Ari Marmell
Agents of Artifice
PROLOGUE
Through a place that wasn't, where time held no meaning, the figure walked.
Winds blew, and they were not winds. Without source, without direction, they tossed the outsider's hair one way, clothes another. They were the hot gusts of an arid desert, the frigid breath of the whirling blizzard. They bore the perfume of growing things, the rancid tang of death, and scents unknown to any sane world.
The ground rolled, and it was not ground. Shifting grays and black-not a color so much as a lack of color-formed a surface scarcely less treacherous than quicksand. Through it, deep beneath it, high above it in what could hardly be called a sky, snaked rivers of fire, of lightning, of liquid earth and jagged water, of raw mana. Colors unseen by human eyes flew overhead, refusing to congeal, soaring on wings of forgotten truths, borne aloft by stray gusts. Mountains of once and future worlds wept tears of sorrow for realities that never were, unchosen futures that no other would ever mourn.
Chaos. Impossibility. Insanity.
The Blind Eternities.
Far behind, and falling ever farther, a curtain of viscous light separated the maddening expanse of raw creation from one of the many worlds of the near-in finite Multiverse that existed within. There was nothing special about this world, at least not when viewed from without, save that this was whence the figure had come, and where it must soon return.
The figure. Here, in this realm beyond worlds, that was all it was. Was she male? Was he female? Short or tall? Human or elf or goblin, angel or demon or djinn? All and none, perhaps, and none of it of any import. Any normal mortal would already have been lost, body and mind and soul torn apart and absorbed into the twisting maelstrom of what was, is, and could be.
Not this one. Anchored by a spark of the Blind Eternities itself that burned within the figure's soul, a planeswalker strode through the tide, and the maddened chaos between worlds was just another obstacle on a road that few would ever walk.
Danger and distaste aside, the figure persevered, continuing ever onward for who knew how long. Finally, when perhaps a whole heartbeat and perhaps a mere century had passed, another curtain of light loomed from the roiling instability. The traveler passed through and was born into a new reality, standing once more on the solid ground of a real world.
It had no name, this world, for it had long since died. No winds blew, the stale and nigh-poisonous air sitting heavy on the earth. No trees or mountains broke the featureless contours, and nothing but a fine dust coated the world's skin. Long dead, lifeless, desolate…
Private.
And there the planeswalker stood, and waited, and paced, and waited longer still, until the Other finally appeared.
The figure's first thought was not relief that the wait was over. That would come shortly. No, that first thought was, instead, Next time, I choose the meeting place!
That would not, of course, be the most political thing to say. So the figure bowed, deeply enough to show respect, shallow enough to say I do not fear you. "Have you decided?"
The Other gazed unblinking for long moments. "I have. Perhaps a better question would be, 'Are you still certain?"'
The walker shrugged, a strangely mundane gesture in so peculiar a discussion. "I've put too much time into this, and I've too much riding on it to back out now. You know that."
"This is a complex scheme you bring me. Convoluted; labyrinthine, even. A great many things must go precisely right if you're to deliver me what's mine.
Another shrug. "My bargain comes due before too much longer. It's not as though I've much left to lose."
"There is that, yes," the Other conceded.
"And this way, I'm protected. If I were to go after it myself, and I were discovered-"
"Yes, yes. So you've explained.
The walker lapsed into silence, a silence that stretched horribly across the entire world.
Then, "You know what must happen now?" the Other asked. "To ensure the mind-speaker cannot just pull the truth from you?"
One deep breath, a second, and a third, to calm a suddenly racing heart. "I do."
"Then do not move."
And then there was only the scream, breathless, endless, a scream that would have drowned even the roaring of the Blind Eternities… as the Other stretched forth inhuman fingers, reached into the planeswalker's mind and soul, and began, oh so carefully, to fold.
CHAPTER ONE
As it turned out, the district of Avaric wasn't any more appealing when one was drunk than when one was sober. The fog of irrimberry wine didn't make the filthy cobblestones, the half-decayed roofs, or the sludge coating the roadways any more attractive; and the sweet aroma of that libation didn't remain in the nose long enough to muffle the stagnant rot and the eye-watering miasma that passed for air. The rows of squat houses and shops leaned over the road like tottering old men, and the wide spaces between them resembled gaps left by missing teeth. Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the entire evening was the surprising lack of mosquitoes.
Normally the rains brought plague-like swarms up from the swamps and sewers that were Avaric's unsteady foundation, but apparently even they were taking the night off for the Thralldom's End celebration.
Kallist Rhoka, who had spent a considerable amount of coin on the journey to his current state of moderate inebriation, glared bitterly at his surroundings and felt that the world's refusal to reshape itself into a passingly tolerable form was the height of discourtesy.
Then again, the Avaric District wasn't alone in its refusal to change its nature to suit Kallist's desires or his drunken perceptions-and between the stubbornness of a whole neighborhood, and that of a certain raven-haired mage, he was pretty certain that the district would break first.
At the thought of the woman he'd left at the Bitter End Tavern and Restaurant, Kallist's stomach knotted so painfully it doubled him over. For long moments he crouched, waiting as the knot worked its way up to become a lump in his throat. With shaking hands-a shake that he attributed to the multiple glasses of wine, and not to any deeper emotions-he wiped the pained expression from his face.
Not for the first time, Kallist spat curses at the man who'd driven him to such a sorry state. Less than a year gone by, he'd dwelt in the shadows of Ravnica's highest spires. And now? Now the structures around him were barely high enough to cast shadows at all. Now he'd have had to actually live down in the sewers or the under-cities of the larger districts to sink any lower.
It was enough to make even a forgiving man as bitter as fresh wormwood, and Kallist had never been all that forgiving.
Still, it would all have been worth it, if she'd just said yes…
Kallist, his wine-besotted mind swiftly running out of curses, stared down at his feet. He couldn't even see the normal color of his basilisk-skin boots, one of the few luxuries he still owned, so coated were they in the swamp sludge that always oozed up from between the cobblestones after the rain. The boots kept swimming in and out of focus, too. He wondered if he might vomit, and was angered that he might waste the expensive irrimberry wine he'd drunk. The notion of falling to hands and knees on the roadway was enough to steady him, however. He could still hear, ever so faintly, the singing and dancing of the Thralldom's End festival, back in the direction of the Bitter End, and he'd be damned thrice over if he'd let anyone from the tavern find him pasting a dinner collage all over the road. With a rigid, yet swaying gait that made him appear sober to nobody but himself, he resumed his trek.
Avaric wasn't really that large a place; none of the local neighborhoods were. It was a backwater district, surrounded by other backwater districts save for those few spots where the underground swamps pooled to the surface, ugly and malodorous cysts on Ravnica's aging face. Those who dwelt here did so only because anyplace else they could afford to move was even worse, and a few small fungus gardens were more than enough to feed the lot of them. Thus, even though the Bitter End was at the far end of Avaric from the house Kallist shared with the woman on whom he currently blamed his inebriated state, it should normally have taken only about twenty minutes to walk from one to the other.