Guildpact

by Cory Herndon

  “I—I am a doctor.”

  “Yes, you are. And a cytoplastician in addition to your other talents, I believe. Don’t worry, I won’t press you on that either. This does explain some of their more charming physical features, doesn’t it?” Teysa said. Smile number two: I know what you mean. “And the Vitar Yescu—why doesn’t it protect them the way it protects the township?”

  “That overgrown dandelion is terribly inefficient,” the doctor said. “And the pollen causes allergies in a small percentage of the population. It uses the same distribution method as the disease—the wind. And since that normally blows from the north, it leaves much of the flats under plague watch and never reaches the Husk, for the most part, before getting blown back down into the valley. I’m told that once the Cauldron is running at full power, the Vitar Yescu will be able to wipe out the plague completely. Pyromanic windmills, or some such infernal nonsense.”

  “Do you think that will work?” Teysa asked.

  “It is certainly a possibility,” the doctor said, “though I feel that it may still take years. One does not change the wind with ease.”

  “This tree is interesting but reeks too much of the Conclave. I prefer my own cure. So feel free to get to work, Doctor,” Teysa said. “You’ve shared more than enough with me. I thank you for your candor and for the information, and I look forward to seeing your progress in a few days.”

  “Days? But I—”

  Melisk cleared his throat.

  “Ah yes, Melisk. Thanks,” Teysa said good-naturedly. She took the Karlov sigil pin from the attendant and stood.

  When the doctor had left, Teysa sat down again. “I feel well-armed, Melisk. I think it’s time you sent in the Izzet magelord. What’s his name? Hauc?”

  “About that—” Melisk began.

  “What now?” Teysa asked.

  “The magelord isn’t coming. The foreman brings his apologies.”

  “Well, send him in then.”

  * * * * *

  Crix slid from Golozar’s back like a dead fish and flopped onto the ground sideways. Every muscle she had buzzed as blood returned and her nerve endings all demanded her attention at once. The leather straps that had kept her bound to the Gruul were still attached to her wrists, but she could not manipulate her hands well enough to even consider trying to make use of the four lengths of leather.

  A few seconds later, the junk elemental crashed through the not-so-solid ground not far away. The impact jarred the goblin enough to force her eyes open in time to see the thing’s limbs—all four of them—disappear into the new chasm that had appeared under its feet. A quick head count revealed all of the Gruul raiding party had survived, none the worse for wear but covered in reddish dust.

  Crix coughed and tried to spit, but her mouth was utterly dry, and her tongue felt scaly. “Decided … to let me … go?” she croaked to Golozar. The bandit chief looked back over one shoulder as he signaled the Gruul party to gather and prepare to move on.

  “You were getting in my way,” the bandit said. “You’re not going anywhere.” He turned back to his gang and barked a few more orders.

  In most circumstances, it was not easy to insult Crix. She was a courier and a servant of a great magelord, and insults came with the territory. But outright dismissal by this savage, who had just put her in repeated peril as far as he knew, pushed her over a brink she didn’t know she had. She closed her eyes and drew on the warmth of the morning sun; the heat of the distant Cauldron; the cool, clean water in their floating reservoirs; and the ice of the polar regions. All of them combined to soothe her aches, get her blood flowing with a minimum of discomfort, and most importantly allow her to stand, the straps hanging at her sides.

  “Gruul,” Crix said, “I believe I have learned enough for now. I should be getting back to my mission, my mission as a courier. A courier, I might add, who is protected by the Guildpact. To further impede me could and most likely will bring the wrath of the Guildpact down upon you—”

  “Shut up,” Golozar barked. He snarled a few words that were outside Crix’s working Utvar vocabulary, and the whiplike cords tied to her wrists began to writhe like snakes. As she yelped in surprise the leather wrapped itself around her entire body of its own volition, pinning her arms to her sides and turning her short legs into a single trunk. As a final insult, a strap that she believe ended at her left ankle wrapped around her jaw like a sling and clamped her jaws together.

  All right, she thought. Now I might be in trouble.

  * * * * *

  “What a charming surprise,” Teysa said. “The weapon, I mean.” She placed the loaded bam-stick on the table so that the business end pointed squarely at the goblin foreman’s chest.

  “A token, Baroness,” the goblin said gruffly but with a veneer of diplomacy that showed he’d had more schooling than most. “A gift, but also a display of trust and goodwill to our allies in the Guild of Deals, the great Orzhov families, and their vast holdings.”

  The foreman of the Cauldron power project was a counterpart of Aradoz. Where the wageboss used what labor he could buy or steal wherever he could find it, the Izzet foreman oversaw his guild’s most important presence in the township and only used loyal Izzet labor—usually goblins such as him—to do the job.

  She hadn’t expected trouble from the Izzet and didn’t seem to be getting any from this particular goblin. But the foreman’s veneer was just that—a veneer. Something was bothering him. The fact that Teysa had been expecting to sit across from the real Izzet power in Utvara had to be irritating to say the least.

  “I accept this token and add the gratitude of my ancestors to my own,” she said. “You begin our talk by giving me an immediate way to kill you. This, I feel, is an even greater token, one of respect. Respect for me is respect for the Karlov and the Orzhov. Nicely done, Foreman …?”

  “Babolax,” the goblin said. He somehow gave each syllable more emphasis than the other, in that typical Izzet way. She wondered how they justified using as many syllables in their own names as the Great Dragon had in his. Izzet belief systems were, to an Orzhov, an obvious scam on most of the believers.

  “How long have you been running things over there, Babolax?” Teysa said. She effortlessly mimicked the goblin’s pronunciation, to his obvious pleasure.

  “Seven months,” the foreman said with pride. “Since old Falazavax had that accident.”

  “Who are your lieutenants? Shiftbosses, I think you call them?” Teysa asked.

  “Dexawik runs days, Jybezax nights. A new fellow, Rawoniq, has been filling in for them and running the new half-and-again shifts we instituted in the last month,” Babolax said.

  “So, working hard, are you?” Teysa said.

  “Very,” the goblin agreed.

  “Why, then, has your power output not increased appreciably since you added these half-and-again shifts, Babolax?” Teysa asked. “You wouldn’t be hoarding it, would you? And where are these ‘windmills’ I’ve heard spoken of?”

  Babolax looked at his feet. Had he looked more closely and been more familiar with magic common in the courts of Ravnica he might have recognized the crudely drawn verity circle around him, but Teysa could see the goblin was baffled at the compulsion to tell the truth that came over him.

  “It’s for, it’s for … the power … it’s for the magelord, Baroness,” the foreman said, his eyes widening as he revealed what he’d obviously been ordered not to share.

  “What does he want with the extra power?” Teysa said.

  “That I don’t know!” the goblin said. He bit the tip of his tongue but couldn’t stop the facts from coming out. “He’s the boss of bosses at the Cauldron, Baroness. Please, don’t ask me any more. He’ll kill me!”

  “I doubt it,” Teysa said. “You will deliver a message for me, Babolax?”

  “Of course,” the foreman said. “Just don’t make me break my oath any more. I don’t want to—I’ve seen what happens to people who disappoint him. I can’t face t
hat.”

  “Very good, then,” Teysa said. She picked up the bam-stick with one hand, pressed the end to Babolax’s forehead, and thumbed the firing stud. One loud, bright, pungent, but small explosion later, the former foreman’s headless corpse slid sideways off of the seat and settled into a smoldering puddle.

  “Get me the day and night shiftbosses, Melisk,” Teysa said. “We’ll work them into the parade later this evening, and they can deliver this message to Zomaj Hauc for me. The magelord needs to learn I don’t deal with underlings and that his Cauldron exists at my pleasure, even if he has got contracts and agreements that say otherwise. I’ve never met a contract I couldn’t turn upside down.”

  “Shall I remove the corpse?” Melisk asked.

  “No, leave it there for now,” Teysa said. “Should help speed things along with the rest of them.” She turned to the mirror that hung on the wall directly to her right. “Don’t you think so?” she said.

  “Well done, child,” the mirror said. “I am curious what that cut-rate pyromancer is keeping from us.”

  “What does the Obzedat say?” Teysa asked.

  “Patience,” the mirror replied. “You’re doing well. Don’t rush this.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Teysa said. “Melisk, turn him around, will you? I don’t like people watching over my shoulder. Even you, Uncle.”

  The Gruul might once have been a guild, even a force to reckon with, but they now are a guild in name only. Scattered and scarred as they are, it would take a miracle to unite them now. The Guildpact bound the rest of us, just as it fractured the clans. And yet you say there is no injustice in this document?

  —Ambassador St. Bayul, address to the Guildpact Council

  (22 Mokosh, 9997 Z.C.)

  1 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.

  Kos slept in for a few hours on the first of what Pivlic had promised would be several days off. He bathed, shaved, ate a boiled egg, and took a cup of ogrish coffee to the top of his private tower about an hour before noon. He was lucky that his home had running water. Not many in Utvara did, even after a relatively long period of reoccupation. This was the hour he set aside every day to look, in vain it seemed, for a missing friend.

  He brought along a goblin spotting scope—a mundane instrument of crystal and wood that let one see great distances with a single eye—and settled with practiced ease into the canvas chair. Normally, he would have completed this ritual and headed in to work at the Imp Wing, but with the place closed (temporarily, of course) he could afford the time. Time to make sure there were still no angels on Ravnica, that is.

  When he’d arrived with Pivlic twelve years ago, Kos had not expected to stay long. He’d bought this small tower—one of many that had survived the fallow period unscathed and relatively stable—from the Orzhov themselves with Pivlic as an intermediary. It had cost most of his pension, but then at his age and with his assortment of old-man maladies, keeping those zinos in the bank did him little good. Kos had meant to sell the tower and move on after a few months, making what should have been a lot of zinos on the deal, but for a long time no buyers were interested. After a while the inertia of comfortable solitude and a good, steady salary had kicked in. He’d settled into the tower for good. In retrospect he couldn’t think of anything else that gave him this view. He could search for Feather and Parhelion just as well from here as he could anywhere else in the world, provided he looked at the right time of day.

  Kos checked the sun’s position in the sky—still an hour before it would cross in front of the Schism and a sort of mirage effect that would give him a clear, 360-degree view of the world, from horizon to horizon. The Schism, Pivlic had told him, was a semi-failed experiment the Orzhov had hired the Izzet magelord Zomaj Hauc to perform. The Izzet had successfully triggered the thing, which wiped out all remaining life that hadn’t made it to the Husk. As Pivlic explained it, the thing the Schism had been before it was the Schism—some kind of magic life-crusher—was then supposed to explode, burning away the dormant plague entirely. The thing never went off, however, and now Utvara faced the kuga every day. The Schism formed a bizarre spiderweb crack in the sky some five miles overhead as the sun drew closer.

  For the few minutes the sun’s orb passed behind the Schism every day, the fractured sky became clear as glass, and light from all over the plane somehow found its way to the old ’jek’s spotting scope. Kos didn’t understand it much beyond that. It was magic, never his favorite topic. With the help of the scope, Kos could even see the heads of three of the stone titans of Ravnica, even though they were almost halfway around the globe. As far as Kos knew, there was no place else he could see so much of his world and her sky at once, and that more than anything had kept him bound to Utvara.

  As usual, today’s hope failed to ignite, as scheduled. The sun passed behind the Schism, and Kos scanned the entire horizon in two minutes. His body was old, but his eyes were sharp as ever. His heart skipped a dangerous beat when he spotted movement against the ruined Husk but calmed as soon as he saw the telltale round shape of the kuga mot, floating in for an uncommon but not unheard of daytime appearance. As far as he knew, a daytime appearance was less ominous than a nighttime showing, but any appearance of the kuga mot tended to rile the Gruul a bit.

  He made a mental note to make sure Trijiro had warned his people to stay clear of the township for a while. The glowing sphere of the kuga mot—”plague herald” in Utvar Gruul—floated upward into the glassy sky and faded from sight within seconds. The ghost, or apparition, or illusion, or whatever it was never stuck around for long. In Kos’s experience, its reputation as an omen of good or ill was overrated. He’d seen it on several occasions and suffered no notable ill effects. Not even an increased heart rate.

  Don’t think about it, Kos, he told himself. That just leads to anxiety, and that—

  Kos looked at his coffee, now two-thirds full, and dumped it out. Now why had he even made coffee? He couldn’t handle it any more. The new arrivals had shaken him up, and so had the messenger bat Pivlic had sent that morning. He didn’t mind an unexpected day off, but it bugged his still-keen lawman’s instincts that he wasn’t privy to whatever Pivlic and the new arrivals were no doubt discussing.

  As the sun moved a few degrees past the Schism, the long-distance sight it granted Kos flickered and faded as well. He still had an excellent view of immediate Utvara, and turned the spotting scope on a few places that seemed to be magnets for disturbances.

  There were the smoke and steam clouds over the Cauldron, the massive dome-shaped … thing that rested north of the township, looming over the flats and the Vitar Yescu. It resembled a domed mesa, but the mad assembly of tubes and ducts around its base also gave it a weird sort of root structure that constantly crackled with light. The Izzet who worked the power station weren’t quite prisoners, but most lived there anyway. Kos had not been out to the place in all his time there. He’d never gotten an invitation and didn’t feel like catching a fireball in the face for paying a friendly hello—even from here the scope revealed a pair of hydropyric weirds, their liquid bodies of pure flame leaving smoking footprints as they patrolled the station.

  Pivlic knew plenty about the place, though, and had given him a simple, wojek-friendly version: The Cauldron was probably at one time some kind of arena but one that nobody could find in the history books. The Cauldron sat over a geothermic dome, burning its way up through layer after layer of Ravnican history, crushing buried architecture from below while occasionally rumbling the surface. The sky reservoirs that ringed the dome of the Cauldron drew water from the Ravnican air and poured it into the fire pits below, where pyromancers, hydromancers, and hundreds of goblin workers turned it into the energy that kept the township alive—and this still left plenty of water for the township itself too. Pivlic had tried to explain the technicalities, but Kos hadn’t grasped most of the details. The steam-power angle made sense, but beyond that it became too arcane and academic, usually both at the same time. All Kos needed to u
nderstand was that the geothermic dome was power. Power for the glowposts, the water supply, temperature control, and most importantly keeping the Vitar Yescu healthy.

  Kos understood geothermic domes, at least. He and his third wife had honeymooned at the northwest pole, where most of Ravnica’s fresh water came from the reaction of fire and ice. It had been an appropriate honeymoon location, as it turned out.

  The exhaust clouds the Cauldron cast sent whirling, foggy shadows over the Vitar Yescu. The giant tree, with its slender willowlike branches shimmering with pollen-laced white flowers that regularly fluttered off on the wind, had grown prodigiously in the time Kos had been in Utvara—so quickly that the Selesnyans had to dismantle at least three nearby structures to accommodate its bulk. The Conclave had built into the side of the tree’s trunk, but it wasn’t a living monastery like the Unity Tree that graced the Center of Ravnica. These were just a few lookouts and platforms where Selesnyan acolytes could bless the Vitar Yescu, which Kos guessed couldn’t hurt. Though the tree took up more space these days, the area it protected hadn’t grown with it. Kos didn’t know why, and he didn’t get many more invitations to the Vitar Yescu than he did to the Cauldron. He had plenty of contacts within the Conclave but hadn’t seen any of those people for almost a decade. They were all back in the city.

  Kos scanned the flats, that once-pristine surface now dotted with mining claims and wandering prospectors in bubble-headed sphere suits. He tracked the scope on up to the Husk and in the general direction of Trijiro’s last known camp.

  There was a small, smokeless fire and a few lookouts posted on jagged towers. A pair of pterro riders flapped overhead. Around the fire Kos could just make out the shape of a big human—Vor Golozar, from the look of it. Golozar was pacing before the fire, occasionally barking at other Gruul or in the direction of a lumpy object on the ground. A prisoner?

  The Gruul had attacked the Orzhov lokopede caravan, hadn’t they? Pivlic had told him that, anyway. Seemed eager to get the word out, in fact. So why hadn’t Pivlic told him anything about a prisoner?