Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel (45 page)

“Piece of cake,” Liliana taunted as they crouched low on the mountainside, peering over heaps of rock at the enormous installation. “Would that be chocolate or lemon-flavored, oh master baker and tactician?”

Jace ignored her, picking bits of shale from his sleeves, flicking frost from his gloves, and staring at the high smokestacks and fortress-like walls. Or rather, staring past them; he’d sent a small band of faeries and homunculi to flitter invisibly about the complex, then read their minds to gain a solid notion of the layout.

If anything, Nicol Bolas had exaggerated their chances.

Multiple squat structures, some of stone and some of a steel alloy that resisted rusting beneath the frost, clung grimly to the mountainside. The thick fumes that rose from within mixed haphazardly with the clouds above, and even where the mages lay, some quarter-mile up the mountainside, the falling snow was tinged gray.

Some of those buildings, his spies had observed, covered mines dug deep into the stone, traversed by carts propelled by squat animated constructs. Others played home to enormous basins of molten metal, so hot that any precipitation to touch the outer walls instantly melted and ran down the sides.

Inside, an array of catwalks spanned the structures, interwoven and intertwined like the home of some giant iron spider. A veritable forest of chains hung from the ceilings, ready to carry any of the dozens of machines or the enormous buckets used to smelt ore. Guards strode the narrow walkways as workers completed one task and dashed furiously to their next.

And Jace’s summoned infiltrators hadn’t even managed to
find
the sealed “arrival” room the dragon had described, let alone determine if it boasted any viable flaws or weaknesses they might exploit.

For a very long while Jace and Liliana watched, shivering in the cold, each waiting for the other to come up with a workable plan. But this was not all the young mind-reader contemplated during those dark, cold, and endless hours. His encounter with the dragon had reawakened other suspicions, worries and concerns he’d tried desperately to push from his mind.

Again he wondered how Semner had found him after so much time, without the use of magic far more potent than the thug and would-be mage could ever possess. Again he wondered how the Consortium had found Emmara, Rulan, and the others—how they’d connected them with Jace himself—when they’d never proved able to do so before. Again he noted that circumstances had
conspired to force him into a corner, removing options one by one until all that remained was the one option he’d worked so hard to avoid. And though he’d chosen not to bring it up, perhaps afraid she wouldn’t answer, perhaps afraid she would, he wondered why the normally fearless necromancer had flinched so strongly at Bolas’s mention of demons on Grixis.

It was impossible. He knew it was impossible, for he’d been inside her mind, albeit only once and long ago. And yet the more he thought on it, the more his misgivings thrust themselves to the fore as he drifted on the edge of sleep every night, the more he came to realize, with a sense of sick horror gnawing parasitically at his gut, that no other answer fit nearly so well.

So muddled had his thoughts become that he honestly couldn’t recall whether he was considering the foundry or the woman beside him when Liliana finally snapped. “This is useless!” she barked at him. “What can we possibly do here that Nicol Bolas couldn’t?”

“Hide in a closet,” Jace muttered, remembering the dragon’s words.

“Fine. So if we wanted, and if we got really lucky, we could watch helplessly from inside the walls instead of outside. Big hairy deal.”

But Jace was slowly smiling as a notion—a long shot, yes, but viable—finally dawned on him. “And there are some,” he said smugly, “who can hide where we can’t.”

“Um, yes. So?”

“So, Liliana, here’s what we’re going to do …”

A sheet of flame erupted from the æther, split down the middle, and once more Baltrice appeared in the heart of Tezzeret’s sanctum. She tried and failed to curse between ragged gasps for breath, for all her efforts were bent toward not dropping the heavy load she carried. Face coated in sweat and as red as the fires
she commanded, she strained to lower the crate to the floor. Only when it landed did she release her breath in an explosive gasp and hurl a litany of obscenities so foul they threatened to corrode the metal of the hall around her.

Oh, but she hated this task! Of all the duties asked of her as Tezzeret’s right hand, the collection of refined materials from the foundries involved in the Consortium’s etherium project was by far the worst. It was time consuming, it was laborious and exhausting, but more than that, it was demeaning! Toting crates back and forth? That was a servant’s job!

But until the artificer either found another planeswalker willing to be employed as a menial laborer—unlikely!—or found a means of artificially bridging the worlds—even more unlikely!—she was stuck with it.

At least she was here, though, and she could leave the task of toting the damned box down to the laboratory to someone more suited to it. Still flexing her aching fingers, she wandered around the corner, gone in search of one of Tezzeret’s golems.

Behind her, hidden not only within the crate but within the metal itself, the phantom flexed and rolled, a wisp of errant mist. It could never have survived such a slow trek through the Blind Eternities on its own; the entropy and the errant magics would have shredded its essence into so much ghostly confetti. But hidden away within the solid weight of the bars, the journey had merely been one of maddening torment, rather than utter destruction. Now it need only wait for its mistress’s summons to draw it back across that realm of roiling chaos; far more swiftly than its journey here, it would flit back, drawn by a call it could not deny, tracing a route between that world and this.

It could not simply describe the journey to them, for what good were mere words or even concepts such as direction and distance in the Blind Eternities? But it
had possessed the one called Jace Beleren once before, and with his cooperation it would do so again. With a melding of their minds, a sharing of the senses, the joined man-and-ghost could find their way. Ensconced within his flesh and protected by his Spark, their thoughts linked by magics only Beleren could perform, it would use its own sensory impressions and the planeswalker’s powers to retrace its ghostly steps once more.

Liliana Vess and Jace Beleren would have their guide.

F
or even the most powerful and most attentive planes-walker, arriving at a single, specific spot—such as, for instance, Baltrice’s ability to appear in the foundry’s sealed room, or the dead-end hall in the Consortium’s heart—was a matter, not merely of intent, but of regular practice and intimate familiarity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, possession by a spirit that had made the journey to the world in question precisely once failed to qualify as either. And thus Jace and Liliana had found themselves in the midst of a seemingly endless desert, the sun beating down on them with hammer-heavy blows, and no trace of Tezzeret’s sanctum—or any other signpost of civilization—in sight. Even the various summoned scouts they sent soaring high above them found no sign of the artificer; they had, however, spotted a slow-moving dromad-drawn caravan, trudging through the sands some few miles away.

Now, their skin already turning red beneath the blazing heat, the planeswalkers sat on simple wooden stools before an older, leather-skinned fellow named Zarifim. Clad in voluminous, sand-hued robes, he appeared almost a part of the desert itself. The rest of his
brethren, similarly dressed, waited politely some yards away while their leader conducted his negotiations.

“… easily spare the clothes you require, my new friends,” he was saying to Jace. “But such things are not easy to make.”

“I understand,” Jace told him. “How about four jugs of water, then?” He begrudged the mana it would take to summon so much water to this parched environment, but they needed the desert garb—and, more important, the directions Zarifim could offer.

To his credit, the old nomad didn’t jump on the deal immediately. “Forgive me for doubting your judgment, but you appear so ill-prepared for desert travel. Can you spare such a quantity of water? I would hate for our deal to leave you dying of thirst before you reach your goal.”

“I appreciate your concern, friend,” Jace told him, ignoring the impatient tapping of Liliana’s foot beside him. “But we’ll make do, I assure you.”

“Very well. Then we have a bargain.” The nomad gestured and several of his brethren came forward, carrying robes akin to the one he wore. “Not to keep questioning you, my new friends,” he said hesitantly, “but are you certain you wish to approach the Iron Tower? Even we go there only when we have many valuables to trade, and then only reluctantly. It is a bad place.”

“I don’t doubt that at all,” Jace admitted. “But from your description, yes, it is exactly where we must go.”

“So be it. I wish you the luck of the heavens. You must start from here, traveling due west for two days. Then …”

It was, in fact, four days later when Jace Beleren and Liliana Vess strode from the seemingly endless deserts, their skin chapped and wind-burned despite their protective magics and native garb, to finally arrive
at the metallic monstrosity that was Tezzeret’s home. Despite the heat, Jace had insisted on wearing his blue cloak, though he did so beneath the nomad’s robe. He knew damn well that he was being superstitious, even silly, but he’d owned it so long, survived with it for so long, he felt naked facing Tezzeret without it. Both were tired from the journey, both were worried that the sands had offered them little in the way of mana suited to their magics. They could only hope to discover some viable source within the sanctum itself, or risk finding themselves truly overmatched.

It rose from beneath the sands, a shallow hill that gleamed blindingly in the pounding sun. Perfectly smooth, at least from this distance, it might as well have been shaped from a single slab of alloy; only one solitary tower in the structure’s center, stabbing daggerlike at the heavens and boasting numerous spires and protrusions of its own, marred the otherwise pristine surface of the gentle slope. Uneven heaps of sand surrounded it, rising and falling waves constantly reshaped by the desert winds.

The mages studied it, hands held high to shade their eyes from the brilliance. From their current vantage, it was impossible to say precisely how large the structure might be, for the desert here was flat and featureless, their view obscured by sand-speckled breeze and the haze of rising heat.

Finally, Jace turned to Liliana and said simply, “How much magic do you suppose it takes to keep the place cool?”

She snorted, and they trudged their way closer still. As they walked, each summoned a small flock of minions—tiny fey, in Jace’s case, with the power to make themselves invisible, while Liliana called up a handful of translucent spirits—and ordered them on ahead.

They learned much as they neared the looming structure. It was not, as they had supposed, perfectly circular;
rather, they had appeared toward the back of what turned out to be a crescent, shallower on the inner curve than the outer, and at the tips than the rear. The tower emerged from the highest point, at the apex of the crescent’s bend. And it was not, in fact, constructed of a single sheet of metal, though the individual pieces were so perfectly fitted together that it might as well have been.