by Ari Marmell
His clumsy, filthy course took him just near enough to the outermost patrol of soldiers to hear their words. At first they were unintelligible, a language he didn’t know spoken in voices that were far from human. But the words passed deep into his mind, filtered through his spell, and grew clear. He still heard the Kamigawa tongue, but the meaning of the words sprang to mind half an instant after the sounds reached his ears, as though he remembered definitions he’d never actually learned.
“… meat,” one of the guards was saying as Jace’s mind finally tuned in to the language. “It’s been a while since I’ve had any good salamander. The day patrols always take the best cuts.”
Jace briefly congratulated himself on his wisdom in not choosing an animal as a disguise, and settled in to listen.
“Not sure I learned much of use, though,” he told Baltrice roughly an hour later, “except to confirm what we were already afraid of. The village pretty much never sleeps. I have no idea how we’re supposed to get to the chieftain without being discovered. My illusions are good, but I’m not sure I can fool an entire community.”
“He lied to us, Beleren. The filthy little rat-prince lied to us.”
Jace nodded. “I’d noticed that, yes.”
Baltrice’s eyes began to glow a faint red, her lip to curl in angry disdain. “We’re being set up, used as some nezumi’s pawns. And by someone who’s either an idiot or who deeply believes that we are. I mean, the ‘intelligence’ he provided isn’t even close to accurate.”
Again Jace nodded. “We should go, then. Report back to Tezzeret, let him decide—”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she proclaimed, her expression abruptly flipping into a horrid grin. “We both know what Tezzeret thinks of betrayal, don’t we, Beleren?”
Covered head to toe in clinging mud and bits of decayed plant matter, a spirit of the swamp rising to vent its wrath, Baltrice stood. Flames danced openly in her eyes, her entire body quivered with a sudden strain.
“Baltrice? Baltrice, what are you doing?”
And then, though she spoke not a word in response, Jace had his answer.
The sky above the swamp brightened. Almost unnoticeable at first, through the umbrella of heavy branches and dangling moss, the strange light swiftly grew. A second moon appeared in the heavens, red and crackling and angry; and then it was no moon at all, but an artificial dawn.
Even as the nezumi peered upward from their posts, or emerged blinking from their huts, the ball of fire plummeted from the sky and burst on the village outskirts. Entire houses evaporated at a stroke, and the flames fanned outward, carried over the stagnant waters on the back of burning winds. Cypress, bamboo, and nezumi pelts ignited in a terrible conflagration—but the trees and the stalks didn’t scream. Smoke rose between the surviving branches, blotting out the stars and spreading the choking, sickening scent of cooked flesh.
Jace screamed at Baltrice to stop, but his voice was lost in the crackling of the fire and the shrieks of dying nezumi. The smoke burned his eyes, and despite the blazing heat, he found himself shivering with a sudden horror.
One murder. One. That he could live with. To that, he had long ago resigned himself. But this …
Unseen behind Baltrice, who exulted in the release of her most devastating spells, Jace raised his hands as though to wrap them physically around Baltrice’s essence. He held her mind in those fists, and for an instant, Jace knew he could kill.
Still she was casting. Even as the carnage from the fireball spread, her muscles tensed once more, her lips parted with something like a screaming grunt. His skin tingled, and he recognized the feel of something forcing its way into the world from outside.
It erupted from the swamp at the heart of the fireball’s impact, a volcano of fire and fury, and the shallow water around it vanished in a hiss of steam. Humanoid only by the most generous use of the term, it towered above the bamboo stalks, above even some of the trees. It glared about it with eyes of fire, lashed about with hands of the same, for that was all it was. Fire: raw, primal, elemental.
The crackle of its flames was the cackling of Baltrice as it advanced on the village, an inexorable titan of agony and death. Turning their attentions away from the burning huts, the soldiers of the nezumi clan formed a defensive line before the oncoming terror, but few had any illusions that they could do more than die with honor.
“Baltrice!” The dam blocking the flood of Jace’s horror finally burst. “Gods and demons, woman, what are you doing? There’s supposed to be a tribe left for us to treat with!”
She seemed past understanding. Her arms were spread as she soaked in the heat of the inferno she had ignited. Her eyes gleamed red with fury and fire.
Even so, she calmly turned her head to face him. “Relax, Beleren. I have a plan.”
“Really? How’s that working out for you?”
She smiled, and it actually looked to be the expression of a rational human being, rather than the guise of pyromaniacal glee she’d worn a moment before. “Why don’t you take a look?”
Jace looked, and he had to admit she might have a point. For all its initial fury, the fireball had obliterated only a handful of huts, and most of the others it had ignited could probably be saved. And the elemental itself, though tearing through the ranks of nezumi soldiers as though they truly were nothing but rats, seemed uninterested in advancing into the village proper.
“This isn’t about wiping out the tribe, Beleren. Just making sure the prince understands the price of lying to the Consortium, understands the power of those he’s tried to manipulate. He’ll be a lot more honest with us from now on, wouldn’t you think?”
Jace felt sick. “How many did you burn to death, Baltrice? Three dozen? Four?”
This time, she truly didn’t hear him, or chose not to respond. All she said was, “We won’t have a better opportunity than this. Come on; assuming anything the little rat told us is true, the chieftain’s hut is the one in the center.”
Not knowing what else to do—or else unwilling to do it—Jace followed. At least, he thought morbidly, staring up at a handful of burning trees that had become little more than the torches of titans, we won’t have any trouble seeing.
Baltrice darted through the dancing shadows, wading through water up to her thighs. She made at least a cursory attempt at stealth, not that it mattered. Every face in the village was turned toward one mass of flame or the other. Jace was certain that the two of them could have marched on the center of the community with a battalion, a full company of drummers and trumpeters, and possibly a war-elephant, and still had an even chance of going unnoticed. He nevertheless took the time to wrap himself once more in a cloak of shadows, just to be sure.
As they neared the large central hut, Jace found his attention drawn to a smaller structure, rising beside the main house. It stood atop an impossibly narrow trunk, one that appeared utterly incapable of supporting the bulk of the structure. It lacked windows, boasting instead a single door and a chimney that protruded from the roof at a sharp angle. But it wasn’t the house itself that drew his notice, but rather the sounds emerging faintly from within. Even over the surrounding cacophony, Jace was certain he heard the rhythm of a tribal drum, accompanied by an inhuman, hissing voice raised in an ongoing chant.
Even as he recognized the cadence as the basis of a potent spell, a heavy rain began to fall. The conflagration that had spread from the fireball’s impact sizzled and shrank. The elemental seemed largely unconcerned, though puffs of steam shot from its body in random wounds. But behind it, the water of the swamp began to bulge, to shift, and to rise, as something equally primal struggled to be born.
Jace concentrated briefly as he mounted the first of the steps leading to the chieftain’s hut. We’re definitely going to have to watch out for the shaman, he sent in warning.
Baltrice froze in mid-stride, her feet on two separate levels of the stair. Her shoulders tightened as though she’d been stretched on a rack, and when she twisted
about to glare at Jace, he was certain those muscles must snap.
“I don’t give a plague-rat’s ass what our situation might be,” she hissed at him furiously. “You put your thoughts in my head one more time, I swear I’ll put my fire in yours!”
Jace shrugged and tried to pretend he hadn’t leaped back off the stairs in reaction to her sudden turn. “Just thought you should know,” he said aloud.
Baltrice burst through the doorway of the chieftain’s hut, ripping aside the leather curtain that served as his door. She had a bare instant to examine in the room in the flickering firelight from outside. It was unevenly round, a single chamber that filled the entire hut. Numerous bones and skulls hung as trophies upon the walls, as did weapons won in a dozen different battles from a dozen regions of Kamigawa. The entire place reeked, and Baltrice noted a filth-encrusted hole in the floor across the chamber, opening onto the swamp a few dozen feet below—the closest thing the rat-king had to a privy.
As she scanned the space before her, something slammed into the side of her skull, something that felt like a stone wrapped in velvet. Her vision swam and she sank to one knee, struggling to regain her equilibrium.
The projectile that struck her fell to the floor at her side, revealing itself to be the head of a light-furred nezumi, its expression still slack from surprise.
“This is the vile traitor for whom you would slaughter my brothers and sisters?” To Baltrice, the words were gibberish, utterly incomprehensible; but Jace, who had made his way to the open doorway, understood perfectly.
Baltrice rose to attack, and a three-clawed foot whipped across her face as a spinning back-kick sent her sprawling across the open chamber. Blood poured from her nose and lip, and one of her eyes was already swelling shut.
The figure that emerged from the dark was hunched forward, as were most male nezumi, making him appear far shorter than his true height. Black fur streaked with patches of aging grey covered his body, save for the scaly pink tail, the clawed feet and hands, and the very tip of his twitching nose. Thick whiskers hung beneath night-black eyes that reflected the dancing fires. He wore a segmented breastplate of salamander hide and a wide-brimmed conical hat. The naginata he held was longer than he was tall, with a serrated, cleaving blade.
Baltrice, the world spinning around her as she failed to summon a creature to her aid, found herself desperately wishing she hadn’t wasted so much of her strength on her previous spells.
“I am Bonetooth,” the ratman continued, advancing slowly across the hut. “Son of Swamp-Eye, the daughter of Moon-Hand the Third. I am leader of the Nezumi-Katsuro gang, as were my fathers and mothers before unto the tenth generation.”
He stood above Baltrice’s prostrate form, the edge of the naginata pressed against her neck until the skin parted, ever so slightly, and the blood welled up from within. She froze, hoping to forestall his stroke long enough to gather her senses.
“You have conspired against me with my worthless son, whose name I cast out along with his head. He has, perhaps, lied to you, as he has me and so many others, and so, though I know you came to slay me, I was prepared to let you leave.
“And then this!” His twisted, taloned finger quivered with rage as he pointed at the flames that shown through the open doorway. “You came to slay one, yet many have died!
“For such a brutal crime against Nezumi-Katsuro, I can offer no forgiveness.”
The naginata rose, a single drop of Baltrice’s blood glistening along its edge.
And there it stayed. Heartbeats passed, then long seconds, and Baltrice could only wait, looking up at her would be executioner. What was he waiting for?
Only then did she notice the violent quiver in the rat-king’s arms. Turning, she saw Jace in the doorway, one hand raised toward Bonetooth, fingers clenched in a grasp that was not quite a true fist. Sweat beaded his brow, and Baltrice knew it was due to no fire of hers.
Tezzeret had been right. Jace felt the shogun’s mind, a presence independent from the physical world. He sensed—he knew—that if he wanted, he could hold it, rearrange it, take it with him, rebuild it or destroy it. He knew that that the power Tezzeret had promised him was indeed within his grasp.
But there was no triumph in that discovery. Jace felt soiled, as though the waters of a thousand rivers could never wash him clean, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. In his mind, he heard the chieftain screaming and shrieking to be free. He swore that he felt, beneath his fingers, the writhing of the nezumi’s brain as it kicked and thrashed to escape his hold.
And more than once it almost did just that, almost escaped the paralysis in which Jace held it—not because the shogun was stronger, but because Jace wanted to let him go. Through their mental link he felt every urge, every desire, and every fear, and he yearned for nothing more than to release the ratman’s mind.
To say nothing of the fact that Jace felt he could happily watch Baltrice pounded and shredded into a carpet of quivering meat. But somehow, he didn’t think Tezzeret would understand.
He could keep his grasp on the shogun’s mind, nauseating as it might be, force him to guide them out, hold him as hostage against the nezumi’s cooperation. But it took too much concentration, too much attention. He’d be unable to defend them if the rats attacked anyway, or against the shaman’s spells, and Baltrice certainly wasn’t up to helping. He could let Bonetooth go, but how then to prevent him from killing Baltrice, or from leading the village in pursuit of those who’d attacked them?
Had he taken the time to think about it, to really understand what he was doing, Jace could never have gone through with it. But by the time he consciously acknowledged that he had only one option remaining, he’d already followed through.
Jace adjusted his grip on Bonetooth’s mind and commanded the shogun, who had already ceased moving, to cease his breathing as well. The ratman’s eyes went briefly wide, his entire body quivered, until finally he dropped dead to the floor of the hut.
Keeping his own mind nearly as empty as the corpse’s own, Jace knelt beside Baltrice, who looked at him with a puzzled and, for some reason he wouldn’t even try to fathom, vaguely hostile expression. “Can you walk?” he asked her. There was just enough emphasis on the last word to suggest that he wasn’t talking about a stroll down the stairs.
“I don’t …” The pounding in her head had subsided, but only slightly. “I don’t think I …”
Jace placed a hand on her shoulder and concentrated, muttering sounds under his breath that were not words. For an instant, it felt as though something rose from within his chest, tingled its way through his arm, and vanished. His shoulders slumped; he felt—not weak, but certainly weaker than he had a moment before.
“How about now? And I suggest you say ‘yes,’ because if not, you’re damn well stuck here. I’m not wasting any more mana on you.”
“I can walk,” she snapped at him.
“Good. Go. I’ll watch until you’re gone; no sense in us both being helpless at once.”
“Feeling chivalrous, Beleren?” she asked as she climbed unsteadily to her feet.
“Not even remotely. It’s just that I wouldn’t trust you to fight off a senile kobold in your current condition.”
Baltrice somehow managed to snarl even further without her jaw falling off. “And I’m trying to decide if I’d rather be dead than owe you for this!” She began to concentrate, and Jace turned away to begin his own spell. Again he poked a hole in the skin of the world, reaching into realms of vicious frost. From the gap poured a flock of razor-beaked raptors, their feathers glistening beneath coats of crackling ice.
Jace dispatched them in groups, to cover the door and every window. Not the most potent minions he might have summoned, they would still be sufficient to slow any nezumi soldiers who might intrude while he prepared for his own walk between the worlds.
Long moments passed, each more nerve-wracking than the next, until Baltrice finally faded from sight. Jace strode to the center of th
e room, very deliberately not looking at the fur-covered body on the floor, and concentrated once more, struggling to complete his efforts before some new enemy appeared.
For just an instant, as he neared the end of his ritual, he thought he might not make it.
The enemy didn’t come through a door or a window. An entire wall of the hut simply vanished, torn from its roots by a strength Jace could scarcely imagine. Standing in the gap was a nezumi, far more bent and twisted than the chieftain had been. His fur was bone-white, covered in scars and festooned with piercings. He carried a staff that appeared to be made of petrified moss, and he wore nothing but a skirt belted at his waist and a headband of snakeskin.
But it was not the shaman who had torn the wall from the hut. Something loomed behind him, bits of steam still streaming from its mouth where it had eaten Baltrice’s fire elemental. Jace had a brief sense of a body made up of multiple cypress trees, with twisted wooden talons and a great gaping maw from which swamp-water fell in a never-ending rain. The shaman shrieked, revealing rows of teeth engraved with mystic runes, and pointed toward him with a quivering paw. The frost raptors swarmed about the intruders, for all the good they would do.
And then the world melted away, a curtain of smoky light parting before him, and Jace could not remember the last time he was so relieved to find himself in the maddening chaos of the Blind Eternities.
“… known some blind goblins who could’ve planned things out better than that. What sort of brain-damaged monkeys are orchestrating our operations these days?”
Jace hunched in a chair the middle of Kallist’s quarters, idly fidgeting with the hem of his cloak, while the chamber’s true occupant sat across from him, drinking a cup of fruit tea that had long since gone cold. On the table between them stood an unfinished game of guilds, one on which they had wagered a bottle of elven wine. Kallist, eying the territories on the board, couldn’t help but notice once again how many more of them were marked in his colors than Jace’s, and wished he’d never brought the subject up.