The Secretist

by Doug Beyer

  Jace thought of those he had known who sought power—Liliana, Tezzeret, Nicol Bolas. He thought of how they always used their power to gain more of it. “Any center of power is going to test its boundaries.”

  Emmara nodded. “And without those boundaries …”

  “You think they’re going to try to exceed them.”

  Emmara looked at the brittle woodcarving in Jace’s hands. “They’ve already begun to.”

  “Who? The Rakdos?” Jace guessed. He had never understood why Ravnicans had allowed a murderous, demon-venerating cult to remain one of the ten official guilds—it just seemed too dangerous. The going theory was that the Rakdos guild provided well-sought services of mayhem and perverse entertainment to those who possessed wealth and power, and that this was enough for them to be kept around.

  “No,” Emmara said. “It’s the Izzet. Izzet mages have made illegal incursions into other guilds’ territories.” The Izzet League—the same guild of magical experimenters that had often been present when Jace had uncovered stone artifacts carved with the code.

  “But isn’t that an issue for the lawmages? Shouldn’t the Azorius maintain those borders?”

  “They’re trying. The Azorius Senate has been issuing injunctions and rulings against the Izzet day after day, at the request of the other guilds. But without the Guildpact, the Azorius have become toothless bureaucrats. Their legislation is just words on paper. Niv-Mizzet doesn’t seem to care.”

  Niv-Mizzet was the guildmaster and founder of the Izzet League, an inquisitive and profoundly ingenious archmage who also happened to be an ancient dragon. If the Izzet had a new scheme, Niv-Mizzet was sure to be its source.

  “What has the dragon said?”

  “Nothing. Whatever the Izzet are undertaking, they’re keeping it secret.”

  “And you want to find out what their project is about.” You want me to find out what it’s about, he thought.

  “Trostani, my guildmaster, thinks it’s urgent for the Izzet to be open about what they’re planning. But if they won’t cooperate, suspicions will grow among the guilds. Tensions will rise. It could lead to a conflict that could tear the guilds apart.” She spread her hands, and clasped them again. “We need the Izzet to cooperate.”

  Jace sat back and took a breath, examining Emmara’s face. She was trying not to plead with him, but he could see the urgency behind her expression. There was an edge to her manner that he hadn’t seen in her before. It wasn’t fear. She had no concern for any threat to her own safety. He sensed that she spoke out of an obligation—something deeply felt, a concern over and above loyalty to her guild. He wondered if there was someone else whom she was protecting.

  “How can I help?”

  Her smile glowed. “Join us,” she said. “Help us. Help us to understand what the Izzet might be doing, so we can maintain peace in this district, and all the districts.”

  “You want me to join your guild?”

  “You’d be welcome in the Conclave. The Selesnya believe in bringing people together, in building ways for all of us to coexist. Jace, with your talents—you’d have such potential for connecting with people. We could use you.”

  “I don’t know.” A guild would mean tying himself to a set of values, to one point of view. Most of all, it meant tying himself to the plane of Ravnica. And he wasn’t sure, even if he were to select one of Ravnica’s guilds, that he would choose the Selesnya. Jace looked around the sanctum, indicating the research around them with a vague gesture. “I have a lot of projects going on … I can’t commit to that right now.”

  “But you’d be able to help so many people. I’m influential in the guild, Jace. Trostani has selected me as a kind of dignitary. And you could be such a natural at bonding with people. We could work toward the same ends. We could learn the truth. Together.”

  Jace hesitated. Not many people had ever looked at him the way Emmara was looking at him in that moment. He wanted to say something that would make her look at him that way for a lot longer. He imagined the way her face would brighten even more if he told her yes—how he could touch her hand and tell her that nothing was more important to him than joining her, helping her. He wished he could go through with it, for her sake.

  But he couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t join the Selesnya. But maybe I could help in another way.”

  Emmara’s smile melted. “Oh. I’m too late, then. You’re part of another guild already?”

  “No. That’s not it.” He thought of all the time he spent on other planes. He thought of all the mysteries that drew him from one side of the Multiverse to the other. “I’m just not … someone who likes to get too attached.”

  That struck her. “I see,” she said and stood. Her demeanor reverted to formality and etiquette. “Well, I should be going. I have a lot of guild matters to attend to. Thank you for your time, Jace. It was good to see you.”

  “No, Emmara, I’m sorry,” he said, standing with her. “I just meant I can’t afford to get mixed up in any of the … guild politics right now. I’m researching something important, and it’s taking up all of my time. I’d love to help you after I solve this.”

  She nodded. “We’d love to have you,” she said. When she was at Jace’s door, she turned. “That leaf I gave you is a Selesnya artifact, made by a woodshaper. You can use it to contact me, if you want. Just say the activating words into it, and I’ll be able to hear you.”

  Jace looked at her gift in his hand. “What are the words?”

  “ ‘I need you.’ ”

  The streetlamps had begun to glow by the time the Selesnya elf woman left the building. Mirko Vosk stood on the building’s flat rooftop, near the ledge, watching her walk off into the night. Following the woman had paid off, and not in the way he had expected.

  Vosk’s eyes reflected the light of the streetlamps like a cat’s, and he was nearly bare-chested despite the cool evening. He walked over to the chimney opening again, where he had listened at it with his sharp ears, but he heard no more from the man she had visited. She had shown clear interest in this man, an acquaintance of hers she called Jace. She believed in his talents—likely some kind of mage. And this Jace had mentioned that he had been conducting research about some sort of pattern or code.

  That was exactly the kind of information Mirko Vosk’s master would want to possess. The Selesnya woman smelled appetizing, and her direct access to Trostani was valuable. But Vosk sensed that he had more than one target now.

  Mirko Vosk stepped off the ledge of the building. Instead of falling, he floated into the night sky with a casual, upright elegance. It was time to seek an audience with his hidden master.

  The Izzet mages weren’t hard to find. After a couple of days of observation, Jace heard an explosion and saw a startled a flight of birds from across the district. The plume of blue smoke was a telltale sign of one of the Izzet’s pyrotechnic experiments. Jace tracked the source of the blast and spied two mages, a human and a goblin, outfitted with alchemical gadgetry and mizzium gauntlets. They emerged from a disused tunnel, leaving behind charred bricks and a haze of smoke, and their instruments crackled with energy. From what Jace had gathered, this was the Izzet style of research: keep adding energy until something blows up, then observe the results.

  Jace stayed hidden at the mouth of the tunnel, letting the two of them pass by. He opened his mind to briefly skim their thoughts. The goblin, Skreeg, appeared to be an assistant to the human, or possibly an apprentice. The human went by Ral Zarek.

  “No sign of any gate there even though the energies were promising,” said Skreeg. “What will we tell the Great Firemind?”

  “You let me worry about that,” said Zarek.

  Skreeg and Zarek were on the move, turning onto a main thoroughfare and chatting quickly, so Jace couldn’t delve deeply into their minds to learn all that they knew. Instead he shadowed them, trying to stay close without being seen.

  “Could it be that the Dimir just don’t
have their own gate?” asked Skreeg.

  “Impossible,” said Zarek. “It’s here. It’s waiting somewhere for us. We’ll just have to look deeper.”

  “How do we know that? How do we know we’re even going to find what we’re looking for?”

  “This path was built for us by the ancients, Skreeg. A parun set all this up, do you understand? A founder of one of the guilds built this puzzle across this whole district so that we could find it.”

  “Of course,” said Skreeg. He scratched his ear. “But why do we think it’s for us?”

  Zarek snorted. “Because we found it first.”

  The two Izzet mages walked fast and spoke in low tones, and Jace couldn’t walk closely enough to them without seeming suspicious. He had to find a way to stay closer to them. He knew blending spells that would mask his presence to the minds of onlookers, but he didn’t think he could maintain such a spell, read their thoughts, and keep up with their pace all at the same time. Perhaps he could get closer without staying on street level.

  Jace ducked into an alleyway as the two Izzet mages walked on ahead. He climbed a fence and pulled himself up onto the rooftop of a tavern. He crept across the roof, staying low, until he could see over the opposite edge to look down at Skreeg and Zarek. He listened in on their surface thoughts again. Unfortunately, he had missed some of their conversation.

  “That’s only the first step,” Zarek was saying. “According to Niv-Mizzet, the code tells us something more. It’s not enough just to find the gates. We have to know the path before we can uncover what’s behind it.”

  Skreeg clasped his hands together and beamed up at Zarek. “Oh! Tell me what’s behind it!”

  “He’s a discourteous old lizard, Skreeg. He doesn’t share with me all the secrets he knows. But I think I know what it is we seek.”

  They were again moving away from Jace. He had to leap across a gulf to the next building, dash to the edge the sloping roof, and crawl along the edge directly above the mages to listen in on them. They were speaking even lower now, and even with his inner senses active, Jace had to strain to comprehend what they were saying.

  “I believe it’s a great weapon, Skreeg,” said Zarek. “Hidden here, in the Tenth. The ancient guild founders knew that the Guildpact might not last. And I think one of them knew that if the pact was broken, a single guild would have to rise to rule all the others. That’s why they left us a weapon, Skreeg, and hid it in such a way that only the one worthy of wielding it could find it. And we are the worthy ones, aren’t we? That’s why Ravnica will be ours.”

  A weapon, Jace thought. The code, the gates, the path—all of this concealed some kind of weapon. At least, Zarek believed it did.

  Jace could no longer follow them by rooftop, and had to watch as they crossed the street away from him. The mages had arrived at the beginning of Izzet-controlled territory, walled off with tall, stark barricades covered in steaming metal pipes. Skreeg and Zarek climbed a wide set of stairs up to a large, round gateway, crowned with a huge signet that resembled the outline of the dragon himself. A squad of Izzet guards nodded to them, and the gate slid open to admit them.

  As the gate opened, Jace was surprised to see the silhouette of a dragon’s head, looking through from the other side. It was Niv-Mizzet himself, waiting for their return.

  “What have you found for me?” asked Niv-Mizzet.

  The dragon’s voice boomed such that Jace could hear it from his hiding place. But he couldn’t hear the reply, and the Izzet mages would soon be sealed behind the gateway.

  He felt he was close to finding out what lay underneath all the secrets, but he was sure that he would be caught if he tried to slip through the well-guarded Izzet gate. He was already losing the connection with the mages’ minds. Still, Skreeg and Zarek didn’t have all the information he craved, anyway.

  The dragon, however, did. He had one chance: He would have to look into the dragon’s mind before the gate closed, if he dared.

  He dared.

  INSIDE THE FIREMIND

  Jace gathered his mana and fired his mind magic like an arrow. The spell sailed invisibly through the air to Niv-Mizzet and punched into the dragon’s mind. Jace knew he wouldn’t have time to root around through the lore that undoubtedly filled the ancient dragon’s memories, so he focused on one task: finding what Niv-Mizzet knew about the maze.

  It was like falling into an inferno. Incomprehensible thoughts blazed past him. Wild theories, impossible experiments, and mad diatribes roiled like a storm around him, all set against the backdrop of thousands of years’ worth of memories. Niv-Mizzet had no surface thoughts. It was as if he had whirlwinds of competing ideas at all times, storm fronts of the mind crashing into each other, yet somehow all converging into coherent thoughts.

  But as Jace’s spell took him through the dragon’s mind, he was able to recognize a pattern, like a single crackle of lightning that branched throughout the chaos. It was the dragon’s obsession with his project. In his mind, he called it the Implicit Maze, a puzzle carved into the face of Ravnica itself, a mystery he believed led to untold power.

  Jace was consumed with the dragon’s fervor for the Implicit Maze. A thousand possible solutions churned through Niv-Mizzet’s mind. Endless routes sizzled and broke apart across his mental landscape. But Jace knew, as the dragon knew, that none of them were quite right.

  And then Jace saw what he what he hoped to see. The dragon knew the prize behind the Implicit Maze. Jace saw it too, and realized the power of it. And then he understood why Niv-Mizzet had set his entire guild to the cause of solving it.

  As the Izzet gate closed and Jace’s contact with the dragon dissipated, Jace sensed that his intrusion had been noticed. The attention of the dragon surrounded him for that moment, like a predator’s gaze latching onto its prey, curious and unsettlingly patient.

  “Jace, it’s good that you’re back,” said Kavin.

  Jace had returned to his sanctum and slammed the door behind him. He huffed inadequate breaths and tried to calm himself. His vedalken compatriot Kavin was there, presumably still working on the fragments of the code they had found, still agonizingly piecing together what Jace had learned all in one blazing moment.

  “Kavin, we have to talk.”

  Kavin waved a sheaf of papers, covered in his neat hand in fresh ink. “Yes, you’re correct. Because you’ll want to hear this. I have discovered something.”

  “So have I.”

  “Excellent. Now, then. I’ve been researching all the samples we’ve collected. The stonework, the rubbings, the artifacts. And I’ve found a pattern.”

  “Kavin.”

  “The code. It’s a version of an antiquated Azorius legal script, dating back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. We’ll have to find someone who can decipher it, naturally. But in fact, I happen to have some facility with Azorius runes. Call it an old hobby—”

  “Kavin, listen.”

  “I wasn’t seeing it before, because we weren’t arranging them right, and our samples are incomplete and worn by time. But I’ve been able to surmise some of the terms and concepts to which it refers.”

  “Kavin, I know what the code means.”

  Kavin blinked. “You do?”

  “I’ve done some … surveillance. The Izzet are investigating the same mystery that we are.”

  Kavin cocked his head an inch. “You were following Izzet guild members?”

  “They’ve unlocked something related to the code.”

  “Wait. You used magic to invade their minds?”

  “I gained some of their knowledge, yes.”

  “Jace, interfering in guild business can be very dangerous.”

  “A path. They have begun to piece together a particular path.”

  Kavin held up his notes. “That’s what I’ve learned, as well. There are repeated mentions in the stonework about a ‘path that winds through civilization,’ a ‘path leading to great promise.’ ”

  Jace nodded. “The Izzet
think of it as a maze.”

  “A maze, yes, that’s a better translation. So, you’ve learned where this maze is?”

  “It doesn’t seem to be a maze in the traditional sense. The maze seems to lead from landmark to landmark—it’s built into the very structure of the existing districts. An implicit maze. That’s why we’ve seen the Izzet showing up repeatedly, doing experiments around the Tenth—they’re uncovering the route through this maze. All this time you and I have been finding the breadcrumbs of the same trail they’ve been following.”

  Jace watched Kavin absorb these revelations. The vedalken’s face rarely showed emotion the way humans did, but Jace could tell that he was struggling. This mystery was a thrill to his own curious mind, but Jace could tell that his compatriot had grave doubts about whether to pursue it.

  “Jace, the Izzet are not just scholarly rivals. Their guildmaster does not take kindly to competition.”

  “I know. But it’s not the competition that concerns me. It’s what lies at the end of the maze. I think it’s something that could prove very, very dangerous. It’s something that could alter the balance of the guilds. Something that could impact our entire world.”

  “What is it?”

  Jace wondered whether even to tell Kavin what he had grasped from Niv-Mizzet’s mind. But this was the end of their research. This was the answer they had sought. “Power. The Izzet believe this maze leads to some form of great power. Perhaps even a weapon. I don’t know exactly what it is yet, and I don’t think Niv-Mizzet does, either.”

  Kavin’s eyes widened at the mention of the dragon’s name, but Jace went on.

  “But this maze, this code, all of this—it’s old. It’s something that was built into the districts long, long ago. If it’s something that inspires such obsession in a dragon, if it’s something he thinks is worthy of his time, then it’s probably something that shouldn’t fall into his hands. We have to chase this, Kavin. We need to learn what’s at the end of this maze before the dragon does. But there’s an even more pressing problem.”