Gatecrash: The Secretist, Part Two (8 page)

BOOK: Gatecrash: The Secretist, Part Two
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Stop analyzing and react
, one of the warriors thought.

Don’t think, you damned fool
, thought another.
Civilization taught you wrong. Let go of it all! Just hit him!

Their thoughts roared in his mind. They were barely even thoughts. Jace felt overrun by a stampede of unstrategic, impulsive, carnivorous instincts. He needed to understand that, to dissect the secret behind it, and use it.

Jace rushed at Ruric Thar. The ogre swung his axe-arm, but the angle was sloppy, and the blade only glanced off of Jace’s shoulder and tore his cloak. Jace’s knuckles slammed into his target, a sensitive spot in the underarm, and then he aimed for the kidney twice. The ogre reacted with an elbow, sending Jace careening.

Jace sat on the park grass again, his wounds thudding.

Stop holding yourself back
, thought one of the warriors.
Let the roar come out!

Thinking is getting your face mashed in
, thought another.
Feel! Uncage yourself!

Jace let it all in, combining the minds of all the warriors into a ring of fury with him as its center. His ribcage pounded and his lungs burned. He could hear the urgings of the warriors in his mind. They thought that in order to beat a Gruul warrior, he needed to think like one—or
not
think like one. They wanted him to surrender his mind, to let the rage wash over him and overwhelm his logic.

But he had a better idea.

Jace focused on the imagery in the minds of the spectators around him. They weren’t just radiating raw fury and bloodlust—they were imagining how
they would attack Ruric Thar if they were in Jace’s place. They were a barrage of combat ideas. Jace let the punches and rolls and throws swirl around him, choreographing an attack plan.

Jace somersaulted at Ruric Thar and grabbed at a leg, clamping onto it. The ogre tried to shake him off, but he bit the thin-skinned area behind the knee, ripping tissue with his teeth. Ruric and Thar roared and kicked Jace off their leg.

More of the Gruul’s battle imagery poured into Jace. He darted back and forth, relying on the warriors’ split-second assessments of the fight to guide him. Ruric Thar swung intermittently with fist and axe, but Jace sensed the impulses of the warriors, and used their unintended warnings to dodge out of the way in time. Ruric Thar was not fighting just Jace, but all of his war party at once. Jace was letting the warriors beat the ogre for him.

When the ogre overcommitted to a lunge, a desperate move flashed in one of the warrior’s minds, and Jace executed what he saw. He leapt onto the ogre’s bowed shoulder and, using a huge tusk for leverage, clambered up onto his back. Jace’s cloak came loose, so he threw the hood over the head of Ruric, the side with the axe. Then, hanging onto Ruric’s head, he beat his fist onto Thar’s cheekbone, as the Gruul’s minds urged—once, twice, three times.

The ogre’s axe flailed, apparently controlled by the head that couldn’t see. The free arm grabbed Jace by the hair, and pulled. But Jace hung on, focused on pummeling Thar’s increasingly bruised and puffy face.

When the axe blade came arcing toward Jace, he didn’t see it, but he felt it through the reactions of the Gruul onlookers. He leapt off of Ruric Thar, landing
on his face, but in one piece, on the park lawn.

Jace heard a truncated yelp. Jace recovered and turned back to see the ogre’s own axe blade embedded a few cringe-inducing inches into the top of Thar’s bald head. The ogre held his breath, frozen in uncertainty, both sets of eyes looking up at the axe-arm that had missed Jace and hit Thar.

Thar began to hyperventilate through his teeth.

“You win,” said Ruric, pulling Jace’s cloak away and wincing.

Jace collapsed with relief. The Gruul warriors cheered.

Ruric Thar pulled gingerly with his axe arm, and the blade came free from the left head with a sickening wet sound. He clapped his hand on the wound and slumped heavily to the ground. Both of the ogre’s faces winced as blood trickled out from between his thick fingers, and his breathing was heavy.

Jace broke his connection to the minds of the other Gruul warriors. Their current of battle-obsessed thoughts began to ebb from his mind.

One of the Gruul compatriots, an extensively tattooed man with hair and beard that resembled coarse beaver fur, approached Ruric Thar and began murmuring a shamanic spell. The shaman’s outstretched hands trembled like windblown leaves, and pale light issued from his forearms and swirled around Ruric’s wound. The ogre kept his hand pressed on his head wound, but the bleeding stopped.

“You have some Gruul in you,” said Thar, between heavy breaths.

“Not as much as you might think,” said Jace. “So now, you’ll let your guard down, so I can find what I came for?”

“As you wish,” said Thar.

The ogre took a deep lungful of air, and let it out, closing their eyes. They nodded slightly.

Jace carefully cast his mind out to the ogre, letting his thoughts seep in slowly. He chose Thar first. As his mental senses began to perceive Thar’s thoughts, Jace felt no backlash, so he moved in deeper.

The ogre’s mind was like a museum of prizefights. Thar remembered triumph after triumph in battle, how his axe cleaved through this Gruul upstart or how he wrung the neck of that Orzhov cartel boss. It was an emotional landscape rather than a deliberative one, built on fervor and violence and laughing in the faces of the defeated. This was to be expected, but it made it harder for Jace to locate information about the maze.

He found nothing. Thar had no recollection of anything that Jace might have been researching at the time he lost his memories. Maybe this was all a mistake, a hunch that went nowhere.

He moved over to Ruric instead. Ruric’s mind, under some understandable surface-level shame of the duel with Jace, was also a timeline of clan battles and Azorius head-butts and street brawls with Rakdos hoodlums. Ruric was, if anything, even more savage, more nonverbal and instinctual. Ruric, too, remembered nothing of Jace’s research. Jace’s thoughts must not have transferred into the ogre.

That was it. That was his last lead.

“I don’t understand,” said Ral. “We divined everything. That mage’s research was the last key to the puzzle. We traveled the route, just like the code said to. But there was nothing. Just an old forum.”

“The Forum of Azor,” said Niv-Mizzet, after swallowing the remains of an underling.

When Ral had entered the aerie at Nivix, the dragon guildmaster had been eating a crunchy-sounding Izzet mage, a new recruit who couldn’t seem to comprehend the dynamic properties of mizzium. Ral was so preoccupied with the failure of the maze that he barely noticed one of his Izzet compatriots being devoured.

“Nothing changed,” said Ral. “The mana braids were stable. The atmospheric energy was strong, but remained constant. I expected fireworks.”

“We expected power,” said the dragon. “But there was none. What does this tell you?”

“We didn’t miss anything.”

“Obviously you did.”

“But what?” Ral remembered how little Niv-Mizzet liked to be questioned, and lowered his head. “Great Firemind, what insight do you possess?”

Niv-Mizzet inhaled deeply, and when he exhaled, flames spread out from his jaws, licking around the scales of his muzzle. Even from where he stood, Ral could feel the heat of the dragonfire.

“I have been thinking of the Implicit Maze as a test,” the dragon said. “And a test indeed it is. But it is not a test for one. It is not simply a puzzle of the mind. Do you know why?”

Ral knitted his fingers. Static electricity leaped between his digits. “Of course. Because we have to walk the route. But I did that.”

“And that accomplished nothing. Look deeper. What is the purpose of the Implicit Maze?”

“It protects great power.”

“Indeed it does.”

“And we have to find out what that power is.”

“Of course, but what it is has everything to do with
how it is protected. What is missing across Ravnica right now? What conspicuous absence has come about only in recent times?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think of it this way: What existed between the guilds that no longer binds them?”

“The Guildpact?”

“Precisely! Do you not see? Harmony between the guilds was enforced by the magical contract of the Guildpact. But the Guildpact has been sundered, and the guilds are able to clash again—and not just in words, but in violence. In war. Do you find it a coincidence that the maze has surfaced now?”

“The mana braids,” whispered Ral. “The mana paths through the districts. They had never manifested until recently. And that led us to the code in the stonework, which led us to the path through all the guildgates. But what does all of that have to do with the Guildpact?”

Niv-Mizzet blew jets of smoke. “Come now, Zarek! I’ve laid it all out for you! It’s the
purpose
of the maze that is paramount. It is not a test of
discovery
. Why test our ability to discover? What would that accomplish?”

Ral protested. “What do you mean? Discovery is everything!”

“Ah, but do not think as an Izzet. Think as its creators did. We have learned the secrets of the maze, and we have tried many routes. But that got us nothing. That is because the maze is not designed to test our explorations, our experiments, our ingenuity. Those who devised it did not value these things as we do. The maze is a test of something else.”

Thoughts swirled in Ral’s mind. He was trying, and failing, to put the pieces together.

Niv-Mizzet bent down suddenly, his head looming
before Ral. “Your time is up, Zarek! I told you to find the mage, the mage who touched my mind—and instead you run the maze yourself?”

“W-we don’t need him,” Ral stammered.

“You think we don’t, and yet your puny mind has not even deduced what all of this is for. Perhaps you’re only of use to me as my next meal.”

Bolts of intuition flashed in Ral’s mind. If what Niv-Mizzet was saying was true, then the Implicit Maze was not a way to reward the brightest mage on Ravnica, or its cleverest guild. And yet it was meant to be found, and found only at the proper time.

“The only reason we found evidence of the maze now,” said Ral, “is because it’s related to the Guildpact. It was created to be revealed in case the Guildpact dissolved. So … it’s a device, in some fashion. Activated by a disruption in the Guildpact. It’s a failsafe.”

The dragon’s chest puffed with pride. “That was my conclusion, yes.”

“So … it must be as old as the Guildpact. It traces back to the paruns.”

“Azor, judging by the code you found. The founder of the Azorius Senate.”

The Azorius, Ral thought. The guild of order and logic. Those who believed that law was the foundation of order. And the maze terminated in the Forum of Azor.

“So if it was created by the Azorius … then it wasn’t a way to assess our ingenuity. To truly solve it, we have to do something else. We have to do what Azor would have valued.”

Of course the founder of the Azorius Senate, the ancient Azor, would have tried to foster an atmosphere of peaceful collaboration.

“So … in order to solve the maze, we will have to, what, cooperate with the other guilds?”

The dragon sat back, and his lips pulled away from his teeth in a glistening, draconic smile. “Not exactly.”

An Izzet messenger appeared at the door of Niv-Mizzet’s aerie. “Pardon the intrusion, Great Firemind,” she said.

“Yes? What is it?”

“You wanted to be informed if there were any major guild conflicts.”

“And?”

The messenger looked shaken. “It’s as bad as we’ve ever seen. And potentially about to get much worse.”

Niv-Mizzet drew back his wings and looked down at Ral Zarek. “Let’s depart. It’s time we made a little announcement.”

ARMIES IN THE STREETS

Jace heard what he thought at first was a rumble of distant thunder, but it was too rhythmic and too deep to be thunder. It was the sound of a distant chant, two syllables repeated like drums.

“Berrr-
rumm
. Berrr-
rumm
.” The chant sounded like the voices of a vast lynch mob, their shouts merging into a cadenced thump, repeated over and over, layered over the sounds of marching feet. There was something oddly familiar in the chant that made a cold twinge in Jace’s subconscious, but he couldn’t place it.

Jace tried to focus on searching the ogre’s minds. But the sound was getting closer. “Berrr
-rumm
, Berrr-
rumm
,” they chanted.

The Gruul war party heard it too. “Someone’s coming,” said Thar.

“A lot of someones,” said Jace.

“War chant,” remarked Ruric, still holding a hand over his head. “Not Gruul.”

At that moment Jace felt a promising echo from Ruric’s mind, a hollow proto-thought that didn’t quite
take shape, but that had the contours of what Jace was seeking. It was a wisp of a memory that Jace had passed over at first, because the ogre himself had assimilated it into his own thoughts. But Jace sensed that the cellar of the ogre’s mind echoed with a purpose that was not his own, a subconscious mission that originated with one memory.

BOOK: Gatecrash: The Secretist, Part Two
9.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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