More of the Gruul’s battle imagery poured into Jace. He darted back and forth, relying on the warriors’ split-second assessments of the fight to guide him. Ruric Thar swung intermittently with fist and axe, but Jace sensed the impulses of the warriors, and used their unintended warnings to dodge out of the way in time. Ruric Thar was not fighting just Jace, but all of his war party at once. Jace was letting the warriors beat the ogre for him.
When the ogre overcommitted to a lunge, a desperate move flashed in one of the warrior’s minds, and Jace executed what he saw. He leapt onto the ogre’s bowed shoulder and, using a huge tusk for leverage, clambered up onto his back. Jace’s cloak came loose, so he threw the hood over the head of Ruric, the side with the axe. Then, hanging onto Ruric’s head, he beat his fist onto Thar’s cheekbone, as the Gruul’s minds urged—once, twice, three times.
The ogre’s axe flailed, apparently controlled by the head that couldn’t see. The free arm grabbed Jace by the hair, and pulled. But Jace hung on, focused on pummeling Thar’s increasingly bruised and puffy face.
When the axe blade came arcing toward Jace, he didn’t see it, but he felt it through the reactions of the Gruul onlookers. He leapt off of Ruric Thar, landing on his face, but in one piece, on the park lawn.
Jace heard a truncated yelp. Jace recovered and turned back to see the ogre’s own axe blade embedded a few cringe-inducing inches into the top of Thar’s bald head. The ogre held his breath, frozen in uncertainty, both sets of eyes looking up at the axe-arm that had missed Jace and hit Thar.
Thar began to hyperventilate through his teeth.
“You win,” said Ruric, pulling Jace’s cloak away and wincing.
Jace collapsed with relief. The Gruul warriors cheered.
Ruric Thar pulled gingerly with his axe arm, and the blade came free from the left head with a sickening wet sound. He clapped his hand on the wound and slumped heavily to the ground. Both of the ogre’s faces winced as blood trickled out from between his thick fingers, and his breathing was heavy.
Jace broke his connection to the minds of the other Gruul warriors. Their current of battle-obsessed thoughts began to ebb from his mind.
One of the Gruul compatriots, an extensively tattooed man with hair and beard that resembled coarse beaver fur, approached Ruric Thar and began murmuring a shamanic spell. The shaman’s outstretched hands trembled like windblown leaves, and pale light issued from his forearms and swirled around Ruric’s wound. The ogre kept his hand pressed on his head wound, but the bleeding stopped.
“You have some Gruul in you,” said Thar, between heavy breaths.
“Not as much as you might think,” said Jace. “So now, you’ll let your guard down, so I can find what I came for?”
“As you wish,” said Thar.
The ogre took a deep lungful of air, and let it out, closing their eyes. They nodded slightly.
Jace carefully cast his mind out to the ogre, letting his thoughts seep in slowly. He chose Thar first. As his mental senses began to perceive Thar’s thoughts, Jace felt no backlash, so he moved in deeper.
The ogre’s mind was like a museum of prizefights. Thar remembered triumph after triumph in battle, how his axe cleaved through this Gruul upstart or how he wrung the neck of that Orzhov cartel boss. It was an emotional landscape rather than a deliberative one, built on fervor and violence and laughing in the faces of the defeated. This was to be expected, but it made it harder for Jace to locate information about the maze.
He found nothing. Thar had no recollection of anything that Jace might have been researching at the time he lost his memories. Maybe this was all a mistake, a hunch that went nowhere.
He moved over to Ruric instead. Ruric’s mind, under some understandable surface-level shame of the duel with Jace, was also a timeline of clan battles and Azorius head-butts and street brawls with Rakdos hoodlums. Ruric was, if anything, even more savage, more nonverbal and instinctual. Ruric, too, remembered nothing of Jace’s research. Jace’s thoughts must not have transferred into the ogre.
That was it. That was his last lead.
“I don’t understand,” said Ral. “We divined everything. That mage’s research was the last key to the puzzle. We traveled the route, just like the code said to. But there was nothing. Just an old forum.”
“The Forum of Azor,” said Niv-Mizzet, after swallowing the remains of an underling.
When Ral had entered the aerie at Nivix, the dragon guildmaster had been eating a crunchy-sounding Izzet mage, a new recruit who couldn’t seem to comprehend the dynamic properties of mizzium. Ral was so preoccupied with the failure of the maze that he barely noticed one of his Izzet compatriots being devoured.
“Nothing changed,” said Ral. “The mana braids were stable. The atmospheric energy was strong, but remained constant. I expected fireworks.”
“We expected power,” said the dragon. “But there was none. What does this tell you?”
“We didn’t miss anything.”
“Obviously you did.”
“But what?” Ral remembered how little Niv-Mizzet liked to be questioned, and lowered his head. “Great Firemind, what insight do you possess?”
Niv-Mizzet inhaled deeply, and when he exhaled, flames spread out from his jaws, licking around the scales of his muzzle. Even from where he stood, Ral could feel the heat of the dragonfire.
“I have been thinking of the Implicit Maze as a test,” the dragon said. “And a test indeed it is. But it is not a test for one. It is not simply a puzzle of the mind. Do you know why?”
Ral knitted his fingers. Static electricity leaped between his digits. “Of course. Because we have to walk the route. But I did that.”
“And that accomplished nothing. Look deeper. What is the purpose of the Implicit Maze?”
“It protects great power.”
“Indeed it does.”
“And we have to find out what that power is.”
“Of course, but what it is has everything to do with how it is protected. What is missing across Ravnica right now? What conspicuous absence has come about only in recent times?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think of it this way: What existed between the guilds that no longer binds them?”
“The Guildpact?”
“Precisely! Do you not see? Harmony between the guilds was enforced by the magical contract of the Guildpact. But the Guildpact has been sundered, and the guilds are able to clash again—and not just in words, but in violence. In war. Do you find it a coincidence that the maze has surfaced now?”
“The mana braids,” whispered Ral. “The mana paths through the districts. They had never manifested until recently. And that led us to the code in the stonework, which led us to the path through all the guildgates. But what does all of that have to do with the Guildpact?”
Niv-Mizzet blew jets of smoke. “Come now, Zarek! I’ve laid it all out for you! It’s the purpose of the maze that is paramount. It is not a test of discovery. Why test our ability to discover? What would that accomplish?”
Ral protested. “What do you mean? Discovery is everything!”
“Ah, but do not think as an Izzet. Think as its creators did. We have learned the secrets of the maze, and we have tried many routes. But that got us nothing. That is because the maze is not designed to test our explorations, our experiments, our ingenuity. Those who devised it did not value these things as we do. The maze is a test of something else.”
Thoughts swirled in Ral’s mind. He was trying, and failing, to put the pieces together.