by Cory Herndon
“Smells like something … improvised,” Teysa said with a bold effort not to wrinkle her nose. “But it doesn’t really matter. I don’t care. Listen—we’re going in to the Cauldron, whether the Izzet like it or not. There’s likely going to be some resistance to our entry when Hauc learns I had Melisk killed.”
“Is that how an Orzhov gets around to saying you want me to help you figure out how to coordinate these losers into a raid gang to take on a magelord in his home? In that?” Shonn pointed at the Cauldron, glowing in the Schism light. It crackled with energy as the Schism brightened.
“Sure,” Teysa said. “The way I see it, the first thing we need to worry about is—”
“You want my help, you listen to me first,” the Devkarin said, “and we renegotiate the deal of my release. Again.”
“You want a raise already?”
“You want your own little army?”
“Yes,” Teysa said. “So let’s get to work. We’ve got to get rid of that drake first.”
“That’s easy enough,” the Devkarin said. “Can you hit anything with that bam-stick?”
“At a distance?” Teysa said. “Can’t say I’ve really tried.”
“I’ll admit I’ve only fired one once, but I can pick a frog off a zombie’s head with a longbow at two hundred yards with the north wind in my face. Let me carry it, and I’ll take care of the drake.”
“What about the exterior guards, the weirds, and the djinn?” Teysa asked, ignoring the request for now.
This did not pass unnoticed. The elf stared hard at the Cauldron for a few seconds, then turned in the saddle and said, “I think we can take care of them. Can any of us other than your parrot there fly?”
The hawk leaped from Teysa’s shoulder and landed on the ground as Barkfeather in his elf shape. “You presume,” he said, “that I can only call on the form of a hawk.” His green eyes sparkled, and he grinned. “What did you have in mind, Devkarin?”
Mizzium is an impossible metal, yet there it sits: impervious to the very agents that forged it. Or is it? I put to you that the dragon’s metal is not immune to the extremes of temperature that are within our abilities to create.
—Magelord Mindosz the Heretic,
immolated by the Firemind on 8 Xivaskir 3203 Z.C.
3 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
Kos had read enough zib-store novellas on late duty at the Imp Wing and decade after decade of slow night shifts at the Tenth to recognize one of the cheap entertainment’s iconic figures: the maniacal magelord with a plan to consume the world with fire, floods, frost, or some combination of all three. The magelord always revealed his plan to the heroes once he’d captured them and strung them up in various awkward positions.
The retired ’jek never thought he’d actually meet such a character, or find himself in such a position, but Zomaj Hauc looked prepared to play the part to the hilt. Kos hoped he wasn’t fooling himself. His ability to read people was a bit rusty, and the man was obviously insane. But here they were, strung up like an audience as Hauc paced the “stage” of his flight sphere landing pad.
Of course, life was not a zib-store novel, and escape seemed a dim hope at best if even Crix was bound up here with them. Mizzium and silver pressed painfully against Kos’s body in a hundred places, but that was nothing compared to the throbbing discomfort at his shoulders and knees as he hung facedown over the Cauldron’s interior. Hauc had ordered the four to be stripped of their gear and most of their clothing (in Golozar’s case, they’d mostly taken weapons) and placed his prisoners at the four compass points. There they hung, suspended above him.
Kos had seen many things in the City of Guilds, but not since the great fertility festival of ’87 had he seen such a dense concentration of goblins anywhere, let alone in Utvara. For better or worse, these goblins weren’t concerned about the propagation of their own species. The Izzet goblins worked like industrious insects, without a break, to birth three new members of what might be the deadliest species on the whole plane. From Kos’s angle they seemed to cover the breadth of the Cauldron’s wide base and crawled upon all the struts, supports, transfer points, and power tubes that ran between the generators, the walls, the ground, and the nest at the center of it all. Smog occasionally blocked his view of the lava pits on the far side, but he could certainly smell them. Kos noted that most of the glowing, glassy white pipes and power from the east side of complex seemed to feed directly into the trio of eggs.
The defenses of the place—the workers could only count as defenders if they chose to fight instead of continuing to work, and they seemed preoccupied—included perhaps a dozen elementals that Kos could see; djinn monitoring the ramparts; and a few archers, goblins, mostly, perched on a ring above Kos. The translucent form of the famed Pyraquin scattered orange light chaotically over the entire area.
The Cauldron narrowed near its domed top, meaning Kos—at the north point, nearest the sleeping watch-drake—was no more than a hundred feet away from Golozar, to what Kos was pretty sure was the south. The old wojek guessed that the tangle of metal holding him up was at least six feet from the actual inner wall. Pivlic was to Kos’s right, at the western point, and the goblin courier Crix hung on his left. They were all at least fifty feet from the landing platform where Zomaj Hauc stood, regaling them with the details of his plan. Or trying to. Kos couldn’t decide what made his current situation worse—what Hauc was planning to do or listening to Hauc describe, around the many tangents, what he was planning to do.
Izzet magelords were legendary for their arrogance. There was a reason all those zib-store villains sounded the way they did—an Izzet with enough power simply could not contain the urge to boast about it.
The interesting part, to Kos anyway, was that Golozar had done most of the prodding that got Hauc talking. If the Gruul had shown such skills in the days Kos had known him back in the city, he might well have stayed on long enough to complete his academy training. Golozar might even have ended up his partner, and that might not even had been a bad thing.
“My lord,” Crix said, interrupting Kos’s ruminations, “why do you do this? I have traveled so far to bring you the message. You gave it to me yourself, said to give it to you here. Well I’m here, and, my lord, it was not easy. You must take this burden from me. Why do you wait?” Kos couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the goblin on top of all the other fear, dread, and panic fighting it out for his attention. Crix had become an uncertain, questioning child before a parent that didn’t seem to want her.
“Give it up, goblin,” Golozar growled. “So you’re uncomfortable. Everyone I ever cared about is probably dead. We’ve all got problems. Take Hauc here. He can’t possibly channel enough power into those eggs, and even if he does there’s no way an idiot like him is going to manage to control three dragons.”
“My discomfort is not—” the goblin began, then said, “Your whole tribe? Even that centaur?”
“Are you listening to the same magelord I am?” Golozar said.
“This is bad,” Pivlic said. “This is really, really, really, bad, my friends.” He wriggled in his polished, silver bindings. The imp was strapped upside down to a roughly human-shaped mizzium rack. The rack and three others like it had, a few hours earlier, been walking around long enough to pick up Kos and his three companions, climb the inside of the Cauldron at the four compass points, and merge back into the twisted tubing. There, the pipe-guardians had twisted and reconfigured themselves into perfect personal prisons.
But why had Hauc’s pipe-guardians taken Crix as well? Kos had gotten the distinct impression that the goblin’s message was urgent, as had the courier, obviously. Yet Hauc had been perfectly happy to let Crix hang there with the rest of them.
Kos stared down at a pulsing pyromanic generator that blasted heat at his face and upper body. It sat atop a beetle-shaped power plant drawing and expelling power and magics Kos did not rightly understand, except that they all combined to turn the air into something just this si
de of an inferno. And everywhere, goblins. Goblins who ran in place inside barrel wheels mounted to the sides of steamcores, goblins who turned cranks with wrenches that were taller than they were, and goblins who pulled levers by leaping upon them from the next level up. Goblins, all of them keeping the whole contraption going. Weirds and djinn poured molten stone and metals into the steamcores and a little less into the generators.
From his vantage point Kos could look down on Hauc’s platform and see two of the three mammoth dragon eggs sitting beneath it. Kos was no engineer, but he’d be willing to bet that platform wouldn’t survive the first hatchling.
Not that he knew a damned thing about dragons, really. Who did? There was only one dragon left, and he hadn’t been seen in public for decades. Drakes, though similar, were just large animals. Dragons were something bordering on the godlike, but that old bastard Niv-Mizzet was a recluse who ruled an entire guild just to stave off boredom. He was famed for that. People wrote satirical plays about that. Niv-Mizzet was a folk hero in some circles, a god in others, but always representative of wanton, massive destruction.
The dragons of old were terrible creatures and were one of the reasons the fledgling guilds first considered uniting into the Guildpact. He’d learned that much at Mrs. Molliya’s one-room school. Three brand-new dragons? Kos figured he wouldn’t last long enough to know for sure, but odds were there wouldn’t be much Utvara or Ravnica left to spend the rest of his life in anyway.
Fate’s tricky solution seemed to involve shortening the rest of his life to accommodate. It wasn’t a solution Kos was crazy about. Thanks a lot, Fate.
Crix was right side up like the rest of them, bound in much the same way as Pivlic, though she had one arm free for readily apparent reasons—the tattoos on her courier arm glowed brighter whenever the magelord drew close to her as he paced through his monologue round the platform. The arm hung useless. The goblin’s nerves had obviously gone numb. Kos knew the feeling.
“My lord,” Crix repeated. “The message. Don’t you want the message?”
“Crix,” Zomaj Hauc said, interrupting what Kos figured was a record for silence since he’d met the magelord—thirty-five, forty seconds, easy. “I will extract that in time. First you no doubt wish to know what the message contains. The curiosity must be killing you. All of you. I don’t want curiosity to steal my thunder.”
“The curiosity is bad, but this angle you have me hanging at is the worst part, all due respect,” Kos said. “I think my shoulder’s almost out of the socket, and the rest of my hair’s going to burn off at this rate. It’s never going to grow back in time for my funeral. And if I ever did want to have children, I’m no longer quite sure it would be physically possible. But sure, tell us. You know you’re going to.” And maybe, just maybe, let slip a way to stop it.
“The contents of the message mean nothing to me, my lord, and are only the business of the recipient,” Crix said by rote. “Only the safe delivery to my master. I trust your wisdom in—”
“Why, thank you! Your wisdom is to trust in my wisdom.” Hauc said. He began to pace a large circle around the edge of the platform, his voice booming in the weird acoustics of the Cauldron. “Your trust was the last piece I needed! Hooray! At last my plan will be complete. I have Crix’s trust, everyone!”
“My lord, I only wanted to do my job. That’s all I ever wanted,” Crix said. “I don’t understand your rebuke.”
“Quiet, I was—Never mind. Crix,” Hauc continued, and in the time it took to speak the goblin’s name he went from frenzied to fatherly. “Dear Crix,” he repeated, walking to stand directly beneath the goblin. The courier’s message tattoos shone in response to the magelord’s proximity. “The message is safe. I will accept delivery soon, but the time is not quite right. You did do your job, eventually. If the knowledge you possess passes back to me too soon, the wrong people may find out and may try to stop me. Neither of us wants that, I think. And I can’t have you or your new playmates running around getting in the way of our operations.”
“The Firemind,” Crix said, her voice a whisper. “You would move against Niv—”
“Do not speak the name,” Hauc interrupted sharply. “Not yet. His attentions must remain away from this place.”
“Your operations are going to level ‘this place,’” Kos said, “and every other place. You can’t control three dragons. And I speak as someone who really only plans on using it for another year or two no matter what you do to it.”
“You don’t know what I can do,” Hauc replied. His eyes flashed red and twin points of light sizzled across Kos’s forehead. They grew hotter, and Kos could swear he smelled smoke.
“Magelord, from what you’ve told us,” Pivlic jumped in with his best negotiator’s inflection, “the Orzhov are your partners in this endeavor. It just so happens that I am the senior Orzhov negotiator present, and I believe there is no need to keep me pinned to this wall any longer.” The imp looked dangerously vulnerable from Kos’s angle, especially after getting used to seeing Pivlic in the bulky suit. His wings were splayed and gripped by dozens of hooks and clamps.
“Pivlic,” Kos said.
“No need to keep my valet pinned to this wall any longer, either. He’s a bit of a dullard—took one too many blows to the head in the brawl-pits. But I still owe back taxes on him.” Pivlic elaborated smoothly. “Surely you can sympathize.”
“You have interrupted my train of thought!” Hauc roared at Pivlic. Twin beams of white-hot energy flashed from the magelord’s eyes and sizzled into the clamps holding the imp’s arms to his side. The silver started to glow orange as Pivlic screamed. They bent and stretched as Pivlic writhed under the magelord’s gaze. Kos caught sight off the fingers of Pivlic’s left hand counting down: four, three, two, one, then a fist.
“Enough,” Kos barked, hoping this was what Pivlic had in mind. “Just start over! You burning him alive!”
“Yes, but of all of you, he is the most worthless. I’m not too concerned about what the Orzhov think, let alone this interloping bartender.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully even as he continued the assault on Pivlic. “But I don’t want to burn Rack Seventeen any more than I have. Some of my servants still respect me.” The magelord’s attack ended as abruptly as it had started, and he turned his literally smoldering eyes on the old wojek. Pivlic moaned and whimpered, but from the corner of his eye Kos saw the imp press against the melted clamps—silver was a flashy but foolish choice for the bindings on “Rack Seventeen”—even as Pivlic put on his noisy show of pain for Hauc’s benefit.
For the first time, Kos also spotted a small glassy globe directly behind Pivlic, glowing brightly as it absorbed the heat. The red water boiled like hot blood within, and a tiny crack appeared in one side.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Pivlic, Kos thought.
One night on the road into Utvara, cornered by Gruul and fairly certain they would die, Pivlic had walked, slowly, through an open bonfire—twice, and each time over the course of half an agonizing minute—and emerged unscathed with his and Kos’s weapons. They’d driven off the bandits, and Pivlic had been none the worse for wear. It took a lot of heat to even begin to make an imp take notice, let alone feel pain. Hauc, apparently, didn’t know this, or thought he’d exceeded even an imp’s pain threshold, because he grinned wickedly as Pivlic carried on.
“I don’t get how you’re supposed to just cook those eggs and expect them to hatch,” Golozar interrupted, still doing his best to draw the details out of the magelord.
“You wouldn’t, Gruul,” Zomaj Hauc said. “But I’ll try to put it in small words so you can understand.” His eyes still rested on Kos as Pivlic worked one arm loose. “The Schism feeds on ectoplasmic energy. This energy follows those transfers there,” he indicated the white, crystalline structures leading from the east wall to the central nest, “and incubates the new ones. This process is close to complete.”
“You mean souls,” Golozar snarled. “Dead souls feed y
our new ones.”
“I believe I just said that,” Hauc snapped.
“Golozar, let him talk,” Kos said. “It’s a … brilliant plan.”
To Kos’s surprise, Crix joined in. “Yes, my lord, you are correct. I do want to know the content of the message.” It didn’t sound particularly convincing to Kos, but he had a century of lie detecting under his belt. Hauc positively beamed. “Surely we can learn its import before you immolate the others?”
“Crix, I knew I could tempt your curiosity,” the magelord said. “Well done. Calm and direct. If you weren’t going to die soon, I’d consider putting you in for an observership. Now, as I was saying, the mana-compression device is at its heart a concentrated nothingness, a dimensional vacuum. Nothing is an unnatural state. The void cannot abide its own emptiness, and it cries out to be occupied. This particular device I created cried out to be occupied specifically by life itself, by living things. Initially, that is. It is a multistage mana-compression singularity bomb—can you believe it Crix?—and it is working perfectly. The initial detonation removed all unnecessary creatures. The second stage has been going on ever since. Soon, the third stage will release all the remaining energy at once into the new dragons. I will awaken them from their slumber, and they will serve me completely.”
“You’re awfully patient for an Izzet,” Kos said.
“An initial outburst, or inburst, I suppose, then a slow build,” Crix said with real awe Kos spotted easily. “You needed more energy than you could get with a single-stage device, but you could never build this place if anything that walked under the Schism was devoured as well. The calculations must have covered a mountainside. You are a genius, my lord,” she finished sincerely. With a barely detectable shift in gear she asked, “And the effect on the dormant plague—how did that benefit your overall strategy?”
“The kuga mot brought the plague,” Kos said, “and the kuga mot was your creature once, Hauc.”