Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel (15 page)

“Etherium?” Jace repeated.

Tezzeret clenched his jaw at yet another interruption and held up his artificial hand. “Etherium. A powerful, magic-rich alloy capable of holding any manner of enchantments. It’s also exceedingly rare, since the secret of its creation is all but lost across the entire Multiverse. This hand is probably more valuable than the entirety of this district.”

Jace’s eyes widened.

“As I was saying, then,” the artificer continued, “two crowns of etherium, one of which should have allowed me to read the thoughts of anyone wearing the other. We managed to communicate, speaking as though we were right beside one another across a distance of miles, but I could never read any thought he didn’t choose to project. I constructed a sarcophagus of needles and tubes, into which a subject could be placed. I managed to extract the equivalent of two words’ worth of thoughts before the machine turned the subject’s brain into so much gargoyle guano.”

Jace shuddered.

“I even once fashioned a crystalline chamber,” Tezzeret reminisced, eyes glazing slightly, “capable of storing the memories and personality of a dying man. But the mechanism that should have allowed communication with the mind within failed to work, and since I’d built it purely for communication, I hadn’t included any means of placing him into a new living body. So I’ve no idea how much of him was actually preserved.

“My point,” he concluded sharply, coming back to himself with a sudden blink and glaring at Jace as though somehow he were at fault for the digression, “is
that, though it comes so easily to you, and though it’s a form of magic wizards have been struggling to develop for ages, it’s actually proven to be a very rare, and very elusive, talent.

“And that means that we’ve got to get you, Beleren, as skilled as we possibly can.”

“I can live with that,” Jace said with a fierce grin.

“I’m so glad to hear it. Talk to me.”

“What?”

“Talk to me.” Tezzeret leaned forward, fists on the table. “Not with your mouth. With your mind.”

For an instant, Jace stared. Tezzeret wasn’t certain if he was concentrating, or had somehow failed to understand the command. Then …

Like so?
The words formed directly in Tezzeret’s mind. Jace’s lips, his tongue, his teeth moved not at all.

“Precisely like that,” Tezzeret told him. “I see you’ve done this before.”

It’s come in useful a time or two
.

“How far?”

Jace shrugged. “Never tried it beyond a few yards or so,” he said aloud “We’ll have to test that.” He pointed a metal finger at the door. “There are several guards in the hallway outside. Can you communicate with them?”

“Hm. I’ve never tried this outside line of sight, except with people I already know.”

“Then now’s a good time to start.”

A moment more, and Jace’s eyes grew wide, his jaw muscles twitching as though he were repressing a shout. And then the door flew open and a trio of guards dashed inside with the clatter of mail, hands reaching for their swords. The room abruptly smelled of oiled steel.

“Boss?” one asked. “Is everything okay? I thought I heard someone shouting for us.”

“And you?” Tezzeret demanded of the other two.

Both shook their heads. “Heard nothing, boss.”

“It’s a start.” Tezzeret pointed to the first guard, though he’d turned back toward Jace. “Can you include him and me both?”

“What?”

“Can you talk to both of us like this?” Jace frowned, felt his fists clenching.
I’m … not sure
. Tezzeret glanced at the guard, who nodded. “I heard him, boss.”

“Excellent!”

The young mage was tiring swiftly, in mind if not in muscle. The sensation was like trying to juggle two balls in two different directions.

And then his entire body slumped when Tezzeret pointed to another guard. “All three of us, now.”

It took Jace half a dozen tries before the second guard also heard his mental “voice.” His entire forehead was drenched in sweat, his mouth had gone dry as a mummified bone, and his vision was starting to blur. Tezzeret and the guards were starting to look as fuzzy as their reflections in the steel walls.

“No!” He shook his head—a bad idea, as the world spun around him—as Tezzeret pointed to yet a third guard. “Tezzeret, I can’t. I—”

“You are not giving up already!” Tezzeret shouted, face slowly going red. “I won’t allow it!”

“But … But I—”

“Do it! Damn you, Beleren, do it now!” Jace cast out his voice to encompass all four men. His head felt as though it would split open, like someone had stuck a pry bar through his skull and was steadily working it this way and that.

“Pathetic,” Tezzeret said, rising to his feet. Yet despite his tone, he reached out and helped Jace to sit back against the wall, rather than leaving him curled on the floor. “I expect better of you, Beleren. I know you’re capable of more than this.” He turned to the nearest guard even as he rose. “Once he’s recovered, he’s not
to leave until he’s proven to you that he can at least still reach three of you. I want to know—and I want him to know—that pain and prior failures aren’t going to hold him back or undo what we’ve accomplished.”

“You got it, boss.”

And then the artificer was gone, leaving the guards to stare at Jace, shuddering not merely with pain but with the shame of his first failure.

Jace lay upon the thick down mattress, arms crossed behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling—just as he had for many hours, across the span of many days. And he wondered, not for the first time, if Tezzeret’s notion of an exciting life was perhaps different from his own. Oh, he had his training sessions to look forward to. They weren’t anyone’s definition of “fun,” and he might have thought seriously about leaving after that first one—except that they worked! Damned if, in mere days, he hadn’t felt his mind expanding, comprehending spells he’d never used before, honing even familiar incantations like a razor’s edge.

But those sessions were sporadic, occurring when Tezzeret had the time to devote from his many other concerns on many other worlds. And Jace was getting more than a little bored.

The Consortium’s Ravnica compound was, or so Tezzeret had claimed, one of the nicest on all the various worlds. Jace had passed through marble-walled and lushly carpeted halls, kitchens capable of producing foods that nearly qualified as magic in their own right, libraries boasting any book one could ask for, on any topic one might imagine. His own domicile was a suite of chambers, complete with self-lighting chandeliers that glowed without heat; a fireplace that never ceased burning and produced either warmth or cold depending on Jace’s command; even a few mechanical servants that were, if not as efficient or unobtrusive as Emmara’s
animate dolls, still more than capable of accomplishing whatever menial task Jace might assign them.

For the first few days, it was a paradise, and Jace luxuriated in an opulence he’d never known.

After
two months
of dwelling here with nothing to do but peruse said libraries or wander about the streets of Ravnica (something he’d been quite capable of doing before the Consortium, thank you very much), he was ready for a change of pace. But neither Tezzeret himself nor the Ravnica cell’s own leader seemed ready to actually let him do anything.

That local lieutenant was an enormously corpulent, sausage-fingered fellow with untamed hair and beard of darkest black, so short and squat that Jace briefly wondered if he might be one of the mythical dwarves he’d heard of on other worlds. Paldor was his name—“Almost like platter,” he would say at every opportunity, hands clutching at one roll of fat or another, “so really, could my parents have expected anything else?” It was a joke nobody found funny, but that never stopped him from repeating it.

He seemed a friendly enough sort, willing to show Jace around and introduce him to other members of the cell, but Jace wondered more than once just how black a dark side the man must possess to have worked his way so high in Tezzeret’s ranks. But of course, Paldor’s duties prevented him from spending more than a few moments on that project, and again Jace found himself left to his own devices. He couldn’t really even go out to make new acquaintances on his own, for he didn’t know how many members of the Ravnica cell knew about the Consortium’s other-worldly nature—and he wasn’t about to spill Tezzeret’s secrets to the uninitiated.

And so he lay on his back, and stared, and brooded, and fell into that state of half-sleep that comes so often when one lies abed with nothing important to do. And it took him several moments of trying to rouse himself to realize that someone was pounding upon his door.

Jace took a moment to tug the worst of the wrinkles from his tunic, flung open the door, and found himself staring, or so it appeared, into a slightly warped mirror.

“You’d be Jace,” the man suggested.

Jace blinked eloquently in response.

“I’m Kallist. Kallist Rhoka. And you need to either learn to sleep more lightly, or get yourself a doorbell. Preferably one taken from a church steeple.”

“Um,” Jace added.

“We’ve been summoned. We’re supposed to be in Paldor’s office in, oh, five minutes ago. So unless your magic can either take us back in time, or summon up a really potent excuse, I suggest we get moving.”

Still not entirely certain what was happening, Jace got moving.

Although he’d long since mastered the ins and outs of the complex, he allowed the other man to lead, and took the time to study his guide. Now that he was a bit more awake and a lot more alert, Jace realized that they did not look quite so similar as his drowsy senses had at first suggested. Kallist was clad in black leather armor over deep blue padding; a match to Jace’s own wardrobe in color, perhaps, but certainly not in style. The various blades that Kallist wore about his person also indicated a wide gulf between their skill sets. Still, they could certainly pass as relatives, a fact that Jace refused utterly to dismiss as coincidence.

Kallist clearly knew the winding halls at least as well as Jace, since he hesitated not at all in his path to Paldor’s office, on the uppermost floor of the highest building. Jace was vaguely irritated, as he panted for breath at the top of the stairs, to note that Kallist wasn’t even winded.

The office, which Kallist entered after giving a perfunctory knock, was massive but largely empty. A mahogany desk, quite broad but abnormally short to accommodate Paldor’s stature, occupied the far end
of the room. Several chairs stood scattered before it, arranged in a vague semicircle. On the wall above hung a large clock of brass gears and heavy pendulums. The rightmost wall was one large window, staring out over the slowly recovering expanse of Rubblefield, while the leftmost …

On the leftmost wall was a peculiar contraption, smaller but far more complex than the clock itself. Tubes of glass twined over and about each other; some seemed almost to be tied in knots, bending at impossible angles. Through those pipes flowed long wisps of … It wasn’t smoke, exactly, for no smoke had ever been so unnatural a color. It took Jace long moments to recognized the æther of the Blind Eternities, for never had he seen so much as a puff of that stuff in the physical world. He couldn’t begin to imagine what purpose the device might serve.

But that was it, the entirety of the office. A great deal of space, with little purpose except, perhaps, to show visitors that Paldor could afford to waste a great deal of space.

Paldor looked up from the desk, scowled briefly at the clock above his head, and then took several steps away from the desk. Today he wore what Jace would politely have called a robe, and more honestly thought of as a tent. It was wine-purple and made Paldor look like a giant, bearded grape. “Welcome to your first assignment, Beleren,” he said.

No response. It required a not-so-subtle “Ahem!” from Paldor to draw his attention from the peculiar contraption on the wall.

“Ah, yes,” Jace said. “Sorry.”

Paldor scowled, then shook his head. “You’ve heard the name Ronia Hesset?”

“I’ve come across it. Who is she?”

“The head of a merchant family who used to have connections with the Orzhov and with whom the
Consortium has had a great many dealings since the guilds went away. She’s even dealt with Tezzeret himself, a time or two. She doesn’t know our true nature—or the existence of other worlds at all, for that matter—but beyond that, she knows as much of the Infinite Consortium as any outsider.

“Of late, more than a few of our transactions with her House have come up short. For a time, Tezzeret and I were willing to let it go; most mercantile sects have one or two corrupt members, and she’s done well enough by us in the past. But now she’s claiming to have lost an entire payment, several thousand-weight of gold in value. Since this happened at roughly the same time one of her relatives paid off an outstanding debt to certain criminal interests … Well, you can see how this might arouse my suspicions.”

“Aroused?” Kallist muttered from behind. “I’d say they were downright seduced.”

“Your job,” Paldor told Jace, “should be simple enough for a man of your talents. We’d hoped to just have you meet with Hesset, read her that way, but she’s refused any meetings for the next few days. ‘Too busy,’ she says. And frankly, Tezzeret’s not willing to wait. You’ll accompany Rhoka into Hesset’s home. He gets you into her house; you then get into her mind. If she’s truly innocent and ignorant of these thefts, you’ll return to me, and I’ll deal with it. If she’s behind them, as I suspect at this point she must be, you tell Kallist and he makes an example of her.”