Kavin looked enthralled to be in the presence of Lazav. The vedalken made a move to step forward and speak up, but Vosk put a hand out to stop him. The idiot didn’t know enough not to provoke his own guildmaster.
Lazav looked up. “Vosk, you will run the maze.”
Vosk ran his tongue along his fangs. He nodded with exaggerated gratitude.
“You’ll use the route you learned from Beleren, and you will participate along with the other guilds. You will not kill any of the others—in fact, you will help them.”
“Master?”
“The maze-runners must live. Any of the others you may kill at will.”
Vosk nodded again.
Lazav hissed a breath out his nostrils and frowned at the floor. “It is not perfect,” he said, “but it will do. Every being not loyal to me shall die, and this city shall be shaken to its knees.”
Kavin pressed past Vosk and bowed. “And what shall I do, Master?”
Lazav cast a withering look at Vosk. “Kill your pet,” said Lazav. “He did not get us what we needed.”
Kavin’s eyes went wide.
“He may yet be useful to you, Master,” said Vosk hastily. “I drained much from him as I fed. It’s true that he knew little of the maze, thanks to Beleren. But he has contacts that might be valuable.”
“So?”
“He was Azorius once. He has the ear of the sphinx.”
Lazav regarded Kavin with new eyes. “Well, then,” he said. “Is that so?”
Kavin bowed, blinking, not knowing where to look.
“She trusts you?” Lazav asked.
“At one time, I advised her on Azorius scholarship, Master,” said Kavin.
“Then it’s time you fulfilled your purpose.” Lazav reached out his hand, and the hand became a liquid tentacle, extending toward Kavin. The tentacle spread into webbing, stretching and warping. The webbing wrapped itself around Kavin’s face and chest, slithering around his body, cloaking him in a cocoon made of Lazav’s own fluid body. Kavin made a muffled, urgent sound, and Vosk saw the man’s hands clench into fists. Then Lazav smiled, and it was a horrible smile. Lazav flexed his body, twitching his warped muscles, and the netting contracted. He crushed Kavin’s upper body with a muffled scream and a splatter of vampiric blood.
Lazav retracted his limb, and Kavin’s remains slumped to the ground. Lazav’s features became fluid for a moment, and when they solidified again, he had taken the form of Kavin.
DISCONNECTED
A sliver of failing sun shone through the crack in the boards nailed over one of Emmara’s windows. She did not eat. She didn’t want to walk around the house or put the teapot on or pump water for the desiccated plants. Guards from her own Selesnya guild did circuits around her house, keeping her locked in from the outside. Nothing she touched felt like her own anymore. This house had become her prison.
“Jace,” she thought. “Jace, can you hear me?”
She had tried to call out to Jace in her mind many times. She had never considered before whether thoughts could have volume, but she had learned that she was able to scream thoughts. She also knew, now, that she could whisper them. Her thoughts seemed barely audible to her now, just thin mental words whispered into the aether, their volume shrinking as her confidence grew that no one was hearing them.
She had also tried to call her nature elementals, but she had even less hope that that would work. Trostani had taken that spell from her. It was as if the power to summon the great beings of marble and vine had only been on loan to her and Trostani had revoked it, and with it all hope of magical escape. Even the few nature spells she knew would be useless to for trying to break out, especially with the building under constant watch.
A guard looked in at her through the tiny round window in her front door. This time the guard was a white-haired, stern-looking man in chain mail. The man grunted, and his face disappeared as he resumed his rounds circling the house.
They did this every hour on the hour, sticking their face through the gap in her door, checking the locks, and making sure she hadn’t moved. She hadn’t. She sat on the floor and watched the sliver of sun elongate as it crawled across the floorboards. She wished she were attached to that spot, as if her body had sprouted roots that had dug their way into the floor, branching out as they dug down, grasping at the soil. She longed to feel stability. When she walked, her knees betrayed her, as if the floor were unsteady.
Her guild had imprisoned her. Jace’s voice had left her. And then there was Calomir. All the bricks of her foundation had vanished.
Eventually the streak of light climbed onto the wall, and soon thereafter it thinned to nothing. Darkness fell, and sleep did not come. She hadn’t heard Jace’s voice in her mind. As far as she knew the world had disappeared outside her house, and she was the only person left in the world, floating in the void. She wished the thoughts would stop whirling. She tried to quiet her mind, but thoughts intruded anyway—thoughts of Calomir.
Jace had said that Calomir, the real Calomir, was dead, and that the man whom she had been seeing was an impostor. A shapeshifter had killed Calomir and taken his face. She tried not to believe that, to hate Jace for his lie. But she couldn’t, not quite, and a desolate anger surged in her. She grabbed a tin cup and threw it at a window. The glass shattered, and the cup bounced uselessly off of the nailed-in wooden boards. She stood and walked to the shattered window. The points of glass reflected her face in chaotic patterns. She took a triangle of glass, conscious of its sharpness. It comforted her somehow, knowing she had something that could slice flesh. She returned to her place in the middle of the floor, sat, and waited.
Sometime in the night, a guard visited again. This time it was a young human man with a thin red beard. He looked in, checked the door locks, glanced at Emmara, and cast down his eyes. They all averted their eyes like this, as if to prevent the traitor’s visage from contaminating their eyeballs, or to prevent her visage from contaminating their concept of her as a traitor. Even so, Emmara hid the shard of glass behind her.
“You there,” Emmara said. Her voice was dry. She hadn’t spoken in the better part of a day. “Please send for Captain Calomir. I have information for him.”
The guard sniffed, and didn’t raise his eyes to her. “He’s busy.”
“Please, it’s important. He’s to represent Selesnya in the dragon’s maze, and I have information he needs.”
“You’ll see Captain Calomir when Captain Calomir sees you, not before, traitor.”
“Without this information, our guild will fail.”
The Selesnya guard sneered. “You’re trying to trap me.”
“Bring a stunning spell, then, and use it on me if I attempt something. Or do you want me to tell him you were the one who prevented him from knowing what he needed to know in order to prevail in the maze?”
The guard wandered away from the door, mumbling.
That would have to do, she thought.
By the time Calomir came to the door, the sun was peeking through the cracks in the window boards again. She stood and held her hands behind her back, concealing the dagger of glass.
“You sent for me?” he asked.
“Come in,” she said.
The statuesque elf, or the being who had taken Calomir’s face, entered and closed the door behind him. He wore his Selesnya soldier’s uniform and sword. “Is everything all right?”
The man was a perfect facsimile of Calomir, to the point that Emmara was questioning herself even now. She couldn’t dismiss the urge to simply embrace him. But even if it were her Calomir, he had branded her a traitor to their guild, turned her home into a jail cell, and guided her guild toward violence and belligerence against the other guilds. Either way, he wasn’t the Calomir she remembered.