by Cory Herndon
“Good morning, minister,” Kos said, nodding at the robed and hooded figure that shuffled up to him and smiled. “Good to see you looking well,” he lied.
“Hello, Argus,” the minister said. Kos thought he detected a hint of simpleton’s glee at an obviously intentional mispronunciation of his first name. The first time it had happened, Kos had corrected him, only to find the minister of auguries simply repeated it again, louder the next time. Kos’s sense of humor had been blunted by death, but he was fairly sure it wasn’t particularly funny.
His own name was one of the things he could remember, as well as the names of Azorius functionaries, which always seemed to appear unbidden in his mind whenever he saw them. Other memories he had more trouble with. He could remember fleeting glimpses of people, strange people of every kind—elves, zombies, goblins, imps, and ghosts. He recalled feelings of anger, loss, happiness, disappointment and had no luck placing them to any complete events. He remembered being a wojek, a protector of the laws, and flashes of life on the job were the strongest memories of all.
But his past life might as well have been a book he read as a child and never picked up again. Not that he could remember much of his childhood.
They said ghosts had no sense of the passage of time, but no one ever asked a spectral guard bound by law to the Azorius Senate. Time did indeed pass for a ghost, and for Kos it passed very, very slowly. To his frustration, he had trouble tracking it accurately. He knew he was relatively new to the guard, but it already felt as if he’d been here for ages. He knew he had been a wojek for a very long time, much longer than this, but he also knew he’d enjoyed that a lot more. Perversely, from what Kos recalled of his tenure as a wojek—as a living, flesh-and-blood lawman of Ravnica, walking a stretch that only occasionally required him to draw steel—he’d always felt pity for spectrals and somehow knew that most ’jeks did. From the average officer’s perspective, the spectral guard looked like a sad imitation, an illusion of a life that deserved to be honored, not extended by bond well into the afterlife.
The worst was being stuck in one spot. Shifts never ended for spectral guards. A spectral was a talking tombstone, unable to leave the shining white graveyard of Prahv. The temples of justice, the Azorius Senate, were home to thousands of flitting, industrious ghosts who had signed the wrong form or, worse, been such dull people in life that they’d requested this duty.
Kos knew intellectually that he would much rather have just been dead. He just couldn’t get angry, annoyed, or otherwise vexed by it anymore. What he’d pieced together of the man he used to be indicated that this was the last thing he would have wanted, back when he was alive. Yet here he stood, in a manner of speaking. He was solid, so long as he didn’t stray from Azorius territory. If he tried, he would dissipate. He did not try.
“Good morning, Tribune,” he said to another late arrival. The Azorius Senate would be in session in just a few minutes, but Tribune Naruscov showed no signs of hurry. Or of hearing the ghost’s cheerful greeting. Kos gave a phantasmal shrug to his opposite, a spectral called Castell. Castell, as usual, shrugged back, and they both turned to see who would pass next. Kos had tried to make conversation with Castell once and regretted it. Castell had a tin ear for small talk. Which, of course, only added to Kos’s interminable boredom.
The four hours of quasi-nonexistence wasn’t the only way the Azorius ensured the sanity of spectral guards—the loss of memory was by design, to prevent spectrals from developing too much of their former personality, personality that could disrupt the time-honored formality of the Azorius Senate and courts.
Sometimes on long, dark nights he saw imps and their ilk traversing the lower towers, traveling to and from Old Rav on all sorts of errands. He had known an imp. Pavel? Pilkin?
The Azorius had kept all of Kos that they needed. He remembered every law he had ever learned and had a suspicion that there were many more he had been taught by Azorius ectomages.
So it was with great surprise and all the shock a ghost could muster that Kos realized he clearly recognized the woman coming next up the steps. “Woman” was a misnomer, in fact. She was female, of that there could be little doubt, but she was far from human. She stood a full foot above the paladins who flanked her, and a pair of golden wings sparkled in the morning sunlight. He saw her and immediately knew her name. At the same time, he knew it was not truly her name but a nickname. A nickname he’d given her. Hadn’t he?
There was only one way to find out.
“Feather,” Kos said. “Is that you?”
The angel’s eyes opened wide when she heard his voice. The pair of large, silver-plated paladins guiding her up the stairs jerked her along forcefully as they passed Kos. Feather opened her mouth to speak, but no sound emerged. That was when Kos saw that the angel not only had her wrists bound together with lockrings, she also wore the familiar wing clamps she’d carried when serving in the League of Wojek.
She’d been a frequent partner of his. At least, he was pretty sure.
He was also sure he’d spent a long, long time looking for her when he was alive. She was the last thing he’d seen before his death. The wings. He’d seen her flying toward him.
The paladins leading Feather into Prahv jerked her head forward and gave the angel a shove that almost knocked her over, and she stumbled up the steps. Kos tried to turn and follow her but felt a palpable wall of force that kept him in place. One of the paladins eyed him suspiciously and barked, “Mind your place, spectral.”
The late Agrus Kos was compelled to obey. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t watch as the paladins pulled and prodded the angel to go with them through the great archway of Prahv.
“Good morning, Guardsman,” a gravelly voiced wheezed beside him. Compelled by the greeting to respond, he turned and nodded.
“Minister Bulwic,” he said automatically. “Good morning.”
Kos and Castell returned their attention to the steps and the slow procession of ministers and other officials making their ways to the halls of law and justice.
The vision of an angel danced around the corners of his mind. The passage of the bound and shackled being had already fled. A roc passed before the sun, a disk obscured by thickening cloud cover that promised more rain.
“Good morning, Minister,” Kos repeated, received a nod from another arriving senator, and nodded in return. Kos heard shouting and catcalls at the top of the steps but kept his attention on the arrivals.
Agrus Kos was dead, but his spirit lived on. The spirit wasn’t particularly happy about it, but you would never know it from asking him.
The skyjek patrol was not the first to see the Parhelion return to Ravnica. But Air Marshal Shokol Wenslauv was the first to go in for closer look.
The flying headquarters of the Boros angels, absent since the Decamillennial, reappeared directly over Utvara several hours earlier, behind clouds that rippled with holy thunder and unnaturally scarlet bolts of lightning. What remained of the Utvaran populace hardly noticed, understandably preoccupied with survival as the nephilim continued to plow their township into rubble.
At first Wenslauv, a veteran roc-rider familiar with a great many types of mental conditions that exhaustion and thin air could trigger after several hours of open-air flight, had thought it must be some kind of mirage. The patrol had been on their way back to the nest, there to check in for an eight-hour rest period before she set back out on another fourteen-hour shift—four on the ground with paperwork, ten in the air.
It was, she soon ascertained, no mirage. One second, the sky was empty except for the usual dawn traffic—riding birds, passenger bats, small personal zeppelids and their much larger freight-moving cousins, and a few Ravnican citizens capable of flight on their own flitting here and there between messenger falcons. Storms looked to be in the offing to the east, not common this time of year but not unheard of.
The next second, there was a golden castle under heavy sail emerging from the clouds at ten o’clock. It wa
s as solid and real as one could hope. At one time, it had formed the upper half of Sunhome, and it still docked there upon occasion.
“Krokt,” Wenslauv swore under her breath and immediately added a short prayer of penance for dishonoring the angelic host with casual blasphemy. The air marshal hand-signaled her wingmate to pull close enough for a shouted exchange.
“Lieutenant,” Wenslauv shouted over the high-altitude winds that screamed through the city’s tower tops around the wings of her flight helm, “report this to Centerfort. I’m going to hail the—” The air marshal paused and peered at the Parhelion. It was still somewhat distant, but she was heading toward them—and by extension, the Center—with all sails unfurled. Most of them, anyway. There was something very odd about the familiar but long-absent aerial headquarters of the angels of Boros, and not just its silent reappearance high over the City of Ravnica. Many masts hung empty or had been reduced to broken stumps. One of the six massive belly-mounted floatspheres that kept the fortress aloft was blackened and caved in, trailing a thin stream of oily smoke. Several of the spires that should have risen to form a peaked arch in the center of the Parhelion were broken off, smoldering and sputtering with magical energy.
“Sir?”
“One second.”
Open flames flickered in several shattered windows, and what looked like impact craters spotted the Parhelion’s surface. Wenslauv was something of an expert on what happened to objects dropped from a great height, and she was also a fine shot with the goblin bam-sticks all skyjeks carried as standard issue these days. The holes that peppered the great vessel reminded her of both. The Parhelion looked as if it had been through a war. But the strangest thing wasn’t what Wenslauv saw but what she didn’t see. When Razia had patrolled the skies of Ravnica from the Parhelion’s command deck, century upon century, a wing guard of at least a dozen angels led the way, always led the way, their pure voices raised in an ever-changing hymn that helped to guide the flying fortress on its course through the skies.
Though the Parhelion was back, the angels were nowhere to be seen. With no wing guard to navigate, the Parhelion seemed to be at the beginning of a slow, descending arc that ended some distance behind the air marshal, in the Center of Ravnica. If there were living angels aboard, there was no way they would be sailing on that vector, listing lazily to starboard at such an angle. They would certainly not have flame-pods burning at what the skyjek swore must be at least one-half power, driving the Parhelion onward. This was all wrong.
She tore her eyes away from the Parhelion long enough to scan the skies around her—as expected, she and her wingmate were the only law enforcement within hailing distance. And it was starting to rain again, as it had off and on for the last three days.
“Sir?” the lieutenant, a gifted goblin roc-rider named Flang, cried back. “That’s the—I mean, the angels! They’re back!”
“Belay my previous order,” Wenslauv hollered. “That thing’s heading right for Prahv. Skip Centerfort and head straight to the Senate. Use my authority and get that place evacuated, now!”
“But sir,” squeaked Flang, “The brass must be notified!”
“Fine,” Wenslauv said. “You’re right. But fly quickly, and to hell with the speed limits. Get the reserve patrol from Centerfort and take them with you, and a strajek team if there’s one already on station. I don’t think the Parhelion is going to stop, and Prahv is right in its path.”
“Are you sure, sir?” Flang asked.
Wenslauv took one brief glance at the vessel, tested the wind with her thumb, and nodded. “Dead sure. Get those people out of there, Lieutenant. At this rate you should have a few hours.”
“That’s a lot of—”
“Lieutenant, if anyone in Prahv gives you trouble, you’re going to arrest them. That’s what your backup is for. I hope you won’t need it and the evacuation turns out to be an overreaction. I’ll find out when I get there,” Wenslauv said, pointing at the new arrival. “It might not be too late to stop it.”
“Sir, what can you do?”
“There must be some way to keep it airborne, if I can get onboard. That’s what I’m going to do. Good luck, Flang,” Wenslauv said and tossed him a final salute.
“Yes, sir!” The goblin saluted then wheeled his roc Centerward.
“Me?” Wenslauv said aloud to no one within earshot. “Oh, I’m just going to go keep half of Sunhome in the air all by myself. No problem.”
She spurred her roc forward and made a beeline for the Parhelion. The younger skyjeks might swear by the tireless pegasus, but for Wenslauv’s zinos nothing flew like a roc.
“Rakdos?” Capobar said incredulously for what felt like the hundredth time as they left Old Rav by way of a little-used gate. “Why the Rakdos? Don’t you know how bad uprisings are for business? You’re going to ruin me. Us. Ruin us. The business.” Silence. He mentally kicked himself for never learning the shades’ true names. At least he’d have someone to curse when they got him killed.
The previous ninety-nine times Capobar had launched into this rant, the shadewalkers had said nothing, though they still gave occasional, invisible shoves to remind him they were close. Capobar was feeling ever more obstinate and emboldened as they moved at a brisk pace through an unending series of blind alleys. The thief had to admit he was lost, and was beginning to suspect that the situation was driving him a little mad. And so he asked again.
“You sold some of it to the Rakdos? It’s mad. You don’t spend enough time in the visible world, you. This is a bad, bad idea. Izolda will not let us live. They’ll find me easily enough, but they’ll find you too. That was a bad deal, and you had no right to—okay, maybe you did, but it’s still crazy.”
Capobar, he told himself, you’re just talking to hear yourself talk, and that, old boy, is an early sign of hysteria. He forced himself to shut up by repeating his portion of the numbered account holding the zinos the blood witch had just paid them. The shadewalkers had the other two thirds. But he could not bring himself to trust the deal. Izolda of the Rakdos was not a guildmaster, exactly, but she might as well be. The demon-god officially held the title, but his was a remote form of leadership. For hundreds of years Izolda had been the real power behind the thrill-killers.
Marching down cramped throughways in the darkness—the alleys and less significant streets of Ravnica only enjoyed the sunlight around the noon hour due to the towering architecture around them—he calculated the odds that the shadewalkers really did know what they were doing versus the blood witch’s reputation for ruthlessness in all of her dealings. Scattered, blinking glowspheres illuminated the damp cobblestones under his feet, throwing his calculations off. Capobar was developing a wicked headache.
Then, to add a little random terror to the adventure, one of the shadewalkers chose that moment to break the long silent treatment.
“You talk very much,” a voice said. The sudden sound made Capobar yelp involuntarily. “Why do you talk so very much?” He felt a cold, invisible blade tap ever so lightly against his chest in warning.
“Fine,” the master thief muttered. “But no good will come of ripping off a g—a client. I made a deal for the entire amount. I didn’t promise to get the client half, or two thirds, or a share. And my client doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who likes sharing. You went over my head. You’ll never work a respectable job again. And you’re going to bring ruin to Capobar and Associates. I can’t accept that, you know.”
“What, I wonder, is respectable?” The shadewalker seemed amused.
Another voice came from the air to Capobar’s right. “This is the place.”
“It is?” Capobar said nervously. “The place for what?” The press of a blade tip against his chest was the only reply. He held up his hands, palms out. “All right, all right.”
Capobar felt his upper arm clamped by a hand that exerted just enough pressure to tell him that the arm would be broken if he struggled. “Will you continue to sputter like this or mus
t I cut out your tongue?” The master thief, feeling less masterful by the second, opened his mouth to reply, felt the blade still south of his throat, and thought better of it. He nodded, carefully.
“Good,” the first voice said with glassy satisfaction. Then, to the other shadewalker: “Sketch the seal.”
Capobar saw a chalk line begin to form on the ground to his left. It curved around in front of him and kept going to describe a full circle around him, six paces across. Then smaller marks appeared, some kind of magical letters, Capobar thought, from the look of them, were scratched in a smaller circle, inside the original. Finally, a third circle was drawn, this one inside the lettering. The entire process took about ten minutes, and every time Capobar tried to so much as scratch, he felt the blade at his chest. As the third circle closed, the master thief felt a second hand clamp on his opposite arm.
The disembodied voices began a brief, whispered chant in a dialect that had a lot in common with High Vedalken, but Capobar couldn’t make out the stylized, complicated words. He recognized the last two, however: the name of his client.
Then there was a flash, and the next moment he was standing between two very visible shadewalkers in an identical circle somewhere muggy and green. At first, focusing on distant objects only watered Capobar’s eyes. All he could make out were vibrant colors, something like a chandelier a few dozen paces away, and the smell of damp earth. There was a familiar smell, but at the moment his senses were too scrambled to place it. But he could get a good look at his employees—soon to be former employees, one way or the other.
He was surprised to see how small the shadewalkers were—each one came up to about his shoulder, with wiry bodies. They were wrapped loosely in blue, gauzy bandages, like the mummies of ancient Grand Arbiters resting on the great mall of Prahv. A pair of glowing eyes peeked out through the face wrappings, and their arms were longer than was quite right, simian and oddly double-jointed. The two primary arms, Capobar corrected. Each shadewalker also had a smaller vestigial arm tipped with a clawed hand growing from his torso. The third arm was bare, revealing pale, almost-transparent skin filigreed with black and blue veins. Around their necks each shadewalker wore some kind of silver collar with three blue gemstones set in a triangle at the throat. Capobar wondered if the collars were the secret to shadewalker invisibility, then a more relevant question popped to his teleportation-addled mind.