by Cory Herndon
“Of course my fee is nonnegotiable,” the shadewalker whispered.
“Of course,” Capobar snapped. “Your salary is the same as always. And,” he added before the shade could reply, “the bonus will be waiting back at the office.”
In his accelerated state, Capobar saw the fog slowly form sharp edges all around him. A second later the ground rocked and knocked him off of his feet.
It sounded like an enormous footstep, while the impact felt like an underground explosion. Capobar curled and came down ready to spring, expecting to see—well, something. He managed to stay upright when the second “footstep” came, and he realized why there was nothing to see. Whatever was making the footsteps was “walking” (or pounding) on the underside of the ground Capobar stood upon.
It sounded big, and it sounded like it wanted out.
He pushed the mana-goggs back onto his forehead. The magical field was blinding. Whatever was down there was practically sweating mana into the air. Through solid rock. Another crashing thump sounded beneath him, and this time a radial crack in the stone before him appeared.
“Strike what I said. That fee is making more and more sense every second,” he muttered, then said a little louder to make sure the shadewalker heard him, “But there’s no way I’m going back empty-handed. You still with me?”
“I am uncertain why we are waiting,” the shadewalker replied.
“Uncertain why—” Capobar began, but a fourth thump cut him off. The cracked ground took on a vaguely conical shape. “Never mind. This is a distraction. Let’s go.”
Capobar bolted forward just as the biggest crash yet struck the flats from below. A single accelerated step took him more than twelve paces, and he caught the sole of one foot on a rising slab of stone that erupted ahead of him to form a rapidly elevating ramp. The spring-loaded thief used the stone’s momentum to launch himself into the air like an acrobat. He risked a look down as he soared faster than a speeding bamshot over the center of a split in the earth.
In the center of the crack, a single yellow eye with a pupil like a cat’s blinked at him once. The alien glare hit Capobar with a palpable wave of malice, like a sucker punch to the soul. The wave made him forget to roll when he landed on the far side of what was rapidly turning into a crater. He regained his footing at a dead run with all of his bones intact only because of the quick reaction time afforded by the magemarks. He didn’t look back, nor did he call for the shadewalker. Capobar just ran as fast as he could for the Cauldron. In a corner of his mind, he was already adding an astronomical amount of hazard pay to the day’s expenses.
The master thief spun in midrun and ran backward, feet blurring beneath him and wind whistling past his hood. He pulled the mana-goggs back on and cast his eyes about for the shadewalker, tapping the refraction until he spotted the ghostly blue shape of his partner dashing down the path beside him. Reason number one Capobar had plunked down so many zinos for this particular piece of equipment: Invisibility was in the eye of the beholder. The mana-goggs let him keep track of his entire staff, including shadewalkers.
As a side benefit, the mana-goggs also made it slightly easier to gaze at that baleful yellow eye. It had risen from the crater in the road and stared from atop a writhing mass of a long, scaly tentacle. The mottled appendage clutched the eye like it was a rubber ball, and through the focused goggs he could see it was misshapen, not like a true eye at all. Some kind of camouflage? Why would something that large need camouflage?
Not that this creature was his concern as long as it stayed put. The crashing seemed to have stopped, and the eye-that-wasn’t-an-eye simply watched him run. The hair on the back of Capobar’s neck stood on end, but as long as it only watched, it didn’t change the original plan. Whatever the thing was, it hadn’t disturbed the Utvara nightlife. It certainly wasn’t another dragon, and though it was visible from the township no one there seemed the least bit concerned about it. The carousing continued beneath the glowposts, and the mining equipment continued to delve beneath the surface.
The master thief had known there were monsters in these parts but not that they were quite so big. But if it didn’t bother the locals, it didn’t bother him either. The thing certainly couldn’t catch him if it wanted to, regardless. He could use it for any explanations he might need to give later, however—new in town, monster attack, took shelter in the nearest structure, even if it was a smoldering ruin.
It only took a few minutes for the fleet-footed master thief to reach the edge of the Cauldron. The heat and smoke grew more palpable and made him pull the bandanna back over his face, sweat beading on his forehead. The place might be a ruin, but it was still sitting atop an active geothermic vent. Nothing rose up to threaten him but the temperature.
Good enough.
He took a few slow breaths as the swiftfoot effect started to wear off. The magic was useful but didn’t last long. It was with relief that he saw the shadewalker keeping pace.
There had once, it appeared, been two main entrances to the caved-in cone that remained of the Izzet magelord’s massive Cauldron project. One of them still provided access to the interior—Capobar could tell from the way the target’s magical aura brightened inside the shape of the arched door. With hardly a sound, he scrambled over the rocks and boulders that hid the access point from the rest of the flats and entered the Cauldron proper.
Upon seeing the interior of the ruined structure, he bit back a warning that had been forming on his lips. From the look of it, a loud voice might trigger one of two outcomes, neither desirable. One, the whole place might finish the slow process of caving in. Tangles of metal architecture and broken stone lay everywhere, illuminated by the soft, orange glow of the lava that made the place as hot and humid as a jungle. A huge disk, looking for all the world like a gigantic broken dinner plate, hung suspended on one end by the wreckage. The other edge of the platform rested atop the indisputably crushed remains of a gigantic egg. Strange geometric shapes were still visible on the disk’s surface.
To Capobar’s surprise, he and the shadewalker were not alone inside the ruin. And to his relief, he had not yet been spotted. The second possible outcome, and the more likely one in his estimation, would be death by monster.
A few taps of the mana-goggs showed that this giant had some kind of magical kinship with the tentacle-eye thing under the road. It was big but nowhere as large as the skeletal dragon—maybe about the size of a pair of good-sized wagons stacked on top of each other—but it might easily have swallowed him whole. Its body was shaped like a beetle’s, though it had no carapace or wings. Its skin appeared disturbingly human, pink and fleshy, with a long tail and a flat, toothy face showing no eyes. It stood on four muscular legs that appeared to end in parodies of human hands, and it shifted back and forth on its hand-feet as it dug into what, for it, must have seemed like a feast—a smashed egg twice its size.
Unfortunately, that meant the eyeless thing’s head was buried nose-deep in the bright glow of Capobar’s target. Fortunately, it was a big target, and he still might avoid detection. The monster looked quite focused on its meal.
The Gruul called creatures like this “nephilim,” but it wasn’t the name of a species so much as a generic term for large, presumably dangerous, mutations that emerged from time to time from the caves in the Husk. They were as large as a cargo wagon, though the tribes claimed they had once been towering and godlike. Nor were the Gruul the only ones who believed it, though it was their name for the creatures that had stuck. Such monsters had been the stuff of both legends and history on Ravnica for as long as anyone could remember, but only in wilder regions like Utvara did one find them anymore. The Gruul also believed the nephilim to be immortal, but Capobar wasn’t the sort to accept such claims. Magic was magic, and magic could do strange things, but magic was a tool first and foremost. Things lived, things died, sometimes they lingered, but nothing lived forever, of that he was fairly certain. No matter how magic they were. Not even the angels were still
around. No guarantee that they were dead, but they had disappeared. Everyone knew that.
The nephilim shuffled toward Capobar to get a better angle on its food. The thief ducked behind a dromad-sized piece of some bizarre, twisted wreckage that had once been an assortment of polished Izzet contraptions.
If Capobar approached the broken egg from the far side, he could still make it out with the treasure. Summoning all the control he could muster, he willed himself to be perfectly silent. The thief padded quietly around the nephilim’s shuffling bulk without incident.
A smell like rotten eggs washed over him. The nephilim smelled as unpleasant as it looked, but compared to the corroding dragon bones it was almost refreshing. At least the nephilim’s distinctive nasal signature wasn’t likely to permanently destroy your nostrils and most of your face.
His eyes trained on the monster, Capobar almost stumbled over a goblin corpse. There were a few scattered here and there, workers who had been unable to escape. Curious that the nephilim hadn’t touched them. He’d have thought the creature would find the corpses to be bite-sized morsels. Perhaps they were too cooked. A careful, silent leap took him over a bubbling seam in the floor that exposed more cooling lava.
Capobar almost collided with a second nephilim that was doing much the same as the first. Hunks of ruined machinery and the rocky lava dome that was the egg’s nest had concealed it. This one was serpentine, with a tubular, coiled body covered in multihued scales and patches of the same pinkish skin he’d seen on the other two. It was impossible to tell exactly how long the creature was, but it sat atop several coils. Its head and upper body were one, and again the creature had a freakish resemblance to at least part of a human being. A pair of humanlike arms with clawed hands picked small pieces of dragon flesh from within the steely eggshell and popped them into a small mouth ringed by silvery teeth set in the navel of a torso-shaped head. In the center of the nephilim’s chest-face was a single yellow eye that stared intently at the feast. It reminded the thief in an odd way of the flying snakes the Simic had set loose into the wild for the Decamillennial celebrations. Or a centaur that was all tail and eyeball.
This second feasting creature paid Capobar no more heed than the first. The remains of the egg must have been some good eating, he guessed, at least if you were a freakish mutant amalgamation. He just hoped they’d leave enough to satisfy his client.
He realized his heart was racing and reminded himself who he was. Evern Capobar was the master. A master, at least. So there were monsters. Big ones. He’d gotten around a monster or two in his day.
One exposed section of the egg was still clear. All he needed to do was get around this second monster undetected and he would be out of sight of both. He carefully slipped past a writhing tail as big as a tree trunk and over another desiccated goblin body, then risked a look up. The cyclopean snake-thing’s claws continued to pick at the morsel. One of them snapped at the first nephilim, which growled. The two creatures were making short work of the stillborn dragon’s remains.
Capobar raised a hand to signal the shadewalker. A few seconds later an empty silver cylinder about the length and circumference of his arm appeared in midair and dropped into his open hand. From his own pack, the thief screwed a sharp, hollow needle into the business end of the cylinder then raised it overhead like a soldier preparing to impale an enemy.
Capobar took no chances. Had he been caught before getting into the Cauldron he would have had difficulty explaining the implement.
The entire affair had gone unnoticed by the snacking nephilim. But not everyone had missed it.
“Human,” a voice rumbled, and the thief almost dropped the syringe. The voice seemed to be coming from—
No, it was definitely coming from within the egg.
Capobar only waited a second before he replied, “Yes?”
“Human,” the dragon repeated. Its voice was unnaturally deep, and it shook the master thief’s bones. But it was obvious even to Capobar, who had never seen a living dragon in his life, that this one was incredibly weak. The thief doubted its words would carry to the ears of the nephilim, let alone outside the Cauldron ruins. And why shouldn’t it be weak? It was being eaten alive.
Capobar had to hand it to the client. The timing was crucial for this particular retrieval, as he understood it, and it seemed to the thief that he had walked in at exactly the right time. Extraction had to take place before death, but preferably just before death, according to his instructions. He wondered if his client had known about the nephilim. Perhaps even sent them. Guildmasters—especially this one—could almost certainly manipulate such monstrous, if rather stupid, creatures.
The thief had expected the dragon to be alive. There was no point in being here otherwise. He had never expected the thing to speak to him.
“I am a human,” Capobar whispered to the darkness inside the ruined egg. He took a silent step forward and looked deeper into the shell where he could make out the shape of a reptilian snout. A faint, red circle appeared in the shadows.
The eye blinked once, slowly, with the sound of sandpaper rubbing together.
“You hear me,” the dragon wheezed. Even as it spoke, Capobar could also hear the two nephilim continuing to tear it apart. He was glad he’d skipped dinner. “You understand.”
“Yes,” Capobar whispered. “I’m trying to keep those two from knowing it though. Could you keep it down?”
If the dragon heard him, it didn’t acknowledge the fact. “You will kill me,” it said. Though truer words, Capobar reflected, had rarely been spoken in his presence, it did not sound like a prediction. The words were a command. A command painted with a hefty coat of plea.
“You want to die?” Capobar asked.
“You will kill me,” the dragon repeated. It didn’t falter even when the snake-thing ripped away one of its ribs.
“I will,” Capobar said. He raised the syringe. “This is going to hur—”
His mouth froze in place as the red eye focused on him with a hint of blazing irritation, even at the end of life. The scrutiny was palpable. Evern Capobar loosened his collar absently.
“However you do it,” the dragon wheezed, “do it. No time to waste.”
“Could you lift—?” Capobar began and grimaced. “I’m sorry, but I’m helping you here, so maybe you could help me. This would be a lot easier if you could, maybe, stretch out your neck? Poke your head out a little bit?”
A gravelly, repetitive wheeze came from inside the crushed egg. The dragon was laughing. “You are small. You cannot see. I am trapped. My spine, crushed or gone. My flesh is being stripped. Consumed. My head is going nowhere, morsel.”
No, I can definitely see that, Capobar thought. He tried to ignore that he’d just been called a “morsel.” To the dragon, he whispered, “Then I guess I don’t need to ask you to hold still.” He tucked the huge syringe under one arm. With careful steps, he moved over the pieces of jagged eggshell and a fortune in dried dragon blood until he could see the massive disk resting just overhead. The red eye was right in front of his face.
“Why do you wait?” the dragon wheezed.
“Just need to make sure I hit the right spot—the gland is right … there,” Capobar said as he raised the needle and drove it home just above the enormous glowing orb. He braced a foot against a stirrup bolted onto the side of the cylinder and pulled with all his might. After a few moments that threatened to throw his back out permanently, a pane of glass showed him that the syringe was filled with a thick grayish-red substance that pushed the definition of “liquid.” A few seconds later he saw that the plunger had retracted as far as it was going to retract.
The needle slid free without a sound. Capobar unscrewed it and returned it to his pack. He slammed a cork stopper into the improvised canister and tucked it under his arm again—with the stopper extended it was the only way to carry the precious cargo.
“Thank you,” the dragon said, and died.
The shadewalker had alrea
dy left to meet Capobar at the edge of the ruins. He thought he heard the sounds of dromad hooves from the direction of the township. Sure enough, someone was coming to check him out. The enormous eye was nowhere to see or be seen.
“Now?” the shadewalker whispered over his shoulder when he arrived.
“Yes,” Capobar said and held out the container that held the precious substance. An invisible hand took it from him, and the portable payday disappeared. “I’ll see you back at the office,” he added. Reiteration never hurt. “Plan on going with me to the client. I could use a little insurance.”
“This is true,” the voice said.
Then Capobar felt something like ice press against his chest. A tiny pinprick of cold just over his heart made him pull back with a start, and he felt himself caught by another pair of strong, invisible arms before he went over backward.
He knew he should never have hired shadewalkers. They were entirely too … shady.
The nephilim fed for hours. The two that Capobar had evaded became three. Three became four. When the fifth nephilim arrived, there was no longer enough room in the Cauldron to hold them. Their bodies would not stop growing, so their hunger would not subside.
Each one was unique. One looked like living rock, a hunk of hillside on three crustaceanlike legs. The head of an ancient statue hovered over its center of gravity, a peculiar effect born of this nephilim’s own magical nature and a recently ended four-century nap during which it had played the part of actual hillside a bit too well. Another resembled a six-legged cross between a salamander and a bloated fish: all arms, legs, and gullet. The bulbous throat of the beast writhed with what looked like a thousand tiny imitations of itself, some of which wriggled free of the thing’s mouth and hopped into the streets, attacking fleeing Utvaran townsfolk. Finally, the burrower moved in, the thing that had ripped its way through the ground at the edge of the Husk and almost ended the master thief’s latest exploit ahead of schedule. When fully exposed, it resembled a cross between an octopus, a jellyfish, and a freakish tree on tentacles. Smaller appendages supported eyestalks like the one that had watched Capobar flee. The creature ripped away bits of meat with barbed hooks lining its writhing arms and stuffed the flesh between light-sensitive eye sacs, there to be digested directly by an organ that had no known analog on the plane of Ravnica, a combination stomach and brain. It could see in every direction, and in seven dimensions.