Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel (37 page)

Jace sank until he sat on the filthy ground.

“You know I came to Favarial to save you?” he said with a bitter laugh. “Well, to save ‘Jace.’ And it was your strength and your decision that brought me here. You who decided to do the right thing, not me.

“There’s so much I wish we could have settled, Kallist. Even if I could never have made up for what I did to you, I could have tried. Maybe even been friends again, now that I understand why Liliana did what she did, why she left ‘Jace’ for …”

And then he was up and running, cursing himself for a thousand kinds of fool. Here he was, moping in alleyways, with who-knew-what still happening to Liliana. He remembered her cry from the stairwell, and a surge of magic passed through him, a spell he could only have wished to cast when he’d still thought himself to be Kallist. He directed his magics sharply down and allowed them to lift him skyward, spreading out in invisible wings of pure telekinetic force that brushed the buildings to each side, the feel of the stone cold against his mind. He took to the air, arcing over the nearest buildings, angling sharply toward the apartment that his mind in Kallist’s body had called home.

This was Ravnica. Nobody gave the soaring figure more than a second look.

Before him was an open window, broken and shattered in Semner’s attack. Jace swooped inside, the psychic wings fading into nothingness even as his feet touched the floor.

Liliana stared with wide, red-rimmed eyes from the
floor, where she’d slumped exhausted against the fallen table. Shaky as a newborn fawn she rose, and made her way toward him with tentative steps. He feared, at first, that she was injured, but the blood that stained her gown was not hers.

“Jace?” she asked softly, her hand rising, her fingers brushing the side of his face, as light as hummingbird’s breath. “Jace?”

He nodded once, trembling at her words, her touch.

“Oh, Jace, I’m sorry!” He almost found himself falling back as she wrapped her arms tight around him, as though afraid he’d simply vanish once more. “I wanted to explain, I wanted to fix it,” she sobbed into his chest. “I didn’t know how.”

“It’s all right,” he told her through tears of his own. “It’s not your fault. I did it to myself, to me and to—to Kallist.” His words ended in a soft gasp, and he refused to turn his gaze, to look at the room beyond the woman he held. “I wonder … I don’t think the right one of us survived, Liliana. I think he deserved it more than me.”

“What was it like?” she asked gently, face still pressed against him.

“It … It didn’t really feel like anything,” he replied slowly, thinking back over the past six months. “I mean, I was just him. It didn’t feel like anything had changed. Even when …” She felt his chest move as he shrugged. “We’re not exactly identical twins, but it somehow never occurred to me that my face had changed. If I thought about it, I could have said ‘Jace was the one who lost a toe to frostbite,’ yet whenever I looked at the stump, it just felt natural. I never even questioned it.”

“Your soul,” she suggested.

“What?”

“You traded minds, Jace, not souls. Your soul was still you. Maybe that was its way of protecting your
mind. Maybe knowing what had happened without being able to fix it would have—damaged you.”

“I’m not sure I believe there’s any such thing as a soul separate from the mind,” he admitted.

“There is.” It was scarcely more than a whisper. “Believe me, there is.”

Jace nodded, and finally steeled himself for what was to come. Tenderly but firmly, he pulled himself from Liliana’s grasp and stepped across the room, ignoring Semner’s mutilated corpse as he searched for—

Jace dropped to his knees, felt Liliana’s hand on his shoulder and couldn’t even turn to meet her gaze. He’d known Kallist was dead, of course, had known since he awoke in the alleyway with his own memories, but to see it …

“I couldn’t save him,” she whispered to him.

“You shouldn’t have had to,” Jace rasped, rising slowly. “This is my fault.”

“Jace—”

“It is. I did this. It’s my fault.

“But,” he added, turning around, eyes sweeping the room, “it’s not my fault
alone.”

There, lying off to one side, half-propped against the wall, one of Semner’s men still breathed. Jace watched him for a long moment, and gathered his concentration as he’d not done in ages. The air around him began to glow, a wintry breezy to waft through the chamber, as he drew on sufficient mana to rip into the man’s mind.

There was no finesse, no care, only power and purpose. Jace slashed through thoughts and memories like underbrush, leaving a wake of devastation behind him. The unconscious fellow twitched and shuddered as entire swathes of his life were frayed. He wouldn’t die of this. Jace had no taste for killing, not with memories of the Lurias marketplace fresh in his mind. But neither would he leave one of Semner’s thugs behind,
unpunished for his sins. The result was a drooling imbecile, a man who might be trusted to push carts or carry boxes in exchange for food and shelter. A grim life, but a life nonetheless, and perhaps more than the bastard deserved.

Deeper Jace delved, without sympathy or compunction; he cared about one thing only, held to but one objective. Yet no matter how thoroughly he sifted through the shreds of what had lately been a sentient mind, he couldn’t find it. Eventually he had to concede that it was never there.

“He doesn’t know,” he said to Liliana as he allowed the spell to lapse, ignoring the faint babbling and drooling emerging from what was no longer entirely a man. “He doesn’t know who hired Semner. I doubt any of them did except Semner himself.”

Liliana gently took his hand in hers. “Is there really any doubt?” she asked him.

“Why would they have sent someone like Semner?” Jace challenged. “They’d have known he wasn’t up to the task. If it’d actually been me, instead of Kallist …

“So maybe they didn’t send him. Maybe he found where you were—where ‘Kallist’ was—and decided to try for the bounty they’ve put on your head. But either way, it’s ultimately their fault, isn’t it?”

Jace looked away. “It is,” he agreed.

“So what,” she said, taking his chin and forcing his face around to meet her gaze, “are we going to do about it?”

“We could walk somewhere. Like we meant to do before. Somewhere the Consortium would never find us.”

“Is there any such place?” she asked. “Would you really want to live in a strange place, without friends, looking over your shoulder every day?

“Would you really,” and her voice grew suddenly hard, “want to let them get away with what they’ve done to Kallist? To us?”

Again Jace pulled away from her, moving across the room to stare out the window at the flickering lights of Favarial. Fear and anger warred across his face, staking out territories in the depths of his soul.

“You don’t know Tezzeret,” he whispered finally. “Not like I do. I can’t—we can’t beat him, Liliana.

“But—”

Jace turned, shaking his head. “We can’t,” he insisted. “But we don’t have to.

“The Consortium will regret what they’ve done, Liliana. And we can blind them in the process, throw them into enough disarray that they won’t be able to come looking for us. Not for a while, at least, not until we’re well and truly gone.”

It wasn’t enough, not nearly. But she dared not push any further, not so soon. And at least it was a start. She nodded, and if Jace noticed the sudden tension in her shoulders, he surely attributed it to the evening’s horrors.

Jace returned to the body of his best friend and knelt beside him one last time. Ignoring the blood that was already drying into a thick stain, he lifted the heavy blue cloak that had always been his favorite. He wrapped it around his shoulders and joined Liliana in the doorway. Later, when he’d had the chance to rest, to draw mana from the waters below, he would sprout his wings and take to the sky once more, carrying them as far as he could. For now, they had only their feet on which to rely as they began the long, monotonous journey toward the Rubblefield.

“Damn it to raging puss-soaked hell!” Paldor ranted at the blinking glow that limned his beard and fleshy features in a blood-red aura. “Why are you doing this to me? Why?”

Oddly enough, the desk didn’t answer.

Constructed by Tezzeret, Paldor’s desk was attuned to every external door and window in the building
through an intricate magical alarm system. Should anyone other than members of the Consortium attempt to enter the complex, the wood glowed, alerting Paldor to the possibility of intrusion.

This was the seventh time the damn thing had gone off in the past three hours.

Paldor practically ripped the speaking tube from the wall and held it to his mouth. “Captain Sevrien! This needs to stop!”

A few moments of silence, and then a breathless voice replied. “Captain’s not in the office, sir. We’re stretched thin, so he’s gone to check on the latest incursion himself.”

Paldor muttered something under his breath that threatened to melt the mouthpiece. Then, “Wake the day shift, if you’re that shorthanded!”

“Uh, we already have, sir.”

More flowery muttering.

It made sense, though. Looking back over the schematic on the desk, it seemed that each false alarm—if indeed they were false—was as far from the previous ones as possible. The guards were running themselves ragged, not merely investigating each new alert, but leaving a pair of men behind to watch the portal in question;
of course
they’d already called in every available blade.

Paldor shook his head as the flashing ceased. Could magic simply malfunction? As long as he’d worked for Tezzeret, he still didn’t really understand more than the basics of sorcery. But if it was an attack, or a prelude to attack, where was the enemy? So far, the guards hadn’t found a threat, or even an explanation as to how the alarms were triggered.

Not for the first time, Paldor glanced at the glass contraption on the wall. And not for the first time, he rejected the notion before it had fully formed. Tezzeret would not take kindly to an interruption without a
tangible threat. Until Paldor knew for certain what was happening, he was better off not troubling him.

“Aarrggh!” In a tempter tantrum worthy of a colicky child, he pounded his fists on the desk when it lit up once more, indicating a window clear on the other side of the building. Grumbling, he rechecked the array of weapons concealed both under the desk and on his person—as he’d done each of the last seven or eight times—and seethed.

But this time, finally, the results were a bit different.

“Got it, Paldor.” The voice, the vedalken captain’s own this time, emerged clearly from the speaking tube.

“You know what’s going on?” Paldor asked hopefully.

“I positioned some men at the windows that hadn’t been triggered yet. We got lucky, finally caught ‘em in the act.”

“And?”

“Faeries,” Captain Sevrien reported, disgust in his voice. “We’re being pranked by a swarm of bloody, damned faeries. Would’ve pulled the bug’s wings off myself, but it vanished when it saw we were waiting for it.”

Paldor nodded, even though Sevrien couldn’t see him, but his brow furrowed in consternation. It was certainly possible; some of the smaller and less malevolent of fey-kind were known for such annoyances, and even the great city of Ravnica, lacking the groves and woods of which the creatures were most fond, wasn’t completely free of the pests.

But why here? Why in such force? Something knocked faintly on the doors of Paldor’s memory but refused, for the moment, to step over the threshold.

“What sort of faerie, Captain?” He hadn’t even known he was going to ask the question until it had moved beyond his beard, but suddenly he had to know.

“Come again, sir?”

“What sort of faerie?”

Paldor could all but hear Sevrien shrug. “Beats me, sir. I don’t know the first thing about the little bastards. I—”

“Then go to the library or the workroom,” Paldor ordered through a vicious snarl, “and find someone who does!” He slammed the speaking tube back into its slot in the wall.

The desk had flashed two more alarms, leaving Paldor gritting his teeth hard enough to have milled a sack of grain, before the captain’s voice emerged from the tube once more.

“What have you got, Captain?” Paldor interrupted.

“Well, sir, according to Phanol down in the stacks, based on the description I gave him …”

“Yes?”

“He says it was a cloud sprite, sir. Pretty much harmless. Weird thing is, sir, he said they’re not known for this sort of mischief, that they …”

Paldor wasn’t listening any longer, for the memory lurking just outside his conscious mind had finally burst its way in. No, cloud sprites weren’t known for this sort of thing. Nor were they particularly common anywhere on Ravnica, and certainly not in the midst of the larger districts.

But most important, he’d finally remembered exactly when he’d last heard tell of the tiny sprites.

“Call your men back, Captain! Set them up guarding the main passageways, and for the heavens’ sake, group them into units larger than pairs!”

“Sir, I’m not sure I—”