Gatecrash: The Secretist, Part Two (10 page)

“Ancient lord, I call you!” Jace screamed, and obsidian fire blazed from his hands into the sky.

To the amazement of the horde, a demonic monstrosity
the size of a building climbed out of the fissure in the pavement. It had a great burning pitchfork and a regal rack of horns, and it breathed fire from its nostrils.

“Lord Rakdos, guide us!” Jace screamed. “Lead us! We do your will!”

The mighty demon stepped out of the fissure and toward the horde, back in the direction they had come: Rakdos guild territory. The Rakdos cultists roared with praise and delight, clearing out of the demon lord’s way, mesmerized by the street-shaking steps and its fiery weapon. The demon parted the horde, and the horde began to follow it in dark adoration.

“That is
not Rakdos
, you freaks!” called Exava, and from across the battle she shot Jace a chilling look.

Jace knew he was getting some of the details wrong. The massive illusion he was conjuring was a figment drawn from descriptions of the Rakdos leader, influenced by snippets of memories taken from Exava herself. He had never seen the demon guildmaster Rakdos in person—but he wagered that most of the Cult of Rakdos hadn’t, either. As he wove the illusion, he let other illusions of dark mystical energy curl around him for added effect. He had no power to summon demons nor mastery over diabolic magic; he was depending on the general ignorance of the Rakdos rank and file on that score as well.

Exava had seen through the trick, but she was having a hard time overcoming the awe it inspired in her horde. Jace could see her screaming at them, trying to shake their belief in the demonic delusion. But the only authority they respected over Exava was that of the eponymous Rakdos, and they followed it blindly.

The witch tried to lash out at Jace instead. She
blasted out a series of pain spells, but he was ready for that tactic, and he countered and unraveled her spells before they could break his concentration. Jace ran forward into the crowd, crowing like an insane dark mage, following his towering illusion back toward the Rakdos-controlled part of the district. Once the Rakdos horde was dispersed in their own territory, perhaps he could face and defeat Exava one-on-one.

Ruric Thar and the other Gruul warriors could only nod in confused respect as he ran past.

ROUGH CROWDS

Jace guided his illusionary demon, and the demon guided the Rakdos horde, back through the quarter of the Rakdos guild. Meanwhile Jace fended off Exava in a personal side combat, her furious bolts of sadistic magic anticipated and deflected. His illusion flickered as the horde marched back toward the Rough Crowd, its credibility wavering.

As they rounded the corner, Jace gasped.

A Selesnya-guild army was assaulting a smattering of Rakdos irregulars. The Rough Crowd was gone, a splintered ruin, its oak beams unraveled by the magic of woodshapers and ripped asunder by huge nature elementals. Swarms of imps flooded out of the carcass of the nightclub, bombarding the streets below them with burning pitch, hitting their own Rakdos warriors as much as the Selesnya.

A contingent of Boros soldiers attacked from the Selesnya flank. A warrior angel screamed commands from the sky, hurling blasts of scorching light. Magic crackled back and forth between guildmages of opposing creeds, searing scars of battle into the
cobblestones.

Jace and Emmara made eye contact, she from atop one of the vine-and-marble elementals, and he from down at street level with the Rakdos. They were both among armies they didn’t command but couldn’t ignore.

Jace’s illusion dissipated, but it seemed irrelevant now. Exava’s horde of Rakdos warriors merged with and reinforced the cultists from the Rough Crowd, and chaos reigned. Reinvigorated, the Rakdos surged against the Selesnya.

A pack of hellhounds, skinless and crackling with flames from inside their blackened ribcages, broke free of their Rakdos handlers and sprinted into a squad of Selesnya guildmages. Jace saw Emmara struggling to ply her magic, but the nature elementals didn’t respond to her, and the hellhounds crashed into the Selesnya mages. Jace could hear their screams over the din of battle.

Finally, whether under Emmara’s control or not, the elemental she rode reached down and smothered two of the mongrels with its fist, and grasped two more hellhounds with a mass of ropy green tendrils. It crushed their bodies into a nearby building façade, to a chorus of hellish howls.

Barbed grappling hooks seized onto the elemental, and Rakdos ogres and goblins pulled on the lines. The elemental’s center of gravity tipped, and more lines snagged onto its chest and arms. It angled into an agonizingly slow stumble. Emmara scrambled to maintain balance as it fell.

“Emmara!” Jace yelled, rushing to her through the crowd.

The elemental toppled, dashing against the street. The Rakdos mob swarmed on top of it with swords
and axes, hacking it apart like mad lumberjacks. Jace lost sight of her, and couldn’t see whether she had landed safely, or was under attack by the Rakdos on the ground. But he stopped short before he got to her.

In his way stood the blood-witch, wielding two serrated swords and surrounded by a team of Rakdos toughs.

“It’s time to play, Berrim,” said Exava.

Emmara slid down the elemental’s back as it tumbled to the ground, and found herself surrounded by heavily-armed Rakdos lunatics. She tried to revive the shattered nature elemental with all the healing magic she could muster, but the cultists were thoroughly dismantling the great beast; it was only stomped foliage and smashed stones now.

The warriors moved in around her. One masked Rakdos ruffian stabbed at her with a barbed spear, but she grabbed the handle, disarmed him, cracked him on the skull with the blunt end, then spun it around and ran it through the guts of a second warrior. She elbowed the neck of a third and caused the armor of a fourth to bloom into a cage of constricting brambles. But she was outmatched. She leapt over one of her victims and darted through the crowd, trying to make it to Jace, to Trostani, to anyone she recognized.

When she finally broke free of the mass melee, she did see a familiar face. It was Calomir, flanked by his elite guards, seemingly waiting for her. They paused for a moment, combatants clashing behind her, aerial warriors flying overhead, screams of the dying ringing in the air.

“Calomir,” she said. “What have you done?”

Calomir’s voice was even and icy. “Guards, take this traitor back to the Conclave. Keep her secure.”

The Selesnya guards seized Emmara’s arms and began dragging her away.

“What have I done, Calomir?” she snarled. “Have I been a voice of sanity during your warmongering? Have I tried to stop this war you’ve caused? Hundreds have died today because of you, and thousands more will come!”

Calomir said nothing more. She craned her neck to watch him stand there, a look of cold amusement on his face, as the guards brought her through the crowd.

His heart had gone insane, she concluded. Calomir had been her ally in peace, a guardian of the spirit of harmony of the Selesnya, and she had loved him for it. But now the man she loved had become possessed by a thirst for senseless war, and soldiers of her own guild, her extended family, had taken her into custody as a traitor. She felt bitterly alone.

She looked back at the battle receding behind her, to where she had seen another familiar face. “I need you,” she whispered.

Inside the sleeve of her robe, a delicate wooden broach blazed bright and warm against her skin. Its intricately carved veins burned for a moment, then faded, and it crumbled to ash.

Exava’s Rakdos minions were quick, too quick, and too strong. They snatched Jace and bound his arms, winding greasy rope around his wrists, laughing with stinking, hot breath into his ears. He slashed at their minds with psychic attacks, but they were already all insensate madmen; they had little consciousness for
him to attack at all.

“Now then,” said Exava. “Shall we begin our game?
You
play by screaming as loud as you can, and
I
play by seeing if I can make it even louder.” Using the tip of one of her blades, she razored his tunic from neck to waist, exposing his bare chest. She grinned crookedly and touched the tip of the sword to his bare skin.

The words came to his mind like white fire, echoing with the image of Emmara’s face.
I need you
. He knew at once that Emmara had used the leaf. She was in danger, and he had to get to her.

He struggled to free his arms, but the Rakdos ruffians held him fast. One of them playfully bit his ear, reminding him how close he was to death—or something worse.

“Where do you think you’re going, I-Go-By-Berrim?” asked Exava. “We’ve just begun our game.”

Jace focused his mind on finding Emmara in the crowd. He launched out with his inner senses, scanning the battle for the characteristic contours of her mind. It was difficult with so many minds in the area, their thoughts intensified by the screaming pain of puncture wounds or the roar of bloodthirst, and his concentration was compromised by the sadistic Rakdos captors and would-be torturer before him. But a single thought, a single phrase, flared brightly for a moment, infused with bitter longing. He wrapped his mind around that phrase, and he followed it like a thread of spider silk, tracking it over the battlefield. It was thin, but he was able to use it to find his way to Emmara’s mind.

“I’m here,”
he thought to her.

“Oh, Jace,”
came the reply.

“I can’t come to you now, but I want you to listen to my voice. I’m staying with you. I’m not going to leave you.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

“Are you ready?” Exava asked. “It’s your turn.” The blood-witch shoved the sword a half inch into his chest, and Jace yelled.

“Jace?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m here with you. Don’t worry.”

When they heard the shouts of all around them Jace went quiet and Exava withdrew her sword.

“Dragon!”

And then they followed the example of everyone else, and looked to the sky.

At first it seemed that Niv-Mizzet himself had appeared out of the clouds, churning the air with great flaps of his wings, his scales scintillating in the sunlight.

The battle froze as the shape of the dragon descended. But as all eyes turned to behold him, it became clear that it was the not the dragon himself, but a projection, a great simulacrum made of light, impressive to behold but without weight or substance.

Jace spied an Izzet mage positioned on the roof of a nearby building, holding up a small lens of brass and crystal in the direction of the image of Niv-Mizzet. In his other hand, the man held a crackling ball of lightning.

The combatants were unsure whether this was a sign to press on or to halt. The illusionary dragon drifted down as if making an actual landing, but set down his hind claws in the middle of the air, and folded his wings, nestling onto his nonexistent perch. The image hung there, floating over the battle.

“My guildmaster has a message for all the guilds of Ravnica,” called the mage from the nearby rooftop, holding steady the magical lens. “I and others of my guild carry his message to you all across the city. I bid you listen well.”