Dissension

by Cory Herndon

  We were proceeding with that plan, great Niv-Mizzet, Crixizix thought back. Had we the time, I would go over those plans in detail, but I assure you they—

  Your incompetence can wait, the dragon thought. Do not fear for your life just yet, Master Engineer. This is ultimately Zomaj Hauc’s doing. You are merely a goblin. Perhaps I asked too much of you.

  My lord, Crixizix thought, I bow to your supreme judgment. Tell me what you will have me do.

  Stay out of my way, the Firemind replied then added, it’s been some time since I’ve had the opportunity to do something like this. I plan to enjoy it. If you wish to save that rabble, I suggest you do it now.

  I implore you, please take care to—

  The mental slap knocked Crixizix’s head back into her seat with an audible crack.

  My wrath does not take care, the Firemind growled. Once awakened, it will see blood. Enjoy the show.

  Crixizix kicked the flame-pods into a flash-burst to dodge the swooping dragon as he passed low over Utvara. She hovered overhead, doing as ordered and staying out of the way. As an afterthought, she activated the observosphere’s recorders. When the Great Dragon promised you a show, it wasn’t a bad idea to save it for history. Even if the show promised to be a disaster for Crixizix’s newly adopted home.

  But despite his words, the dragon did not—as the goblin had feared—immediately torch the entire place. It seemed Niv-Mizzet’s wrath felt a bit more visceral today. He veered over the city with a roar that made all five of the rampaging creatures issue their own howled challenges in return.

  From her new vantage point, Crixizix could see the battlefield Utvara had become. On the north end of town, devouring entire swaths of Golgari fields and Selesnyan veztrees, the four-legged beast that was all mouth and tail bellowed another challenge to the dragon. To the east, the tentacled brain-thing pulled down the walls of a low-rent hostelry. Just south of that, something that looked like a walking mountain topped with a statue’s head dug cruel troughs in the ground, shaking another set of dwellings to their foundations and sending them tumbling over sideways. Due west, the snake-nephilim was crushing a Haazda watchtower in its constricting coils, surrounded by a ring of fleeing Haazda volunteers who ran smack into a wall of embryonic froglings headed in the opposite direction. The froglings’ parent loomed over its brood and belched up a few more, and the hopping nephilim-spawn—each one half again the size of a man—pummeled every Haazda within reach.

  Each of the original five nephilim Crixizix had spotted easily outweighed Niv-Mizzet after hours of uninterrupted growth. But the creatures still did not have the Firemind’s ancient intelligence, power, and cunning. She felt a wave of roughly similar sentiment from the dragon himself. The Izzet guildmaster hurled a shot of flame at the tail-mouth, enveloping the nephilim in dragon fire. The eyeless monster wailed pitiably inside the blast, then hunched all four spindly limbs. It launched directly upward, on a collision course with Niv-Mizzet, dripping blazing chunks of oily, melting skin on the ruined buildings below.

  Niv-Mizzet was not waiting around to be tackled, and looped around the burning creature. As it shot past, he raked it across the back, opening three grievous wounds and tearing out a good many spiked vertebrae that rained, clattering, to the ground. The flames had burned themselves out when it somehow landed on all four hand-feet in a crouch, charred, smoldering, and furious. The dragon extinguished that fury with another sustained blast of superheated pyromanic flames that reduced the facing half of the nephilim to white-hot cinders in seconds. The remaining half collapsed, twitching, against the last remaining part of Baroness Karlov’s new mansion.

  Crixizix’s cheer died on her lips when she saw what Niv-Mizzet’s quick first strike had caused. Sections of rubble were alight with uncontrolled—and likely uncontrollable—flames fed by the winds the dragon kicked up with every stroke of his wings. Worse, the other nephilim were all focused directly on Niv-Mizzet, the advantage of surprise was gone. The guildmaster looked distressingly … surrounded.

  Nonsense, the Firemind said but did not elaborate. The goblin could feel the vast intelligence racing, ablaze with the immediacy of the fight, and decided to think more positively. Dragon fire was one of the few things that could melt the magically forged element mizzium, and Crixizix’s observosphere would not likely survive a stray shot.

  Niv-Mizzet flew low toward the brood-belching frog nephilim, strafing the open flats with fire. The encroaching horde of froglings popped and crackled in the flames, hundreds dying in the time it took the dragon to make a single pass overhead.

  The horde’s instincts kicked in, and several that had escaped only with burns managed to grab onto the dragon’s tail. Without looking back Niv-Mizzet cracked that tail like a whip, sending dozens of the froglings to splatter against the stony ground.

  The move was effective but was almost the dragon’s undoing. The brood parent lashed out with a simian, sucker-tipped arm that wrapped around Niv-Mizzet’s tail. The dragon flapped his wings furiously, blasting the landscape with scattered, unfocused mini-twisters but failing to free himself from the nephilim’s iron grip. The nephilim set its remaining five limbs and wrenched Niv-Mizzet out of the sky. The dragon struck the flats with a crash that was heard, if not immediately recognized, for miles in every direction. Just before he struck, the dragon twisted enough to land on his belly without breaking a wing, but Niv-Mizzet’s next roar was tinged with pain. The agony carried through the Firemind, and soon tears rimmed Crixizix’s eyes as the pain, to a certain extent, became her own.

  But Niv-Mizzet was not down yet, not by far. He recovered from the body slam within a few moments, pushed himself to all four feet and whipped his serpentine neck around to hurl a blast of flame directly into the frog-nephilim’s open mouth. The creature’s gullet inflated like a balloon, and hundreds more frogling spawn were immolated. Then even the nephilim’s tough, ancient hide could withstand the pressure no more. The brood belcher exploded.

  The blast sent pieces of brood parent and frog spawn in all directions, raining down over everything within the ring of the Husk for a full minute. The shock wave knocked Niv-Mizzet back past the observosphere. Crixizix had better luck, the ’sphere was built with such conditions in mind, and she managed to keep her vessel both stable and airborne. The hunks of nephilim that spattered over the observosphere forced her to feed a touch more pyromana to the flame-pods, but otherwise she appeared to be unharmed. She released the sphere-within-sphere cockpit clamps and swung around to follow the Izzet guildmaster’s seemingly uncontrolled flight. The dragon appeared stunned, limp, perhaps injured. Halfway down the descending side of his arc, Niv-Mizzet’s wings filled with air and he somersaulted out of freefall, coming to rest on all fours before the snake-nephilim. The monster’s enormous eye gazed impassively at the dragon, but it unwrapped itself from the Haazda watchtower—the tower collapsed in a cloud of dust behind it—and rose like a cobra preparing to strike, a cobra with arms growing out of either side of its head.

  With a threatening rumble, Niv-Mizzet mirrored the snake-thing’s movement and arched his neck, mouth wide and showing twin rows of terrible, razor-sharp teeth. Smoke billowed from the dragon’s throat and disappeared as he drew in a deep breath.

  The breath was cut short by the impact of a bulbous mass of tissue against the side of Niv-Mizzet’s head. The dragon recoiled, stunned, unable to pinpoint this second attacker before another projectile struck his left wing with frightening force. Crixizix and Niv-Mizzet spotted the fourth nephilim almost simultaneously. The tentacled beast tore loose another hunk of its own head—or more accurately one of the bulbous, eyelike spheres that covered it—and cast it with a snap. The dragon ducked, avoiding the projectile, and flapped mightily to regain the sky.

  That, Niv-Mizzet thought, was fun. But I grow weary of this.

  But my lord, Crix thought, there are still three of them. You must—

  You presume to tell me what I must do? the dragon replied. No. This was an
enjoyable diversion—one that I am quickly losing interest with. Nothing more. I think I shall retire and watch the others try their might against the nephilim for a while.

  Crixizix was stunned.

  You are leaving? The goblin asked in mental disbelief.

  The Firemind did not reply. Niv-Mizzet wheeled one last time in the sky and veered off toward one of his many hidden aeries in the north. Crixizix noted that he did not go back in the same direction he had come. Niv-Mizzet was abandoning the City of Ravnica, it appeared.

  Crixizix did not know what to do. Fear within the Firemind was inconceivable. As was the idea of the Guildmaster of the Izzet abandoning his people and his responsibility, allowing the Izzet to be destroyed by the rampaging nephilim. If she were to reveal this to the others—well, they’d probably use it as an excuse to drum her out of the guild. It wasn’t as if she were popular—most magelords seemed to believe she had been promoted well above her station.

  The goblin began to weep. Whether it was a result of disillusionment or shame, she wasn’t sure.

  As the three triumphant nephilim lumbered off, tearing a path through the Husk that exposed layers of civilization long since forgotten and likely never to be studied, Crixizix turned her gaze back to Utvara. She forced herself to calm down. So what if her mind felt like it had been torn in two. So what if the Firemind was, ultimately, a living thing that could be irresponsible, or afraid, or whatever had caused him to abandon the Izzet. These things happened. All things considered, the people down below had it far worse, and she was still in a position to do something for them.

  She set the observosphere to land outside the Imp Wing—one of the only structures in Utvara that was more than fifty percent intact—and scrambled to collect every piece of medical and alchemical equipment she could find.

  A ledev has no love but the open road and no family except the Conclave—at least that’s what the Conclave wants you to believe.

  —Memoirs of a High Centuriad

  Published anonymously, 9104 Z.C.

  Banned by the Selesnya Conclave, 9105 Z.C.

  Second printing, 9106 Z.C.

  31 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.

  The newly reopened Utvara highway narrowed considerably at a point a couple hundred miles due east of Prahv. Fonn eyed the half-empty buildings rising on either side of the road, which cut a narrow cleft into the outlying regions of the central city. She had traded in her dromad for a trusty wolf, and the part-time apo sat tall in the saddle at the head of a small group of youthful scouts. The half-elf had left behind her wojek armor for the time being and returned to duty as a ledev guardian, one of the knights of the road who protected the vital routes of travel and commerce on Ravnica. And happily those duties also meant spending time with her son. She, Myc, and the others were bound for Utvara, but they were in no hurry. This sojourn to Utvara was not vacation. The scouts were to learn the roads outside the City of Ravnica in detail.

  Fonn found the League gave her one form of fulfillment—satisfying the desire to honor her father’s memory in her own way, since few others ever would. But she felt truly at home on the road, and since Myc had begun training with the scouts it felt less and less like duty. But duty it was, and necessary training that Fonn was determined her son would have. Lately, it seemed to her, the ledev guard spent more time patrolling newly constructed temple outposts, defending Selesnyan interests, than serving the good of all by patrolling the roads. The ledev were, in Fonn’s opinion, on their way to becoming nothing more than simple security guards. This did not sit well with the half-elf, and she knew she wasn’t the only ledev to feel that way. But such was the legacy of the quietmen, who for thousands of years had acted as guards, servants, and even vessels for disembodied members of the guild’s ruling collective. The quietmen had, unfortunately, been corrupted by dark forces at the Decamillennial and could no longer be trusted. The corpse fires had burned shamefully outside of Vitu Ghazi for weeks, and the Selesnya Conclave swore their faceless creations would never rise again.

  She forced herself not to dwell on such things, though the road, for her, always brought long stretches of philosophical contemplation along with long stretches of cobblestone. Contemplation aside, it felt remarkably good to be alive. Traffic was light. Fonn nodded to a small merchant wagon that trundled past. She recognized the man as an Utvaran. He had been among the crowd that assembled at the memorial for Agrus Kos and all those who died in the dragon attack. She still felt guilty that in the last twelve years she’d cut Agrus Kos more or less out of her life, and his sudden and senseless death had left her feeling even more unsettled than usual. Not that Fonn thought she could have stopped the dragons herself, but she could have helped Kos, perhaps saved him from his needless fate.

  Then again, Kos himself would probably have been the first to point out that she didn’t make him retire and move to a reclamation zone. He did that on his own.

  Fonn scratched her cytoplastic hand, a Simic replacement for the one she’d lost around the time she’d met Myc’s father. The original could not be restored through conventional magic, thanks to some kind of curse left by the creature that had taken it. She hardly even noticed it anymore, but ever since she’d left the city, the hand had started to itch like a gobhobbler with fleas. Cytoplasty was a relatively new form of bioalchemy, the Simic had said, but one that was virtually foolproof, with a rejection rate of only a few hundredths of a percent. She’d worn it for twelve years without incident, and it was virtually indistinguishable from the original and completely functional.

  Functional, but it could never be called attractive—pale and somewhat translucent, supported by a fibrous skeletal network of membranous blue and green tendrils that were clearly visible through the cytoplasm. The Selesnya Conclave did not approve of Simic cytoplastics on strict theological grounds, though there was technically no law against them.

  Her wolf flicked his ears in alarm, and she scratched his neck. “Nothing to worry about. I smell it too,” Fonn said in the wolf’s ear. “That’s Utvara. There’s a geothermic vent there. Burning stone. That’s all you smell.”

  Her eyes scanned the road, and she added, “Or maybe it’s them.”

  A little more than a mile ahead, the road followed a broad tunnel that ran beneath a complex network of original and rebuilt architecture that was home to thousands of guildless Ravnicans and members of the savage fringe guilds, like the Gruul, Rakdos, and even Golgari. It was one of the reasons she like using this stretch of highway to break in new recruits. You never knew what you might run into around here, but it was also close enough to the city gates to provide an escape route if real trouble arose. Danger seemed unlikely today, with so much daily life going on all around them.

  Even so, the band of travelers that had emerged from the shadows, clad in the familiar rags and leathers of Rakdos priests, caused a moment of alarm. It appeared to be a small prayer gang and not a raiding party, probably pilgrims headed to Krokt-only-knew-what sordid and bloody rituals. That was the thing about the roads of Ravnica—they were interconnected all over the world, a web of constantly moving people, commerce, and cultures, and just because you crossed paths with someone didn’t mean they were leaving where you were going or going where you came from.

  The Cult of Rakdos had a well-deserved reputation as one of the bloodiest-minded of the nine—no, ten, Fonn corrected—guilds. But that reputation had declined somewhat in recent years, tempered by the dispersal of the Rakdos rebels in an uprising several decades ago. These days those with the tattoos and scars of the Cult of Rakdos could be found working as bouncers, mercenaries, and laborers all over the city. Most lived in hivelike warrens where others rarely went and kept their sordid, bloody rituals to themselves. Supposedly, those warrens were huge carnivals of violence and mayhem, but no one knew for sure. The only Rakdos cultists who left the warrens for reasons other than work were priests observing the rituals and pilgrimages of their religion outside the range of the City Ordinances that did not allo
w things like the religious sacrifice of sentient beings, let alone killing for the express purpose of cannibalism. As Fonn understood it, that was the most sacred of all the Rakdos rituals.

  But as long as their demon-god guildmaster, Rakdos himself, remained entertained in Rix Maadi, the Rakdos kept to their place in Ravnican society. But the demon-god would surely rise again, on his own schedule, as had happened dozens of times since the Guildpact was signed. Why the paruns had allowed a guild like the Cult of Rakdos to exist was something that scholars and philosophers debated to this very day, but Fonn’s personal opinion was that it was simply to keep the near-immortal demon Rakdos in check by shackling him with a formal religion.

  These priests, far from their kind, seemed almost comical at this distance. A few were strumming and blowing musical instruments in an atonal marching rhythm. Another lead a giant indrik pack-beast. Fonn could hear its flat, heavy feet thumping along at a leisurely pace that matched the music. It was slung with dozens of animal cages of various sizes, most empty, but they made the mammoth creature look like a walking zoo. Portions of its skeleton were exposed, a sure sign of the Rakdos’ haphazard but effective necromancy.

  Fonn grimaced. Well, this was what training was for. They’d just have to go on as planned. She’d chosen this road, after all. A fully trained ledev guardian wouldn’t shirk from passing a small gang of Rakdos. She certainly wouldn’t if she were alone. As long as they kept their wits about them it should just be a passing exchange of greetings.

  And yet there was her son among the recruits, just eleven years old, even if that was only a few years short of adulthood for an elf. Myc was three-quarters elf so he was maturing even faster than Fonn had.

  “Something wrong, Mom?” called a young voice from a few paces back.

  “Probably nothing. I think Tharmoq just isn’t used to geothermic vents,” she replied quickly, fighting off a strange feeling of guilt. “But all of you, keep your eyes open. There’s a mean-looking bunch a few miles ahead of us, probably just pilgrims looking for stray beasts to sacrifice, but I want you all alert. It’s not against the law for them to capture living creatures, as much as we may not like it.”