Dissension
Page 1
A World Bathed in Fire
Eldritch monsters stalk the streets, the demon cultists are in a murderous frenzy, and the Guildpact is torn by dissension. Every guild is on its own. Divided, they will fall. Lucky for Ravnica, on a world where ghosts linger, being dead isn’t half the excuse Kos would like it to be.
Cory J. Herndon concludes the thrilling tale of heroism, adventure, and deception he began in Ravnica.
Ravnica Cycle, Book III
DISSENSION
©2006 Wizards of the Coast LLC
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. MAGIC: THE GATHERING, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC, in the U.S.A. and other countries.
All Wizards of the Coast characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005932335
eISBN: 978-0-7869-5707-1
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v3.0_r1
Dedication
For cousin Erik, my collaborator on many an unpublished
monster comic.
Acknowledgements
The following good people helped make this book possible:
Susan J. Morris, editor
Brady Dommermuth, Magic creative director
Peter Archer, executive editor of Wizards of the Coast Books
Matt Cavotta, Magic creative writer
Jeremy Cranford, Magic art director
Scott McGough, wise guy
the creators of Magic: the Gathering in all its incarnations
and the crew of the Behemoth (1977-1979)
Special thanks to the unsinkable S.P. Miskowski,
the unflappable Bayliss, and the unstoppable Remo.
Contents
Cover
A World Bathed in Fire
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Possession is nine-tenths of the law—we take care of the other tenth. Capobar and Associates specializes in object retrieval. No job too small, too big, or too dangerous. Satisfaction guaranteed. Fee negotiable, consultancy available (100 zinos/day plus expenses). 15017 Funnel Street, Midtown, Center of Ravnica. In-person meeting required. Expenses not negotiable. Everyone is looking for something. Send a falcon to us for an appointment today!
—Long-running classified advertisement,
Ravnican Guildpact-Journal
29 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
Evern Capobar, master thief, hadn’t been out on a job in almost ten years. The last one had taken him into the undercity of Old Rav, where he had almost lost several limbs to Devkarin bandits before getting away with one of their more sacred relics. He hadn’t been on a job outside the City of Ravnica for almost three decades. This new job had the potential to be even stranger, and more dangerous, than a journey into the depths of Golgari territory, but Capobar was not worried. All jobs were strange in their own way, even if this one wasn’t his usual cup of bumbat. Near as he could tell, he wouldn’t so much be stealing something as retrieving it—and long-running classified advertisements aside, stealing was generally the job for which one hired a master thief. “Retrieval” was, of course, a convenient euphemism.
Capobar had people for this sort of thing, assuming you stretched your definition of “people.” For this job, his personal attention had been requested, and fortunately the basic skill set for treasure hunter and thief were remarkably similar. Capobar had crossed that line on several occasions.
As the primary stakeholder of one of the most successful independent, fully licensed thieveries in the metropolitan center of the plane, Capobar rarely saw the need for personal risk and even less for passing through the city gates to the world beyond. He was not a coward, or fearful for his life, but he was realistic. He wasn’t as nimble as he used to be, and truth be told, he had taken to his office more and more of late. Well into his eighties Capobar had been the best thief in the whole section. Now he had the books to oversee and face-to-face negotiations to lead. Those were the heart of his business as he entered his 101st year. Fortunately he had an excellent eye for talent, so Capobar and Associates was doing as well—if not better—than it had when he took on most jobs alone.
The exceptions were those clients who, for whatever reason, wanted Capobar to do a job personally and were willing to pay extra to ensure that the master oversaw the operation. For the right price, the right client, and the right job, Capobar would occasionally come out of semiretirement to add that personal touch. He still had a few tricks he hadn’t taught his employees. More than once he’d even accepted jobs involving said employees, honor among thieves being relative. He would never have told the client, but even if Capobar’s personal participation had not been requested he might well have gone ahead and done it anyway. You didn’t get to be a master thief without a powerful sense of curiosity, and he was mighty curious about this job. For one thing, his client was a guildmaster. By definition, one of the ten—no, nine, he corrected himself—most powerful and wealthy beings on the entire plane of Ravnica.
For that kind of coin, Capobar would accommodate quite a bit. He would honor the client’s odd demands and travel hundreds of miles from his urban stomping grounds to this far-flung reclamation zone.
He stood at this moment inside the ribcage of a creature that provided excellent cover from the still-noisy township and gave Capobar a glimpse of what he could expect inside the ruins. The blackened bones were all that was left of the massive corpse that had crashed and literally burned three weeks ago. Half a mile north, a similar jumble of charred skeletal remains marked the final resting place of the second dragon.
Rare as they were, these skeletons were not his objective. The rotting, corroded bones were useless to his client and therefore useless to him. They’d been set ablaze by the locals, it seemed, to ensure there was no chance either still lived. The black smoke coming from the region for weeks had spread as far as the city, and reports of the Utvarans torching the corpses had been on the front page of the newssheets the next day. For a short time, there were fears that the smoke would bring the dreaded kuga plague along with it, but Simic biomages had reassured the public that they detected no trace of the pathogen. The plague had been wiped out, or so it seemed, by a cure some other Simic dropped on the population. He’d been glad to hear that, though he kept protective gear and a couple of ’drops on his belt. Just in case.
He contemplated retrieving that gea
r when the smell began to burn his sinuses but decided to hold off. His partner wouldn’t be much longer. Partner on the job, that is, since the shadewalker worked for Capobar. The bones had begun to corrode and filled the air with a metallic tang. Putrid, gelatinized marrow oozed from within. A drop fell from the dead dragon’s tenth rib and sizzled as it melted into the stone near his right foot. If he hadn’t been on a schedule, he would have found a way to collect some—it certainly would have made a potent poison and a simple, if pungent, way to get through most any lock. But dragon skeletons and acidic marrow were not what he’d been hired to find and retrieve.
What Capobar had been hired to retrieve rested in the center of a ring of ruined architecture built over a simmering volcanic caldera. He pulled a black bandanna over his nose and mouth to fight the odor of decaying dragon bones. He could move as soon as his scout returned from—
“The path to the ruin is clear,” a disembodied voice whispered over his right shoulder. The sound, as usual, came without warning—not even footsteps marked the shadewalker’s passage, one of the reasons he and his kind were paid so well. Another was near-perfect invisibility, which prevented any but the shadewalker himself from knowing exactly what a shadewalker’s “kind” really was. Capobar, for all his sources, had never been able to find out whether that invisibility was some kind of ability inherent to the shadewalker’s species or if the stealthy operator was simply a human with remarkable skills of deception.
“Well done,” Capobar whispered. “No sign of the plague?”
“I would have smelled it,” the shadewalker replied. “The air is clear as well.” The invisible stalker added, “Clear of plague, at least. There is much death, and the scavengers have not yet taken it all away.”
“Perhaps the scavengers are among the dead,” Capobar observed.
“If by ‘scavengers’ you mean Gruul, I would say you are right. They number among the more distant corpses. Many, in the hills.”
“You’re talkative,” Capobar said. “Nervous?”
“Hardly,” the voice replied. “May I ask your instructions?”
“Stick with the plan,” the thief replied, a little nervous himself. He wasn’t a stickler for rank in this informally organized business, but it was peculiar, and a little unnerving, that none of the shadewalkers he employed at quite handsome rates had ever used the slightest of honorifics when speaking to their employer. No “sir,” no “boss.” Capobar might even have been content with “Mr. Capobar.”
The master thief kept three shadewalkers on retainer (as far as he knew—getting a head count was tricky, and he was only paying three of them), but had not worked much with them personally. He didn’t even know this one’s name. It wasn’t like he could tell them apart. Shadewalkers lived in a state of natural invisibility. Certain tricks could reveal them—though Capobar pitied anyone who tried to toss powder or paint on one—but no living eye could detect them without magical assistance.
They always took payment in cash. Cash that disappeared, literally, from Capobar’s hands. He wondered what they did with it. Presumably they had to eat, but what else did they buy with the zinos?
The shadewalker’s heightened senses were only one reason the master thief had brought the invisible agent along. From his vantage point at the edge of the Husk, the glowspheres of Utvara’s main thoroughfare still flickered, and the noises of a typical evening’s debaucheries continued. A great many of the miners on the flats continued to work through the darkness or hired graveyard shifts of nomadic laborers to do it for them, and there was little cover between Capobar and the remains of the Cauldron.
The flats were the real problem. They were not endless by any means, ringed as they were by the Husk (and beyond that, mile after mile of architecture), but they were huge enough. An open wasteland now, at some time in the distant past it had been a grandiose pavilion, paved with brick and stone. Beneath that stone were layers of ancient, abandoned civilization littered with treasure, or so the fortune-seekers working their scattered islands of prospecting activity testified.
The target was sitting smack in the middle of it. Anyone who cared to glance might spot him at some point, no matter how many precautions he took. Capobar had never trusted invisibility magic, personally—it could be quite dangerous when applied by unskilled hands—which made the shadewalker instrumental.
He had to work under the assumption he would be seen, but Capobar still had to personally retrieve the booty according to the doubly enchanted, thrice-signed, and virtually unbreakable contract. Then the shade would move the actual item back to the office in the City of Ravnica. Just because the client had hired him to personally retrieve it didn’t mean he had to transport it all three hundred miles back to the city. Success relied on two factors. Capobar had to reach the target quickly—he had that covered—and any response from the locals had to be slow. They might reach him by the time he was heading back out, but by then the shadewalker would be slipping into the foothills on the way to delivering the financial future of Capobar and Associates. According to his inquiries, new settlers were flocking to the area. A new face wouldn’t be overtly surprising. Capobar reasoned he could put off any serious inquiries by simply claiming to be new in town and curious about the ruins.
More dangerous than the miners in the township were the tribal Gruul who laid claim to a ring of crumbling hills that bordered the small region on all sides. The Husk—the ring of corroded hill country surrounding the Utvara township—was their sovereign territory since the battle weeks earlier, from that day and on into perpetuity (though that word, “perpetuity,” had many different dimensions and definitions when it came to Orzhov contracts). Capobar had no doubt that at this very moment one or more Gruul scouts watched him even as he watched the township, the flats, and the ruins. Just as he was counting on the local constabulary, such as they were, to respond with midnight lethargy to a lone man walking into the Cauldron, he had done enough research into the area to learn that the Gruul didn’t give a wooden zib what you did in the flats. If they cared they would already have been on him. Judging from what the shadewalker had said they weren’t in any shape to show an interest even if they wanted to. But if he tried to cut through the Husk on his way out, the trespass alone would mean the end of the venture, even if their numbers were reduced.
He slipped a pair of mana-goggs from his forehead to the bridge of his nose and tapped the refraction crystal several times to get a look at the entire spectrum of magical auras. The old magelord’s djinns and elementals, even his goblins, had long since abandoned the place or, perhaps, been driven away by the same townsfolk who had incinerated the dragons’s corpses. On the lowest and highest refractions he thought he could make out a haze over the path ahead, perhaps a magical fog, but with so much mana recently burned away here, that was to be expected. The small swath of farmland to the west looked gray under the moonlight but glowed green in his crystallized vision. Elsewhere, other spots of magic appeared on the inner lenses—the reddish shape of a miner in a strength-enhancing liftsuit, the streaking white line of a passing falcon enchanted for speed, and the olive-gray wall surrounding two structures that looked like dorms for zombie labor.
A month ago, Capobar knew little of Utvara. It was just another reclamation zone, one of many such areas all over the world, places where the old, crumbling infrastructure of civilization was flattened and rebuilt anew. It was a process long since perfected, in theory. Then the dragons had come, which had, of course, been big news even in the central city. Two of them had torn out of the still-smoldering ruins that stood a half mile away from him. They’d flown, they’d fought, and they had killed each other. Most blamed the Izzet magelord who had built the collapsed power station and adjoining superstructure, though it was widely reported that some damn fools had tried to ride the things.
Capobar’s client said that there had been three dragons, and only two had made it out of the caldera. And whether it was simple superstition or a real concern about s
afety, the ruins of the Cauldron had lain undisturbed for three weeks and change. The townsfolk had no idea of the treasure that lay within or its value. The Orzhov baroness certainly didn’t or it wouldn’t still be there.
And it was definitely there, suffused with a blazing orange and blue aura, sitting in the ruins. It was so bright he had to tap the goggles again to bring it into focus.
Capobar adjusted his cloak as he stood and stretched his legs, wincing involuntarily at the popping joints. He was dressed in dark, unassuming clothes that didn’t scream out “master thief” but didn’t draw attention to him either. Capobar tapped the mana-goggs until the refraction field settled on the higher spectrum of magic that had shown the “fog” and left it there.
The thief pulled his hood down tightly over his head, popped his knuckles inside his fingerless gloves, turned over his shoulder, and whispered, “Stay ten paces behind me until I have it. Make the exchange without a word. Wait for me at the office, and don’t even think about running out on me.” He added the last almost by reflex as he leaned down and pressed his palms against his outer thighs, over the twin swiftfoot magemarks tattooed on his legs. The magical markings were relatively new features on his aging body and had cost him a pretty zib. He whispered the activation words and potent magic rushed into his muscles, bones, and circulatory system all at once. They would not last long, but in twenty-four hours (give or take) he could use them again. Not that he expected the need to arise. In twenty-four hours Capobar intended to be sipping hyzdeberry wine and counting the take from this little adventure.
“The thought occurs that if you did not trust me, you did not need to hire me.”
“The thought also occurs that I’m not paying you to think,” Capobar said. He shuddered before making a small hop that almost sent him crashing headfirst into the half-arch of a blackened rib. It always took him a few minutes to get used to the magemarks’ effects. “From here, the only real danger is falling rocks and cooling lava. In fact, between you and me, the paycheck on this job makes even less sense now that I see this place. The road is clear, and there are no guards at all.” He tapped his foot, which made a sound like a hummingbird and looked a bit like one too. A craving not unlike thirst was settling into his bones thanks to the magical tattoos. Capobar needed to run.