by Cory Herndon
“I’m speaking,” Hauc said and gestured at Kos without turning from the goblin. Kos’s rack released a spring somewhere and a single red-hot needle lanced through the retired ’jek’s left shoulder, exiting with a narrow jet of blood just above his collarbone. The needle was superheated to a dull rusty glare, but it was more than enough to cauterize the wounds. He hoped.
The needle entered some key nerve and began to tug ever so slowly upward. It was a strong contender for the single worst piece of agony Kos had ever experienced.
“Ever been filleted?” the magelord said. Kos struggled to keep his eyes focused. Hauc turned back to Crix. “The plague is for the brood. My brood. To them it is the breath of life, and they have been asleep for a very long time. The world was a different place the last time one of their kind first saw life. A place of fire and acid rains, and the great peaks still belched the core of Ravnica into the skies.”
“Why not just start a bonfire?” Golozar said. “I’m sure you could get it started if you gave it a little effort.”
“Only dragon fire can create such smoke,” Hauc replied, “while the kuga will be in every breath they take from the first moments of their lives.”
“You trusted a Simic to help you get your special air just right?” Pivlic asked, his tone carefully balanced to suggest just enough awe to keep the magelord explaining. Despite their ridiculous postures, Kos was now reminded much less of a zib-store novel and more of the interrogation rooms in the Tenth Leaguehall.
Kos could see Pivlic’s free arm still at his side, but Kos thought he saw a silver shard in the imp’s fist. Then the rack jerked the blazing needle out of his body and Kos went momentarily blind with pain. He barely heard Pivlic add, “Simic are crazier than Izzet, present company excepted, my friend.”
“Yes, I am your friend. Someday you’ll see that. Someday it will work,” Hauc said. “Your small mind underestimates my abilities. Imp, I have studied every shred of Nebun’s work. I’ve confirmed it independently. Nebun is a rank amateur compared to me—he did attempt to insert a ticking clock into the plague, something that would kill it after a few centuries, but I found that and removed it. The plague will remain for the brood as long as they want it. Ravnica herself has blown the cursed pollen back into your township and away from here, so that life churcher tree won’t cause them any harm.”
“Dragon fodder?” Crix said.
“A crude analogy but yes, essentially. There are other benefits as well. Utvara, as you might imagine, has the highest mortality rate on the plane, what with all the disease, heat, and general discontent in the hills. Ectoplasma does not come from nothing, and this place has the richest supply of ghosts on the planet. I calculate at least fifty thousand have fallen into the Schism already.”
“Why all the dead?” Golozar bellowed. “What purpose did that serve? What have you—My village. What did you do to them?”
“Odd that you should ask the most pertinent question,” Hauc said. He spun on one foot and clapped his hands deliberately, a professor praising a shallow student. “And we return—again—to the ectoplasmic relays,” he said, waving at a vague area over Kos’s head. “They are so very old, these new dragons. These new gods. They are not the parun’s progeny. He is old, but they were meant to be his contemporaries. Contemporaries to the dragons that burned the world into being,” He sneered. “I required Orzhov help confirming that they did indeed live, barely. But the raw, fresh essence of life, captured at the brink of death, would ensure they would continue to grow.”
“Well, that and heat,” Kos coughed.
“Lots and lots of heat,” Pivlic grimaced.
“Yet you’re moving against—against the parun of our guild,” Crix said. “How? Why would he set you to that task?” A light seemed to appear on her face, which wore a sudden, horrified look. “Firemadness. My lord, I am sorry.”
“Firemadness? What’s firemadness?” Pivlic asked.
“The Firemind eats away at—” Crix began.
“Crix, perhaps you don’t have as much vision as I thought,” Hauc said. “The parun cannot see all, not if we use simple precautions that keep him from focusing too closely, not when I shield us within mizzium. This entire place is lined with it to the core. But there are gaps in this shield.” The magelord looked meaningfully upward at the circular skylight in the center of the domed roof. “I could not risk his learning from my own mind that I planned to betray him. That is where the message comes in and why I sent it in the first place,” Hauc said, rounding a long bend to finally arrive at his initial point. “That is the key, the final part of the spell that will trigger stage three and make the brood kin recognize me as their true equal, no, their true master, when they emerge. The great one has long since lost real interest in the guild that bears his name. It is time for a new Great Dragon—for the Izzet and for Ravnica herself!” Kos found himself waiting for maniacal laughter and was rewarded a few seconds later with a long bout from the magelord.
The outburst gave the imp just the opening he was looking for.
“That,” Pivlic said, “is not going to help property values at all, my friend. You must think of simple businesspeople such as myself. I am afraid as the sole Orzhov representative, it’s my duty to register a complaint.”
With that, the imp thrust a shard of silver blindly backward, shattering the cracking power node behind him. The glass exploded, and Kos half expected it to ignite and consume the imp whole, fireproof skin or no fireproof skin. The rack holding Pivlic in place went dead, and the silver clamps around his wrist popped open.
The proprietor of the Imp Wing Hotel and Bar, long since freed of the confining miner’s suit, spread his wings and soared directly across the open space over Hauc’s head. He looped twice to narrowly dodge twin blasts from the howling magelord’s eyes then flew out of Kos’s narrow field of vision.
* * * * *
Crix, still reeling from the revelation that the magelord she’d served her entire life planned to move against great Niv-Mizzet, didn’t see the barreling imp until Pivlic was just a few feet away.
“Lean right!” the imp shouted, and Crix did the best she could to comply. “No, no!” Pivlic shouted. “Sorry! My right, your left! Good! Now close your—”
The imp didn’t get a chance to finish before he reached the goblin. Pivlic hooked one hand under Crix’s left arm—the one without the message tattoos—and slammed the improvised silver weapon he still clutched into the power node of the rack holding Crix in place. The node had not overheated, but apparently the imp’s momentum was enough to do the job. Hot, acrid fuel showered briefly against the goblin’s back, and she felt the clamps holding her in place detach. Before she could drop the twenty-odd feet to the platform below—assuming she could even aim for it and didn’t drop all the way down to the lava pits—Pivlic, wings straining in the heat, managed to lift her away from the wall.
“Kos!” the imp shouted and swooped nauseatingly to dodge a shot from the magelord, who was calling his guards. “I can’t reach you!”
“Get the Gruul free,” Kos said. “You’re closer.”
“I can’t carry any more than two, I’m not an infernal—” Pivlic sputtered.
“I’ll make it to the platform,” Golozar shouted. “Just get me loose!”
“Hold on, goblin,” the imp said, and Crix did her best to wrap her numbed limbs around Pivlic’s arm and left leg.
They would have made it, but Hauc would not keep missing forever. A blast of burning heat struck the goblin’s arm and Pivlic’s simultaneously, and the next instant Crix was falling. Falling past the Pyraquin, past the platform, and toward the open top of a lava-powered pyromanic generator. Just before she reached the rim of the house-sized cylinder, she heard a crash of breaking crystal as Pivlic, somehow, reached the Gruul. The last sound Crix heard before the heat made her pass out—she’d clenched her eyes to keep them from popping already—was Kos’s voice.
“Pivlic! Leave us, damn it! Get back to town a
nd warn them!”
The Guildpact Statutes shall only extend to those zones designated “civilized” (see Corollary 0.315) by at least seven of the document signatories or their duly appointed representatives.
—Guildpact Statutes, Corollary 19.72
(the “Reclamation Clause”)
3 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
Was the sky just a bit clearer than before? It was hard to say in the weird light the Schism was sending into the night, but the haze seemed thinner, the air less oppressed with the tang of plague. Teysa’s efforts with the cure were already bearing fruit, it seemed. Except for the Cauldron and any Gruul survivors, the Simic medicine had gotten around to everyone in the valley—even the prospectors—and now that it didn’t have to keep as many people alive, the Selesnyan pollen went to work on the kuga winds themselves, as Wrizfar Barkfeather and Dr. Nebun had said it would. And everywhere the cure went it came with word of who had provided it.
Botany, magic, and medicine worked in strange ways, and Teysa really understood only one of those subjects. Neither was medicine or botany, but she trusted her verity circle, and her zinos. Teysa was in the process of bribing an entire township, plus the surrounding areas and transients.
It was too bad the Selesnyan Conclave and the Simic Combine seemed so diametrically opposed in their philosophies—Teysa suspected that if Barkfeather and Dr. Nebun ever got their heads together, they could do great things. Great, profitable things that would probably fetch a lot of zinos for the baroness who held the leases on their accomplishments. Once this crisis was over, she’d have to look into that.
Twenty-four of the taj had joined Teysa and the others on the last leg of their nighttime journey, and by the time they neared the Cauldron, the moon had almost completely set. The taj and Melisk had confirmed what she suspected: That messenger was probably already inside the Cauldron. It would still be a few hours until dawn. She’d dispatched the other six taj to the hills with inviolable orders to distribute the plague cure to any remaining Gruul. She doubted there were many, and the six who left had assured her they should have no trouble tracking the ones that were hiding. Melisk had made sure the taj tracked the survivors as they fled, with the apparent intention to finish them off once “his” taj had eliminated Teysa.
Teysa wished she didn’t have to send the taj to save the same people they’d just been trying to kill—it wouldn’t make the job any easier—but those Gruul were going to get that cure whether they wanted it or not. The taj could do that just as easily as they could kill the rest of them, even if it wouldn’t be pleasant for those Gruul survivors. Pragmatism was called for. And if the Gruul then destroyed those six taj, it would be no great loss. The taj were even more resilient than thrulls.
She patted the remaining tubes of Nebun’s cure—the last three—inside her cloak. Surely that would be enough. It was unfortunate that any Izzet inside who refused would have to be forced to take the cure, but Teysa’s impressive regiment was ready for the fight, as far as she could tell.
The truth was, though, that Teysa wasn’t sure what kind of resistance to expect from the Cauldron. She had one chance to avoid a fight, but she doubted it would work: Even if he hatched the new dragons, they’d destroy the magelord as well as everything else. She was not a military tactician, just a political and legal one. Hauc seemed to be following neither school of thought, and Teysa wondered if it were true that magelords sometimes went dangerously senile, then truly mad, from too much of “Niv-Mizzet’s gift.”
Could such madness mean the loyalty of his forces was questionable? She figured—hoped, really—that the workers wouldn’t put up a fight if one happened, but there was sure to be trouble from the djinn guards, the weirds, and the sleeping drake perched between two of the floating sky reservoirs, one eye open for sudden movement that would awaken the reptile instantly.
Nayine Shonn had planned on taking the shot at the drake herself, but Teysa had ordered one of the shadewalkers to requisition a bam-stick and take care of it. The baroness could see parts of the weapon, if not the sniper, perched atop the last remaining column in a line that had fallen over like dominoes.
They couldn’t afford to take this shot more than once, and the best way to ensure they didn’t have to was taking it from as close to the target as possible, Teysa had insisted. Only the light-bending shadewalker could do that without alerting the drake to its presence. Teysa hadn’t mentioned to Shonn that she didn’t trust the Devkarin with a bam-stick just yet. Someone this helpful was just the tiniest bit too good to be true.
The other pair of shadewalkers armed with explosives had already been carried into position atop the water reservoirs flanking the red drake by a small, golden hawk that still rested on Teysa’s shoulder, conserving strength for the upcoming fight. Shadewalkers barely existed in the third through second dimensions, or some such thing. They were light, from what Teysa understood, but solid when they needed to be. They were a little different from the taj but had a similarly silent, obedient angle going for them that Teysa appreciated.
The taj had split into small groups of five and six and moved stealthily near the rim of rusted hillside abutting the craterlike seat of the Cauldron. Some of their borrowed Gruul bodies were beginning to show signs of age, and many showed clear signs of obviously mortal injury that spilled white light. That didn’t matter to Teysa. No one had to think they were Gruul anymore. Melisk’s deception was over—now they were soldiers. Quick, deadly, ghostly soldiers. At Shonn’s suggestion, the taj would stay until summoned by Teysa—or, in the event she was unable to summon them, by Shonn—when they met enough resistance to warrant the taj stepping in. It made sense to Teysa, and she’d readily agreed: Showing your entire case in the opening statement was not a good idea.
The charge would be led by Teysa, on dromaback. The virusoids would flank her on all sides. They would be able to withstand quite a bit of the heat they were likely to encounter and weren’t as slow as the Golgari zombies assigned to bring up their rear. The minotaurs and Dreka-Tooth were the spear of the charge, while Shonn rode beside the “raid captain,” as the minotaurs insisted on calling her. The Haazda, who were the most physically vulnerable, would break off from the charge at assigned points. There they could convey orders from Teysa, who planned to be inside the Cauldron soon after she launched the charge, to the taj and shadewalkers outside as needed. Their ultimate objective was to stay alive. If they went down despite the belt-loads of teardrops they carried, the taj would launch the second wave as a fallback, without the order.
Teysa flipped her cloak over her shoulders to reveal the dazzling Orzhov officer’s armor she’d found in Pivlic’s stores. It was a relic the imp said he’d acquired in an auction on Tin Street, and it fit Teysa well enough. The armor itself was a reflective obsidian black embossed with a gold Orzhov sigil—cut in a stark military style—upon the breastplate. She hoped it wouldn’t come to combat on foot; her reduced ability to maneuver could easily be a disadvantage in that situation, but better safe than sorry. Besides, it helped her make herself believe she was really about to do this insane thing she was aiming to do.
Shonn rode up on one of the dromads, a stark white beast mottled with silver patches that reflected the looming Schism light. “Everyone is in position,” she whispered. Teysa could tell her elf’s instincts bristled at the lack of attention the Cauldron guards had paid them thus far. It was suspicious, Shonn had said. And it was, but there was little she could do about it.
Teysa had one chance to stop this entire thing from happening, without any fighting at all. And in that hope she had ordered everyone to let her advance on the Cauldron alone.
It was a little insane, but if she could pull this off, the sniper would not have to fire, the Cauldron might actually survive intact, and, most importantly, Teysa would be able to get back to the business of making this place something other than a blight, an insane gamble on prosperity.
“All right,” Teysa whispered. “The open palm toward you mea
ns stay back, I’m parlaying. I’ll wave you on if they reject me outright.”
“And if they just kill you?” the Devkarin replied in kind.
“You have to ask?”
“You got it, Baroness,” Shonn said and sidled over to give Teysa room. Her army parted before her and she rode out, into the Cauldron crater and down the oxidized road that led to the east gate.
Only two guards stood on either side of the iron doors, at least only two that Teysa could see: a glittering pyrohydric with four arms and a mizzium pike, burning with a light that rivaled the Schism, and a reddish, oily djinn. After being ignored so long, she was startled when one of them, the djinn, finally moved. He turned to face her and raised a hand in greeting. The weird stepped in front of the doors, moving just behind the other guard’s shoulder. Each of them towered above her.
Teysa fought the urge to get her cane from the saddle. Sweat soaked her tunic beneath the black armor, but Teysa maintained a coolly neutral expression—number thirteen: I admit nothing—and reined the dromad to a halt. To its credit the beast also kept its cool, for now. Barkfeather stepped from side to side on her shoulder, the only display of nervousness Teysa hoped got across to the bemused djinn. Like those of most every race on Ravnica, the djinn had long ago been mixed in with humans. The true, gigantic variety—those who had rivaled dragons like Niv-Mizzet for power in the pre-Guildpact days, according to legends and histories—were long gone, for the most part. The remaining few were enslaved at the polar water stations—a badly kept secret.
The main difference between this djinn and a large human (other than the body that moved like living oil) was his lack of legs. The guard floated on a whirling cloud of wind that reached to his waist. Beyond that he was more or less solid. It made djinns slippery opponents, she guessed.
“We were wondering when you were going to attack,” the djinn said. “I had a bet with my friend Vulka here about the size of the force you would use. Looks like we both lost. Neither of us thought you’d be crazy enough to ride up alone.”