Agents of Artifice p-1

by Ari Marmell

  Even knowing that she wasn't about to hurt him, he couldn't help but shiver at the blood-chilling, vampiric cold emanating from the necromancer. From within the midnight-tinted aura, he swore he heard the whispers and moans of a score of souls.

  Yet her tone, when she spoke, was calm, collected. She was, Kallist realized with something akin to awe, simply making a point, not trying to intimidate him.

  "Do you really think," she asked him, "that waiting here in Avaric, to find out if you've succeeded, is the best use of my abilities? Do you really think you can convince me that it's a trip you can make, but that it's somehow too dangerous for me?"

  It had, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with danger. Kallist just wasn't remotely certain he could stand spending three or four straight days with Liliana, so soon after the crushing conversation of the previous evening.

  Kallist, not being a complete idiot, knew better than to say so. "Yes. I think it's too dangerous to risk both of us."

  Liliana laughed and sank until her feet once more touched the wooden planks, allowing the necromantic aura to fade. "So it's safer for one of us than both? I thought I was supposed to be the illogical one."

  "Liliana-"

  "Besides," she said lightly, flicking the tip of his nose with a finger, "you'd be bored without me."

  Kallist knew when he was beat. It seemed to be happening a lot lately.

  "Fine," he grumbled with ill grace. "Start packing up what you need. I've got one last thing to take care of."

  The humor instantly fell from Liliana's face. "Would you rather I do it?" she asked gently.

  "Not even a little bit."

  Kallist hefted his broadsword from the pile, allowing the scabbard to slide from the blade. Mechanically, he turned and strode across the room to stand above Errit.

  The bound thug, who'd regained consciousness at some point during their discussion, began to thrash. "Wait! Wait a minute!"

  "Why?" Kallist's voice was as mechanical as his movements.

  "I-there's no reason! Look, I'm no threat to you! I could even help you! I-"

  "Should have asked Semner exactly who it was you were dealing with." Kallist brought the heavy blade down with a crash. Then, without a word, he turned away to wash the weapon clean, leaving the body to drain itself dry into the crevice he'd cleaved through the floorboards beneath it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kallist glowered about as though hoping to cow the rain into submission. The rain petulantly refused to be intimidated, however, and he had to settle for running his fingers over his face, flinging another handful of water to the sodden earth.

  "At least it keeps the worst of the stench and the mosquitoes out of the air," Liliana told him, her voice cheerful enough that it made Kallist very seriously consider hitting her over the head with the first loose brick he could find.

  He glared at her instead. "Maybe if you'd take one of these packs for me, I'd be a tad less miserable."

  "I have what I need. It's not my fault you pack like a girl."

  "And I suppose that means you pack like a man, then?"

  "I, my love," she said, with a seductive twinkle in her eye and just a faint touch of her tongue on her lips, "do not do anything like a man."

  Kallist, still not emotionally steady enough to broach certain subjects, kept walking.

  The both of them were clad in heavy cloaks, designed not only to keep the elements off but to hide the fact that their clothes were clearly of poor, peasant stock. Though the only routes out of Avaric took them through alleys, sewers, and under-streets that made even that poor district seem classy, they would soon enough be wending their way through neighborhoods of far greater affluence. They could acquire new outfits easily enough, but until then, it wouldn't do to stand out as yokels.

  Kallist had topped his outfit with a broad-brimmed hat, Liliana with a deep hood, and neither had done much in the way of keeping the pair dry. Their shoes were all but unsalvageable, the rain-soaked mud of Avaric having been replaced by the much purer garbage and excess sewage of Ravnica's most foul under-streets.

  A few more moments of silence, a few hundred more yards. The rains increased marginally, but enough to soak through what few spots of Kallist's outfit were still dry, and he could only shake his head.

  "This is not an auspicious start to our journey," he muttered.

  "Why, Kallist. You're not superstitious, are you?"

  The expression he turned on Liliana was utterly bland. "I'm accompanying a sorcerer who was born on another world, on our way to warn a third that he's about to be assassinated, possibly at the behest of either an inter-planar criminal organization or a spirit-binding rat. As far as I'm concerned, what you call 'superstition,' I call 'paying attention."' "Fair enough. You should try that, then."

  Kallist squinted, not entirely certain if he was imagining the insult there or not, but Liliana's smile suggested that she hadn't seriously meant it anyway. At least, he assumed that's what it meant.

  Another few moments of silence, save the persistent rain and the squelching of boots.

  "Liliana," he began hesitantly, "about our talk last night…"

  "No."

  "Fine." Kallist couldn't keep the anger or a touch of petulance out of his voice. He began to pull ahead, but a soft hand on his shoulder stopped him.

  He turned, and the wide eyes into which he gazed glimmered with more than the rain.

  "Kallist," Liliana said gently, "not now. After we're done with this-when we've found Jace and we're done with whatever we're doing in Favarial-if things have changed, ask me then. But not now. There's too much to deal with."

  He could only nod, unable to form anything resembling a coherent word, and resumed his pace.

  Struggling to keep his voice steady, he asked, "Assuming we can find him, do you think Jace'll be willing even to see us?"

  "I doubt it," Lilian a told him seriously. "But I wasn't planning on asking. You said it yourself, Kallist: He's never forgiven either of us. We're going to have to save him despite himself.

  "And who knows?" she added, voice far more hopeful than it was certain. "Maybe saving his life one more time will help balance out the books where he's concerned."

  Kallist smiled a grim, sad smile. "And when you're through with that delusion, I've got a pristine castle with a mountain view on Dominaria that I can sell you, cheap."

  Again they walked in silence. As their footsteps drew them inexorably farther from Avaric, their surroundings grew ever filthier, ever more gloomy. At least the huts and shops in Avaric had no pretensions; these, however, stretched as high as those aspiring to the glory of other, far wealthier neighborhoods. Narrow windows and tall arched doorways provided ingress through walls of stone; but that stone was cracked and encrusted with dirt and droppings, those windows boarded over, those doors rotted away. Cobwebs grew thicker than curtains, and the sounds of what few inhabitants remained within were furtive and scurrying. The cobbles were colored in all manner of molds and mildews that rarely saw the sun, feeding off the runoff and waste.

  His attention locked on that nightmare of abandoned, dying buildings, half-blinded by the precipitation that hung in the air like a mist, Kallist all but leaped from his skin as Liliana's fist clenched on his shoulder.

  "Holy hell, Liliana! What are-"

  "Shush!" The rasped whisper shut him up faster than any shout. "Listen!"

  Indeed, he heard it now, cursed himself for missing it. Drums in the sewer tunnels, a dozen or more.

  "Sewer goblins," he hissed at Liliana, hand dropping to the hilt of his broadsword.

  "I don't understand," she admitted, even as she stepped away, clearing him room to draw. "I thought they didn't come out during the day?"

  "They don't." But Kallist's voice was distant, for something else had begun to disturb him, something that tickled at the back of his mind. Something about the drums themselves, about the tale Jace once told him of the Kamigawa ratmen…

  "Liliana," he rasped, throat
suddenly dry, "I think we have bigger things than goblins to worry about…"

  Did the goblin shamans, or the demoniac night-creeps who sometimes ruled them, call it forth from the toxic mire in which they dwelt, shaping mind and body and soul from fungal growths and human wastes and rotting, caustic refuse? Or had their primitive call been heard farther away, worlds away, summoning a vile soul to manifest through what foul materials they had to hand?

  Ultimately, it made no difference. The beat of the drums rose, growing ever louder, ever more frenetic, and the worst of the sewers rose with them.

  The fetid waft of methane was its herald, vicious gouts of sludge and slurry its outriders. Taller than the house Kallist and Liliana had left behind, it oozed up and through the storm drain, jaws agape in a silent bellow. Thick mud and foul slimes sluiced from its body, and always there remained another layer of corruption beneath, bubbling up to take its place. Its arms were broken boards, its claws bits of stone and rusted nails, the fangs within its cavernous maw ancient and filthy shards of glass. It was the worst of Ravnica's filth, the feces and flotsam and decay, given a terrible, primeval life. And hate.

  And hunger.

  The sounds within the surrounding structures turned to sudden screams, to pounding feet and slamming doors, as the destitute took what shelter they could from a menace they could not comprehend. In older times, more ordered times, such an abomination would have been met swiftly by the Legion of Wojek, or at least the forces of one of the other great guilds. But today, only those districts that could afford their own defenders, or the exorbitant fees demanded by the Legion's successors, had any such protection. Here, in the dwellings of the poor, the filthy, and the forgotten, no one cared.

  Kallist, his waking mind reduced briefly to gibbering horror, reacted without conscious thought. Through instinct alone, he summoned up a shroud of magic even as he charged the abomination, blade held high. Poor a mage as he might be, his desperate illusion should have rendered him briefly invisible. He should have reached the shambling form unseen, gained precious seconds to hack away at it while it remained unaware of his location.

  But Kallist was not thinking clearly, and Kallist had never faced a beast such as this. Without eyes within its face, without brain within its skull, the creature possessed no purchase on which his illusions could take hold. Even as he neared, the shambler lashed out with a fist of muck and refuse. Agony flashed across Kallist's body as a dozen jagged edges traced a dozen lines of deep red through his flesh. He barely had time to note the alleyway dropping away beneath his feet before he slammed hard against a wall across the way. Bright lights flashed before him and the breath rushed from his lungs, leaving him gasping as he slid to the base of the house. Only sheer luck prevented his spinning body from landing across the blade of his own brutal weapon.

  Nor was the beast through with him. Even as Kallist settled to earth, propped upright only by the wall, the shambler's maw split apart. First like a snake with jaw unhinged, and then farther still, it gaped wider, impossibly, bonelessly wide. And from that portal to some squalid hell, the creature vomited up a putrescent mass of sewage, a deluge that slammed into Kallist as brutally as the fist itself. It clung to him, choked his lungs, hardened about his joints and glued him to the ground.

  Liliana, who had far greater experience dealing with such violations of nature, still found herself stunned. Frantically her gaze flitted from the shambling mass to her fallen companion and back again, conflicting needs tearing at her soul.

  The horror started toward her, not even bothering to turn its sightless head in her direction, and the time for indecision was past. Mouthing a funereal chant, lower, more somber, more soul-churning even than that she had voiced in the Bitter End, she raised both hands and circled right, forcing the creature to move ever farther from Kallist if it meant to reach her. The runic swirls tattooed across her back began to glow, a sickly bruise-purple, pulsing in time with her heart.

  With agonizing sluggishness, light returned to Kallist's eyes, feeling to his limbs. He saw only smatterings of the wall that rose above him, or the cloud-laden skies beyond, for he could scarcely turn his head. His legs and back began to itch, then burn, as the caustic fluids of the sewage seeped through his clothes. The hardened muck held him fast, and he feared he would simply lay there, helpless, until something awful appeared to claim him, or until he suffocated in the waste's poisonous effluvia.

  When he felt the muck begin to break away, first from about his wrists and arms, then from around his neck-when he saw the tips of pale and slender fingers-he nearly sobbed in relief.

  "Liliana!" he gasped, sucking in great lungfuls of air, "how did you-"

  And then Kallist saw precisely what had rescued him. The blood drained from his face until even his lips were fishbelly-pale, and he could not help but wonder what cost Liliana had paid to cast such a summons.

  The common folk of a hundred worlds believed angels were the servants of gods, beings of light who dwelt on high, graceful and beautiful, pure and righteous. The common folk here on Ravnica knew angels as their neighbors, dwellers in the same cities where lived humans and vedalken and viashino.

  Nowhere on Ravnica, or on any others of those worlds, had anyone imagined an angel such as this.

  She straightened the moment Kallist was free enough to extricate himself, revealed in all her nightmarish glory, this angel that certainly came from nowhere near "on high." Wings of midnight feathers, dull and grim as the blackest crow, blotted out what little sunlight had forced its way to the alley's floor. Corpse-pale skin was girded in leather armors harvested from the hides of demonic and mortal foes alike, and a deceptively dainty fist clutched a jagged, rusted shaft, less a spear than a lightning bolt of forged steel. Where she stood, even the stone-coating mildew died, overcome by the angel's essence of desolation. Beetles, rats, and other crawling things emerged from the sewer grates and the cracks between the cobblestones, desperate to flee her deathly presence, only to wither away at her feet.

  Eyes, empty of anything but a need for destruction beyond Kallist's imagining, turned away to gaze with naked lust upon the conflict raging down the street. Sitting upright, digging frantically for his blade, Kallist himself did the same.

  Liliana was clearly paying for her decision to send her summoned servant to rescue Kallist. She hovered several feet above the roadway, hands crossed before her at the wrists, surrounded once more in an aura of black and shifting mists. Above her the shambling thing rained down blow after blow, only to recoil each time as its murky "flesh" made contact with the life-sapping energies that cocooned the necromancer. But the thing of the sewers was not alive in the truest sense of the word, and with each strike, its denticulate limbs passed farther through those mists before it was forced to draw back. It could be only a matter of seconds before Liliana's protections failed her utterly.

  "What are you waiting for?" Kallist demanded of the power that stood before him, motionless as any statue. Only later would he truly think on the fact that he had shouted at and berated an angel of the darkest depths, and then his hands would shake. For now, he saw only the imminent death of the woman he loved. "She called you here! Help her!"

  It turned to him, offered him a smile of terrifying, soul-bruising beauty. Kallist's breath lodged again in his chest, as that seductively murderous face sent blood rushing to his loins even while it turned his stomach, caused his limbs to grow palsied and his head to pound. Only then, spurred on not by Kallist's feeble demands but by a silent call from Liliana, did the angel take to the air, a song of battle and blood and death flowing with heart-rending beauty from her throat. Her wings spread wide, wider, impossibly wide, until they spanned the breadth of the alley, until even the blind shambler, one fist raised over its head to strike, could not help but feel the chill of her shadow. And briefly it shuddered, in whatever primeval ember passed for its soul.

  Her voice never wavered, her song never faltered, as the angel dropped upon the animate sewer, sp
ear sinking deep into waste and mud and slime. Where it struck, what was green decayed to brown, brown and grey rotted to black. Bubbles rose to the shambler's surface, popped open with the foulest stench, leaving great, gaping abscesses in its viscous hide.

  But the elemental spirit called up by the goblin shamans would not fall so easily. With another silent roar, it turned from the exhausted mage and slashed viciously at its raven-winged tormentor. She rose ten feet higher with a single vicious flap, as swiftly as if yanked by invisible strings. Just as swiftly she dropped once more, plunging her spear into the shambler's head.

  It rippled, twisting and shifting, the mud and sludge rearranging themselves. From the front of its head, the glass-toothed maw slid upward to split open at the scalp. It snapped shut with a ferocious clack, locking hard onto the rusty blade. The angel yanked back, attempting to free the weapon, but even her great strength and the mighty flap of her wings could not wrench it loose. And in that moment of distraction, the foul heap reached upward and wrapped the angel in an unbreakable embrace of garbage and nails.

  The angel's battle song faltered but did not end. In a grotesque dance, an echo of the spinning celebrants at the Bitter End, they twisted across the roadway, scattering cobblestones before them. Skin split and bruised, sludge flowed and rotted away.

  Liliana dropped to the earth with a gasp, the aura of darkness disappearing as her feet touched down. Sweat mingled with the rain that covered her brow and plastered her hair to the sides of her face, but she kept her focus locked on the grappling angel, her lips moving in unheard mantras.

  Seeing that she was in no immediate danger, Kallist dived into his pack. Leaving his broadsword momentarily untouched, lying half-covered by the hardened sewage, he pulled from the satchel one of the mechanized crossbows they'd taken from their rather ineffective captors.

  Clutching the weapon in his left hand, Kallist slipped a bolt from the small quiver. Even as he placed it in the groove, his thumb traced a rune in the air above the projectile's steel head. The shape took on a substance of its own, hovering in the air above the bolt for two full heartbeats before it faded away into the rain.