Ultimately, it made no difference. The beat of the drums rose, growing ever louder, ever more frenetic, and the worst of the sewers rose with them.
The fetid waft of methane was its herald, vicious gouts of sludge and slurry its outriders. Taller than the house Kallist and Liliana had left behind, it oozed up and through the storm drain, jaws agape in a silent bellow. Thick mud and foul slimes sluiced from its body, and always there remained another layer of corruption beneath, bubbling up to take its place. Its arms were broken boards, its claws bits of stone and rusted nails, the fangs within its cavernous maw ancient and filthy shards of glass. It was the worst of Ravnica's filth, the feces and flotsam and decay, given a terrible, primeval life. And hate.
And hunger.
The sounds within the surrounding structures turned to sudden screams, to pounding feet and slamming doors, as the destitute took what shelter they could from a menace they could not comprehend. In older times, more ordered times, such an abomination would have been met swiftly by the Legion of Wojek, or at least the forces of one of the other great guilds. But today, only those districts that could afford their own defenders, or the exorbitant fees demanded by the Legion's successors, had any such protection. Here, in the dwellings of the poor, the filthy, and the forgotten, no one cared.
Kallist, his waking mind reduced briefly to gibbering horror, reacted without conscious thought. Through instinct alone, he summoned up a shroud of magic even as he charged the abomination, blade held high. Poor a mage as he might be, his desperate illusion should have rendered him briefly invisible. He should have reached the shambling form unseen, gained precious seconds to hack away at it while it remained unaware of his location.
But Kallist was not thinking clearly, and Kallist had never faced a beast such as this. Without eyes within its face, without brain within its skull, the creature possessed no purchase on which his illusions could take hold. Even as he neared, the shambler lashed out with a fist of muck and refuse. Agony flashed across Kallist's body as a dozen jagged edges traced a dozen lines of deep red through his flesh. He barely had time to note the alleyway dropping away beneath his feet before he slammed hard against a wall across the way. Bright lights flashed before him and the breath rushed from his lungs, leaving him gasping as he slid to the base of the house. Only sheer luck prevented his spinning body from landing across the blade of his own brutal weapon.
Nor was the beast through with him. Even as Kallist settled to earth, propped upright only by the wall, the shambler's maw split apart. First like a snake with jaw unhinged, and then farther still, it gaped wider, impossibly, bonelessly wide. And from that portal to some squalid hell, the creature vomited up a putrescent mass of sewage, a deluge that slammed into Kallist as brutally as the fist itself. It clung to him, choked his lungs, hardened about his joints and glued him to the ground.
Liliana, who had far greater experience dealing with such violations of nature, still found herself stunned. Frantically her gaze flitted from the shambling mass to her fallen companion and back again, conflicting needs tearing at her soul.
The horror started toward her, not even bothering to turn its sightless head in her direction, and the time for indecision was past. Mouthing a funereal chant, lower, more somber, more soul-churning even than that she had voiced in the Bitter End, she raised both hands and circled right, forcing the creature to move ever farther from Kallist if it meant to reach her. The runic swirls tattooed across her back began to glow, a sickly bruise-purple, pulsing in time with her heart.
With agonizing sluggishness, light returned to Kallist's eyes, feeling to his limbs. He saw only smatterings of the wall that rose above him, or the cloud-laden skies beyond, for he could scarcely turn his head. His legs and back began to itch, then burn, as the caustic fluids of the sewage seeped through his clothes. The hardened muck held him fast, and he feared he would simply lay there, helpless, until something awful appeared to claim him, or until he suffocated in the waste's poisonous effluvia.
When he felt the muck begin to break away, first from about his wrists and arms, then from around his neck-when he saw the tips of pale and slender fingers-he nearly sobbed in relief.
"Liliana!" he gasped, sucking in great lungfuls of air, "how did you-"
And then Kallist saw precisely what had rescued him. The blood drained from his face until even his lips were fishbelly-pale, and he could not help but wonder what cost Liliana had paid to cast such a summons.
The common folk of a hundred worlds believed angels were the servants of gods, beings of light who dwelt on high, graceful and beautiful, pure and righteous. The common folk here on Ravnica knew angels as their neighbors, dwellers in the same cities where lived humans and vedalken and viashino.
Nowhere on Ravnica, or on any others of those worlds, had anyone imagined an angel such as this.
She straightened the moment Kallist was free enough to extricate himself, revealed in all her nightmarish glory, this angel that certainly came from nowhere near "on high." Wings of midnight feathers, dull and grim as the blackest crow, blotted out what little sunlight had forced its way to the alley's floor. Corpse-pale skin was girded in leather armors harvested from the hides of demonic and mortal foes alike, and a deceptively dainty fist clutched a jagged, rusted shaft, less a spear than a lightning bolt of forged steel. Where she stood, even the stone-coating mildew died, overcome by the angel's essence of desolation. Beetles, rats, and other crawling things emerged from the sewer grates and the cracks between the cobblestones, desperate to flee her deathly presence, only to wither away at her feet.
Eyes, empty of anything but a need for destruction beyond Kallist's imagining, turned away to gaze with naked lust upon the conflict raging down the street. Sitting upright, digging frantically for his blade, Kallist himself did the same.
Liliana was clearly paying for her decision to send her summoned servant to rescue Kallist. She hovered several feet above the roadway, hands crossed before her at the wrists, surrounded once more in an aura of black and shifting mists. Above her the shambling thing rained down blow after blow, only to recoil each time as its murky "flesh" made contact with the life-sapping energies that cocooned the necromancer. But the thing of the sewers was not alive in the truest sense of the word, and with each strike, its denticulate limbs passed farther through those mists before it was forced to draw back. It could be only a matter of seconds before Liliana's protections failed her utterly.
"What are you waiting for?" Kallist demanded of the power that stood before him, motionless as any statue. Only later would he truly think on the fact that he had shouted at and berated an angel of the darkest depths, and then his hands would shake. For now, he saw only the imminent death of the woman he loved. "She called you here! Help her!"
It turned to him, offered him a smile of terrifying, soul-bruising beauty. Kallist's breath lodged again in his chest, as that seductively murderous face sent blood rushing to his loins even while it turned his stomach, caused his limbs to grow palsied and his head to pound. Only then, spurred on not by Kallist's feeble demands but by a silent call from Liliana, did the angel take to the air, a song of battle and blood and death flowing with heart-rending beauty from her throat. Her wings spread wide, wider, impossibly wide, until they spanned the breadth of the alley, until even the blind shambler, one fist raised over its head to strike, could not help but feel the chill of her shadow. And briefly it shuddered, in whatever primeval ember passed for its soul.