Dissension

by Cory Herndon

  “So much for my theory,” Pijha said. “ ‘Necrotic observations?’ Like what?”

  As if in reply, a shriek rang in the late-evening air, from the sound of it only a few alleys away. “That, for starters,” Helligan said. “Woundseeker. I waited for it to leave before I began to work. Standard safety protocol, labmages aren’t issued grounders. She didn’t seem to want to hang around.”

  “I can’t imagine she found the view appealing,” Fonn said. “So the rats didn’t kill her, but she was killed.”

  The labmage picked up one of the rats, and Fonn steeled herself for another natural-history lesson she hardly needed. Helligan fancied himself more than a simple labmage and rarely wasted a chance to demonstrate the breadth of his extracurricular studies.

  “Your partner is correct, Officer Fonn. They are fascinating creatures,” the labmage began. “No fear of us whatsoever. They easily outnumber every other form of life in the world, you know. Perhaps not if you include the undead, but then the definition of ‘life’ is such a—but I digress. My point is that I would hesitate to put anything out of the reach of their rodent brains, or their efficient little bodies.” As if to emphasize Helligan’s point, one of the feasting rodents chattered at him as he poked a small, hooked tool into an open wound on the woman’s neck.

  Fonn grimaced. She knew that joining the ’jeks would not always be simple. Today, it was outright disgusting.

  In the wake of the Decamillennial, the League of Wojek had found its ranks decimated. Between the corrupted Selesnyan quietmen and their mad attack on every wojek fort in the city, and the disturbingly widespread lurker infiltration (still not a widely known fact outside the League), hundreds of wojek officers had been killed. Before the reckoning of wojek losses was even complete many more had left the service for higher-paying jobs in security. And some, like Fonn Zunich’s troubled friend Agrus Kos, simply quit. This created a void that needed filling, and the League turned to similar organizations with other guilds that could help. Fonn’s father had been a wojek, and she was one of the first ledev to volunteer for the auxiliary ranks. She took to the work easily. It was in her blood, perhaps even more than the open road.

  Her blood and all of her instincts told her this was not as simple as it looked, but she could not tell exactly why it wasn’t so simple. Pijha might be right.

  “Not long ago,” Pijha said, “this wouldn’t even be worth our time. You know that, right? A simple murder like this, I mean. We might really be stretching the definition of guild commerce here. There was no sigil over the door.”

  “No, but look, she’s got the collar pin of the Karlov family. She’s connected, all right. And her customers might have been—” Fonn began. “Wait. Her customers. We need to check her sales records. The last person to buy something will be a possible suspect, or at the very least a witness.”

  “Rats ate that,” Helligan said. “I think there are a few shreds over there in the corner where they’re building a nest.”

  “Okay,” Fonn ventured. “Then we can make an educated guess. No other animals here, so let’s say we can assume she only sold rats. Rats are holy in many cultures. And the Rakdos Guild favors rats as pets, right?”

  “Officers?” Helligan said.

  “And maybe—maybe the Rakdos didn’t like her prices,” Pijha said. “They roughed her up a bit, but they’re thrill-killers and couldn’t resist. Except there’s only one problem.”

  “Yeah,” Fonn nodded with a grimace, “she still has blood left.”

  “Rakdos would have drunk it or smeared it all over the walls. They’re not exactly known for restraint,” Pijha said, rolling now. “So it wasn’t Rakdos. Who else would—”

  Helligan coughed and repeated more loudly, “Officers? Lieutenant?”

  “What have you found?” Pijha said.

  “Oh, nothing yet. I’ll have to run tests first on these samples,” the labmage said. “But there is a simple way to determine whether any of these rats consumed anything other than this woman, if that is something you wish to determine immediately. I think there are enough to spare for the alchemical sciences, since we’ll be collecting extra.” Helligan’s empty hand shot out lightning quick and snapped up a fat, squealing rat by the tail. In the other hand he raised the surgical tool, currently configured as a razor scalpel.

  “No, Doctor, that’s really not—” Fonn said and finished with an involuntary “Ew.”

  Several seconds and several more sounds the half-elf apo would not soon forget later, the labmage shook his head. Surprise registered on his face, tempered with scientific curiosity. He tossed the rat corpse aside and took up another, then did the same with the new rat corpse, and another.

  “Well, I’ll be a dromad’s mother,” he said. “I admit it was a small and not particularly scientific sample, but all I’m finding are several semidigested chunks of Mrs. Zuza Uldossa, proprietor.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to try a few more to be sure, of course. But if they ate the birds, this one didn’t get any.”

  “Birds?” Fonn said. She had picked up a faint avian scent in the air but had attributed it to the pigeons that lined the eaves of the roof outside, as they did almost everywhere in the city.

  Helligan waved his bloody scalpel in a circle around his head. “Birdcages, if I don’t miss my guess. And I found this.” He produced a golden feather curiously free of blood.

  “Where did you find that?” Fonn asked.

  “In the dustpan,” Helligan said, pointing to the corner where the dustpan in question rested on the floor next to an upright straw broom. “Aside from the obvious, this place is quite tidy. She must have swept up recently.”

  Pijha took the feather from the labmage and held it up to the light. He shook his head, shrugged, and handed it to Fonn, who did the same. “It’s not pigeon,” she said after a few seconds.

  “It’s not?” Pijha said.

  “No,” Fonn said. She gave the feather an experimental sniff, and her nose confirmed what her eyes told her. “This is a tail feather from a bird of paradise.”

  “Those are exceedingly rare,” Helligan said. “I’d say it qualifies as ‘exotic.’ ”

  “It certainly does,” Fonn agreed, and Pijha nodded.

  “I’ll send a falcon for a few extra hands,” Helligan said. “We may need to collect more of these little fellows than I thought. If they ate a bird of paradise—”

  “This investigation is going to expand too,” Pijha said with a sigh. He was dedicated, but Fonn knew he also preferred his cases simple, like most career ’jeks, or at the very least free of interference from the brass. But the death of such a valuable creature would elevate the level of the crime, and the higher-ups would almost certainly take an interest once the assurors and other interested parties came to them demanding to know what was being done to protect the good, wealthy citizens of Ravnica.

  Outside, a chorus of ringing bells interrupted Fonn’s train of thought. She counted the tolls and grimaced.

  “Lieutenant, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m going to have to let you take it from here. I have a prior commitment.”

  Pijha’s frown curved back into his usual amiable grin. “I remember. You mentioned it yesterday, and the week before, and the week before that. Say ‘hello’ to the kids for me. Helligan and I can hold down this fort until you get back. And if we figure this out before then, the first round will be on you.”

  “I don’t doubt you will,” Fonn said. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

  Myczil Savod Zunich held his breath as his quarry shuffled past the makeshift hunting blind. He was eleven years old, but this was not his first venture into the wilds that fringed the underground metropolis of Old Rav. His father had made sure the boy could load a crossbow by the time he could walk. He had made his first kill at the age of five, a serpent-wurm hatchling that had fallen into a trap the precocious child had concocted himself and built with his father’s help.

  Jarad, the Devkarin guildmaster of the
Golgari and the de facto lord of the undercity, was similarly silent, crouched beside his son with an ornately carved Devkarin spear gripped loosely in one hand. This was the first time he had taken the boy on a hunt for two-legged prey. Their quarry was a small gang of rebellious zombie deadwalkers who had taken to raiding the less-traveled roads into and out of Old Rav, where neither the ledev nor the wojeks bothered to keep order. Jarad preferred it that way. Keeping his own form of order in the undercity was a point of pride for the Golgari under his leadership. And whenever he could attend to security personally, he gladly did so.

  Technically, these deadwalkers were Golgari, but they had given up any rights to the name when they’d defied Jarad’s edict that outlawed such activity.

  The guildmaster did not know if his son would choose to follow in his footsteps or those of his mother. Perhaps the boy would choose neither path and find his own way, which was his right. But Jarad was a father as well as a guildmaster and naturally preferred to have his progeny carry on for him when his own time ended, as it inevitably would. So far, young Myc had always done him proud. The boy had matured rapidly, like those with elf blood did, and had already proven himself against beasts. Now he would be tested against more canny prey. Myc had formed his own plan for this hunt, and Jarad had approved, impressed. The boy had come up with a simple but quite effective plan, even if it wasn’t as lethal as the one the guildmaster would have conceived.

  Jarad blamed Myc’s mother for that.

  Seven, eight … in all, thirteen pairs of gray, skeletal feet shuffled past. The deadwalkers were still several paces away from springing the trap when Jarad heard Myc gasp, a sound that abruptly stopped short when the last zombie froze in its tracks. The Devkarin saw what had made his son gasp a moment later and scowled.

  His ex-wife rounded the corner and rode boldly down the little-used road at a trot, the hooves of her great dromad clopping on the moss-covered stones. The deadwalkers immediately turned to face her, well short of the pit that would have cast them all into a huge net and captured them easily in one fell swoop. As soon as she saw them, the dromad rider pulled the reins and stopped her mount short.

  “Hello,” the half-elf said, the silver crest of her ledev helm glinting in the blue light of the only glowsphere for half a mile in either direction. “I trust there will be no trouble. I am bound for Old Rav.”

  The thirteenth zombie, in the lead position as the pack reversed direction, shuffled ominously toward the dromad rider and hissed a simple reply. “No, yoush are nosht,” the deadwalker managed through its toothless mouth.

  Jarad felt a jab in his ribs and saw Myc looking up at him anxiously. He mouthed the words, What now?

  The dromad rider dismounted easily and stepped between the animal and the deadwalkers, drawing a silver long sword as she did so. “Yes,” she said calmly, “I am.”

  For the briefest of moments, Jarad remembered why he had pursued Fonn Zunich’s heart, and felt a tinge of regret that things had turned so sour between them.

  Courage or not, she was still outnumbered. Jarad turned to Myc and mouthed, on three. Myc nodded. When the entire gang had shuffled by and closed on Fonn, who remained as calm as ever despite a nervous whinny from her dromad, the Devkarin counted down silently. One. Two.

  Myc tensed and nodded.

  Three.

  Father and son sprang from the blind simultaneously behind the zombies. The two rearmost deadwalkers whirled slowly on them. Devkarin steel cut down each one in turn.

  “Good to see you both,” Fonn said, breaking the zombies’ stunned silence. “Friends of yours?”

  “Hi, Mom,” Myc said.

  “Not friends,” Jarad smirked. “Prey.”

  The deadwalkers were smart enough to understand the words—and the fact that their numbers had been quickly reduced from thirteen to eleven. On either side, slick, stone walls blocked their way, and in both directions drawn blades obviously wielded with some skill blocked the underground road.

  The deadwalkers would react to this one of two ways, in Jarad’s experience: They would turn on each other, or they would fight.

  As one, the deadwalkers chose option two. Four charged toward Fonn, who beheaded one before blocking a series of ragged, uncoordinated strikes from the other zombies’ rusty, makeshift weapons.

  That was all Jarad saw of her before the remaining seven went after guildmaster and son. The Devkarin took the forearms off of the nearest with an upward swipe of his kindjal, and removed the top of the zombie’s skull on the downward strike. Myc’s smaller stature allowed him a different angle of attack, and the boy drove his own sword through the leg of a hissing deadwalker who was just within reach. The zombie toppled to one side, but two more took its place, forcing Myc to backpedal to his father’s side.

  A lucky strike from one of the deadwalkers knocked Fonn’s blade free from her grip, and she backed into the dromad, which started to shuffle backward itself.

  “Mom!” Myc cried and threw a look over one shoulder. “We’ve got to help her!”

  “I’ll be fine!” Fonn said. “Don’t do anything—”

  Myc was already moving, however, and Fonn’s protest fell on deaf ears. It was all Jarad could do to keep up with the agile boy as he ducked around and under the deadwalkers, making his way to his mother’s side as the swipes and snarls of the zombies followed.

  The distraction was enough for Jarad to take out another pair of deadwalkers and incapacitate a third with a backward kick that shattered both of the zombie’s kneecaps. Jarad followed that with a boot heel that crushed the thing’s skull.

  By the time Jarad returned his attention to Myc and Fonn, the other four lay in pieces on the road, twitching as their necrotic energy dissipated into the ground.

  “Did you—?” Jarad said to Fonn, who shook her head.

  “They were messing with my mom,” Myc said. “Sorry, Dad. We’ll have to capture them next time. Couldn’t be helped.”

  Jarad had to suppress a grin that he knew would have brought grief from his ex-wife, which he preferred to avoid when in their son’s presence.

  Fonn, for whatever reason, wasn’t so inclined at the moment. “So this is how you take care of my son?” Fonn said with sudden anger. “A zombie hunt?”

  “It was my idea, Mom,” Myc said. “I’ve been learning a lot, but I’ve always got more to learn, like you always say. And I thought—”

  “Never mind,” Fonn said with a sigh. She arched an eyebrow at Jarad. “We can talk about this later. Right now we’ve got a journey ahead of us. You’re ready, Myc? Do you need to pick anything up from—”

  “No,” Myc said, but he looked questioningly at his father. “I’m ready to go?”

  “You did well. Take pride in this hunt,” Jarad said. “The ability to improvise is at least as important as the ability to plan—nothing can be completely foreseen.”

  “Yes, Dad,” Myc said. The Devkarin instinctively concealed the unseemly disappointment he felt when he saw how easily the boy changed his focus to his ledev studies. Intellectually he knew that his son would ultimately be a better man for the scope of his training. The disappointment was more visceral. Jarad buried it as he always did. There was little point in dwelling on it.

  “Fonn, it is good to see you,” Jarad said formally.

  “Right,” Fonn said.

  The Devkarin shrugged and pulled a white hunting mask, his symbol of office, over his face. “I will see you soon. I must summon hunters to clean up this mess.” He placed a hand on Myc’s shoulder then looked at Fonn and said, “You did very well today.”

  “Thank you,” Fonn said with surprising sincerity. Then she turned from him. “Myc, the other scouts will be waiting.”

  “I know, I know,” Myc said and gave his father a quick hug. “I’ll see you soon too, Dad.”

  “Come on,” Fonn said. “You can ride the dromad.”

  “I think I need to stretch my legs,” Myc said. “You go ahead.”

  Jarad wa
tched them go with a fading smile and returned Myc’s final wave. He turned his mind to the immediate, messy task before him and the infinitely messier tasks waiting for him when he returned his full attention to running the guild. Usually, that would have been more than enough to keep his mind occupied until the next time he saw his son and actually got to enjoy himself in some small semblance of his old life, hunting and exploring the wilds.

  This time, a nagging uncertainty refused to release its grip on his thoughts. Some Devkarin elves had the gift of prophecy, but Jarad had never been one of them. Yet he could not shake the feeling that the two people on all of Ravnica he truly cared about were headed into deep trouble.

  Don’t say I have the face of an angel,

  ’Cause it’s such an easy thing to do.

  I would never want the face of an angel,

  Not after seein’ what an angel goes through.

  —Face of an Angel, by Shonya Bayle,

  the Balladrix of Tin Street

  30 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.

  Teysa Karlov shivered. She wished she had thought to wear a heavier cloak over her ceremonial advokist’s robes to this first interview. The entire complex was still chilly from the night and an unseasonable cold snap. The sun was only just peeking over the towers outside when Teysa had stepped inside the Azorius demesnes, and Prahv, the seat of law in the center of Ravnica, was always a little chilly throughout its vaulted halls. The Azorius employed a lot of vedalken, and they liked low temperatures—they claimed the chill helped preserve their “superior intelligence.” Regardless of the reason, Teysa had already grown used to the warm, desertlike conditions in her new barony. The young woman, a scion of one of the three most powerful ruling families in the Guild of Deals, ruled the reclamation zone of Utvara as baroness (and soon as duly elected mayor, all the right gears having been sufficiently oiled). She was also a fully licensed Orzhov advokist, a lawmage of great acclaim, and she had returned to the city of Ravnica to take on a new client she could hardly refuse.