by Cory Herndon
Amid it all, a chaotic carnival of sorts was in full swing. Morbid entertainments, lewd dancing that Myc’s mother would probably not have appreciated in the slightest, and clusters of growling singers adding to a dull roar of unending noise. Everywhere he looked, Rakdos were drinking, dancing, or brutally fighting their fellow cultists. The air was thick with smoke, stench, and cruel, cackling laughter.
He and the other scouts were all still in their cages but had been lined up in a row for inspection. At last Myc could see that, for the moment at least, the other three were all right. He also noted that his instincts had been correct: His mother was not among them.
Myc suspected he wouldn’t enjoy this inspection; especially once he got a good look at the inspector. The cultists called her Izolda, which Myc thought meant something close to “blood witch” in Old Ravi. Her pale shape was wrapped in thin chains and slick, blackened hides. Her hands ended in long, black, bladelike claws that dripped thick, red fluid onto the stone floor as she approached the captives. Her wholly white eyes had scars that ran through them, from eyebrow to cheekbone, but she seemed to have little trouble navigating the boisterous and bloody crowd.
Maybe—and the idea was almost too terrifying to Myc to consider—Izolda was some kind of vampire.
Whatever Izolda was beneath the scant clothing, rough-hewn chains, and ivory skin, the young scout was positive he didn’t want to know why she was called a “blood witch.” He was also relatively certain he was going to learn soon, whether he wanted to or not.
Izolda considered Myc with her empty eyes, her steady, calm breathing a snakelike hiss. She cocked her head and sniffed the air, nodding. Then she turned on one heel and turned her attention to the end of the line. The blood witch hunched over the first prisoner, the centaur Orval, and reached a clawed hand into the cage. She extended a single talon and swiped it across the centaur’s forehead. The move elicited a stifled yelp from Orval and drew a few tiny droplets of blood. Izolda retreated from the iron cage and moved with a determined but measured stride through the celebrants to the large brazier mounted in the center of the deathmonger’s temple floor.
Yes, it was a temple, not a cavern or hall, Myc realized. This was a place for high worship of low deeds. The congregation was a madhouse.
The Rakdos blood witch held the talon over the glowing coals for a few seconds. Her empty eyes peered at it all the while, watched it begin to glow orange. Then she snatched the hand back with a sensual purr that drew out into another hiss.
Izolda was really giving Myc the creeps.
“Not that one,” the blood witch hissed to her cackling lackeys. “Next.”
Izolda repeated the process twice more. Aklechin was sniffling before the claw got to him and stifled a sob immediately afterward. Lily, to Myc’s surprise, didn’t make a peep. And he saw her moving, so he figured there was an eighty, eighty-five percent chance she was alive. His Devkarin heritage never let him forget about the fifteen to twenty percent of people who moved and did not necessarily live, but he didn’t see any telltale signs of necromancy on her. She was just being obstinate and brave.
Myc found that combination impressive and compelling. So when the blood witch hooked a claw toward Lily’s cage and two lumbering, masked zombies shuffled forward to tear the cage open, Myc shouted angry epithets at them, words he wasn’t entirely sure where he’d learned but that poured forth as the cultist slaves pulled the blonde girl from the cage by the arms. They held her in the air, her feet dangling, as Lily joined in the screaming and cursing.
“Take her to my abattoir,” the witch said. “She amuses me.”
“Leave her alone!” Myc shouted.
“Yes!” Lily screamed, “Leave me alone!”
The blood witch laughed, a cold sound that cut through the oppressive heat. “Wait your turn, boy,” she snarled and waved at the zombies, who dragged Lily off through the crowd, still shouting threats at the Rakdos as loudly as she could.
Myc felt his knees wobble as Lily disappeared from view, and Izolda slinked toward his cage. “And now for you,” she said. “The girl will make a fine servant, but you, I think, have another fate awaiting you. Does that frighten you?”
Myc didn’t respond, but with heroic effort and by biting almost all the way through his bottom lip he kept himself from crying. “No,” he finally spat.
“It should,” the blood witch said and reached inside the cage. Myc tried to press his body into the corner, out of reach, and waved his head back and forth, but she still easily swiped the tip of her talon across his forehead with a casual flick.
“Yes,” Izolda hissed. “It is this one.” She nodded to a second pair of simian lackeys. They pulled him kicking and screaming from his cage, but to his surprise and dismay they did not drag him in the same direction they had taken Lily. Instead they hauled him toward a twisted, rusted effigy of a Selesnyan veztree bolted into the floor before the lava pit. His exposed skin burned at the proximity.
“This one what? The one what?!” Myc demanded as the zombies pushed him onto the lowest “limb” of the iron effigy and tied his wrists to the branches with rough, painful ropes. More zombies closed in around him, called forth with vicious glee by the blood witch, who bid them all gather round for the main event of the charnel-house carnival. Once his legs were bound together and affixed with the same rough rope to the trunk of the effigy tree, they all pressed closer, but none of them touched him. It seemed they were saving him for their mistress.
As terrified as he was, Myc was even more frightened for Lily. There was no telling where they had taken her or what might happen to the girl. He held on to that hateful, angry emotion as a shield against his fear.
Myc hauled with all his might on the rough ropes. He had a tiny amount of slack but could not fit his hands through the knotted fibers. Perhaps, if he could wriggle the rope back and forth, the edge of the metal “tree branch” could wear through it. …
Izolda raised her clawed hands into the air and began to chant in a barking, guttural tongue. The cultists took up the chant, of which Myc only understood a single word. A name. Rakdos. The Defiler.
He felt blood trickling down his wrists, but Myc tugged on the ropes harder than ever.
Fonn had expected Jarad to move quickly. They had their differences. Different expectations, different interests, goals, and callings. Differences that had, after a few years, grown insurmountable, at least when it was so easy to hit the road or the Leaguehall rather than deal with them. Whatever they thought of each other these days, she had never known him to hesitate when their son was involved. Even so she hadn’t expected the Golgari guildmaster to muster such a search party in so short a time.
Hippogriffs, dusky bats, manticores, and a few giant ravens flanked the Devkarin as he swooped down from the sky over the wide expanse of the Utvara highway. Jarad sat astride his personal mount, the great bat Vexosh, and he led another bat of equal size by a long tether.
“Don’t waste time landing,” Fonn called to him. “Just fly low.”
The Devkarin nodded and waved. “Be ready,” he called. Jarad aimed his bat straight for the ledev centuriad, hauling on the spare mount’s lead, and, just before it was too late to pull up, released the tether. The riderless bat kept heading straight for Fonn, and at the last second she leaped into the air, over its head, and caught the reins. She spun in the middle of her somersault and came to a jarring rest upon the saddle. Fonn hauled mightily on the reins and pulled the bat through a tight turn that brought her alongside Jarad’s wing.
“What’s happened?” he called, not shouting but using what Fonn had come to think of as his “guildmaster voice.” It cut through the noise without sounding too desperate or emotional. He used it when negotiating on behalf of the Golgari. It was also handy for communicating when you were speeding through the air as fast as a bat could fly. The ancient subspecies that the Golgari had bred for thousands of years could achieve a good deal of velocity—not observosphere speed, or even roc
speed, but more than fast enough for the undercity, where the ability to maneuver was much more important for a flyer.
Fonn closed her eyes for a moment, listening. “Underground. He’s underground. We’ve got to go back to the undercity. Toward the center. Probably—”
“Rix Maadi. The damned warren,” Jarad said, adding a few choice Devkarin curses. “I should have torched that place when I took over the guild. There’s no need for—”
“Just get us there as fast as you can,” Fonn said. “Once Myc and the others are out of harm’s way I’ll help you start the fire.”
Jarad nodded. “This way. We’ll go back the way I came.”
As she followed Jarad into an access tunnel that led to Old Rav she explained the details of their son’s abduction. A chorus of animal cries trailed behind them, and she occasionally had to shout over the noise of the teratogens bringing up the rear. Fonn suspected they hadn’t been this worked up since Savra sent them to attack Centerfort.
Jarad, for his part, surprised her by—for once—not going out of his way to start an argument. He didn’t blame her again for the situation, as she’d half-expected. If anything, he seemed to have some idea why the Rakdos had been interested in kidnapping.
Being master of the guild that controlled much of Old Rav, one heard many rumors. Jarad had the extra advantage of his insect minions, with which he had a special mental bond that made learning the secrets of his allies and enemies, or potential allies and enemies, relatively easy. When they’d met, he’d used them to keep her prisoner. Their courtship had been unusual in many respects.
This time Jarad told her he didn’t need insects to learn that the Cult of Rakdos was up to something. There were rats everywhere, he said. Over the last week he’d heard dozens of reports of whole undead colonies being consumed by hungry rodents, to say nothing of the rats’ collective impact on the insect population at large. Rats were the harbingers of the demon-god Rakdos, parun and nominal guildmaster of the cult. The cycle of violence continued, and this spoke was rounding the wheel with malicious timing.
When Jarad explained his suspicions, including a very specific—and terrifying—reason that the scouts might have been kidnapped, a surge of panic made her dig her heels into the bat’s side so hard the creature squeaked a high-pitched objection.
They’d covered more than half the distance to Rix Maadi when they both heard a tremendous crash overhead that made the teratogens roar and squawk in alarm.
They did not stop. Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with Myc. Fonn could still hear him in the song, directly ahead. This new disaster would have to get in line.
The crash did not have anything to do with Myc, not directly, and when Myc heard it, the sound was just part of the hooting, clanging nightmare his life had become.
Once, when he was five, his father had taken Myc on one of many hunting forays through the wilds of the undercity, his first time venturing out in the cold, underground winter. During the first night of this particular foray into the wilds, the boy had fallen asleep too close to the campfire. Myc had woken up a half hour later feeling like his face was ablaze. It wasn’t, but he’d gotten a nasty burn just from the proximity of the flames.
The heat of the lava pit behind him was far, far worse, and it wasn’t letting up. If anything it just kept getting hotter. The rational part of his mind that fought to keep in charge argued that he was just getting cooked, and it wasn’t getting hotter at all. It just felt like it.
Myc Zunich had packed a lot of learning and growing up in eleven short years. But he was eleven years old, and a quarter of the blood in his veins was human. Before long, his brave façade washed away in a wave of pain, heat, and fear. He had given up on the ropes. One seemed to be fraying, but the other didn’t show any signs of wear—besides, he simply had no strength left. He’d cried out at his captors for the first few minutes then just cried. Now his throat was so dry and hoarse, the heat growing so intense, that he focused all of his attention on drawing breath.
It wasn’t easy. The smell and the dense, smoky air did not get easier to take with time, like the killing floors of the slaughterhouses. The walls were covered in a thick carpet of rats, and every so often one lost its grip in the heat and dropped into the lava to burst with a puff of smoke and a wet pop.
Myc coughed miserably.
The chant degenerated into a general cacophony when the crowd parted beneath the spiked bludgeons of the blood witch’s personal thug squad. Izolda strode purposefully toward the effigy tree. She had retracted her claws—or maybe removed them—and in one hand she held a small, wide, silver bowl containing a viscous fluid that scattered the firelight and glowed with some inner magic. The other hand clutched a jagged, inscribed knife as long as Myc’s arm. Her scarred mouth was spread in a skeletal grin. Somewhere between the time she’d started the chant and the time Myc saw her approach, she had wrapped her skull and arms in bloodstained razor wire.
The blood witch raised the bowl and the blade high over her head, as if offering them to Myc. Izolda resumed her rhythmic, guttural chant, which was picked up again by the surrounding cultists, their many calls and bloody songs merging into one. The blood witch held that position for almost a minute, soaking up the collective bloodlust of every creature in the room.
Finally, with a sound that was half howl and half scream, the pale witch lowered her hands, slowly, with great concentration, as the chants continued on their own, self-perpetuating through the bloodthirsty priests. As her hands drooped, her feet left the floor, buoyed by the crowd and floating on a cloud of dark, swirling energy. Izolda floated toward him, howling her terrible wail, and her empty white eyes bored into Myc’s heat-addled spirit.
He had to think straight, but the blazing pit beneath him was cooking him alive—not a very conducive circumstance for quick thinking. He couldn’t move away from the heat. Izolda was closing on him, and everywhere else a variety of claws, fingers, and jagged, bone weapons swiped at him. The ropes were too strong. He was just a kid.
He was, he realized, going to die.
Myc’s voice was gone. He could no longer cry out. Aklechin and Orval were still in their cages, but even if he could call to them, what could they do? Nothing. What could Myc do? Nothing.
What was Izolda going to do? Nothing good.
“This isn’t good,” Pivlic said. “This isn’t good at all.”
The imp’s aching wings carried him over the Utvara highway at what for him was an admirable velocity. But imps were not made for soaring, sustained flight, and the strain was getting to him. They were better at quick jumps and maneuvering in cramped spaces. He had at least succeeded in getting ahead of the nephilim. The dense, blocky towers of the city outskirts had slowed the three remaining monsters’ initial progress considerably, and Pivlic had leaped ahead. They seemed to be in no rush, though they never veered from their course.
Pivlic did not consider himself particularly empathetic, but even so he was horrified at the carnage he saw as he passed over the giant nephilim—a microcosm of what they might do if they reached the city and an extension of their carnivorous rampage through the reclamation zone. Hundreds of bodies, partly consumed or smashed flat by one of the three, lay strewn across the road below. Hundreds more had been eaten whole by the ravenous monsters. Ghosts were everywhere, woundseekers, most of them, but unable to do anything to the monsters that had killed them. Fortunately for Pivlic, the woundseekers—vengeful, mad ghosts who could cause great harm to the living if they chose to try—lingered on the ground, screeching pointlessly at the titanic nephilim. Unfortunately for the survivors of the carnage, the ghosts only added to the panic, and most fled toward the city—and that wouldn’t help them at all if the nephilim continued on course.
The jagged, silver knife did not slice neatly through the skin of Myc’s palm. It cut painfully. It dug in and tore the skin aside, forcing blood to well up around the blade as the young scout tried to yell, but found his dry, swollen throat allowed
no more than a scratchy croak.
The blood witch of the Rakdos pinned him in place with a white-eyed gaze that pierced his soul like a spear. The fibrous ropes cut deeper into his skin as he tried to pull away from that cruel, ghastly visage, and he felt like he was made of stone. But the pain in his hand was excruciating, and what little water his body had left leaked from the corners of his eyes. Izolda lost not a drop of Myc’s blood as she held the silver bowl beneath his dripping hand. The scarlet liquid plopped into the weird fluid already inside and swirled atop it like water on oil. For a full minute the Rakdos held the bowl there collecting Myc’s blood, until she was apparently satisfied with the amount. Then she pressed the glowing, hot, flat side of the knife blade against his bleeding palm without warning. Myc managed a sound between a squeak and a croak.
The wound cauterized, Izolda pulled the blade away. Myc smelled his own flesh cooking and would have retched if he had anything left inside him.
The priest started another growling chant, and the crowd joined in again. Myc had never seen anything quite like the Rakdos gathering, which seemed to be growing more populous by the second, even though death screams were frequent, and at any given time it seemed one cultist might turn on any other on the merest whim. Their vile laughter rang inside Rix Maadi, interrupting the rhythm of the chant, moving through the gathering on the heels of … clowns?
At least, Myc guessed that they were clowns. That was the closest word he could think of for them, though they were not the kind of clowns any kid ever wanted to see. They were fat, deformed, scarred creatures, human but only just. They wore tattered parodies of Ravnican formal wear—waistcoats with white buttons and shredded sleeves, cylindrical hats caved in on one side, fingerless white gloves, striped pantaloons atop huge, red shoes with ridiculously oversized buckles. Those affectations alone were not that frightening.