by Ari Marmell
The walls, the floor, the tables, and the chairs of the Bitter End shook as though in the midst of an earthquake, as the good folk of Avaric celebrated Thralldom’s End. In one corner, a gaggle of performers pounded on drums, plucked the strings on a variety of instruments, blew through various horns, in a veritable frenzy of activity that should have produced nothing but anarchic noise, yet somehow managed to shape itself into actual music. Around the perimeter of the common room, the people not currently caught up in the dance clapped or stomped to the highly charged beat, and the footsteps of the dancers themselves kicked up clouds of sawdust from the floor and brought showers of dust sifting from the rafters. Before the start of business tomorrow, a handful of floorboards, a couple of chairs, and a legion of mugs and plates would need replacing—but the Bitter End was the largest establishment in Avaric to hold a Thralldom’s End gala, and if a bit of ruined furniture and broken crockery was the price for such a huge influx of custom, it was a cost Ishri, barkeep and the tavern’s owner, cheerfully paid.
Liliana Vess was a whirlwind sweeping through the assembled dancers, leaving footprints not merely in the sawdust, but on the hearts of a score of hopeful men. Her midnight-black hair moved about her head like a dark cloud, or perhaps a tainted halo. Her cream-hued gown, which was cut distractingly low, rose and whirled and fell, promising constantly to reveal more than it should, but, like a teasing courtesan, always managing to renege.
She breathed heavily from the exertion of the rapid dance, spinning and twisting through the arms of a dozen of her fellow celebrants. Her smile lit up her features—high and somewhat sharp, forming a face that few would envision when imagining a classic beauty, yet which all would agree was beautiful once they saw it—but that smile failed to reach her eyes. For all that she tried to lose herself in the festivities, in the adoration of those who watched her, who reached out in hopes of a simple fleeting touch, she could not.
Damn him anyway! Guilt was not an emotion with which Liliana was well acquainted, and she found swiftly that it was not at all to her liking.
The bizarre accumulation of notes and beats and rhythms successfully masquerading as a song came to an end, and so did the last of Liliana’s ability to fake any remaining enthusiasm for the celebration. The musicians, bowing to much applause and acclaim, left the stage for a well-earned break, leaving an instrument with enchanted strings to play a slow and lonesome ditty until they returned. Several couples remained in the room’s center, swaying to the somber notes, but most returned to their tables to await a more energetic piece.
Liliana watched them go, marveling at these people among whom she’d made her temporary home. They were all clad in their best and fanciest—which here in Avaric meant tunics with long sleeves instead of short, trousers without obvious patches, and vests that actually boasted some faint color, rather than their normal browns and grays. Nobody here could afford the rich dyes or the fancy buttons and clasps of the rich, yet they wore their “finery” with pride; splurged on lean steaks when they normally subsisted on fungi and the occasional fish or reptile hauled from the swampy pools. And they lived it up as though such ridiculous luxuries actually meant something.
Liliana didn’t understand any of it. She approved of it, even respected it, but she didn’t understand it.
Even as she floated back to her table, hand reaching for a glass of rough beer to quench her thirst, Liliana spotted a figure moving toward her through the crowd. A gruff face, split into what the owner probably thought was a charming smile, leered at her through a thick growth of beard. Two sausage-like thumbs hooked themselves through the pockets of a heavy black vest, perhaps trying to draw attention to the fine garment. The drunkard had been watching her all night, since well before Kallist had ruined the evening and stormed off in a huff. Every night there was always at least one, and she’d wondered how long it would take him to drink enough nerve to approach.
“I couldn’t help but notice,” he slurred in a voice heavy with beer, “that you finally sent your scrawny friend packing. That mean you interested in spending some time with a real man?”
In a better mood, Liliana might’ve engaged in some light flirting before telling the drunk to find his own personal hell and stay there. Not tonight.
Liliana lifted her dinner knife, still stained with remnants of her overcooked steak, from the table. “If you don’t walk away right now,” she said sweetly, “you won’t be a ‘real man’ for very long.”
It took a moment, the battle between common sense and belligerent pride that raged across the fellow’s face—but finally, aided perhaps by the unnatural gleam in Liliana’s eyes, common sense won the field. Grumbling, he turned and shuffled back to his table, where he would tell his friends all about how he’d turned down the woman’s advances.
Liliana sighed once as she lowered herself into her chair, and found herself uncharacteristically wishing that Kallist had been here to see that exchange. Damn it, she thought once more, reaching again for her mug. If it’s not one thing.
“Hey! Bitch!”
It’s another.
Half the tavern turned toward the large, dark-skinned fellow who’d just come stalking through the front door, his boots leaving a trail of castoff mud, but Liliana already knew precisely for whom his call was intended. She rose gracefully and offered her most stunning smile.
“And a joyous Thralldom’s End to you, too, Gariel.”
“Don’t ‘joyous Thralldom’s End’ me, gods damn it!” he growled, pushing his way through a few of the slow-dancing couples to stand before her table. “I want to know what the hell you think you’re—”
They were skilled, Liliana thought later, when she actually had a moment to think; you had to give them that. She hadn’t noticed them at all, until a blade sped toward her from over Gariel’s shoulder.
There was no time even to shout a warning. Liliana brought a knee up sharply into Gariel’s gut—she had just enough respect for him as Kallist’s friend not to hit him any lower—and caught his shoulders as he doubled over, using his own weight to topple them both backwards over her chair. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t graceful, but it took them out of a sword’s sudden arc with half a heartbeat to spare.
The sounds of the chair clattering over, and the pair of them hitting the floor, were just loud enough to penetrate the din. First a couple of faces, and then a handful more, turned away from dinner or dancers to stare at them; a ripple in a still pond, awareness that something was very much not right spread through the Bitter End.
Liliana gasped as the wooden edge of the seat dug painfully into her side, but she didn’t let that stop her from rolling. Their bodies tilted across the chair like a fulcrum, her head striking the hardwood floor, but that, too, she ignored as best she could. Twisting her grip on Gariel as they fell, she kept him from landing squarely atop her. She left him gasping on the floor as she scrabbled swiftly to her feet, trying to keep the table between herself and her attacker. No. Attackers, plural. Damn.
They were strangers here, certainly. Avaric was small, yes, but not quite tiny enough for everyone to know everyone else by sight. From a distance, then, these two blended perfectly, both of roughly average height, both clad as workers gone out to hoist a few after a long day’s work, before going home to hoist a few more. But up close, their cold, emotionless eyes marked them as something else entirely.
Well, that and the heavy, cleaver-like blades.
They advanced unhurriedly, even casually, one passing to each side of the table. Clearly, despite the speed of Liliana’s evasion, they didn’t expect much in the way of resistance.
And in terms of anyone coming to Liliana’s aid, they were correct. The folk nearest her had only just begun to run, to scream, or to freeze in shock, as best befit their individual temperaments. From behind the bar, Ishri emerged with a heavy cudgel in hand, but hampered as she was by the bulk of the crowd retreating from the coming bloodshed, there was no way she’d reach the table before it was a
ll over. To his credit, the suitor whom Liliana had just rebuffed was also making his way back across the tavern, fists raised, but he was already so drunk that even if he managed to reach the fray, it was unlikely he could meaningfully contribute.
But then, Liliana didn’t require anyone’s help.
Crouching slightly, she shifted the dinner knife—hardly an intimidating weapon, but all she had—into an underhand grip. Beneath her breath, her lips barely moving, she began to utter a low, sonorous chant. Across her neck rose an abstract pattern of tattoos that suggested even more elaborate designs farther down her back, as though burned across her skin from the inside out.
Had they been able to hear it over the ambient noise of a panicking tavern, that sound alone might have given her attackers pause. The tone was surreal, sepulchral, far deeper than Liliana’s voice should ever have produced. The syllables formed no words of any known language, yet they carried a terrible meaning that bypassed the mind entirely, to sink directly into the listener’s soul.
But they could not hear it, those deluded fools who thought themselves predator rather than prey. And even if they had, it would have been far too late to matter.
As though biting the end off a leather thong, Liliana spat a word of power into the æther, gestured with her blade. Something moved unseen beneath the table, just one more shadow in the flickering lanterns of the Bitter End, summoned from abyssal gulfs beyond the realms of the dead themselves. With impossibly long fingers it stretched out, farther, farther, and brushed the edges of two of the table’s legs. Rotting away as though aged a hundred years, in single instant, they folded in on themselves, putrefying into soft mulch. The rest of the heavy wood surface toppled to the side, slamming hard into one of the bandit’s calves. He cried out in pain, stumbling and limping away from the unexpected assault, a handful of dishes and a half-eaten loaf of pumpernickel bread clattering around his feet.
At that cry, the second man’s attention flickered away from Liliana for less than a heartbeat—but that was enough. Ducking in low, she drew the edge of her knife across his extended arm. Cloth and flesh tore beneath the serrated steel, and the bandit barely muffled a curse of pain behind clenched teeth.
Blood welled up, beading along his wrist in a narrow bracelet. It was a shallow wound, stinging but harmless, and his grimace of pain turned into a savage grin as he realized just how ineffective his target’s attack had proved.
But then, Liliana’s attack wasn’t intended to cause him harm. It was meant only to draw blood—and the attention of the unseen shadowy thing sliding impossibly across the floor. Invisible to all, darkness against darkness, black on black, it stretched forth its talons once more and dipped them into the welling blood. A foul corruption leeched into the seeping wound, intertwined itself around the muscles and vessels of the man’s arm.
He screamed, then, an inhuman cry of agony, as gangrenous rot shot through his flesh. The blade fell from limp fingers, lodging itself in the wood by his feet, as the skin turned sickly blue, the blood black and viscous. Flesh grew stiff and cracked, splitting to unleash gouts of yellowed pus. Falling to his knees, the sellsword clutched his dying arm to his chest and bawled like an infant.
Liliana spared him not so much as another glance. His suffering would end soon enough—when the spreading necrotic rot reached his heart.
Growing ever more unnerved, the second bandit had nonetheless recovered from the impact of the table against his leg, swiftly closing to within striking range. Snarling, he raised his chopping blade high and brought it down in a vicious stroke that no parry with the fragile dinner knife could have halted.
Liliana didn’t even try to lift her feeble weapon in response. No, lips still moving though she must long since have run out of breath, she raised her left hand and caught the blade as it descended.
The cleaver should have torn through her upraised limb like parchment. Should have, and would have, had it not begun to turn black at the apex of its swing, suddenly cloaked and tugged by wisps of shadow. By the time it should have reached the flesh of Liliana’s hand, it was simply gone, drawn away into the nether between the worlds of the living and the dead. The swordsman was left standing, staring at his empty fist.
With a shrug, Liliana bent two fingers into talons and drove them into his staring eyes. Hardly fatal, but more than enough to take him, screaming, out of the fight.
And just like that, the tavern grew calm once more. The eldritch symbols across Liliana’s back faded as swiftly as they appeared, leaving her skin pristine. Ignoring the slack faces that gaped silently at her from those partygoers who hadn’t already run screaming from the Bitter End, Liliana moved away from the fallen bandit, dismissing the spectral shadow with the merest thought. Only she, of all those present, heard its woeful cry as it spiraled back into the endless dark.
She placed one foot atop the fallen chair and leaned on her knee to gaze meaningfully down at Gariel—who was, himself, staring up at her as though she’d sprouted feathers.
“What … What did … What?”
“All good questions,” Liliana told him. “Are you all right?”
“I—I’ll live.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions just yet.” She reached down to offer the flustered fellow a hand up—then yanked it away as he began leaning on her, allowing him to fall flat on his face once more. The floorboards shook with the impact. “There’s still the little matter,” she said with a predatory smile, “of you stalking through that door, yelling at me, calling me all sorts of ugly names.”
“I—you…” Gariel wiped a hand across his face, smearing rather than removing the blood that now dribbled from his nose. “People are watching, Liliana.”
“That didn’t bother you when you were shouting obscenities at me.”
Gariel could only gape once more, at the gathered audience and at the injured bandits, and wonder exactly how crazy his friend’s girl actually was. He’d actually opened his mouth to ask such a question—only to choke on a spray of splinters as a bolt that appeared roughly as thick as a tree trunk slammed into the floor mere inches from his head.
Liliana heard the whir-and-click of a mechanized crossbow even as she jerked away from the sudden impact, glaring at the figures standing in the doorway.
There were three more, all strongly resembling the pair who had attacked her moments ago. Only these three, Liliana realized as she stared at a trio of self-loading identical weapons, were far better equipped.
“The next one,” the man in the middle told her gruffly, “goes through his head.” His gaze flickered to the two figures on the floor, one breathing his last, one blinded, and his face hardened. “I don’t think you’re fast enough to stop all three of us, witch.”
She scowled in turn. “So shoot him. He means nothing to me, and even with those fancy crossbows, I promise you’ll not have time to reload.”
“Ah,” the man said, voice oily, “but he means something to someone, don’t he?”
Liliana’s scowl grew deeper still—but her shoulders slumped, and she knew that they saw it. “What do you want?”
“What I want is to put a few shafts through you for what you did to my boys,” the bandit told her. “But what’s going to happen is this …”
A light rain was falling by the time Kallist opened his eyes. It was a slow, soaking drizzle, good for the swamp fungus and sewer slime and not much else, the sort of precipitation that managed to soak everything without forming into actual drops. It ran from the sloped roof, flowing around the broken and missing shingles, to pour in sporadic rivulets past the windows. The mosquitoes, Kallist thought, are going to be murder tomorrow, holiday or no holiday.
That was his first thought. His second was, Why am I stuck to the table?
He winced in pain, and more than a little embarrassment, as he peeled his unshaven face from the wood, recognizing the gluey sensation of his own drool. At least, he realized, glancing around at the familiar surroundings, he had made it home befo
re passing out completely.
He stood up, his back protesting at the slumped position he’d apparently held for quite a few hours. Bleary-eyed, but without the pounding headache he’d expected, Kallist staggered across the room. It was a small dwelling: two interior rooms, one of which included the kitchen, and a separate bathhouse for cleaning and other necessary relief. It was tiny compared to what he’d known elsewhere in Ravnica, but by the standards of Avaric, it was almost palatial.
Rather than trudge out to the bathhouse where their well was located, which would have required getting soaked to the skin, Kallist simply cut out the middleman, threw open the shutters, and caught some of the ambient rain in his hands. The first palm-full went to quench his burning thirst, the second to scrub the sticky residue from the side of his face.
And only then, as he truly began to wake up and as the expected pounding slowly seeped into his skull, like faint hoofbeats from a distance, did Kallist wonder what had awakened him.
He froze, hands still held out the window, and tried to remember how to think. It couldn’t have been thunder, but this was a gentle shower, not a storm. Someone’s door slamming? Possibly. But someone would’ve had to give their door a blow sufficient to fell a tree for it to have awakened Kallist from his drunken slumber. It didn’t seem likely.
Yet he was certain, in retrospect, that some sort of crash had roused him, a crash that could have been inside the house.
Kallist’s mind finally shrugged off enough lassitude to start working at something approaching normal capacity, at roughly the same time he heard the faintest whisper of cloth against wood in the kitchen doorway.
At the best of times, Kallist wasn’t a fraction of the mage Liliana was; he’d had training, yes, but his skills had always leaned more toward the sword than the spell. And now, with more than a little alcohol still flowing through his blood, anything approaching a complex incantation was beyond him. Nevertheless, spurred on by a sudden burst of fear, a swift whisper allowed Kallist to cloak himself in the thinnest, flimsiest of illusions. It wasn’t much—but it made him appear as though he still held both hands outside, cupped to catch the rain, when in fact one had dropped to the hilt of the dagger he wore strapped to his right thigh. It felt awfully light in his hand, and he had a moment to wish that he’d chosen the window nearer the bed, where his broadsword rested in easy reach.