DOUG BEYER
RETURN TO RAVNICA
The Secretist, Part One
KNOCKING ON DOORS
Jace Beleren held a sheet of parchment up to the window. Huddled between much taller towers of Ravnica’s Tenth District, the building only reached a few floors up from street level, but a cold, evening light reflected off brick and stone through the glass. Smudged with ink and magically marked with his own unique mage seal, the parchment was covered in notes about the code he’d found. His handwriting had gotten progressively less sane–looking lately. The walls of the sanctum were papered with pages like this. Jace wondered when he had last washed his hair or had a full night’s sleep. He hoped the other researcher, a vedalken man named Kavin, hadn’t noticed that he had been staying at the sanctum building, sleeping only when unable to keep his eyes open any longer, not even walking outside to the marketplaces or street vendors in the surrounding district. His bed was a stacked pile of notes, his furniture was odd pieces of broken architecture collected from around the Tenth, and his main nourishment was the gnawed end of his ink pen.
The discovery—Jace’s current obsession—had come gradually. He hadn’t recognized it as a code when he saw it initially, and in fact had not even recognized any connection at all until he saw it manifest itself a few times around the district.
He had almost tripped over it, the first time. It was not out of the ordinary to see a group of Izzet guildmages unearthing a layer of cobblestone from the street. Their guild was tasked with the maintenance of much of the city’s magical infrastructure, and when he happened past them working along a road in the Tenth, Jace had all but ignored their work. But Jace saw that the Izzet mages had dismantled an ancient chunk of stone from the curb, and as they toiled away at a length of exposed steam pipes and elemental conduits, Jace noticed that the discarded piece of stone had a pattern carved into its underside. It had been worn from age and half-covered with cobwebs, but Jace could see a series of curved impressions running along its length, like a procession of geometrically perfect parentheses.
It struck Jace as curious that such care had been taken to carve a pattern on the underside of the stonework, the side that wouldn’t even be visible from the street. But he didn’t think of it again until the code returned in a new form.
An old and battered neighborhood of the Tenth was being excavated. Jace stopped and watched one day as a burly cyclops in crackling mizzium gauntlets demolished the remains of a textile factory. The cyclops lifted great slabs of stone and hurled them onto a rubble heap, presumably making room for some new Izzet experiment. Jace saw that the discarded stone was carved with a sequence of triangles.
Recognizing it as the code, Jace had kept the details from Kavin, his confidant and fellow scholar who had been of great help in tracking down other instances of the geometric patterns, taking rubbings, mapping the locations of their sightings, and occasionally covering for Jace as he snuck into guild-restricted territories to fetch more pieces of the code. But Kavin was a logical, practical man—not given to obsessive impulses. If Jace let on how much this code had seeped into every moment of his waking consciousness, Kavin would abandon the project.
Jace’s eyes stung. He squeezed them shut for a moment and rubbed his eyelids. They had plenty of samples, but no answers. The pieces didn’t fit. There were regularities and patterns within the sinuous shapes set in stone, but no sequence, no message. Something was missing.
There was a knock at the door downstairs.
In a forgotten chamber of the undercity, several hours’ journey below street level, an ancient brick wall began to glow. Blue lightning danced along the edges of the bricks. The old mortar smoked and sizzled. The wall exploded into the chamber, bricks tumbling into a heap, leaving a rough, oval-shaped hole.
The planeswalker Ral Zarek stepped through the hole he had just made. Dust curled in the sodden, rotting air as the instruments on his gauntlet twittered and spun, the remaining mana from his spell flickering out.
Ral winced and put a hand over his nose. He kicked a brick with his boot and snorted. “Ugh. Skreeg, tell me this isn’t the place.”
A goblin in Izzet armor hopped into the chamber, looking around with his hands clasped. The goblin rummaged through his pack and produced a newly-constructed Izzet mana-sensing device that he waved around the chamber.
“Yes!” replied Skreeg. “The concentrations are higher in here! This must be it.”
A group of Izzet mages followed Ral and Skreeg into the chamber, where they began scrutinizing their surroundings with analytical spells and alchemical devices, lighting the chamber as magical energies shone through the damp haze.
Ral moved through the chamber, pushing aside curtains of hanging mosses and stepping over ancient, fallen columns. He knelt down to investigate something covered over with sickly roots. He pried a mossy tendril away from the lump and started backward. The gray face of a skull smiled through the foliage with a smattering of jagged teeth. Ral took a breath and let the fight-or-flight impulse fade.
He turned back to the others. “Are we ready?” he asked. “Skreeg, the mana coil. Charge it up, already.”
Skreeg placed a sculpture of spiraling bronze on the floor. The other Izzet wizard researchers surrounded the alchemical device and fussed over its operation. Gems of crimson and turquoise lit up along the artifact’s edge, and it began to hum quietly.
“Ready soon, sir,” said the goblin.
“Soon? Do you think the Great Firemind would be satisfied with soon?”
“I’m sorry, my colleague, but it takes some time for the coils to—”
“Connect it to a richer source,” Ral snapped. “If this chamber has one of the ley lines running through it, then there must be a font of mana underneath—an old source, probably unused for centuries.”
“There is indeed a deep source here,” said one of the other Izzet mages, her eyes closed.
“But the coils will overheat,” said Skreeg. “They’ll be plugged directly into the mana well. That much power—”
“Direct all of the mana into me,” said Ral. “I’ll be able to tell instantly if this is the line we’re meant to follow.”
An insectile chittering sound echoed from one of the ancient corridors that led into the chamber. The Izzet mages froze.
“Who’s there?” Ral called into the corridor.
He strained to see, but the light from their instruments couldn’t penetrate the dark. There was a sound of scraping, like eggshell against porcelain—and more chittering, this time accompanied by footsteps. Many footsteps.
“End your unnatural experiments,” hissed a voice from the gloom. “Forsake this place. The Guildmaster Jarad claims this territory for the Golgari Swarm.”
A small crowd of pale, dreadlocked elves and humans stepped into the light. Bits of bone and detritus woven into their matted hair clicked lightly. Their chitinous armor swarmed with tiny, riotous insects that moved in and out of the sheen of moss growing on their shoulders—a bed for sprouting fungi. Whether it was the Golgari themselves who had made the chittering sound or their bugs, Ral could not be sure. A few of them bore short blades, but most of them were unarmed: spellcasters.
The speaker, an elf woman, held forth a gnarled staff. She pointed the tip, which was decorated with a large rat skull, directly at Ral Zarek. “You. Vacate now.”
Ral swept his palm around him. “This is nothing but ruined, abandoned tunnel. No one owns this.”
“All that civilization discards, we own,” sneered the Golgari elf.
“Well, you’re going to have to scurry away to whatever crevices you crawled out of. The dragon Niv-Mizzet claims this area now—and any other scrap of unused turf he sees fit for the Izzet League.”