Guildpact

by Cory Herndon

  Aun Yom wondered again at how a people who refused to consider practicality over affectation had risen to such power in the world while his own people scrabbled for bits and scraps at the feet of those like the Orzhov. The Orzhov had even found a way to rob the Gruul of the ghosts of their ancestors, who no longer lingered to give advice and guidance.

  The lokopede’s body consisted of alternating segments of black and white plates that reflected the thin, silver light of the crescent moon like cold obsidian. If the bandit’s ears were correct, the thing had a separate set of legs for each of its more than two thousand individual sections. The lokopede was a fast-moving tube on legs, easy to control, and difficult to spook or hurt. Aun Yom’s attack would require storming the carriage cars but only after sending in some leg breakers on catback. A well-aimed strike from their sweeper scythes should be able to take out a dozen legs at once. The eyeless creature followed the guidance of a single crouching figure, some kind of foul, impish coachman, with another posted atop the second car back.

  The sets of feet carried the lokopede forward without a chance of jostling the riders inside the cars, but the smoothness of the transport was countered by its relatively slow speed compared to a typical dromad-drawn coach. That gave the bandits an edge. The skeleton-mounted guards would be easiest of all to knock out, thanks to Aun Yom’s new weapon and their ridiculously bright shields. Aun Yom was the best shot in his gang. The second-best shot—his sister Illati—was taking up a position much like his on the facing cliff side.

  The Izzet goblin had not even asked for zinos when he gave the Gruul the power orbs that fed the miraculous bam-sticks, the same ones Aun Yom’s ancestors had used to destroy the kuga mot, though they failed to stop the kuga plague itself. The heirloom weapons had not worked for decades, exhausted from hunting long before they ever saw another like the plague bringer. Until the goblin came.

  The Izzet had also told them when and where the Orzhov caravan would approach. It reeked of a willing deception, but Aun Yom didn’t have the luxury of turning down the offer. Such power was too tempting. Aun Yom had considered interrogating the creature before eating him but had lost the coin toss to Illati.

  Neither of them had given much more thought to why the Izzet wanted them to have arms and advanced knowledge of an Orzhov caravan. The goblin had to have known he would be killed and cooked and had walked into the camp alone and bearing ridiculously generous gifts. It was obviously a setup, but the brother and sister bandits had great faith in their own ability to improvise.

  The kuga plague winds that lingered in Utvara made air transportation by zeppelid virtually impossible for an Orzhov—the creatures fed off of the pollutants in the air generated by ten thousand years of unending civilization, but their immune systems had little defense against infectious diseases as dangerous as the kuga. Few creatures did. And flying birds, bats, and insects didn’t come in the sizes needed to move the possessions and passengers that accompanied so much as a single patriarch, at least not in the style to which the Orzhov seemed to be accustomed.

  Ground transportation through the Husk was the only alternative to flight that was reasonable, provided one moved quickly, reached the safety of the reclamation zone within a day or two, and reached the plague-free area in time. The hated ledev guardians had given up on this particular route years ago, after the disaster at the Decamillennial had forced them to call many of their number home to Vitu Ghazi, so this pass through the hills was one of the few stretches of road on the entire plane that had no protectors.

  The Gruul, of course, had developed some resistance to the plague but at a painful cost—one that Aun Yom was reminded of as he scratched the thick, knotted patch of fungal growth on his left shoulder. Many more like it grew on his back, ribs, legs, arms, and face. They itched constantly, though fortunately for his sanity never all at once. The antigen fungus kept the kuga from killing him quickly but not from shortening his lifespan by decades. Gruul life expectancy had never been high; in the forty-seven years since the kuga mot’s golden sphere had turned the ancient, dormant plague into a ravenous, airborne killer, it had been sliced in half.

  And it was getting worse. Aun Yom himself would never have been a gang chief forty-seven years ago. He hadn’t even been born forty-seven years ago. The rest of his band was even younger, including Illati.

  Aun Yom signaled his brethren to move into position and continued to watch the new arrivals as they followed the winding route through the crumbling ruins. With a sharp twist he brought the goblin weapon to life and crouched against the cracked remnants of a ruined wall to steady his aim. He raised the cylinder to his eye and brought the sight level with the head of the lokopede driver.

  He’d placed his thumb against the firing stud but hadn’t yet pushed hard enough to fire when he realized he hadn’t heard or seen any of his gang take the positions he’d told them to take when planning this ambush.

  In fact, he didn’t see them at all, in or out of position. So enamored of the weapon and its potential had he been that their disappearance had gone unnoticed.

  “Foolish, Aun Yom,” the bandit chief whispered. “You knew there’d be a catch.”

  Aun Yom of the Utvar Gruul never did find out where they had gone or who, exactly, had betrayed the gang. No sooner did he open his jaws to call out to Illati in warning than a thin, silver stiletto blade entered his neck just below the base of the skull. By the time Aun Yom saw the tip, it ran red with his own blood and protruded a few inches beyond his chin. He did manage a brief, strangled gurgle before he hit the ground. The blade was removed swiftly and cleanly from the dead Gruul, though the wielder could have decapitated the corpse with little effort.

  His ghost did not linger to get a final look at his attacker. It tried but fell too quickly into a crack in the sky. A few seconds later, his body got back to its feet, but Aun Yom was no longer in control.

  * * * * *

  Inside the front car atop the giant lokopede, Teysa Karlov rode in luxury and comfort. The lokopede swayed mildly from side to side, causing the fresh wall hangings inside the gold-and-platinum-appointed cabin she shared with Melisk and Uncle to follow suit. The only other occupants of the car were Uncle’s thrull bodyguard, one of his two dark angels, and some mute thrull servants. The five cars behind them contained an assortment of servants, slaves, courtiers, and other hangers-on, along with supplies that would allow her to live in the manner she, and all others with the true blood of Orzhov in their veins, deserved. There were also a few non-Orzhov passengers who had paid ridiculously large sums to the Karlov coffers for one of the only safe ways into Utvara, including a female goblin that had paid in shiny zinos and refused to name any destination but “the Utvara region.”

  Uncle had allowed Teysa and Melisk to forego their masks, and he wore a traveling mask of his own. Teysa had been forced to sell her law practice, though she retained forty percent and had left a qualified advokist—her second cousin Dahlya—in charge. Teysa hadn’t told Uncle, but in case the old patriarch’s plan didn’t work out she had also included a clause that gave her the right to buy back a controlling interest in the firm whenever she chose, at fair market value.

  The walls glittered with indigo silks and woven strands of precious metals that, among other things, conveniently regulated the temperature and humidity within the car. Unfortunately, Uncle had refused to relinquish control over the woven sigils and was keeping this car at near-freezing temperatures. Uncle was decidedly uncomfortable in hot weather.

  Teysa was not, by nature, a patient young woman, but while studying law, she had also devoted herself fervently to side studies of the alchemical and sociological sciences with the finest tutors the Karlov fortune could offer—brilliant Simic manabiologists, cunning Orzhov lawmages, foolishly noble but well-informed Azorian archivists, and many others. Teysa’s mind had absorbed all this information and more, confined as she often was to the tower in which she’d grown up. She had cast aside all other considerations to ma
ke herself the most indispensable young Orzhov advokist she could be. But grand estates were run by patriarchs, not matriarchs. As an advokist she had examined the will when Uncle had finally produced it. She’d also pored over all the appropriate laws involving inheritance. Sure enough, there was nothing that stated a Baroness—the word “matriarch” was apparently still verboten—could not be awarded ultimate control of an estate if and only if she was the closest blood relative of the deceased.

  That, certainly, was true. There were cousins, nieces, nephews, even other uncles and aunts, but Teysa was both a niece and a direct descendant of Uncle. The disgusting old creature had, it seemed, been quite familiar with his brother’s wife long ago, as she had learned only days earlier.

  Now Teysa was poised to become the first Karlov baroness in at least ten generations.

  She was more than ready to take control of the Utvara reclamation zone. All that remained was for Uncle to die already and officially hand over the estate, which comprised the surrounding Husk area, a central township, a treasure-ridden waste known as the flats, and acres of abandoned architecture awaiting development and exploitation. She had hoped the transfer would take place back in the Orzhov territories, but Uncle had refused. He demanded a certain drama to these things, and he’d been insistent. What she could not fathom was how Uncle seemed so certain his death was imminent. The obvious answer—taking out an assassination contract on his own life—was forbidden to those who would take their place on the Obzedat. Yet the old patriarch seemed positive he would soon be on his way out.

  Teysa’s patience was stretching thin, but soon the waiting would be over. Reclamation zones were a curious investment that the Orzhov did not usually make. Most were the result of plagues or disease, unfortunately common occurrences in places where populations grew faster than the cityscape’s ability to accommodate them. If a plague was lethal, such a place was quarantined for a suitable period, as determined by the Simic Combine, whose knowledge of diseases was frightening. Then a minimum of four hundred years of abandonment was required, to ensure that whatever had wiped out the population was gone. For these reasons and more, reclamation zones rarely made the financial return a great family expected on an investment, and the laws of the Guildpact—enforced by millennia-old enchantments that had a sometimes frustratingly mysterious way of working—demanded that reclamation zones had to attain a certain level of civilization in the year after their mandatory four-hundred-year fallow period. Once the fallow time ended, if there were not some form of local government, law enforcement, and public works available (and the definitions of these were relatively broad) then the reclamation zone reverted to the control of the guildmasters, who invariably handed it over to the Selesnyan Conclave.

  The Selesnyans had their rackets too, Uncle often said. But this time he’d challenged Teysa to beat them at their own game.

  Utvara was an unusual reclamation, to be sure. It had been part of the ancient hunting range of old Niv-Mizzet, the legendary dragon parun of the Izzet Magewrights’ guild, who these days rarely left his majestic aerie in the City of Guilds. Supposedly, Niv-Mizzet’s first lair was down there somewhere, and, even if it wasn’t, the city had been wealthy. The crumbling structures and caved-in buildings contained an untold amount of lost treasure just waiting to be found, and the landlord—whether it was Uncle or Teysa—was entitled to a substantial percentage.

  The other thing that made Utvara different was that Uncle had won special dispensation from the Guildpact Council to end the fallow period early. He’d hired an Izzet to aid in crafting a device that would eliminate all life in Utvara, and apparently it had worked. It had also left a floating distortion of reality in the sky called the Schism, about which little was truly known. “Just don’t fly anywhere near it and you’ll be fine,” Uncle had told her. As if Teysa had any intention of flying at all—ever since her youth, heights had given her unsettling vertigo she’d rather not experience any more than necessary.

  The now-ubiquitous Utvaran treasure prospectors had provided the rest of the reason for the short fallow period. They’d invited members of the Selesnyan Conclave to plant a disease-fighting Vitar Yescu in the center of what was rapidly becoming a small squatter’s town among the ruins. Essentially a giant tree in a state of perpetual flower, the Vitar Yescu filled the air around the town with a pollen-carried antigen to the new plague, which had mutated when the Schism was created. Now the locals called it the kuga.

  A strange series of special circumstances to be sure, and so Uncle had been given reign to do things his way. Uncle’s lawmages had easily been able to prove in court the place was livable because people he hadn’t invited were already living there. They were technically his property too, or at least a percentage of them were.

  Soon they would be hers.

  The “foothills” of the Husk rose around their lokopede caravan as they entered the eastern canyon road that would take them to the heart of town. Like most of the seemingly geological features on Ravnica’s surface, the foothills were derived from ancient architecture that had been rebuilt and reused over thousands of years by millions of individuals. Unlike most, the foothills of the Husk had been allowed to decay to the point where they almost looked like paintings of the ancient natural rock formations that had once stood here, now deep beneath layer upon layer of advancing civilization. Her studies of the region over the last couple of weeks indicated that the foothills were filled with dangerous sinkholes and, of course, the Utvar Gruul that somehow clung to existence despite the kuga plague winds.

  She let her bored gaze leave the hulking, greasy, perpetually sweating shape of Uncle, snoozing in his massive seat beneath his pale mask, and exchanged a glance with her trusted attendant. Melisk, his pale-white skin now covered only in a light traveler’s suit, still displayed a few magically inscribed tattoos that testified to his high rank within the Orzhov servant class—there were many so-called Orzhov “nobles” who possessed nowhere near the prestige and influence her “servant” did. Melisk smiled humorlessly and returned to staring out the window. He seemed distracted.

  Teysa leaned forward and prodded Uncle with her cane. His beady, black eyes flickered open beneath the mask, somehow taking in Teysa and Melisk through layers of surrounding fat and scraggly eyebrows that dangled like jungle moss.

  “Uncle, we draw close to our destination,” she said.

  “Ah! Yes,” Uncle rumbled, and absentmindedly picked up a half-eaten piece of his most recent meal—a double-roasted ratclops—to chew on. His eyes shot to the landscape outside, and he nodded into his rolling chins in satisfaction. “Lovely. Right on time, right on time.” He noisily slurped marrow from a shinbone.

  “Why must we approach under cover of darkness, Uncle?” Teysa asked.

  “The Gruul do not strike by day,” he rumbled between long wheezing breaths. “And I find it more fitting this way. Your inheritance, this grand gift, is wrapped in the blanket of night.”

  Teysa sighed and turned back to the window. The darkened shapes of crumbling towers against the gray night sky revealed nothing but shadows moving in shadow.

  She’d made a good start with her advokism, but Uncle was right. Now that she was prepared for it, the potential she saw in Utvara was enormous. An entire system of laws built from scratch but bound to the Guildpact, and they were hers to create. The size of the place had surprised her, as had the already-developing township that she would take over, assuming Uncle’s predictions of his own demise proved accurate.

  She found herself actively wishing for that demise.

  The Orzhov scion’s sigh triggered an unexpected reaction from one of the Grugg brothers. “Need somethin’, do ya?” Bephel piped up. The diminutive thrull was on his shift inside the cabin, while brother Phleeb drove the lokopede and brother Elbeph stood lookout. “Need someone killed, do ya? Do ya?” His head was shaped like two fat, stacked arrowheads, and his three rows of teeth clacked as he spoke. His bulbous, black eyes protruded out from either s
ide, taking in 360 degrees at once. Of the three, he was the only one she had granted the power of speech.

  “Not right now, thanks,” Teysa said.

  “Suit yerself,” the thrull said and squatted back into his corner. Bephel’s source corpse had been a reptilian viashino, and he still vaguely resembled a crouching lizard but without the scales and with a much longer, barbed tail lined with metallic needles. The only skin the thrull had, in fact, was almost translucent, a gray, thin epidermis that showed more of Bephel’s innards than anyone really needed to see. The Grugg brothers had been her personal bodyguards for several years now, almost as long as Melisk had served as her attendant. Bephel, in particular, was always more than ready to tear apart anyone or anything that could conceivably threaten his charge, but such opportunities to prove his loyalty were rare.

  Ahead lay open road with no sign of the life churchers and their meddling “protection,” filled with hundreds of Gruul that could be slaughtered with impunity if Teysa cut the Grugg brothers loose and really let them get to it. The thrulls were incapable of betraying her, even if they weren’t the brightest of traveling companions. Their fervor to kill was admirable, and their talent for it was indispensable.

  As boredom gave way to weariness, Teysa stood and stretched, her cape and robe splayed like wings, and yawned. Her less-than-useful right leg almost buckled, but she caught her weight on the cane before she lost composure or bearing.

  “Perhaps you should move back to a sleeping cabin,” Uncle said.

  “I think not,” Teysa said. “I just need to stretch this useless limb now and then.”

  “Of course, of course,” Uncle said. “Perhaps you are right. And perhaps … I should sleep some more. Just a quick nap before we arrive?”