The prison was, by all normal measures, perfectly designed to provide neither any means of escape nor even the most crude of improvised weaponry.
"Normal measures," of course, had no meaning to its present occupants. Oh, it had wards and sigils to prevent wizards from escaping-but the prison's builders had never thought to contend with mages, with walkers, of Liliana's power.
Obviously, Semner's people hadn't told the squad commander much about whom he was dealing with. If they had, he might have taken more precautions.
If they had, the fact that the mages hadn't escaped already would have warned him that something was very, very wrong.
Kallist and Liliana sat, continuing on occasion to bicker and silently wondering how long they would have to wait. Finally, as night slowly crept up behind the loitering daylight, cudgel in hand, they heard the heavy oaken door to the prison hallway screech open. They moved as one toward the bars so they could see. The officer who had arrested them stepped past the reptilian guard, grinned broadly at both of them, and strode toward the door of their cell.
"I'm Lieutenant Albin," he introduced himself. "And you are…?"
"Not," Kallist answered gruffly.
"Enjoying the accommodations?" the lieutenant asked, refusing to be put off.
"Enjoying the bribe Semner paid you?" Liliana retorted.
Albin's grin didn't falter, but his voice turned hard. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he told them, presumably more for the viashino's benefit than their own. Still, he moved nearer to the cell, so that anything else they might say wouldn't be so easy to overhear.
"Our 'mutual friend,"' the lieutenant began, "seems to think that you might know something that would help him locate his target. Cooperate and I can make your stay here a lot more comfortable; might even get you out of here faster. If not…"
"What are you offering?" Kallist asked. Albin smiled once more and stepped closer still so he could whisper, stopping just outside the bars.
It was precisely what they'd been waiting for. Concealed in his fist, Kallist clutched one of the iron bolts that had held the cot to the floor, a bolt that was supposed to be impossible to remove. Kallist had never mastered more than the most rudimentary spells of telekinesis-even Jace hadn't been an expert there-but chipping away at a bit of mortar? That, even he could manage. With a wolfish grin, he dropped into a crouch, stuck his hand through the bars, and shoved the rusty length of metal into Albin's inner thigh.
He and the guard fell back from one another even as Albin's scream echoed through the cells. The bolt vanished up Kallist's sleeve, hidden not merely by cloth but a thin layer of illusion. The lieutenant fell writhing to the floor, hands clasped around the jagged, bleeding wound.
The viashino leaped toward them, weapon raised high, but Kallist and Liliana had already retreated to the back of the cell, beyond her reach. Several long seconds passed as the reptile glared, her tongue flickering in and out, before she knelt and lifted the wounded man as easily as she would a newborn babe.
For a moment more she hesitated, discomfited at the notion of leaving her post. But she would be only a few moments, and the growing pool of blood suggested rather firmly that time was of the essence. She cast one more furious gaze at the prisoners and then vanished through the hall's only door, slamming and barring it behind her.
"Is this enough?" Kallist asked, producing the blood-soaked bolt.
Liliana barely glanced at it. "More than."
"Good. Then let's get out of here before some guard shows up to take her place and we have to kill someone who doesn't deserve it."
By the time anyone else entered the hall, the mages were simply gone, with no evidence they'd ever been present save a few scattered iron bars, and tiny bits of dust that had once mortared those bars in place.
CHAPTER SIX
Lieutenant Albin staggered and limped across the office to slump into his chair. For long moments he simply sat, cursing with every breath as he searched for a position that didn't pull at the bandages on his thigh, didn't send embers flashing through the constant, abominable ache. He cursed the prisoners who'd stabbed him, cursed Semner for getting him involved, cursed the city for not paying him his due and forcing him to accept outside bribes to live the lifestyle he deserved.
He cursed the paperwork on his desk, the forms and requisitions. Hell with 'em; let them wait.
And he cursed the cold draft that wafted beneath the closed door of the office, a draft he felt even through his uniform.
Where in the name of all gods and demons was the draft coming from? His office stood in the heart of the watch-house, far from any exterior exit. Even if every door in the building stood open, no such draft could have wended its way down the passages. And unless some mad deity had reached out and flipped the seasons with the flick of a divine switch, any breeze from outside should've been warm, not this icy breath of winter.
He rose on shaky legs, chair creaking, in time to see the air between him and the door turn black. A swirl of inky fog rose from the stones of the floor, obscuring all vision, all light. The air in the chamber grew colder still, until Albin's terrified gasps steamed in the frigid air, and his teeth chattered like the sound of falling marbles.
Two pinpricks of light, and then two more, formed in the whirling shadows. They glowed sickly yellow, emanating the heat of swift decomposition, as they formed themselves into pairs of eyes that gazed unblinking from opposite ends of the office. Beneath and behind them, the shadows ceased to writhe but instead hung limp, forming the faintest suggestion of long-taloned hands, bulging wings folded close, legs that trailed away into the ethereal birthplace of night.
They drifted forward, impossibly still; Albin could not shake the horrid impression that they hadn't moved at all, that he and the world itself had somehow shifted nearer to them. Fingers that were naught but wisps of deepest darkness reached out, and the corrupt guardsman found himself drawing breath to scream.
"Do not cry out…" A gleaming, jagged chasm of a mouth had opened beneath one pair of eyes, but Albin heard no speech in his ears. He felt it in his gut, remembered it from long-forgotten dreams. Though a low whisper, it was nigh deafening, for it was the voice of a thousand restless dead. "Do not cry out, or we shall raze the house of flesh from around your soul, and leave your five disembodied senses to linger, forever helpless, unknown, and unseen in this wretched room."
Albin bit down on the scream welling up in his throat, and all but choked on the blood he drew from his tongue.
From each side, he felt the fingers of the abyss wrap tight about his upper arms. His flesh burned as with the prolonged touch of ice, his vision blurred, his chest and head pounded as though he suffocated.
And then he was moving! Locked in a grip as unbreakable as death, he felt himself sliding backward through the wall itself. A moment of hideous nausea, as the world turned inside out and he felt the rough texture of the stone passing through his flesh, and they were on the other side. The ground dropped away beneath his feet, as he was borne aloft in the bone-crushing and soul-numbing grasp of the shadow things.
His arms were numb, but the icy burn had spread below to his fingers, upward through his chest and shoulders, until he could scarcely draw breath. Higher and higher the spirits carried him, until a wide swath of Ravnica was nothing but a map of intercrossing bridges and roadways below, until wisps of cloud mingled with the wisps of darkness that carried him.