Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel

by Ari Marmell

  “My ‘sort?’” Liliana asked dangerously. “Human?”

  “Necromancer,” Emmara retorted.

  “Yes, I am,” she said without shame. “Death, undeath, age, and decay. None of which makes me any less human.” She placed just the slightest weight on the last, as though daring the elf to make an issue of it. “Jace is … important to me.”

  “To you?” Emmara asked. “Or to what you want?”

  “And what of you?” Liliana demanded, suddenly eager to change the subject. “You’re a healer, or so Jace tells me. Why is he not up and around after almost two days?”

  “I could mend his wounds more swiftly,” the elf admitted. “But the bolt struck deep, uncomfortably near several organs that he wouldn’t do well without. I’ve chosen to take the more careful route, to ensure the inner damage is repaired before I seal the outer. The magic is at work, even as we speak. He’ll be well enough, soon enough.”

  “Thank you,” Liliana said grudgingly. Both sipped from their respective glasses, examining one another in silence.

  “You and Jace …” she began finally.

  “Berrim. I knew him as Berrim.”

  “Whatever. You two weren’t together?”

  “Of course not!” Emmara protested, taking her meaning. She actually shuddered. “He’s human.”

  Liliana couldn’t help but grin at the elf’s revolted tone.

  “We were friends,” Emmara continued. “Or I thought we were. Perhaps I’ll know for certain when he tells me precisely who was Berrim and who was Jace. And why I only learned of the latter when a number of very unpleasant people started searching for him. The guilds may be gone, but I still have my sources. It didn’t take me long to learn the Consortium was looking for someone who went by both names—and several others, besides.

  “I’ve lived long enough to understand change, Liliana, be it cities, governments, names, or people. And from what I’ve heard of Jace, I can understand why he might have preferred to become Berrim. But he could have trusted me enough to tell me. Now I don’t know who my friend actually was. Do you know who it is you actually care for?”

  The almost-but-not-quite-hostile conversation continued, but Jace ceased listening. With a moment’s effort—made only moderately more difficult by his lingering injury—he allowed his senses to recede, pulling away from the table but not dismissing the spell of clairvoyance entirely.

  Sadly, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, he dropped his head into his hands. Much as he felt his use of a pseudonym had been justified, he couldn’t blame Emmara for her anger. She’d thought him a friend, he’d claimed to be a friend, yet he’d failed to trust her even with his own real name.

  Everything he’d ever done, he’d done for what he thought were the best of reasons. How had he managed to screw it all up so dramatically?

  And how could he know he wasn’t doing just as badly even now?

  Yet for all that, she’d taken him in, tended his wounds, even though she owed him nothing, knew that he wasn’t who she’d believed him to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found his thoughts of Emmara turning to thoughts of Kallist. Jace Beleren wondered if he’d ever been worthy of a single one of his friends—and he wondered, too, if all of them would have to suffer for him.

  He tried to shake off his self-pity before it consumed him, focusing instead on the immediate. Without either opening his eyes or ending his clairvoyance spell, he concentrated on the room around him. He felt the heavy blankets that lay atop his legs as he sat up in bed, felt the itchy, greasy sensations of his hair, which had soaked up the sweat of his pain and was more than overdue for a wash. He prodded at his bare ribs with a finger, felt a faint divot in the flesh and a deep ache in the muscles of his torso, but nothing that approached the earlier agony. He remarked to himself on just how much he owed his elven host, then cut the thought short before it could drive him right back into the arms of the brooding funk he was struggling to evade.

  Gradually, he removed his fingers from the wound, letting his hands flop to the mattress beside him, but continued to poke at the injury with his mind. He dwelled on the sense of warmth that had flowed through him at the healer’s touch, the “taste” of her mana flooding over his soul, the sensation of his flesh stitching itself together. For just an instant his spirit quivered on the verge of discovery, an understanding of a new and brighter magic than any he had practiced before. The lingering pain in his wound lessened by a featherweight. And a part of Jace exulted, warmed by a spark of joy not in using the power for his own ends, but with the experience of a magic worth casting purely for its own sake.

  And then the moment was gone, blown away along with Jace’s concentration as someone pounded on Emmara’s front door with a brutish, heavy fist. Jace fell back against the pillow with a gasp as the sharp sound not only came to him faintly through the floorboards, but directly into his mind via the spell that kept a portion of his senses hovering in the room below.

  Curious and perhaps more than reasonably annoyed at the interruption, he directed the spell to flow outward, moving it past the many pillars that supported Emmara’s manor, slipping it through the wood of the heavy portal, allowing him to take a good solid gander at the man outside. He saw nothing of note, just a large, vaguely gorillalike fellow with a crate under one hand. A courier of some sort, obviously.

  But Jace’s paranoia was in full bloom, and he took a moment to really concentrate, to scan the surface thoughts of the man outside. It was difficult, reading his mind through a lens of clairvoyance, but that just made it a better test of his recovery.

  And then Jace was out of bed, stumbling and slipping against the lingering pain, careening off the wall as he lost his balance, reaching desperately for the nearest teleportation pillar.

  Kerstophe shifted foot to foot, burning with nervous energy, as he waited for a response to his knock. In the crook of his left arm, he adjusted the wooden crate, utterly empty. In his right hand he held a thin stiletto, held backward so the blade was hidden up his voluminous sleeve.

  He heard a faint rattling from behind the heavy door, and a small portal—one so expertly blended in with the contours of the wood that he hadn’t noticed it was there—slid open, revealing roughly a quarter of a pretty elven face. “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Delivery for you, m’lady,” he said, voice respectful but as bored as any good courier’s.

  “What is it?”

  “Couldn’t say, m’lady. Nothing written on the outside, and it’s certainly not my place to open it or to ask.”

  “All right. A minute, please.”

  Kerstophe’s pulse quickened, and he felt excitement radiating from his chest—to say nothing of places somewhat lower down. It always got him worked up, this moment just before it happened. Especially when his “partner” was a pretty girl.

  He heard the thump-and-clatter of a bolt being drawn and a chain being unhooked, and the door swung wide. He smiled down at the elf with an almost excessively friendly grin.

  “Emmari Tandars?” he asked, dramatically mangling the pronunciation.

  “Close enough,” she offered with a smile.

  “Fantastic,” he said. With a smooth motion born from years of practice, he reversed his grip on the stiletto, stepped in close until their bodies nearly touched, and sank the blade deep into her flesh, directly beneath the sternum, angled upward.

  They gasped as one, she in stunned agony, he in pleasure. The elf staggered, and he withdrew the blade and shoved, so that her body tumbled backward and out of the doorway, dead before it hit the floor. Just as casually he knelt to lay the empty crate on the floor beside her, then stood, calmly shut the door, and wandered back down the steps to join the traffic on the street below.

  A dozen passersby or more, and nobody had seen a thing.

  Jace, clad only in the leggings he’d worn in bed, dashed out from behind the door and dropped to one knee beside the fallen elf. His hands were already reaching for her, his jaw clenching at the sight of the g
rowing pool of blood, when her eyes snapped open like the jaws of a drake. Jace released a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

  “Emmara?” he asked, his voice soft.

  “That really hurt,” she grumbled, slowly sitting up. Already the wound in her gut had started to close, the blood to dry. Jace knew that if she hadn’t begun the healing spell in advance, the wound would have been lethal; as it was, the ugly bruising around it didn’t fade with the wound itself, and he knew that Emmara was likely to be in more than a little pain for days to come.

  “I’m so sorry to put you through that,” he told her. “But I didn’t have time to set up any sort of illusion—at least not anything he’d believe after sticking a knife into it.” He reached a hand out to help the elf rise. “I just—”

  Glaring a mixture of anger and pain, Emmara pushed his hand away and rose, albeit shakily, under her own power. Then she turned that heavy gaze directly on him, matched by Liliana’s own glare as the necromancer emerged from behind a nearby pillar. Both women stood with arms crossed, scowling darkly, warped and twisted reflections of one another.

  “What?” he asked them.

  “Would you care to explain, ‘Berrim’?” Emmara demanded.

  “I figured—” he began.

  “Were you afraid I wouldn’t be up to defending myself?” she continued unabated.

  “And you should certainly know better in my case,” Liliana added darkly. “Oh, heavens! We’re in trouble! Let’s wait for the wounded man to come charging in to save us!”

  “I—” he tried again.

  “You have any idea the sort of damage your lunging around could have caused?” the elf demanded. “And I don’t just mean to me! There’s a reason I had you resting in bed, you idiot!”

  Liliana, Jace thought sourly, is a bad influence on her. “I didn’t race down here to save you two!” Jace shouted, clutching his ribs as the dull ache returned. “I did it to save him!”

  That, at least, was sufficient to draw a confused silence. Jace took the opportunity to move from the door and collapse into the nearest chair—a velvet-upholstered monstrosity that might well have been older than the elf who owned it.

  “You,” he said, stabbing a finger at Liliana, “would have had one of your specters eat his soul, or maybe rotted his flesh off his bones into a puddle of really smelly goo.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “And you,” he continued, turning to Emmara, “well, I’ve never seen you in danger, but I’m betting that your response to a man trying to stick a knife in your gut would be a lot uglier than your healing spells.”

  “You’d win that bet,” she told him, still puzzled.

  “So,” Jace said, trying to lean forward in his chair and failing, “then what?”

  Liliana and Emmara looked at one another.

  “Is there anyone here,” Jace asked, “with the slightest doubt that your delivery came courtesy of Tezzeret?”

  Emmara frowned. “It would be quite a coincidence for it to be anyone else, under the circumstances. Unlike some people, I don’t have whole swathes of angry enemies clamoring for my head.”

  “Exactly!” Jace exclaimed, as though pouncing on a long-sought prize. “Emmara, the only reason Tezzeret could have to come after you is because you’re a friend of mine.”

  “Might be,” the elf corrected under her breath.

  “So if I hadn’t talked you into letting the assassin ‘kill’ you, then what? What happens when the assassin fails to report back, hmm? Who—or what—does Tezzeret send next?”

  Liliana nodded in sudden understanding. “But this way, the assassin goes back and reports the job done, with nobody the wiser.”

  Jace smiled. “And of course, without the resources of a Ravnica cell, he’s got no way of finding out any time soon that his hired killer was duped.”

  Emmara flushed ever so slightly. “You’re right, of course. I’m, um, not accustomed to dealing with the assassin’s mindset. My apologies, Jace. Thank you for stepping in.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said sincerely. He turned to Liliana, opened his mouth to ask when her apology was forthcoming, and then thought better of it.

  “Emmara,” he said seriously, “you might be able to count on the deception to hold. I doubt Tezzeret’s going to expend what few resources he has remaining on Ravnica following up on a report of a successful kill. But I can’t promise that. You may want to consider moving.”

  The elf gazed around her at the dozens of columns and groaned softly.

  “In the interim,” he said, rising to his feet with a faint groan of his own, “we’ll get out of your hair.”

  Again he found himself pummeled by a pair of stares, this time unbelieving.

  “Jace—” Liliana began.

  “You’re not ready for—” Emmara said at the same time.

  But Jace shook his head, raising a hand to forestall them both. “Kallist is dead,” he said, his voice soft. “And now someone’s tried to kill Emmara.” Both women were startled to see Jace fighting back tears. “I’ve never been much for heroics; you both know that. But until Tezzeret invited me into his damned Consortium, I never set out to hurt anyone. And now that I’ve started, it seems I can’t make it stop.

  “I can’t undo the trouble I’ve caused you, Emmara.” At least not yet, he added mentally, thinking back to Liliana’s ambitions. “But I won’t put you in any further danger. We’re leaving.”

  In the end, neither Liliana nor Emmara could offer any argument to change his mind, despite the occasional shudder of pain that wracked his body, or the brief moments of dizziness that threatened to knock him off his feet. Thus, fully clad once more and carrying a pouch of medicinal herbs given to them by their host, Jace and Liliana exchanged their farewells with the elf—along with Jace’s promise that some day, when the danger had passed, he would find Emmara and tell her the truth about his life, about who and what he was—and moved once more into Ravnica’s bustling streets.

  They walked arm in arm so Liliana could catch Jace when his sporadic weakness overtook him, lest he fall to the earth amid the marching feet of the thick city crowds. His jaw was clenched in a grimace of constant discomfort, and Liliana felt his arm tremble on more than one occasion.

  “When you think about it,” she said, hoping to keep his attention focused, “Emmara owes Paldor her life.”

  Jace blinked. “How do you figure?”

  “Had he not shot you, we wouldn’t have been at her home. And without us there, without the forewarning that something was amiss, how much attention would she have paid to a courier at her door?”

  “You may be right. I’ll be sure to thank him the next time he’s actually a person.”

  She chuckled, more so than the comment actually warranted, and Jace found himself smiling. They walked in silence—well, without speaking, as the crowds around them hardly qualified as anything less than deafening—for several more moments.

  “How did they find her?” Jace finally asked. “They didn’t know to question her when I first disappeared, so why now?”

  Liliana could only shake her head. For a long while, Jace said nothing more, concentrating purely on putting one foot in front of the other while his companion searched the streets for a tavern or hostel where they might lay low until his strength returned. Only when they’d firmly ensconced themselves in a small, dusty room did he speak again.

  “I …” He cleared his throat, trying to keep the worry out of his voice. “Liliana, I need you to do something for me. It may take a few days, even as fast as your specters travel, but I can use the time anyway.”

  “Of course,” she told him. “What do you need?”

  He’d been right; it had taken a while, almost four days. By the time the last of the spectral spies had returned with news, Emmara’s magics had completed their work and Jace was feeling almost himself again—despite three nights of sleeping in a bed so fragile it seemed a particularly weighty dream would collapse i
t entirely.

  “How did it go?” he asked, almost afraid of her response.

  “You were right,” she told him gently. “It wasn’t just Emmara.”

  Jace hung his head, slumped down against the far wall, ignoring the furniture entirely. “Who?”

  “Gariel’s fine, at least,” she told him. Of course, she’d already known he would be; she hadn’t given Tezzeret his name.

  “Who?” Jace asked again, almost pleading.

  “Rulan, Laphiel, and Eshton. They’re all gone, Jace.”

  Jace buried his face in his hands, too exhausted even to weep. “I’m running low on old friends to get killed,” he told her.

  The look she turned on him was one of pity, yes, but tinged around the edges with a growing disdain. “This won’t stop until we make it stop, and you know it. So cut it out!”

  “You’re right,” he said after a moment to catch his breath.

  “I don’t understand,” she said more softly. “How could they know?”

  Jace jerked his head up, staring at her, but she had turned away, peering through the filthy window at the abstract shapes moving outside. For just a moment, a dark and terrible suspicion crept from the depths of his mind and lodged itself in his thoughts.

  But no; no, that couldn’t be. Jace shook his head, as though trying to physically shake the notion loose. He knew her intimately; he’d been inside her thoughts. It simply wasn’t possible, and no trace of the foul thought remained in his expression by the time she turned back to face him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “But it stops now. You were right, Liliana. Obviously, Tezzeret’s got sharper eyes than I thought, and now he’s turned them on my friends. He doesn’t want to let me run? Fine. No more running. No more hiding.”

  Liliana crossed the room, squeezed his shoulder in reassurance. “We can beat him,” she promised. “But we have to find him.”

  Jace turned to meet her gaze, and his eyes flashed a deep, inhuman blue. “Watch me,” was all he said.

  Of course, Jace hadn’t the first notion of where to find Tezzeret. But it had occurred to him, during his restless nights waiting to learn the fate of his friends, that he just might know how to find someone who did.