Ravnica

by Cory Herndon

  Zunich’s eyes did not look entirely sane when the older ’jek turned over one shoulder to regard Kos. A mad grin crept over his face.

  “Kos, don’t call me ‘sir,’” Zunich said. Despite his peaceful expression, the admonition sounded like a death threat.

  “You’re killing that man,” Kos said steadily. “I don’t know what he’s done, but neither do you. I do know he didn’t kill that girl.”

  “Yeah,” Zunich said and took a pause to knock the elf’s head against the stone it rested on, “he did. He put her in there. In danger. He did it, Kos. Him. It’s his fault.”

  “Please put him down,” Kos said. “I will—I will force you to comply if I have to. Sir. Please.”

  Zunich lifted the elf by both shoulders and tossed him to the roof tiles. He turned to Kos as the bounty hunter coughed up blood and writhed in pain.

  “‘Force me to comply,’” Zunich said. “Really. And how do you suppose you’re going to do that, Constable Kos?”

  “Sir, this is bad, I know it’s bad, but you’re in shock. You’re not thinking straight. Listen. Palla is dead.”

  “I killed Palla,” Zunich said.

  “No,” Kos said. “Sir, I killed her while you were—”

  “I killed Palla,” Zunich repeated. “That’s what you’re going to say. That’s what I’m going to say. And him, he’s not going to say anything. Because he’s just another victim. Going to be. And—and she—” Zunich waved at the pile of stone that concealed the girl’s corpse. As he did so, a translucent blue shape emerged from the chunks of rock, a small, slim ghost in the shape of a small, dead girl.

  The spirit floated toward Zunich. To Kos’s surprise, the specter bore no sign of a wound or anything that would indicate she had become one of Ravnica’s many angry ghosts. The girl, despite her violent, sudden death, did not want revenge. In fact, the ghost didn’t seem to want anything at all but continued to float toward Zunich. As the ghost-girl passed through Zunich, his eyes grew wide with shock. The old man dropped to his knees in the downpour, bowed his head, and began to sob.

  “Gods …” the old man moaned. “No. I’m a good man, Kos. I’m a good man. It was a mistake.”

  “I know, Mycz,” Kos said. He placed a tentative hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder but found it batted away violently.

  “You killed Palla?” Zunich said and raised his head to gaze up into the falling rain.

  “I—Yes, I did,” Kos said. “She’s gone.”

  “Kos,” Zunich said, pleading. “Don’t tell—Don’t let them know.”

  “What?” Kos said. “Let who know, the League? I don’t know what I can—”

  “My family,” Zunich whispered. “My wife. We have a little girl. They can’t know about this. Ever. Let them think I died a coward, let them think I took my own life. But they can never know what I’ve done. Promise me, Kos.”

  “Lieutenant, I—”

  “Promise me!”

  “All right,” the younger ’jek said. “I promise. But you’re not going to die, Zu—”

  Kos stopped at the sound of the elf getting back to his feet. The masked hunter regarded the two ’jeks warily.

  “I’m leaving,” the bounty hunter said carefully. “I’m taking the girl’s body. Her family will want that, at least, even if they can’t have her alive. If you try to stop me I will kill you. Elves recover more quickly than humans, wojek. Don’t try it.”

  When Zunich didn’t reply, Kos said, “You were—you were here to rescue that girl?”

  “Live bounties pay better than dead ones, rescues better than that,” the elf said with chilling matter-of-factness. “Are you going to try to stop me or not, wojek?”

  Kos looked at Zunich, hunched and sobbing at his feet—and at the dead girl’s feet, visible in a pool of blood through a gap in the statuary pile. “What will you tell the parents?”

  The elf looked at the broken wojek and said, “The Rakdos killed her. No one will hear otherwise from me.”

  “No!” Zunich roared. He rose and wrenched Kos’s sword free before the younger ’jek realized what was happening and turned, seething, on the bounty hunter. He took one step toward the unarmed bounty hunter, who looked genuinely surprised.

  He did not get to take a second step. “Stop!” Kos shouted and swung out with a fist that caught his partner in the solar plexus. Zunich exhaled hard and doubled over, dropped the sword, and stumbled backward. His foot slipped on a loose roof tile, and before Kos could catch him, his partner tumbled over the edge and into the rain.

  Kos dived after him, but this time there would be no last-minute catch with a grappler. Zunich had fallen too fast. Kos leaned over the gutter just in time to see his partner strike the cobblestones far below.

  The young ’jek couldn’t move. He heard footsteps and saw a familiar pair of boots step up to the edge next to him. Unable to take his eyes off of Zunich’s twisted corpse, Kos still managed to push himself to his knees.

  “That was unexpected,” the elf said.

  “Yeah,” Kos said, unable to summon anything like anger or even fear at the moment.

  “You are not responsible, wojek,” the bounty hunter continued. “And I have no more time to spend on you. You have a mess on your hands, I think. But what I said before stands. No one will learn anything about this from—”

  Kos was back on his feet in an instant and had the elf by the throat. The elf’s eyes bulged in surprise, but he easily pulled the wojek’s hands from around his neck. He held Kos’s forearms in a viselike grip. “As I said,” the elf continued, “no one will hear of this from me.”

  “Get out of here,” Kos said. His hands were trembling, and he could not raise his eyes to look at the elf. “If I see you on my streets again …”

  “Threatening me will do you no good,” the elf replied. “But trust me, I won’t be back in this section anytime soon. After this, I’ll be lucky to find work in these parts, anyway.”

  The bounty hunter moved as silently as a cat, retrieving the girl’s broken form with surprising care. He cradled her small body in one arm. If not for the blood-soaked dress, she might have been napping peacefully.

  “I know you don’t want to hear any more from me,” the elf said just before he disappeared over the ladder at the far side of the roof, “but here’s a little free advice: Don’t quit. You’ve got something a lot of your ilk doesn’t. You have decency. You could have let him kill me.”

  “I said get out of here,” Kos said.

  “Fine,” the elf said. “See you around, ’jek.” The bounty hunter produced a grappler not unlike Kos’s and threw it over the side. A second later, he and his grisly burden dropped from view.

  Kos’s knees finally gave out, and he sat down hard on the rooftop. He now had a choice.

  He could listen to his conscience and tell the truth. He could sully the record and name of the great Myczil Zunich and reveal the whole sordid story. Zunich would become a cautionary tale at best, his remarkable career forgotten in the bloody mistake that had driven him to try and murder an unarmed man.

  Or, with the girl’s body conveniently gone, he could go with another story. How Zunich had fought Palla to the death at the cost of his own life. The ruined state of the bodies would not cause any to question him. Even if the bounty hunter wasn’t true to his word, it was the word of a Golgari hired blade against a sworn protector of the City of Ravnica.

  Kos made the only choice he felt he could. On the first day of the ten thousandth year of the Ravnican calendar, fifty-seven years after the fact, he would make a different choice. He would tell the truth.

  1 SELESZENI 10000 Z.C., LATE AFTERNOON

  When the teacups had gone cold and the story was finished, Kos walked Jarad and Fonn to the lifts at Grigor’s Canyon. As promised, he had told Fonn the whole story. As expected, she had difficulty looking Kos in the eye after the tale was done. And as he watched them go he wondered if he really should have told Fonn the truth about her father’s death
and the fact that Jarad had been there. But it was too late now. She’d wanted the truth, and she certainly deserved that much. He’d simply wanted to spare her the pain. He swore to himself as much as to Fonn that he would add the truth to the eighty-year-old case file before he left the Leaguehall for the last time.

  He shot them a wave. Jarad took the lift down into the canyon and Fonn took a walkway to the center and Vitu Ghazi where she had been more or less living since the day Biracazir joined the collective. Kos headed back on foot to the Leaguehall, where the commander-general’s temporary office was located in what the ranks had started calling “Tenthfort.”

  Kos had a few more stops to make. Then he had to meet Pivlic at the zeppelid field before midnight. In the last couple of days he’d seen and signed and generally dealt with more paperwork than he’d ever seen in his life, but it had to be done before he left.

  He jogged up the steps to the main doors, stepping around the many areas and structures undergoing necessary repairs after the quietmen had gone on their rampage. They were all gone now, and would not return. Helligan preserved the body of the one that had resembled Wenvel Kolkin for study, but neither Kos nor the labmage believed that Kolkin had been one of the original models, as it were. The true quietmen still were, and probably always would be, a mystery.

  The necro lab had been seen to first. Their work was too important to successful investigations to stay in disrepair for long. Helligan hunched over the shriveled, shattered corpse of the charred remains of what the labmage had taken to calling the “Wenvel Man.”

  “Hello, Kos,” Helligan said as he approached. The head labmage wasn’t much for ranks, and with all the promotions and acting so-and-sos around, Kos didn’t blame him. Until midnight, Kos was acting commander-general, but tomorrow morning that responsibility would be Migellic’s. Jarad had helped him make sure there were no more lurkers amongst the brass, and under normal circumstances the new commander-general would have come from their remaining ranks. It was Migellic’s heroic defense of the Tenth Leaguehall—one of the only ones still functioning when the convocation wave hit—that had sealed the deal, though Kos’s strong recommendation hadn’t hurt.

  “Helligan,” Kos said, nodding.

  “We’ve closed out the subjects from your last case,” the labmages said. “Or should I say your final case?”

  “Let’s not say either, and you just get to the point.”

  “Of course. The few remnants of Borca’s body we extracted from the goblin tissue turned out to be something made of those worm-things too, and they didn’t last long. But that just confirms what we already suspected.” It also confirmed why Borca’s ghost hadn’t remembered the bombing, but Kos didn’t mention that. “I just pulled the drawer open one day, and it was filled with little dried rice bits,” Helligan continued. “I put them under the scrutinizer, and they just looked like ordinary worms. Craziest thing.”

  “Keep those secure,” Kos said. “No, better yet, incinerate them.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Helligan said. “Done, in fact. Saint Bayul’s body has been returned to the Selesnyans, and that just leaves—”

  “I know,” Kos said. “Do you think I could get a minute alone in here?”

  Helligan shrugged. “I’m going to be locked in here for weeks with this stuff. I’ll go get some fresh air. I’ll be back in, oh, five minutes?”

  “Should be long enough.”

  Helligan patted Kos on the shoulder as he passed, whistling. When the door had clicked behind the labmage, Kos went to the morgue wall and checked the names until he found the one he was looking for. He thumbed the latch and slid it open as gently as he could.

  “Hello, Luda,” he said. “I wanted to tell you we got him. You can …”

  Can what, Kos? She’s dead.

  “You can rest easy,” Kos said. The girl’s face looked exactly as it had when he’d seen her in the alcove outside Tin Street. Her eyes had been closed.

  Kos didn’t weep. He’d long since passed the time when even a killing as pointless and as painful as Luda’s could bring real tears this far after the fact. It was part of the job. Maybe someday, when the job was no longer his, he would grieve. For all of them.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save you,” he said. “Justice is all I have.”

  He passed Helligan on his way out and ordered the body cremated.

  * * * * *

  Kos settled in behind his desk for the last time. He’d only been at this job briefly, but he was already growing to despise the blocky, wooden thing so like a blockade that kept him trapped in Phaskin’s former office. He stared at a blank case file that he didn’t even know how to begin.

  Something else was bothering him—Zunich’s ghost. Maybe it had been Lupul, maybe it hadn’t. He still wasn’t sure, and doubted he would ever know the truth. The other ghost he’d been dealing with recently, however, chose that moment to reappear.

  “Got a minute?” Borca’s ghost said as it burst through Kos’s office wall. “You would not believe what I’ve been through the past couple of weeks. I’ve been stuck in that stupid tree, see, and—”

  “Borca?” Kos said. “I thought the vampire—”

  “He smacked me!” Borca said, “Stuck me in that blasted tree. He can—could—do things to ghosts I can’t even tell you about. If I’d have known I could hit him, you’d be looking at the first ghost commander-general, I’ll bet. But of course the pretty girl gets all the glory.”

  “I’m not that pretty,” Kos said. “So what, you ghosted your way straight here?”

  “Didn’t have a choice,” the ghost replied. “Contractually obligated. It actually sort of, well, hurt being stuck in that tree. I don’t think this form holds together very well if I’m not close to the avenger. So I sort of oozed out, with the, er, sap.”

  “Now that’s fitting.”

  “Kos, we need to talk.”

  “Yes?”

  “You solved the case. I’m still here. What’s going on?”

  “I haven’t filed the report yet,” Kos said. “You weren’t killed in the bomb. That was a lurker. The lurker killed you as far as I know, but we have no witnesses. If it wasn’t for the fact that the one behind all this turned out to be … who it was, I doubt we could have gotten the charges to stick. Besides, I just figured—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Going out in an explosion sounds better than getting eaten by worms,” Kos said. “Thought I was doing you a favor.”

  “Yeah, well,” Borca’s ghost said and looked uncomfortable. “I’m bored. This is so dull. No offense, Kos, but now I get to sit around and watch you sign forms?” His spectral copy of the Orzhov insurance contract appeared in his hand. “According to this, the policy requires that an ‘honest and full accounting’ be made. In writing.”

  Kos considered. There was actually a lot of potential in having an invisible ghost around. There was also a lot of annoyance. “Are you sure you want me to do this, Borca? Because you’ll be dead. Really, sincerely dead.”

  “I am dead,” Borca said. “And did I mention I’m bored? I’m bored. Bored, bored, bored, bored. Do it.” After a moment, he added, “Please. Come on, partner.”

  Partner. How many times, Kos thought, did I tell Borca he wasn’t really my partner? And why? To honor the memory of a man who died years ago? Borca had been a decent sort. He didn’t deserve Kos’s scorn, and after days without a drop of bumbat, it finally began to dawn on Kos that despite his startling arrest record, he’d been a lousy partner for no reason other than old, bitter guilt.

  Many years later, the infamous “eaten by worms” report, also known as the Borca file, would often come up in lectures and training courses as an example of how wojek investigative techniques can be adapted to virtually any situation. The focus would be on the descriptions, the way the case was investigated, the historical implications—and there were many—that put proof of Lupul’s existence in the records of Ravnica’s defenders. If there were still lur
kers out there, and Kos suspected there were, the wojeks would be ready for them, and watchful.

  Not one student at those lectures ever bothered to point out that Kos had been the only ’jek on the biggest case of the century. Yet at the top of the incident report that led off the famed Borca file, two names were listed, and one of them could not possibly have been correct. But whether it was sentimentality or a simple error, Bell Borca became the only wojek in Ravnican history credited with solving his own murder.

  * * * * *

  Helligan took a sip of his coffee, which had gone cold hours before. Even he had to sleep sometime, and he had decided to call it a night. He only had one thing left to do—send the last victim from the Tin Street fiasco to the crematorium.

  He walked to the morgue wall and pulled open the drawer that held the body of Luda. He slipped his arms under the small girl’s body and chalked up the odd, lumpy texture to the fact that the body had been there for some time. Longer than most.

  The worms moved. The worms squirmed. Before Helligan, not an easy man to spook, even thought to drop the body, it was too late. The oily blur of writhing maggots crawled up both his arms and consumed him in minutes. The labmage didn’t even have time to scream.

  What with construction, recruiting, and new shift rolls, there was no guard on duty when Helligan left that night. Therefore, no one thought to ask why the famously reclusive and solitary labmage walked down the steps of the Tenth leading a little girl in a white dress by the hand.

  About the Author

  Cory J. Herndon is a freelance writer and editor currently providing content for Xbox.com and the official STAR WARS® RPG web site, among others. He has edited numerous STAR WARS roleplaying game books and is the author of The Fifth Dawn, MAGIC: THE GATHERING Starter Game Strategy Guide, the MAGIC: THE GATHERING Official Encyclopedia Vol. 5, the short story, “Like Spider’s Silk” in The Secrets of Magic anthology, and the STAR WARS roleplaying game title Ultimate Alien Anthology (with co-author).