Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel

by Ari Marmell

  The mage’s eyes refused to focus, and still he screamed.

  For an instant, Kallist felt only panic. What had happened? What could he do? Maybe he should wait for Liliana, but where was she? Could he afford to wait that long? Could Jace?

  No. No, Kallist didn’t think he could.

  “Jace!” He held his friend’s face close. “Jace, listen to me! It’s Kallist; I’m here!”

  He took a deep breath; he didn’t know what Jace was suffering, but he’d both seen and inflicted enough anguish to recognize it now. A second deep breath, steeling himself against he knew not what.

  “Jace, I don’t know what to do! Tell me what I can do …”

  Jace never heard the words, but he felt the thoughts and the emotions behind them. Kallist’s mind, which he knew so well, was a beacon in the dark and the pain, a light showing him the way out.

  And Jace’s screaming ceased. Kallist felt something invade his mind, a touch that squeezed so painfully he thought he must surely die or go mad himself—but it squeezed not with anger, but with fear, a grip of desperation.

  Jace felt Kallist’s mind in his hands, a rock amid the tearing tides around him. Clinging to it, he hauled himself back, inch by maddening, agonizing inch.

  Both men lay, side by side, panting in exhaustion and pain, surrounded by the dead and the dying until Liliana found them moments later. And with Jace leaning on her, Kallist staggering behind, they managed to limp away before Sevrien and his soldiers could find them once more.

  “Fight back? Are you insane?”

  Liliana shook her head. “Jace, they found us. They’ll keep finding us! What choice do we have?”

  They were huddled in Kallist’s own flat, trying to catch their breath and regroup. The shutters were tightly latched, casting the room in a grim shade, and the door was triple-bolted. Kallist had sworn they’d be safe there, at least for a time, as he hadn’t rented the place under his own name. Still, they jumped at every sound, froze at every movement in the stairwell or the street beyond.

  Jace sat flopped in a thickly cushioned chair, pale and shaking, though some of his strength seemed to have returned. He refused outright to discuss what had happened, brushing off even Liliana’s most concerned inquiries, focusing only on what came next.

  “Liliana,” he said softly, “we can’t. I can’t.”

  “What choice?” she demanded again.

  “We planeswalk. We go somewhere they’ll never find us.”

  “It means leaving Kallist behind,” Liliana reminded him.

  “That’s fine.” Both of them turned to see Kallist in the door to the flat’s tiny kitchen, a mug of something or other in his hand. “I’m not prepared to give up my life a second time,” he told them. “Besides, let’s be honest. They’re not really after me. Once they’ve figured out you two are gone, I doubt they’ll spend too much time hunting for me. I’ll disappear for a few weeks, and that’ll be it.”

  “Just like that?” Jace asked, and neither Kallist nor Liliana was entirely sure if he doubted Kallist’s predictions, or referred to the end of their own relationship.

  “I think so,” he answered softly. “You do what you need to, Jace. I’ll be fine.”

  For several hours Jace and Liliana talked, discussing possible worlds and destinations, she occasionally trying to talk him into staying and fighting, he always refusing even to consider the notion. And eventually she rose and left, ostensibly to send her ghosts out to see if Jace’s flat was safe, so they could recover the rest of his belongings, but mostly because she was sick of arguing.

  All right, so he’d need a bit more convincing. She could do that. She had time.

  Only when she was well and truly gone did Jace rise and make his way to the next room, to which Kallist had retired, giving the couple the chance to talk. He stood in the doorway, staring at his friend who slumped, dozing, at the table.

  He hadn’t told Liliana what he’d planned; she’d have tried to talk him out of it. He hadn’t told Kallist, for Kallist would most assuredly have refused. And Jace admitted he’d have had good reason to do so.

  But Jace couldn’t leave him behind, not now. He’d been in Kallist’s mind, seen how much his friend still worried for him. And Jace worried for him in turn. He knew Tezzeret—better than Kallist did—and Jace believed, in his heart and soul, that Kallist was wrong. He wasn’t safe here, not even if Jace and Liliana were gone for decades.

  There was a way. He’d thought it possible for years, ever since Tezzeret had told him of his “mind-storage” device, ever since he’d felt the minds of the traitor and the nezumi shogun and realized they were, indeed, objects that he could manipulate. And now, now that he’d touched Kallist’s mind once more, felt its weight, its shape, its essence, Jace was all but certain.

  No, a planeswalker couldn’t take another person with him through the Blind Eternities. But another mind? That, Jace knew, he could do. He could hold Kallist within himself, just long enough to make the journey and to find another body, a new body, for him to inhabit. It would mean erasing the mind of someone else, to make room for Kallist’s own, but Jace was certain he could find someone who deserved it.

  Kallist would never forgive him; he knew that before he even started. But he would be alive, and Jace owed him that—even if it wasn’t what Kallist thought he wanted.

  With a deep sigh, Jace thrust his mind into his friend’s. Again he cradled it in his grip, tenderly examining it from all sides. And then he did what he’d never tried before—what nobody, to his knowledge, had ever tried before—and drew it to him.

  He was Jace Beleren, mind-reader, planeswalker. And he knew he could do this.

  Knew, right up until the moment that Kallist’s mind truly entered his own, and everything went wrong.

  Jace thought he could keep them separate, that he could keep the him that was Kallist in a tiny corner of the him that was Jace. Two minds sharing a body, yes, but far from equally. As they touched, Jace’s protections popped, soap bubbles on the wind, for this was a pressure of a sort he’d never known. It wasn’t an attack, it wasn’t communication, it wasn’t anything he could have imagined—and what Jace could not imagine, he could not weave into his spells.

  Already he was experiencing memories not his own, remembering dreams he’d never had. He seemed to be staring at the room from two different angles, staring at two faces, and he couldn’t recall which was his. His head began to throb, his concentration to blow away like perfume on the wind.

  Desperately he tried to stop the spell, to push Kallist’s thoughts back where they belonged—but even if he’d had the power or the focus to do so, Jace had already forgotten how, the knowledge buried beneath the flood of someone else’s mind.

  Still he pushed, running on instinct now rather than knowledge, struggling to separate the thoughts of his friend from his own, even if he could no longer remember which was which, who was who.

  On it went, and on, until finally what had nearly become one was indeed two once more. And Jace, who had been Kallist, and Kallist, who had been Jace, lay unconscious together on the thin rug of the anonymous flat.

  Slowly, so slowly, the rush of returning memories, of a returning life, subsided. Shivering violently despite the night’s warmth, Jace Beleren opened his eyes, and found himself once more in the alley—once more today—lost no more in the memories of the past. For the first time in months, he was himself, rather than the man whose thoughts and recollections he’d stolen.

  His hands and legs were coated in refuse from where he’d fallen, and the stench of the alleyway permeated his clothes. He noticed neither. The sounds of the city, muted but hardly silenced after the setting of the sun, crept into the narrow walkway behind him, and he ignored them as well.

  How long he’d lain there, he couldn’t say. He felt as though he were awakening from a long sleep, a sleep beset by nightmares of his own device. Jace rocked back on his heels, wiped a sleeve across his face to clear the worst of the tears fro
m his cheeks.

  A dozen times he drew breath to speak to his absent friend, a dozen times he faltered.

  “How can I?” he whispered finally. “How do you apologize for something like this? ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I lost control of the spell. I never meant to steal your mind; I just meant to commandeer it for a while and stick it somewhere else. Still friends?’”

  Jace shook his head, and sniffled once or twice. “You’d know what to say, Kallist. I don’t know if I’d want to hear it, but you’d say it. I was so sure. So certain I knew what was best for you, so certain I could do it. The great Jace Beleren couldn’t fail, could he?”

  Jace sank until he sat on the filthy ground.

  “You know I came to Favarial to save you?” he said with a bitter laugh. “Well, to save ‘Jace.’ And it was your strength and your decision that brought me here. You who decided to do the right thing, not me.

  “There’s so much I wish we could have settled, Kallist. Even if I could never have made up for what I did to you, I could have tried. Maybe even been friends again, now that I understand why Liliana did what she did, why she left ‘Jace’ for …”

  And then he was up and running, cursing himself for a thousand kinds of fool. Here he was, moping in alleyways, with who-knew-what still happening to Liliana. He remembered her cry from the stairwell, and a surge of magic passed through him, a spell he could only have wished to cast when he’d still thought himself to be Kallist. He directed his magics sharply down and allowed them to lift him skyward, spreading out in invisible wings of pure telekinetic force that brushed the buildings to each side, the feel of the stone cold against his mind. He took to the air, arcing over the nearest buildings, angling sharply toward the apartment that his mind in Kallist’s body had called home.

  This was Ravnica. Nobody gave the soaring figure more than a second look.

  Before him was an open window, broken and shattered in Semner’s attack. Jace swooped inside, the psychic wings fading into nothingness even as his feet touched the floor.

  Liliana stared with wide, red-rimmed eyes from the floor, where she’d slumped exhausted against the fallen table. Shaky as a newborn fawn she rose, and made her way toward him with tentative steps. He feared, at first, that she was injured, but the blood that stained her gown was not hers.

  “Jace?” she asked softly, her hand rising, her fingers brushing the side of his face, as light as hummingbird’s breath. “Jace?”

  He nodded once, trembling at her words, her touch.

  “Oh, Jace, I’m sorry!” He almost found himself falling back as she wrapped her arms tight around him, as though afraid he’d simply vanish once more. “I wanted to explain, I wanted to fix it,” she sobbed into his chest. “I didn’t know how.”

  “It’s all right,” he told her through tears of his own. “It’s not your fault. I did it to myself, to me and to—to Kallist.” His words ended in a soft gasp, and he refused to turn his gaze, to look at the room beyond the woman he held. “I wonder … I don’t think the right one of us survived, Liliana. I think he deserved it more than me.”

  “What was it like?” she asked gently, face still pressed against him.

  “It … It didn’t really feel like anything,” he replied slowly, thinking back over the past six months. “I mean, I was just him. It didn’t feel like anything had changed. Even when …” She felt his chest move as he shrugged. “We’re not exactly identical twins, but it somehow never occurred to me that my face had changed. If I thought about it, I could have said ‘Jace was the one who lost a toe to frostbite,’ yet whenever I looked at the stump, it just felt natural. I never even questioned it.”

  “Your soul,” she suggested.

  “What?”

  “You traded minds, Jace, not souls. Your soul was still you. Maybe that was its way of protecting your mind. Maybe knowing what had happened without being able to fix it would have—damaged you.”

  “I’m not sure I believe there’s any such thing as a soul separate from the mind,” he admitted.

  “There is.” It was scarcely more than a whisper. “Believe me, there is.”

  Jace nodded, and finally steeled himself for what was to come. Tenderly but firmly, he pulled himself from Liliana’s grasp and stepped across the room, ignoring Semner’s mutilated corpse as he searched for—

  Jace dropped to his knees, felt Liliana’s hand on his shoulder and couldn’t even turn to meet her gaze. He’d known Kallist was dead, of course, had known since he awoke in the alleyway with his own memories, but to see it …

  “I couldn’t save him,” she whispered to him.

  “You shouldn’t have had to,” Jace rasped, rising slowly. “This is my fault.”

  “Jace—”

  “It is. I did this. It’s my fault.

  “But,” he added, turning around, eyes sweeping the room, “it’s not my fault alone.”

  There, lying off to one side, half-propped against the wall, one of Semner’s men still breathed. Jace watched him for a long moment, and gathered his concentration as he’d not done in ages. The air around him began to glow, a wintry breezy to waft through the chamber, as he drew on sufficient mana to rip into the man’s mind.

  There was no finesse, no care, only power and purpose. Jace slashed through thoughts and memories like underbrush, leaving a wake of devastation behind him. The unconscious fellow twitched and shuddered as entire swathes of his life were frayed. He wouldn’t die of this. Jace had no taste for killing, not with memories of the Lurias marketplace fresh in his mind. But neither would he leave one of Semner’s thugs behind, unpunished for his sins. The result was a drooling imbecile, a man who might be trusted to push carts or carry boxes in exchange for food and shelter. A grim life, but a life nonetheless, and perhaps more than the bastard deserved.

  Deeper Jace delved, without sympathy or compunction; he cared about one thing only, held to but one objective. Yet no matter how thoroughly he sifted through the shreds of what had lately been a sentient mind, he couldn’t find it. Eventually he had to concede that it was never there.

  “He doesn’t know,” he said to Liliana as he allowed the spell to lapse, ignoring the faint babbling and drooling emerging from what was no longer entirely a man. “He doesn’t know who hired Semner. I doubt any of them did except Semner himself.”

  Liliana gently took his hand in hers. “Is there really any doubt?” she asked him.

  “Why would they have sent someone like Semner?” Jace challenged. “They’d have known he wasn’t up to the task. If it’d actually been me, instead of Kallist …

  “So maybe they didn’t send him. Maybe he found where you were—where ‘Kallist’ was—and decided to try for the bounty they’ve put on your head. But either way, it’s ultimately their fault, isn’t it?”

  Jace looked away. “It is,” he agreed.

  “So what,” she said, taking his chin and forcing his face around to meet her gaze, “are we going to do about it?”

  “We could walk somewhere. Like we meant to do before. Somewhere the Consortium would never find us.”

  “Is there any such place?” she asked. “Would you really want to live in a strange place, without friends, looking over your shoulder every day?

  “Would you really,” and her voice grew suddenly hard, “want to let them get away with what they’ve done to Kallist? To us?”

  Again Jace pulled away from her, moving across the room to stare out the window at the flickering lights of Favarial. Fear and anger warred across his face, staking out territories in the depths of his soul.

  “You don’t know Tezzeret,” he whispered finally. “Not like I do. I can’t—we can’t beat him, Liliana.

  “But—”

  Jace turned, shaking his head. “We can’t,” he insisted. “But we don’t have to.

  “The Consortium will regret what they’ve done, Liliana. And we can blind them in the process, throw them into enough disarray that they won’t be able to come looking for us. Not for a wh
ile, at least, not until we’re well and truly gone.”

  It wasn’t enough, not nearly. But she dared not push any further, not so soon. And at least it was a start. She nodded, and if Jace noticed the sudden tension in her shoulders, he surely attributed it to the evening’s horrors.

  Jace returned to the body of his best friend and knelt beside him one last time. Ignoring the blood that was already drying into a thick stain, he lifted the heavy blue cloak that had always been his favorite. He wrapped it around his shoulders and joined Liliana in the doorway. Later, when he’d had the chance to rest, to draw mana from the waters below, he would sprout his wings and take to the sky once more, carrying them as far as he could. For now, they had only their feet on which to rely as they began the long, monotonous journey toward the Rubblefield.

  “Damn it to raging puss-soaked hell!” Paldor ranted at the blinking glow that limned his beard and fleshy features in a blood-red aura. “Why are you doing this to me? Why?”

  Oddly enough, the desk didn’t answer.

  Constructed by Tezzeret, Paldor’s desk was attuned to every external door and window in the building through an intricate magical alarm system. Should anyone other than members of the Consortium attempt to enter the complex, the wood glowed, alerting Paldor to the possibility of intrusion.

  This was the seventh time the damn thing had gone off in the past three hours.

  Paldor practically ripped the speaking tube from the wall and held it to his mouth. “Captain Sevrien! This needs to stop!”

  A few moments of silence, and then a breathless voice replied. “Captain’s not in the office, sir. We’re stretched thin, so he’s gone to check on the latest incursion himself.”

  Paldor muttered something under his breath that threatened to melt the mouthpiece. Then, “Wake the day shift, if you’re that shorthanded!”

  “Uh, we already have, sir.”

  More flowery muttering.

  It made sense, though. Looking back over the schematic on the desk, it seemed that each false alarm—if indeed they were false—was as far from the previous ones as possible. The guards were running themselves ragged, not merely investigating each new alert, but leaving a pair of men behind to watch the portal in question; of course they’d already called in every available blade.