War of the Spark, page 5
Karn frowned. “Then ‘ghost-assassin’ is a very imprecise term.”
“So this Kaya is beholden to the dragon, too?” Teferi asked, trying to get things back on track.
“No. That was clearly Bolas’ intent, but Kaya refused to help him any further, and I believe she’s a reliable ally. Though I’m not sure how much support she has within her guild. She’s been forgiving debts.”
“Oh, that must be going over well with the Orzhov bankers,” Jace said sarcastically.
“Pretty much as you’d expect.”
* * *
—
House Dimir.
“Bolas had infiltrated the spy guild, as well, but its Guildmaster Lazav seems to have cleaned house. Not that Lazav is all that trustworthy, either. Still, he seems to regard the dragon as a serious threat and remains a—probable—ally.”
* * *
—
The Izzet League.
“Without the amendment to the Guildpact, Niv-Mizzet was forced to fight Bolas under his own power.”
“I take it—” Jace began.
“The battle was brief, leaving only Niv’s charred bones behind. Zarek is the new acting guildmaster, and one of the few still ready and willing to fight the dragon.”
* * *
—
The Boros Legion.
“Guildmaster Aurelia remains solidly on our side.”
“Of course she is,” Gideon said with a satisfied smile.
“Indeed,” Lavinia said. “But you just missed their first attempt to put Bolas down. Minutes after his Citadel and statue appeared, they attacked with two squadrons. The dragon routed them easily, effortlessly. Without budging from his throne. Aurelia has withdrawn the Legion to regroup. They’re maintaining a wide perimeter around the plaza, keeping bystanders clear. But there are easily a few thousand civilians still within the boundary, and there’s been no organized attempt to evacuate them.”
* * *
—
Jace made a quick assessment: “So we have two guilds we can count on. Izzet and Boros. Two more, Dimir and Orzhov, that are likely allies. Four—Simic, Selesnya, Gruul, and Rakdos—who believe they can sit this battle out.”
“The fools,” Ajani said.
“Well, there’s plenty of foolishness to go around. Baan has placed Azorius staunchly on Bolas’ side. And…” He trailed off.
“The Golgari,” Lavinia said, raising that single eyebrow yet again.
Jace cleared his throat. “Yes, the Golgari. In disarray with no leadership. Unless Vraska returns.”
“If she does,” Lavinia said, “she’ll have nine other guilds after her head. Especially the Azorius, for the murder of Isperia. And especially Izzet. Zarek trusted her, befriended her. He’s not likely to forgive her betrayal.”
Jace nodded slowly and then turned to Gideon. “Try to Planeswalk,” he said.
“What? I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m confident of that. But try anyway.”
Gideon shot him a suspicious look. Then he rolled his eyes and vanished with a flash of golden light. He hadn’t been gone two seconds when he reappeared, shouting, perhaps in pain, perhaps in frustration. It wasn’t clear. A golden circle within a triangle—the crest of Azor—shimmered briefly above his head…before fading away.
“What just happened?” Chandra asked.
Recovering quickly, Gideon said, “I was on Kaladesh. At your mother’s place. But I couldn’t hold the plane. I was pulled back—yanked back. I tried to fight it. Not sure why. I wanted to come back. But it felt unnatural, so I fought the pull with everything I had. Didn’t help.”
“It’s what I assumed would happen.” Jace crossed to a bookshelf, pulled off a title and flipped through its pages. “Here,” he said, reading to himself. “I think I can show you.” He approached a wall of windows that looked out over the city to the east. The rest followed. He held out his hand and rotated it thirty degrees while whispering a single word: “Display.”
A few miles away, above the Azorius Guildhall in New Prahv, a gargantuan and intricate version of the circle-within-the-triangle symbol appeared in the sky.
Jace heard multiple gasps but didn’t bother trying to decipher who was the most shocked. He said, “It’s the Immortal Sun, a powerful talisman created by Azor himself, originally to trap Bolas. Clearly, Baan has activated it for the dragon. Its power will keep all of us from planeswalking away, while Zarek’s Beacon will draw more and more Planeswalkers here.”
“And that’s Bolas’ trap,” Ajani said.
“Exactly,” Jace said. “There’s no escape for any of us now, as long as the Sun is active.”
“Which means,” Gideon stated simply, “as long as Nicol Bolas lives…”
Gideon had stopped pretending he gave a damn about plans.
Strategist? Tactician? That was never me. A general? No. I’m a foot soldier. A sergeant, at best. A fighter. A brawler. And maybe, I suppose, a weapons master.
There was a dragon that needed slaying, an Elder Dragon, and Gideon had acquired a weapon, Blackblade, that had once slain another Elder Dragon.
Get close and stab.
These days, that sounded like Gideon’s kind of plan.
On the other hand, his attempt to slay Bolas on Amonkhet—admittedly with the wrong weapon—had proven that “get close and stab” was easier said than done. Bolas had quite literally bounced Gideon around like a rubber ball. Gideon’s magical invulnerability had protected him, but he never got close enough to any of Bolas’ vital organs to make stabbing a viable solution.
So Gideon was fine with the current compromise. A small unit. Jace, Teferi, Lavinia and Gideon. Jace was already using his power of illusion to make all four invisible. He’d initially insisted it was only a scouting mission. But Jace didn’t need to be telepathic to know that if Gideon got his shot, he would take it.
So when they got close, Teferi would, at the crucial moment, use his control of time to slow the clock around the dragon, allowing Jace to use his power over Ravnica’s magical law, as its Living Guildpact, to literally arrest Bolas in place, so that Gideon could bring Blackblade to bear. Lavinia—a fine warrior in her own right and the only native Ravnican in their little group—would have their backs, in case one of Bolas’ endless series of minions attempted to rescue his or her master. (Lavinia had announced—in a low voice that almost gave Gideon chills—that she was hoping said minion would be Tezzeret. She seemed to have a score to settle with that one.) Again, a simple plan.
Direct. Clean. No nonsense. Or not much nonsense, anyway.
Chandra had objected: “Come on, Gids! You can’t leave me behind!”
Gideon had sympathized, but Jaya Ballard had pointed out to her protégée that neither pyromancer could generate enough heat and flame to harm an Elder Dragon. Fire was the first magic Bolas had learned, probably when he was still an egg. He literally inhaled and exhaled the stuff. Jaya and Chandra wouldn’t be helpful, and the fewer people Jace had to mask, the better.
Which was also why Ajani and Karn had stayed behind. Or part of the reason. Deep down, Gideon hadn’t needed to catch Beleren’s subtle nod to them to know they remained in Jace’s sanctum as a fail-safe. Ajani, Karn, Jaya and Chandra could rally whatever Planeswalkers were summoned by this Beacon thing to take Bolas down in the event that Gideon and company fell. Gideon wasn’t actually afraid of dying. His invulnerability made that unlikely, and frankly he hadn’t feared death since he was a kid on the plane of Theros. Kytheon Iora—the name he’d been born with, before foreign pronunciation had altered it to Gideon Jura—owed the Multiverse a death. If today was the day that debt came due, so be it. But damn if he wasn’t going to take the dragon along for the ride.
Tenth District Plaza was nearly empty. Those who hadn’t fled when Bolas’ Citadel and statue had risen were mostly staying inside. But there were a handful of hardy (or foolish) souls who still scurried about for reasons of their own. The four invisible warriors raced past five or six humans, two goblin children and a blue-skinned vedalken.
They were about halfway across the plaza when they paused for just a moment to look up at the towering obelisk upon which Bolas had set his own image. Gideon had to stifle the urge to attempt to push the thing over. He didn’t have the strength for it, and it would have warned Bolas. Still, he’d have almost been willing to risk the latter if the former had been within his power.
Jace, keeping even telepathic communication to an absolute minimum, waved them forward. They started up again, passing three more children—a human, an elf and another goblin.
What’s with all the children in the plaza? Don’t they have anyone who cares enough to get them out of harm’s way?
Of course, Kytheon hadn’t had anyone at their age. No adults, anyway. Just his Irregulars, the oldest of whom wasn’t much older than he had been, before—
Anyway, from what he knew of his companions, most of them hadn’t had anyone to take care of them, either, for much of their childhoods. Maybe it was a Planeswalker thing.
But there had to be responsible parents and guardians on some damn plane, didn’t there?
Again he had to fight off the temptation to do something noble, heroic and idiotic. To stop, turn around and whisk the kids off the plaza. Instead he kept moving. In the long run, the little ones would be safer if Gideon dispatched the dragon quicker.
So no stopping. No turning around.
And just then, he stopped and turned around.
A loud sonic boom and a rush of dry desert air from behind them nearly knocked Gideon and the others off their feet.
The four turned as one, as the sound of crashing masonry echoed across the plaza.
To their mutual horror, a gigantic portal—fifty yards tall—had opened behind them, instantly decimating the Embassy of the Guildpact, shearing it nearly in half. Soft violet light poured forth from the portal, looking almost serene—in stark contrast with the destruction that the tear in space had caused and was causing.
Gideon watched in horror as an ogre stumbled forward before collapsing, her entire upper right quadrant evaporated by the portal’s arrival. Too far away to help, Gideon saw the embassy’s crumbling façade fall, crushing two more bystanders beneath its formerly polished stone.
This was the Planar Bridge that Tezzeret had stolen for Bolas from Kaladesh. With it, the two of them could transport inorganic matter from one plane to another. Jace had warned them that this would be part of Bolas’ plans, but Gideon hadn’t realized the Bridge would be this large, this devastating. And worse…
I left Chandra behind! She and the others are still inside the embassy!
Amid a puff of purple smoke, Dack Fayden planeswalked to Ravnica, empty-handed and annoyed. And four feet above the ground.
“Gods-be-damned!” he said aloud as he dropped in a heap. This had happened to him more times than he cared to count. He didn’t know many other Planeswalkers, but none he had met would admit to materializing in midair and falling like an idiot. Of course, he didn’t admit to it, either, so maybe it happened to them all.
Yet somehow, I doubt it, he thought as he picked himself up off the cobblestone alleyway, rubbing his now sore ass.
Dack hadn’t planned on coming back so soon. Ravnica might currently be the closest thing he had to a home, but he had spent considerable time and energy casing a number of valuable treasures on the plane of Innistrad, and leaving without even one was professionally embarrassing for the man who had once declared himself the Greatest Thief in the Multiverse.
But here he was, back on Ravnica with no Amulet of the Kralmar, no Seelenstone, no Bloodletter, no Praying Gargoyle, no Tome of Eons and no Grimoire of the Dead. Nothing to use his psychometry upon, stealing its spell of creation. And nothing to fence to J’dashe down in the Lower Sixth. Dack had borrowed expense money from the Orzhov pontiff (a.k.a. the self-proclaimed Greatest Fence in the Multiverse) a few weeks before J’dashe had died. The Innistrad score would have squared Dack with J’dashe’s ghost, but now interest on the loan would continue to pile up.
I hate owing money to the dead. They are so impatient.
It was no longer about the coin to J’dashe. After all, what use did she have for it now? “It’s the principle of the thing,” the pontiff’s spirit had said, just before Dack left for Innistrad. But Fayden knew J’dashe really meant “the principal”…and the interest.
So why did I come back?
The truth was he hadn’t been able to help himself. A combination of dread and anticipation—not to mention a light show that no one else on the streets of the High City of Thraben seemed to see—had called him to Ravnica.
It made no sense, beyond the obvious cause: magic. Magic of some kind. Magic powerful enough to summon a Planeswalker. And powerful enough to spark Dack Fayden’s curiosity.
Well, he’d better get to the bottom of it all, and the sooner the better. After all, the treasures of Innistrad weren’t going to steal themselves.
Dack adapted a tactile spell he’d once acquired off the Amulet of Tarantual and quickly scaled the wall of the alley. He pulled himself up onto the roof of the nearest building to get his bearings. But he still wasn’t high enough to see anything that might provide a clue as to what was going on.
Lithely, he made his way from rooftop to rooftop, running, jumping, climbing when necessary. This part he enjoyed.
This is freedom.
The only thing that would have made it better was if it had been night and not morning. A cool night with only a sliver of moon. That was a thief’s time. Simply being out in daylight left him feeling exposed. Last thing he needed was to be picked up by a Boros patrol or an Azorius Arrester. Of course, for once he wasn’t carrying any stolen goods. (Frankly, he wasn’t carrying much of anything. Not much left of J’dashe’s loan even.) Broke and bereft as he currently was, he could actually risk being out in the sun. In fact, when he ultimately did see a patrol of Boros Skyknights (and then another and another), Dack Fayden, Master Thief, grinned up at them and waved.
He was heading northeast, toward the center of the city, figuring if there was something to be seen or some bit of intel to be learned, he’d find it there.
He wasn’t wrong. Minutes later, Dack leapt across an urban canyon, his hands sticking to the side of a sandstone wall. It was a little slick from a predawn rain, and his tactile spell didn’t hold perfectly. But he managed to spider his way up to a high rooftop overlooking Tenth District Plaza.
From this height, he immediately saw three things that shouldn’t be there, three things that definitely were not there when he left Ravnica a month ago: a huge pyramid-shaped citadel, a looming column with a statue of a dragon atop it…and a gods-be-damned hole into another world!
Chandra didn’t know what hit her.
With a groan, she raised herself onto her hands and knees, pushing up off the floor of Jace’s library. A floor that was now sloping at a forty-five-degree angle. Through clouds of dust and a soft purple haze, she tried to clear her head and comprehend what had happened. The whole room was aslant. No, not the whole room. Because a good third of said room was simply gone. Only a foot away from her right shoulder, what had been floor and ceiling and shelf after shelf of books and half of a long wooden conference table around which the Gatewatch once met were now nothing but a curve of violet light.
The Planar Bridge! It’s open!
Its activation had wiped out a chunk of the building, collapsing and tipping what remained of the embassy toward the gaping portal. Chandra looked down. Part of an old leather-bound volume rested on the floor against her hand, looking as if a very precise monster had taken a perfectly curved bite out of the tome’s corner. She picked up her hand, and the book slid down across the slanting hardwood floor, falling off into an indigo void.
If I had been standing a foot to my right…Or if Nissa had been here…
“Chandra! Chandra, are you there?” It was Jaya’s voice, calling from Jace’s office, which moments ago Chandra had left in a snit, because Gideon and Jace hadn’t let her go with his squad.
“Yeah,” she answered thickly—and too quietly to be heard. She heaved herself up onto her feet, cleared her throat and called out, “I’m here! I’m okay!”
“Then get in here and help!”
She stumbled “uphill” toward the door, managing to grasp the knob and pull herself up the final distance. She turned the handle, and when the door swung open toward her, she nearly lost her balance, nearly let go of the doorknob, which would have resulted in her sliding down across the smooth floor and off its edge into…into what, she wasn’t exactly sure.
But she held on. Even managed to grab hold of the doorjamb and pull herself up into the other room. She pulled and latched the door behind her so nothing else could fall out into whatever oblivion lay beyond the Ravnica side of the Bridge’s giant circular portal.
Jace’s sanctum was even more dust-filled than the library had been. Calling out, “I’m here!” she squinted and looked about till she spotted Jaya’s flame. She leaned in and carefully trudged up to the elder pyromancer, who was using precision flames to burn through a fallen oak beam that had pinned a fallen Ajani Goldmane to the smooth hardwood floor. Ajani was bleeding from a cut above his one good eye, but his own magic was rapidly healing the wound beneath a semi-transparent white glow.
“Should I help?” Chandra asked.
“Can you help,” Jaya responded (a little crossly, Chandra thought), “without setting what remains of the place ablaze?”
Chandra bristled slightly but instantly realized this was not the moment to take offense. After silently patting herself on the back over this little bit of maturity, she asked, “Where’s Karn?”
“Here,” the golem called out through the haze, while pushing Jace’s large cedar desk off one silver leg.
From somewhere, Jace’s mind reached out urgently to hers: Chandra? Are you all right?
