Niv-Mizzet bent down suddenly, his head looming before Ral. “Your time is up, Zarek! I told you to find the mage, the mage who touched my mind—and instead you run the maze yourself?”
“W-we don’t need him,” Ral stammered.
“You think we don’t, and yet your puny mind has not even deduced what all of this is for. Perhaps you’re only of use to me as my next meal.”
Bolts of intuition flashed in Ral’s mind. If what Niv-Mizzet was saying was true, then the Implicit Maze was not a way to reward the brightest mage on Ravnica, or its cleverest guild. And yet it was meant to be found, and found only at the proper time.
“The only reason we found evidence of the maze now,” said Ral, “is because it’s related to the Guildpact. It was created to be revealed in case the Guildpact dissolved. So … it’s a device, in some fashion. Activated by a disruption in the Guildpact. It’s a failsafe.”
The dragon’s chest puffed with pride. “That was my conclusion, yes.”
“So … it must be as old as the Guildpact. It traces back to the paruns.”
“Azor, judging by the code you found. The founder of the Azorius Senate.”
The Azorius, Ral thought. The guild of order and logic. Those who believed that law was the foundation of order. And the maze terminated in the Forum of Azor.
“So if it was created by the Azorius … then it wasn’t a way to assess our ingenuity. To truly solve it, we have to do something else. We have to do what Azor would have valued.”
Of course the founder of the Azorius Senate, the ancient Azor, would have tried to foster an atmosphere of peaceful collaboration.
“So … in order to solve the maze, we will have to, what, cooperate with the other guilds?”
The dragon sat back, and his lips pulled away from his teeth in a glistening, draconic smile. “Not exactly.”
An Izzet messenger appeared at the door of Niv-Mizzet’s aerie. “Pardon the intrusion, Great Firemind,” she said.
“Yes? What is it?”
“You wanted to be informed if there were any major guild conflicts.”
“And?”
The messenger looked shaken. “It’s as bad as we’ve ever seen. And potentially about to get much worse.”
Niv-Mizzet drew back his wings and looked down at Ral Zarek. “Let’s depart. It’s time we made a little announcement.”
ARMIES IN THE STREETS
Jace heard what he thought at first was a rumble of distant thunder, but it was too rhythmic and too deep to be thunder. It was the sound of a distant chant, two syllables repeated like drums.
“Berrr-rumm. Berrr-rumm.” The chant sounded like the voices of a vast lynch mob, their shouts merging into a cadenced thump, repeated over and over, layered over the sounds of marching feet. There was something oddly familiar in the chant that made a cold twinge in Jace’s subconscious, but he couldn’t place it.
Jace tried to focus on searching the ogre’s minds. But the sound was getting closer. “Berrr-rumm, Berrr-rumm,” they chanted.
The Gruul war party heard it too. “Someone’s coming,” said Thar.
“A lot of someones,” said Jace.
“War chant,” remarked Ruric, still holding a hand over his head. “Not Gruul.”
At that moment Jace felt a promising echo from Ruric’s mind, a hollow proto-thought that didn’t quite take shape, but that had the contours of what Jace was seeking. It was a wisp of a memory that Jace had passed over at first, because the ogre himself had assimilated it into his own thoughts. But Jace sensed that the cellar of the ogre’s mind echoed with a purpose that was not his own, a subconscious mission that originated with one memory.
The memory was of tearing down the sanctum where Jace had done his research. The ogre had wrecked the entire building, and Jace’s research with it, at the same time that Jace was busy destroying his own memories of it.
It was not enough to go on. Ruric Thar was an ogre of the Gruul Clans—he was not known for his attention to detail, or for his proclivity to stop and study that which he was about to pulverize. Only thin strands of details remained—a glance at a scribbled diagram, or a flash of a sheet of notes, before the memory of setting them aflame and collapsing the building on them. Not enough to get a coherent picture of the research.
“Berrr-rumm. Berrr-rumm.” The voices were getting louder. Whoever it was would round the corner in minutes.
“Time to go,” said one of the Gruul warriors, and they readied their gear to leave.
Ruric Thar got to his feet. “You done?” asked Thar, looking down the street toward the sound.
“Wait a moment,” said Jace. “Almost.”
The detail of the sanctum was lacelike, riddled with holes, but he was only considering one of the ogre’s minds. Jace quickly hastened his inner eye over to Thar’s memories, now looking for similar traces of the sanctum.
He found more. A snippet of a code that Jace and Kavin had deciphered—an old Azorius script. A path through a series of gates—guildgates, the ancient territory markers set up in the guilds’ distant past. He even detected a memory of when Jace first hired the ogre, and when he used mind magic to communicate with him—clues from Jace’s own speech pointed to the need for secrecy, the importance of the information stored in the sanctum, and the urgency of the need for thorough destruction. Jace’s mind assembled the scraps of memory from the ogre’s two brains and lashed them together with leaps of deduction. He saw it now. It was enough. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
“Rakdos!” cried the Gruul war party.
Jace turned. He saw a vast mob of Rakdos-guild rioters, jabbing at the sky with their spiked spears and jagged swords, led by the blood-witch Exava. And at that moment he realized what the crowd was chanting.
It wasn’t “Berrr-rumm.” They were chanting “Berrim,” the alias Jace had given in the Rough Crowd. They were here for him.
“Run,” said Thar. “We’ll slow them down.”
“By breaking some legs,” added Ruric.
“You’ll be overrun in seconds,” said Jace.
“Just go,” said Ruric “We owe the Rakdos a lesson.”
“I’m not just going to leave you—” Jace began, until he was interrupted by Thar grabbing him around the throat with his one meaty hand, and drawing him up to look him in the eyes.
“You learned nothing about the ogre mind?” asked Thar. “We say it? It’s done.”
Ruric only grinned, his tusks gleaming.
The ogre dropped Jace back onto his feet, and the ogre’s axe-arm rose to a battle-ready position, still edged with his own blood. The Gruul warriors gathered around Ruric Thar’s flanks, weapons raised. They roared in defiance, outnumbered dozens to one, as the Rakdos crashed into them.
Jace wiped his bloodied mouth and gathered a tidal wave of mana.
Selesnya troops poured into the streets, emptying the nature temples, wildlife preserves, and other green spaces controlled by the Conclave. The centaurs’ hooves clattered on the cobblestones and the wolf-riders bounded over stone bridges. Human and elf infantry flooded through the arteries of the district, streaming past intersections and flowing around buildings. Griffins and their riders swooped down out of a blanket of low clouds, strafing past the spires.
Emmara struggled to maintain concentration. She rode on the shoulder of a massive creature made of a snarl of marble, wood, and vines, her hand resting on its great head. Two more of the nature behemoths strode ahead of her, swinging their limbs in slow motion, indenting the streets with their footfalls as the other Selesnya troops ran between their legs. She had never controlled this many greater elementals this way. Tendons in her neck were taut. In her vision, the streets before her were overlaid with a constant flow of mana channeling through her and into the three elementals.