“Was this how you planned to navigate the maze?” Emmara asked. “By shaking down the better-informed competitors? It’s a wonder your guild still exists after all these years. You fool no one into thinking you’re a religion. You’re nothing more than petty criminals.”
Teysa Karlov laughed mirthlessly, squeezing the knob on her cane.
Jace found the part of the axe-wielder’s mind that governed the man’s thoughts and opinions of his fellow Orzhov compatriots. Jace created an urge, laid the urge over the Orzhov knight’s mind, and pushed the thought in as far as it would go, deep down into the subconscious. He could sense the knight’s views changing, like a dark stain spreading through silk cloth.
But he could tell immediately that attacking the mind of just one of the Orzhov wouldn’t be enough. He would have to disarm or distract them all.
The spell to warp the Orzhov knight’s mind was taking effect. Jace expanded the reach of his mind, letting the spell spread to the minds of the others in the area—to a sweaty priest with a dark sun pattern on his robe, to a spindly, elderly guildmage whose face was covered with a hood, and to a shifty-eyed Orzhov enforcer with a cluster of knives sheathed at her belt. All of them had been devoted to the Orzhov for years, but Jace put a twist in their minds to make them question their allegiance.
Jace felt a twinge of pain as he connected to the Orzhov’s minds, just as he had with the family on Zendikar. But he didn’t need to become the bridge, to let them all see into each other’s thoughts—he only needed to plant a thought in them.
Teysa Karlov nodded sharply to her entourage. “Get her wrists. You, with the axe, get ready to take her hand off.”
“Enough orders from you!” shouted the knight. He lifted his axe high over his head, his body squared directly in front of Teysa Karlov.
The words of the bailiff flashed in Jace’s mind. “If, in the course of the Assessment, one or more of the guilds’ chosen do not appear for the final sentencing, then the Guildpact cannot be actualized.” Teysa Karlov was the Orzhov maze-runner. If she died—if Jace induced this man to kill her—then the verdict would be inevitable.
“No!” Jace dashed from his hiding place and shoved Teysa Karlov out of the way. The knight swung the axe down and the blade smashed into the cobblestones. Jace and Teysa fell sprawled in a heap.
The other Orzhov attendants encircled Teysa and Jace. Their ire was focused on Teysa Karlov. Without their drilled-in sense of obedience, these devotees to the guild were turning on the symbol of authority, the one who occupied a position much higher than their own in the hierarchy of the Orzhov Syndicate.
“What in blazes is going on,” demanded Teysa. She was oblivious to the change of heart of her attendants, and hurled all her indignation at Jace. “Who are you?”
“You’re in danger,” said Jace, looking around at the oncoming Orzhov gang. “We have to get to the next gate.”
“Jace,” said Emmara, backing toward the guildgate. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What is this?” demanded Teysa, standing and brushing off her aristocrat’s raiment. “Seize them. I command it.”
“They’re not going to obey you,” said Jace. “I’ve made a mistake. We have to go. Miss Karlov, come with us, now.”
“We can’t just leave her, can we?” Emmara thought to him with a note of resignation.
“Unfortunately not,” he responded. “She has to make it to the end.”
The Orzhov attendants brandished their weapons and closed in on Teysa Karlov. Her facade of indignation became a sneer of dark fury. “You dare betray me?” She held up her hand to the sky, and a sphere of blackness appeared in the air above her, swelling and swirling with spectral howls. Spears of dark magic exploded out from her spell, lancing through the bodies of her associates. They fell, each of them with an ugly, black hole punched through their chests. Unnaturally dark smoke floated out of their wounds.
“Now,” said Teysa Karlov, eyeing Jace and Emmara, still maintaining the dark sphere of spectral energy over her head. “Tell me why I shouldn’t do the same to you.”
“Let me tell you what you’re going to do,” said Jace. “You are going to watch us walk through that gate, and you are going to wait here for exactly one hour. Then you are going to proceed through the last gates in this order: Simic, then Izzet, then Rakdos. Then you will join us at the Forum of Azor.”
“That’s the rest of the maze route?” asked Teysa.
“Yes,” said Jace.
“Then you are no longer required.”
Teysa sliced the air with her hand, directing bolts of darkness toward Jace and Emmara. With his own slicing motion, Jace counteracted the spells, never breaking eye contact with Teysa.
“You’ll do as I told you,” said Jace. “Or I could counter all your spells, pierce your mind, flip your allegiance as I did with your subordinates, and alter you to be a willing servant of Emmara and the cause of the Selesnya forever.”
“I’ll wait here,” said Teysa Karlov, letting her dark sun spell evaporate.
As they turned to head through the gate, Emmara grabbed Jace’s hand. As brief as it was, the touch felt peculiarly complex, at once breathlessly electric and yet the most natural thing Jace could ever conceive. She released his hand after a moment, and her eyes shone into his. As the two of them hurried under the archway, a thought came to Jace unbidden. It was the thought that, out of all the worlds he had visited, Ravnica might be one he could call a certain word, a word he believed only other people would ever use: “home.”
TEMPEST OF LIES
Jace and Emmara had passed through the Simic gate and now approached the zone of alchemical machinery and steam-driven arcana known as Izzet territory. Jace tried to watch the sky for the draconic shape of Niv-Mizzet, but he was oddly focused on how the strands of Emmara’s hair moved. A storm brewed over the Izzet area of the district, with attendant rolls of thunder, and drops had begun to spatter on the streets.
“Where did Vorel get off to?” Jace asked.
It felt strange talking with Emmara out loud. Somehow it was a bit embarrassing after all their mental speech. It was too real, too out in the open.
“I lost Vorel at the Gruul gate,” said Emmara. “Or rather, he lost me. Some of the Gruul seemed to know him. There may have been some bad blood there. But he made it out, I found out later. I saw him pass ahead of me just before running into the Orzhov.”
“And the other gates? How have you fared?”
“I’m in one piece,” she said. “I don’t think I’m winning this thing, though.”
A force of Izzet goblins came around the corner, recognized them, and charged at them with fire-tipped pole weapons. Jace pinpointed their minds as they rushed, and the goblins fell asleep in mid-charge, clanging onto the cobblestones in their bronze-colored metal armor. Jace walked on without breaking his stride.
“I don’t think you need to end up at the Forum of Azor first,” Jace said. “I just have to make sure you’re there, and in one piece. You’ll do the rest. You have a way of uniting people, of bringing them together. And I’m starting to see that that’s the most important thing in this world.”
“Jace,” Emmara said.
The way she said his name made him halt and turn to her.
“Yes?”
Her eyes searched his face, as if she sought for an answer that might be written there. For some reason, Jace thought of Calomir. He realized he had never actually met the man she had loved, that the real Calomir was a memory by the time Jace had met Lazav’s imitation of him. “I know all of this has been hard for you,” he said.