by Cory Herndon
The dead girl had not moved but just stood there, not far from the blood witch, humming her happy melody. Jarad could not take his mind off of the sound. It grew louder in his ears, pouring into his brain. It shattered his focus. The acidflies were lost, along with any other contact he tried to establish. His balance was next to go, and he stumbled over his own feet as he tried to back away.
The mob was on him as soon as he hit the floor. Bony, knotted fists gripped his arms, and a heavy club shattered his right kneecap. The cultists hauled the beaten guildmaster before the blood witch.
“Entertaining,” Izolda said, “but now I need that blood, Guildmaster.”
“Jarad, Myc’s still up there. He’s still alive. Are you going to get to him or what?” Fonn’s voice rang over the speechstone.
It took every ounce of remaining strength in his body, but Jarad wrenched one arm free of the Rakdos’s grip long enough to tap the stone and shout, “Get him down! I’ll set him free. Don’t wait for me—”
Izolda hooked her knife under the leather strap that held the stone in place and cut it. The stone dropped to the floor, and the dead girl scampered forward to pick it up, apparently fascinated.
“Jarad?” Fonn called. “What do you mean don’t wait for you? Talk to me!”
“Child,” Izolda said calmly, “throw that in the pit, would you?”
The girl turned and without a sound—or eyes, apparently—tossed the speechstone into the open, searing crater from which the demon-god had emerged.
Then the blood witch plunged the knife into his heart. Jarad watched his lifeblood flood the silver bowl. He held on long enough to see Izolda raise the bowl to her lips and drink deeply of the mixture.
At least my son is free, Jarad thought just before his life drained completely away.
Myc’s mind felt split in two. He could not hear Rakdos anymore, though he could certainly hear the monster bellowing threats at the Selesnyans as he led his derranged followers against the Unity Tree.
He was no longer connected to the demon, but he still had a demon’s rage. And as Myc realized that he could no longer hear his father in the song, that rage exploded. He screamed, he cursed, he called down every evil he could conceive on Rakdos, on the blood witch, on anyone that had ever tried to harm him or his family.
No one could hear him but the Defiler.
“Shut up, boy,” the demon said. Then he reached up with a clawed hand and plucked the ledev scout from his neck. Rakdos held the relatively tiny Myc up to one eye. “You,” the demon growled, “were in my head. That was a bad idea, insect. I am Rakdos, the Defiler. You do not touch my mind without—Arrrgh!”
Rakdos the Defiler clutched his bony temple in one hand. The other hand flung open in shock, dropping young Myc Zunich from a terrible height.
Kos slid the last glass receptacle into place, feeding the third dose of dragon cerebral fluid—so this is what the stuff looked like—into the neuroboretum cluster that formed the central intelligence of Project Kraj. Momir Vig turned to him and smiled.
“And now, we change the world,” the progenitor said. Without another action from the Simic guildmaster, Kos could feel the Kraj intelligence spring into being all around him.
I wonder what will happen now? Svogthir thought.
This, Kos thought. Then he seized Savra’s staff and plunged the sharp end into Momir Vig’s beady, black eye.
I am not a monster.
—I, Loxodon (Act V, Scene 5, line 102)
by Montagon Trevis (6037 Z.C.)
31 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
“Kos has lost his mind,” Obez shouted. “He’s inside the god-zombie. And he just—I mean, do you have any idea how dangerous—Imp, have you ever heard of something called ‘Project Kraj’?”
“The god-zombie?” Pivlic gasped, straining. “Project what, now? What are you talking about?” The roc had long since returned to join its flock—in this case, a passing wing of skyjeks—and now all that was keeping imp and lawmage in the air were his tired, tired wings.
“The god-zombie,” Obez repeated. “That ‘zombie priestess’ the thief told us about—it’s Svogthir. He’s back. Again.”
“Sure, why not?” the imp said.
“Can you get us back to the Senate?” Obez said. “The Simic are up to something. Look.”
“I can’t. In case you hadn’t noticed, my friend, I’m carrying four hundred pounds of lawmage.”
“That’s a lie, I’m—Look, that doesn’t matter. Something is happening to Novijen.”
“What?” Pivlic gasped.
“It’s standing up.”
“What?”
“Kos, what are you doing?” Obez said.
“What does he say?” Pivlic asked.
“To trust him,” Obez spat. “This is ridiculous.”
“I would,” Pivlic offered. “You must have fa—faith. You must try to …” Gasp. “You must try to lose some weight. Pivlic is not a mule. Besides, should we not stay close? Catch Kos when he leaves this ‘god-zombie’ of yours?”
“Azorius must be told,” Obez said. “The return of one as powerful as Svogthir can only mean that the Guildpact is failing even faster than he anticipated. Szadek and Svogthir together, why—”
A bellowing roar from Stomper made the fat lawmage break off. Waiting to meet the roar with one of his own, at the edge of a fresh crater that had reduced a quarter of the central pavilion to nothing, stood the demon Rakdos—leathery hands clenched into fists, eyes ablaze, terrible wings spread wide, and flames curling up from his glowing, orange veins.
There was someone on the chain around his neck, but from here Pivlic could not see who—more likely it was a skeleton. Then the demon-god passed behind one of the remaining towers, and the imp focused again on staying in the air.
He might still be able to get them to the ground alive. Though he was starting to wonder if there would even be a Ravnica left by the time this day was done.
“Pivlic, we’re dropping,” Obez observed. “That rock-monster is getting closer.”
“You ask too much of Pivlic,” the imp said, his lapse into third person a sure sign of exhaustion. “Too much of this today. Too much flying. Just …” The imp trailed off, but his wings remained spread, filled with a warm updraft from below. Even unconscious, Pivlic acted as a glider, allowing the lawmage to steer the two of them to the closest surface. Which was, as it happened, Stomper’s back.
“I’m going to get kicked out of the guard,” Fonn muttered.
“Why’s that, sir?” Orval asked.
“If you have to ask, Orval …” Aklechin said.
“Oh, right,” the centaur said. “This.”
The three of them stood astride the wide, flat back of the three-legged rocky nephilim that had almost stomped them flat not long before. With a carefully timed set of jumps and a few friction-increasing climbing spells, the small group had found it relatively easy to ascend the beast. It had been an impulsive move. Fonn’s plan consisted of little more than “Stop this thing before it gets to my son,” and she felt stymied. Her brief contact with Jarad hadn’t helped—she was frankly worried sick. She could no longer hear him in the song, and though she told herself that Jarad could hide himself from the song if he wished—he had done so in the past—this time felt different. It would be a while before she could try to speechstone again, so until she learned Jarad’s fate she would just have to do her best for the scouts she had left.
Between the three of them, they’d stabbed, hacked, and shouted at the Stomper until they were blue in the face. It had no more effect on the creature than flies on a dromad. They were close enough to the demon that Fonn could see Myc clearly, sitting under the demon’s chin in a trance. He had to be in a trance. The song would have sounded a sour note immediately if he was—if he had not survived.
Then, before her horrified eyes, the demon plucked Myc from his perch, eyed him, then lurched and tossed her son like he was a burning cinder. The boy flailed in midair and caught hold of the wiry h
airs covering Rakdos’s left leg.
“Good job, Son,” she whispered and hoped Myc could feel her concern through the song.
“Hold on. It’s moving!” cried Orval, who for obvious reasons was especially sensitive to shifts in balance. “Rearing up!”
Aklechin needed little warning. He was already on all fours, hands digging into the unforgiving hide. Orval took his stolen pike and jammed it into the nephilim’s stony back. The blade didn’t enter far enough to even draw blood, but it kept the centaur stable as their ride raised its forelegs off of the stone and opened its segmented mouth wide.
“Get down,” she said, and they both followed Aklechin’s lead.
“Sir, what’s it doing?” the scout said.
“I don’t know,” Fonn said. “Maybe it’s going to bite him?”
It was a logical guess but turned out to be completely wrong. The nephilim instead drew a deep breath into massive lungs. At the same time, Fonn heard a series of whistles that slowly fell together into a solid musical chord, like someone tuning a pipe organ. The sound came from the nephilim beneath them, and Fonn saw six membranous nostrils that lined the monster’s back in two rows flex open. They reminded her of the blowholes the brachiosaurs of the southeast pole used to breathe the cold, thin, polar air, but much larger.
“It’s singing while it breathes,” she said.
“What?” Orval asked. “I mean, what, sir?”
“It’s breathing,” Fonn clarified, pointing down the line of the monster’s back. “Through those. It must not breathe often. I hadn’t even noticed before. That’s—”
“Fascinating?” offered Orval.
“No—Well, yes, but that’s not my point. It means we have a chance here to keep it from drawing a breath,” she said.
“The mouth is glowing,” Aklechin interjected, shouting over the rising pitch of the “pipe organ” note.
“Myc,” Fonn said, willing the boy to hurry up. Truthfully she was amazed that he had even managed to hold on this long but could not imagine the alternative.
Then she returned, momentarily, to the beast beneath them, and Fonn realized that Myc was in even more danger than she thought. The glow, the long indrawn breath, Rakdos standing there like a bellowing peacock. She knew exactly what would happen when the inhalation finished.
“Scouts, listen up,” she said clearly and calmly. Panic could send one or more of them tumbling off of the unsteady back of the nephilim. “We’ve got to block all six of those blowholes, now. Ideas?”
“We stand in them,” Orval said immediately.
“Impractical,” Fonn said. “We might suffocate, and there’s only the three of us. Six holes.”
“Sir?” Aklechin said and opened his jacket. Slung across his tunic was a double-bandolier of bampops, the small pyromanic grenades that were technically outlawed for everyone but the Boros and the Izzet but were a favorite of cultists, especially at carnarium time.
“Where did you get that?” Fonn said.
“I pulled it off of a dead Rakdos,” he replied.
“Brilliant, Scout,” she said with a grin. “Now if we can bind them together or maybe drop them in clusters, we could—”
“Sir!” Orval cried.
“Yes?” Fonn said.
“The sound stopped.”
So it had. The loud pipe-organ chord was only an echo in the remaining towers.
For some reason Fonn shouted, “Hold on!” even though the three of them already held on with everything they had. She caught a last glimpse of Myc as the boy let himself drop to the rubble below. He disappeared behind a toppled column, so Myc’s mother could not see whether or not he survived.
The stone nephilim exhaled.
* * * * *
Myc flung his arms in front of his face and hunched himself into the smallest ball he possibly could as the blinding beam of fire and light struck overhead. Of all things, Myc had miraculously landed in the wreckage of a hostelry, on a pile of furniture that had bruised him considerably but certainly saved his life.
As the furious blast engulfed Rakdos, the demon spread his wings and arms to embrace it. The demon seemed to absorb the hellish energy directly into his skin, and his eyes blazed even wilder then before when it was done.
Myc ignored the heat to concentrate on his parents in the song. His father was still unsettlingly lost in the general noise, but he pinpointed Fonn easily enough. She was only a few hundred yards away. As quickly as he dared, Myc scrambled through the perilous ruins of central Ravnica to reach her before some new disaster struck.
“Myc!” Fonn hollered into the darkening sky. The glow of the energy blast had faded, leaving a smoldering and very angry-looking demon. From her vantage point, it was impossible to tell if Myc had survived the fall.
You’ll find him in the rubble, she thought. Right. He’s not on the demon any more. He’s safe. And Jarad—Well, she pushed Jarad out of her mind for the time being. She needed all her concentration to time this. Aklechin had handed her a way to kill—or at least seriously wound—the mountain-monster.
Ledev often used explosive charges to clear blocked roads, and the typical ledev guardian knew quite a bit about placing explosives. Fonn knew far more than most. She credited her father’s influence, and her recent foray into the League of Wojek, with the knowledge. The Leaguehall kept stores of explosives, and old Myczil Zunich had been one of the few wojeks who could be considered expert in their use.
She quickly sketched out her plan for the two scouts, stealing glances up at the demon, which was still seething and hadn’t yet responded. The nephilim seemed winded, and as the thought passed through her head she heard the organ notes start again.
“We’ve got maybe twenty seconds,” Fonn said. “Each of you take two of these,” Fonn said, turning the dial atop each bampop ten clicks as she handed them out, doing the same with the six left on the bandolier. Then she spoke the activation words. “Bang-boom-bam.”
Ten. “Let’s go. They’re clicking,” she said and charged ahead along the rocking surface of the monster. Eight. She reached the front two blowholes and hurled two bampops down the left one. Six. Two more at once, right. Five. She spun on one foot and slammed two more into the second one back on the right just as Orval did the same with the third. Aklechin backed away on all fours. Three. “Go, Orval!” She shouted and the two of them bolted after the other scout. One.
Fonn spun at the last second and turned to watch the fireworks.
“Boom,” she said.
The bampops echoed her words but in a much louder manner. Six geysers of orange liquid and reddish-gray tissue blasted from the nephilim’s stony back—it may have looked like a walking mountain on the outside, but inside it was definitely flesh and blood. Fonn and the scouts held on for dear life as the explosions were followed by wave after wave of spasms and shudders that resembled an earthquake. Orval finally gave up on his spear when it snapped off in the monster’s back and folded his legs beneath his body, holding on only with his powerful arms.
The nephilim’s “head” just about killed them. The stone face, heretofore suspended by some magic field over the creature’s back, collapsed atop the nephilim and rolled straight for them. Fonn cleared her charges out of the way just in time, and the head rolled over the edge of the nephilim’s stony shell.
A few seconds after the head crashed into the ground with a monstrous thud, the spasms stopped all at once. The nephilim went rigid for a moment, then with a sigh that expelled only a blast of warm, putrid air and a cloud of bloody foam, it collapsed, all three legs splayed. The monster’s sudden drop knocked the wind out of Fonn and almost cost her a scout when Al bounced at the bottom of the fall. He would have tumbled over the side had Orval not caught him by the ankle. Al smiled up at Orval, dirt and scrapes decorating his face.
“Guess they’re not entirely immortal,” Fonn said as she helped the centaur haul the young man back up.
“Is it dead?” Aklechin asked, a question echoed by Orva
l.
“I think so,” Fonn said. “I think those went right to whatever it’s got for a brain, and the constriction and shape of the—” The scouts were staring, still terrified but hiding it under all the bravery they could muster. “Yes, it’s dead,” she finished. She stood carefully and peered at the demon, which had taken an abrupt step back when she and the scouts had stolen his thunder. He turned to the sky and roared. There was still no sign of Myc, but a sound—a scream, rapidly increasing in pitch and volume, intruded on her thoughts.
The sound came to an abrupt halt when a fat man and an unconscious imp fell on Fonn’s head.
When Fonn came to, she was looking up into Myc’s tearstained eleven-year-old face. “Mom?” he said. “Are you—”
“Myc!” She clutched her son to her fiercely. “I think so,” she said. After a few seconds and a cough from her son, she let Myc help her to her feet. “How long was I out?”
“Just a few seconds,” Orval volunteered, and Fonn realized she still stood on the back of the dead nephilim. And a strange, pudgy man in the blue robes of an Azorius lawmage stood before her.
“Who’s the fat man, Myc?” Fonn asked.
“I don’t know. All he seems to do is think really hard,” Myc said. “But the imp says his name is Pivlic. The imp’s name, I mean. Is Pivlic.”
“Pivlic?” Fonn said. “How did you get here?”
“I wish I knew,” the imp replied. “It is good to see you again, my friend, but it has been a rough day.” With that, he fainted.
Before she could get answers about where Pivlic had come from, who the fat man was, and why they were here, Fonn’s hand tore itself from its stump and flew away.
Kos, Obez sent. Kos, what is going on? What’s happening up there? Great Hesperia, you just—
Killed a lunatic, Kos finished. But there’s still one in this body with me.
Kos, Novijen—it’s come to life, Obez thought. Most of it.
Don’t worry, Kos sent. The pilot of this beast is out of the picture. I don’t think Rakdos is going to leave it in one piece. I think it’s time you brought me back, don’t you?