Jace stayed hidden at the mouth of the tunnel, letting the two of them pass by. He opened his mind to briefly skim their thoughts. The goblin, Skreeg, appeared to be an assistant to the human, or possibly an apprentice. The human went by Ral Zarek.
“No sign of any gate there even though the energies were promising,” said Skreeg. “What will we tell the Great Firemind?”
“You let me worry about that,” said Zarek.
Skreeg and Zarek were on the move, turning onto a main thoroughfare and chatting quickly, so Jace couldn’t delve deeply into their minds to learn all that they knew. Instead he shadowed them, trying to stay close without being seen.
“Could it be that the Dimir just don’t have their own gate?” asked Skreeg.
“Impossible,” said Zarek. “It’s here. It’s waiting somewhere for us. We’ll just have to look deeper.”
“How do we know that? How do we know we’re even going to find what we’re looking for?”
“This path was built for us by the ancients, Skreeg. A parun set all this up, do you understand? A founder of one of the guilds built this puzzle across this whole district so that we could find it.”
“Of course,” said Skreeg. He scratched his ear. “But why do we think it’s for us?”
Zarek snorted. “Because we found it first.”
The two Izzet mages walked fast and spoke in low tones, and Jace couldn’t walk closely enough to them without seeming suspicious. He had to find a way to stay closer to them. He knew blending spells that would mask his presence to the minds of onlookers, but he didn’t think he could maintain such a spell, read their thoughts, and keep up with their pace all at the same time. Perhaps he could get closer without staying on street level.
Jace ducked into an alleyway as the two Izzet mages walked on ahead. He climbed a fence and pulled himself up onto the rooftop of a tavern. He crept across the roof, staying low, until he could see over the opposite edge to look down at Skreeg and Zarek. He listened in on their surface thoughts again. Unfortunately, he had missed some of their conversation.
“That’s only the first step,” Zarek was saying. “According to Niv-Mizzet, the code tells us something more. It’s not enough just to find the gates. We have to know the path before we can uncover what’s behind it.”
Skreeg clasped his hands together and beamed up at Zarek. “Oh! Tell me what’s behind it!”
“He’s a discourteous old lizard, Skreeg. He doesn’t share with me all the secrets he knows. But I think I know what it is we seek.”
They were again moving away from Jace. He had to leap across a gulf to the next building, dash to the edge the sloping roof, and crawl along the edge directly above the mages to listen in on them. They were speaking even lower now, and even with his inner senses active, Jace had to strain to comprehend what they were saying.
“I believe it’s a great weapon, Skreeg,” said Zarek. “Hidden here, in the Tenth. The ancient guild founders knew that the Guildpact might not last. And I think one of them knew that if the pact was broken, a single guild would have to rise to rule all the others. That’s why they left us a weapon, Skreeg, and hid it in such a way that only the one worthy of wielding it could find it. And we are the worthy ones, aren’t we? That’s why Ravnica will be ours.”
A weapon, Jace thought. The code, the gates, the path—all of this concealed some kind of weapon. At least, Zarek believed it did.
Jace could no longer follow them by rooftop, and had to watch as they crossed the street away from him. The mages had arrived at the beginning of Izzet-controlled territory, walled off with tall, stark barricades covered in steaming metal pipes. Skreeg and Zarek climbed a wide set of stairs up to a large, round gateway, crowned with a huge signet that resembled the outline of the dragon himself. A squad of Izzet guards nodded to them, and the gate slid open to admit them.
As the gate opened, Jace was surprised to see the silhouette of a dragon’s head, looking through from the other side. It was Niv-Mizzet himself, waiting for their return.
“What have you found for me?” asked Niv-Mizzet.
The dragon’s voice boomed such that Jace could hear it from his hiding place. But he couldn’t hear the reply, and the Izzet mages would soon be sealed behind the gateway.
He felt he was close to finding out what lay underneath all the secrets, but he was sure that he would be caught if he tried to slip through the well-guarded Izzet gate. He was already losing the connection with the mages’ minds. Still, Skreeg and Zarek didn’t have all the information he craved, anyway.
The dragon, however, did. He had one chance: He would have to look into the dragon’s mind before the gate closed, if he dared.
He dared.
INSIDE THE FIREMIND
Jace gathered his mana and fired his mind magic like an arrow. The spell sailed invisibly through the air to Niv-Mizzet and punched into the dragon’s mind. Jace knew he wouldn’t have time to root around through the lore that undoubtedly filled the ancient dragon’s memories, so he focused on one task: finding what Niv-Mizzet knew about the maze.
It was like falling into an inferno. Incomprehensible thoughts blazed past him. Wild theories, impossible experiments, and mad diatribes roiled like a storm around him, all set against the backdrop of thousands of years’ worth of memories. Niv-Mizzet had no surface thoughts. It was as if he had whirlwinds of competing ideas at all times, storm fronts of the mind crashing into each other, yet somehow all converging into coherent thoughts.
But as Jace’s spell took him through the dragon’s mind, he was able to recognize a pattern, like a single crackle of lightning that branched throughout the chaos. It was the dragon’s obsession with his project. In his mind, he called it the Implicit Maze, a puzzle carved into the face of Ravnica itself, a mystery he believed led to untold power.
Jace was consumed with the dragon’s fervor for the Implicit Maze. A thousand possible solutions churned through Niv-Mizzet’s mind. Endless routes sizzled and broke apart across his mental landscape. But Jace knew, as the dragon knew, that none of them were quite right.
And then Jace saw what he what he hoped to see. The dragon knew the prize behind the Implicit Maze. Jace saw it too, and realized the power of it. And then he understood why Niv-Mizzet had set his entire guild to the cause of solving it.
As the Izzet gate closed and Jace’s contact with the dragon dissipated, Jace sensed that his intrusion had been noticed. The attention of the dragon surrounded him for that moment, like a predator’s gaze latching onto its prey, curious and unsettlingly patient.
“Jace, it’s good that you’re back,” said Kavin.
Jace had returned to his sanctum and slammed the door behind him. He huffed inadequate breaths and tried to calm himself. His vedalken compatriot Kavin was there, presumably still working on the fragments of the code they had found, still agonizingly piecing together what Jace had learned all in one blazing moment.
“Kavin, we have to talk.”
Kavin waved a sheaf of papers, covered in his neat hand in fresh ink. “Yes, you’re correct. Because you’ll want to hear this. I have discovered something.”
“So have I.”
“Excellent. Now, then. I’ve been researching all the samples we’ve collected. The stonework, the rubbings, the artifacts. And I’ve found a pattern.”
“Kavin.”
“The code. It’s a version of an antiquated Azorius legal script, dating back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. We’ll have to find someone who can decipher it, naturally. But in fact, I happen to have some facility with Azorius runes. Call it an old hobby—”