Agents of Artifice p-1

by Ari Marmell

  In the midst of it all came the faint pitter-patter of a light rain-a rain not of water, but of teeth.

  "Liliana!" He could all but feel his own words whip past him, carried away by the deadly winds. "Liliana!" He called again and again, between fits of violent coughs, called until his voice grew hoarse, but never heard any response.

  Desperately, he pushed out with all his might. This was no formal spell, no focused and molded effect, but a raw and unpolished burst of mana unshaped. He flung the incorporeal veil before him, a shield between himself and the murderous winds. And for a time, at least, it armored him. The chill in his flesh grew less, and though buffeted still by winds nearly strong enough to knock him sideways, he found himself able to breathe cleanly. The pall of exhaustion refused to fade, but at least it grew no heavier.

  Leaning into the horrible gale, one arm still shielding his face, Jace began to walk-and it was only then, as he took his first step, that his already overwhelmed senses acknowledged that the earth on which he stood was not ground at all.

  Pale as a week-old corpse and just as pliable, an endless plain of flesh sprawled before him, giving way with a grotesque stretching beneath the soles of his boots. Little grew upon that horrid expanse, at least as far as the storm permitted Jace to see: just a flaky lichen that resembled an infection upon the rotting skin. Sporadic hills were great boils rising from the flesh, and tiny hollows where something had punched through that flesh were filled with a pus-like sludge shot through with veins of brackish blood.

  Jace felt his stomach heave, his skin crawl as though it were determined to flee even if he were too foolish to run with it. In that moment, nothing else mattered, not Nicol Bolas, not finding Tezzeret, none of it. Had Liliana stood with him, had he not lost her somewhere in that nightmarish storm, Jace would have turned around and bent all his remaining strength to walking from Grixis, never to return.

  But lost she was, or perhaps it was he who was lost; in either case, Jace allowed his churning innards a moment to settle and pushed on into the winds. His head ached with the sounds, with the strain of searching for any sign of Liliana while still maintaining the all-but-uncontrolled film of magic that shielded him from the worst of the tempest.

  Ten yards, twenty, fifty, and he found himself descending slightly into a bowl-shaped depression, a lesion in the flesh. And there, just as he decided that things couldn't possibly get any worse, Grixis proved him wrong.

  Beneath him, the quivering earth split, and the hands of the dead reached out to claim him.

  Only three or four initially, but then a dozen, and a dozen more. From graves that had been dug into the flesh and then healed over, from tumorous abscesses where fallen corpses were simply absorbed by the ground, they hauled themselves into the raging storm. Most had once been human, a few were ogres, and many were the twisted remnants of no creature Jace had ever seen. Some were naught but skeletal remnants of the people they once were; others boasted shifting, viscous skin sluicing from rotting muscles and viscera. All clawed and grabbed for him, hauling themselves hand over hand toward this source of the life for which they lusted, which they needed to stoke the smoldering remnants of their own inner embers.

  More than a few collapsed the instant they arose, their remaining life stripped away by the entropic, consuming winds to which not even the undead, apparently, were immune. But others held firm, though they lost flecks of hanging skin and muscle and even bone to the tempest, and advanced upon their prey. Driven by an instinct beyond meager hunger, they were eager to consume from him whatever life they could, to prolong their tortured existence that much longer.

  Jace retreated before the nightmarish advance, but there was nowhere to go; the dead roiled from the earth in all directions, a sprouting garden of rotted bone. He backed up the incline, his balance more precarious with every step, moving with the wind now, rather than against it. Desperately, he threw spell after spell into the mass of shambling dead, all to woefully meager effect. Driven only by hunger, they lacked any sentience for his mind to command; drawn by the scent of his life itself, they refused to be slowed or hindered by even the most intricate illusions. And Jace could summon nothing so potent that it wouldn't swiftly be slain by the storm, not without dropping his concentration on the mystic shield that protected his own body from those dreadful gusts.

  He struck, instead, at the magics animating them, rather than at the undead themselves. Focusing as intently as he dared, he unraveled the chains of mana that bound a fragment of the soul to these lurching bones, that allowed lifeless joints to bend and dead muscle to flex. Stabbing his hand outward as though hurling a spear, Jace dispersed the mana within first one of the crawling zombies, then the next. They slumped, limp and truly dead as they long should have been.

  But still they came, and still he retreated, and each time he severed the last remnants of life from one, three others had advanced upon him. Jace was swiftly tiring, for these were no simple necromantic spells he was countering, but the natural order of things in this impossible realm of Grixis. Soon he'd not be able even to slow the undead horde-but then, it wouldn't matter, for the deadly storm would shred his eldritch shield and drain the life from him before the first of the corpses closed their deathless fists around his limbs.

  And he wondered, then, if he even had a legitimate death to look forward to, or if he would be as they were, slumbering beneath the skin of the world only to rise in insatiable craving at the passing of any living thing.

  The crawling swarm grew too thick to navigate, so close that every step Jace took landed not on the fleshy earth but on a writhing, grasping limb. He stumbled, almost fell, and he felt the first of what must be many hands clasp tightly around his ankle.

  But even as it squeezed, bruising him to the very bone, the undead froze. Rigid, they formed a motionless carpet of corpses across the landscape. Only their rotted eyes moved, as they gawped into the fury of the punishing storm.

  As a goddess striding from the heavens, Liliana appeared on the raging winds. She stood, arms outstretched and head thrown back in potent ecstasy, held aloft by the crackling black aura that flowed effortlessly from her pale skin. The tattoos burned with dark fire on her back, as though her skin had opened to reveal an endless void beneath. Ignoring the storm, she gently descended until she set foot upon the vile ground; her hair and tunic lay perfectly still, indifferent to the tempest around her.

  "Uh…" Jace began.

  "It's incredible!" Her voice, though a whisper, carried clearly over the howling winds. She turned to him, and Jace would have fallen back were he not held fast by the grip on his leg. Black mists poured from her eyes, which had themselves grown dark as moonless night; from between her lips as she spoke; even from beneath her nails, flowing out to join with the inky aura that had borne her aloft.

  "Oh, Jace, you have no idea! The power in this place…" Her smile widened further still. "I've never felt a concentration of manas like this, never knew it could exist."

  Jace, who felt only a fraction of what Liliana was drinking in and found it terrifying, could only shake his head. "There's no light, Liliana. No life in these magics."

  "I can live with that," she told him bluntly, her tone somehow jubilant and cold at once.

  "Well," he said, after struggling to clear his throat, "then I guess it's a good thing you didn't know about this place years ago. You might have come here instead of hiding on Ravnica."

  Liliana's gaze snapped to him, and the darkness cleared from her eyes. She scowled with a bitterness

  Jace couldn't interpret, and then raised a hand. The undead cowered back, releasing Jace's ankle in the process.

  "They're barely animals," she told him, sounding vaguely irritated, "but some recognize the notion of 'the great winged beast' that terrifies them. They'll lead us to him, or at least to the area where they most frequently sense his presence."

  She was moving before he could so much as ask a question, following a coterie of crawling corpses across
the wind-blasted plains. Jace, hobbling slightly at the pain in his ankle, could do little but struggle to keep up.

  It could have been hours or days; with the strange, sunless sky lurking above, Jace couldn't really tell. The fleshy earth gave way to a more rocky, scab-like substance; the planeswalkers and their undead entourage moved now through a twisting chasm that reminded Jace-in shape if not in hue or in temperature-of the arctic crevice through which he and Tezzeret had fled, so desperate to escape the very creature Jace now sought.

  With every mile, an ever greater number of corpses shambled up from the earth. Liliana's eyes grew slightly wild as she dismissed many who already followed, sending them far away so that she could command those who rose nearer, but Jace was far from certain she could keep it up indefinitely. The crackling black aura around her hair, the depths of her eyes, and the dark tattoos were growing painful to look at.

  "There are so many," she whispered to him once, even as he'd opened his mouth to ask if she was all right. "I've never felt so many."

  Finally, one of the dead indicated that they were nearing the home of the "flying thing," waving a desiccated hand vaguely forward. With a gasp of relief, Liliana cloaked herself and Jace in a faint field of necromantic magics that would blind the undead to their presence, and allowed her command over the corpses to fade. Then, almost at a run, she led Jace away, farther into the winding crevice, until they found themselves in a cul-de-sac. They sank in unison to the foul earth, and for long moments they lay sprawled, gasping for breath.

  "That may have been the most horrible thing I've ever seen," said Jace.

  Liliana nodded. "I thought… It felt for a time as though I would lose myself in them, Jace. It felt like I was trying to bend the will of Grixis itself."

  "But you both handled it very well," said Nicol Bolas.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  He hadn't dropped from the sky, hadn't crept from hiding. He was simply there, where nothing but dust and foul odors had been before. His wings stretched high between the opposing walls of the crevice, and his bulk was a living avalanche that filled the passage entirely.

  Jace and Liliana scrambled to their feet and shrank back against the far wall. Both knew full well that if Nicol Bolas had wanted them dead, they would already be so much ash on the wind or detritus in the back of his throat. But such knowledge was nothing in the face of instinctive fear.

  And yet, for all the terror that wracked his body-both at the sight of the predator before him, and the sudden influx of memories from their last meeting-Jace couldn't help but blurt out, "What is it with you and crevices?"

  "But then again, they were only the risen dead," the ancient beast said blandly, ignoring Jace's comment. "I imagine you'd have fared somewhat worse had you run into any of Grixis's demons. Why have you come here?"

  "Demons? Here?" Liliana asked in a strangely small voice. She recovered swiftly, but in that one instant, she'd sounded more frightened than Jace had ever heard her.

  "Of course. Why are you here?"

  "What about those undead?" Jace asked. "Is the whole of Grixis like this? I can't imagine that-"

  "Keep trying my patience," the dragon rumbled, as twin tendrils of dark smoke snaked from his nostrils and danced their way skyward, "and I'll lay you out among them to find out for yourself. I may have more time on my hands than anyone else in the Multiverse, Jace Beleren, but that doesn't mean I appreciate seeing it wasted. So once more, and only once more: Why are you here?"

  Apparently unwilling to risk letting the frazzled and frightened Jace irritate the beast any further, Liliana squeezed his arm-tightly-and said, "We seek your help, Nicol Bolas."

  "Do you, indeed? And do you recall what I just said about wasting time? Why would I involve myself in your petty affairs?"

  "These are affairs that already involve you, great Bolas," Jace told him. "Tezzeret. We seek the location of the Infinite Consortium's inner sanctum."

  "Ah. You should have simply said so, Beleren. With that, I am happy to help you.

  "Or I would be," he said, as Jace's face began to brighten, "if I had the slightest notion where it was."

  The words were a physical blow to Jace's gut. The sounds of Grixis faded, as though he'd shoved cotton in his ears; his shoulders slumped, and he could actually feel the angry "I told you so!" radiating from Liliana. He'd been so sure.

  But the dragon was not finished. "I can, perhaps, set your feet upon the path to find that information."

  That got their attention. "Then, uh, why haven't you acquired it yourself?" Jace couldn't help but ask.

  "Because, little planeswalker, I have many potent abilities, but remaining hidden in a closet for weeks on end is not among them."

  He nodded at their bewildered faces, as though it was the reaction he'd hoped for.

  "You remember, I'm certain, the icy realm in which you and I first met?"

  Jace smiled grimly. "I've been thinking of it a lot recently."

  "Excellent. Then you'll remember that the artificer and I were discussing mining operations."

  "I will. Uh, I mean I do."

  "We were not arguing over land, little mind-reader. We were arguing over what waits within that land. Many of the ores of that world have long been inundated with all manner of mana; they seem almost to absorb it. Tezzeret believes such ore to be a vital component in the creation of etherium. And although he's never managed to perfect that process, he uses the material for other purposes. I do so as well.

  "On a mountainside, quite distant from my own territory on that world, the Infinite Consortium keeps an establishment that serves as both a mine and a foundry. There, they slowly chip from the earth a vein of particularly mana-rich ore. At random intervals ranging from a few days to more than a month, either he or his hellhound Baltrice appear to take possession of the refined ore-never more than a small amount, so they may carry it with them-and return with it to the Consortium's heart, where they move ahead with whatever experiments they're conducting."

  Jace and Liliana exchanged distraught glances. "Are you suggesting," Jace asked haltingly, "that the two of us should hide in a damned Consortium foundry for who knows how long, just for the shot at reading Baltrice's or Tezzeret's mind? Which would also, incidentally, warn them we were there."

  "Oh, no," the dragon assured them. "It's not remotely that easy."

  "Of course it's not," Jace muttered.

  "Not even the personnel know when the planes-walker arrives for the processed ore, or see them when they do so. Small crates filled with ingots of the metal, barely light enough for a strong person to lift, are left in a tiny room with thick stone walls and only a single door, constructed of heavy steel. When a shipment is ready to go, they leave it within, and some days later, it's gone. And before you ask, no, the room is not large enough to hide in and remain unnoticed, not even with your potent illusions.

  "The foundry is heavily patrolled, with living soldiers and at least two of Tezzeret's clockwork golems. Even the workers are trained in battle and carry alarm whistles enchanted to be heard clearly above the worst roaring of the furnaces. And all this, of course, was the level of protection and security before you and the Consortium declared war on each other. It's doubtless increased since then.

  "And that, sorcerer, is why I've not made efforts at rooting out this information."

  Again the two mages stared at one another. Finally, however, Jace turned back to the dragon and forced across his face the widest grin he could muster.

  "Piece of cake," he said.

  "Piece of cake," Liliana taunted as they crouched low on the mountainside, peering over heaps of rock at the enormous installation. "Would that be chocolate or lemon-flavored, oh master baker and tactician?"

  Jace ignored her, picking bits of shale from his sleeves, flicking frost from his gloves, and staring at the high smokestacks and fortress-like walls. Or rather, staring past them; he'd sent a small band of faeries and homunculi to flitter invisibly about the complex, then
read their minds to gain a solid notion of the layout.

  If anything, Nicol Bolas had exaggerated their chances.

  Multiple squat structures, some of stone and some of a steel alloy that resisted rusting beneath the frost, clung grimly to the mountainside. The thick fumes that rose from within mixed haphazardly with the clouds above, and even where the mages lay, some quarter-mile up the mountainside, the falling snow was tinged gray.

  Some of those buildings, his spies had observed, covered mines dug deep into the stone, traversed by carts propelled by squat animated constructs. Others played home to enormous basins of molten metal, so hot that any precipitation to touch the outer walls instantly melted and ran down the sides.

  Inside, an array of catwalks spanned the structures, interwoven and intertwined like the home of some giant iron spider. A veritable forest of chains hung from the ceilings, ready to carry any of the dozens of machines or the enormous buckets used to smelt ore. Guards strode the narrow walkways as workers completed one task and dashed furiously to their next.

  And Jace's summoned infiltrators hadn't even managed to find the sealed "arrival" room the dragon had described, let alone determine if it boasted any viable flaws or weaknesses they might exploit.

  For a very long while Jace and Liliana watched, shivering in the cold, each waiting for the other to come up with a workable plan. But this was not all the young mind-reader contemplated during those dark, cold, and endless hours. His encounter with the dragon had reawakened other suspicions, worries and concerns he'd tried desperately to push from his mind.

  Again he wondered how Semner had found him after so much time, without the use of magic far more potent than the thug and would-be mage could ever possess. Again he wondered how the Consortium had found Emmara, Rulan, and the others-how they'd connected them with Jace himself-when they'd never proved able to do so before. Again he noted that circumstances had conspired to force him into a corner, removing options one by one until all that remained was the one option he'd worked so hard to avoid. And though he'd chosen not to bring it up, perhaps afraid she wouldn't answer, perhaps afraid she would, he wondered why the normally fearless necromancer had flinched so strongly at Bolas's mention of demons on Grixis.