enchanted belt buckle flashed with a blinding glare. The cyclops opened its gap-toothed mouth to roar at the heavens, a sound soon joined by the massed armies of wolf-men, obviously caught up in the moment.
“Those who watch will later swear the sun shrank for a moment in the sky as if in fear,” the chorus said.
The cyclops opened a tusked mouth to speak in a voice that rolled like thunder. “Razia! This day shall see your end, for you will never be able to match my strength. There shall be no guilds. No order. Only death, starting with yours. This day, Skullhammer will drink of your blood, Razia. So says Cisarzim, Lord of Chaos!” On the last word, the hulking creature let his holy weapon drop into both knotted hands and shifted into a predatory stance.
The angel facing the cyclops blazed with a nimbus of holy fire and drew a flaming sword longer than Kos was tall. She stepped up to face the one-eyed champion and raised the sword to the heavens, prompting the chorus to roar with approval. It almost looked real, Kos thought—the weapon, not the angel. He knew the angel was real. The Boros crest, a fist encircled by a blazing corona, flashed brilliantly off the angel’s helmet, and the air around her body shimmered with a thousand tiny mirages in the midday heat.
“Chaos shall always be tamed by law, Cisarzim,” the angel said in a voice like a choir. “It is the destiny of Ravnica to be guided by the law, not the whim of beasts. This plane shall be ruled by guilds, and by the Guildpact, and shall be at peace. So says Razia, Heart of the Legion, Champion of Order.”
“Over my dead body,” the cyclops rumbled.
“That,” the angel replied as she took the hilt of the sword in both gauntleted hands, “is the general idea.”
The two foes circled each other in the ring of ballistae, mangonels, and catapults. The gathered choruses of the two opposing sides chanted steady, rhythmic support for their respective champions—those backing the angel chanted her name as a triumphant hymn with a stark, repetitive, military beat, while the cyclops’s allies howled and roared their support for the cyclops in a bestial cacophony that soon reached a fevered pitch.