“But it’s all true.”
“Stop it. It doesn’t make sense. Tell me one other place you’ve been.”
“I’ve been many places. Places very different from Ravnica. The details don’t matter. It’s only important that you understand that this is the truth about me.”
“Why are you doing this? Why are you making everything so hard?”
“Because it’s the truth, and because he’s right. If I didn’t tell you the truth, I’d be holding back. I’d be keeping a wedge between myself and Ravnica. Between myself and you.”
Jace reached out to her with his mind, to explain in thoughts what he was failing to in words. But he felt her rebuff him. Her thoughts became a wall, a refusal as tangible as a blow. He saw that she was shaking, but whether from fury, despondency, or cold, he couldn’t tell.
“Is it true?” she asked, and he saw that she was looking at Ral Zarek.
Zarek only raised his eyebrows, like two extra smiles.
“How long?” she asked, back at Jace. “How long have you kept these things from me?”
Jace couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. Her confusion had flared into fury. He just knew he had to tell her everything, to trust her with everything, or he would lose her. “As long as we’ve known each other. Since the beginning.”
There was a long moment, and then she said, “Rakdos, and then the Forum of Azor.” She didn’t ask it as a question, but she waited for confirmation.
His eyes widened, then he gave a barely perceptible nod.
She stalked toward the gate. “Take it down,” she said to Ral.
Ral smiled, and the lightning barrier that protected the gate split open in the middle, parting like a curtain.
“I’m coming with you,” said Jace.
“You do not follow me.”
“I know I’ve lied to you. I know it’s a betrayal. But there are reasons. Don’t go.”
Emmara turned and walked through, and the bars of lightning covered the arch again after she passed.
Ral Zarek clicked his tongue. “A shame,” he said. “But it’s best we not get too close to our planebound pawns, isn’t it?” He floated in the air, lightning crackling from his limbs and eyes. He looked like a thunderstorm taken human form. “We must focus on the true powers, and the true threats of our world—fellow planeswalkers. Savor this moment, Beleren, for now I rid the Multiverse of you.”
Jace drew from all his sources of mana, and poured all of his fury and shame into his magic. The rain lashed down on him, streaming down his body, and thunder crashed all around him. He felt none of it. His body trembled with power, and his cloak billowed in its own winds, which ignored the course of the storm.
“Listen to me very carefully,” said Jace, his voice audible over the thunder. “That woman is going to win this, and you’re not going to stop her.”
“Why should I need to stop her? She’s heading into the demon’s territory. I mean only to stop you.”
A bolt of lightning crashed from the storm to the ground, impacting just after Jace darted to one side, but the force of its shock wave blasted him from his feet.
Jace rolled and sprung up again. He threw back a barrage of mind-crushing spells, but Zarek had raised a battery of mental defenses, and Jace’s assault crashed through the psychic barricades like rocks through endless layers of thick glass. Zarek’s mind was all dazzling shards of countermagic and ingenuity and ferocious ambition. Jace forced his way through it, trying to find the man’s sensitive inner psyche, but his consciousness felt like a windswept kite.
Zarek lashed into Jace with gusts of wind-spiked rain, knocking him back step by step. Then he clapped his hands together, and an explosion of thunder knocked Jace into a back flip and onto the pavement.
Jace crashed into the puddles. He spun away from another sizzling torrent of lightning, and fired back another volley of intrusive thoughts into Zarek’s mind, but only broke more of the never-ending mind barriers. He was making no headway, and meanwhile he was spending a lot of his strength on useless attacks.
Zarek had been prepared for this. He had been waiting for Jace to come through the Izzet gate and face him, with full knowledge of Jace’s abilities. Zarek would let Jace exhaust himself with as many mind-puncturing attempts as he wanted, and then would no doubt finish him off with a sky-shattering bolt of lightning.
But that plan had a flaw, thought Jace as he huffed with exhaustion through the rainwater cascading off his hood. It assumed Jace wanted the same thing Zarek wanted—to destroy his foe. As long as Jace took that line of attack, he would play right into Zarek’s prepared scheme. But Jace didn’t even want Zarek destroyed. He was the Izzet maze-runner. Whether he was officially selected by his guild or not, he would be that guild’s representative in the eyes of the bailiff, in the eyes of the maze. Jace needed him to finish the maze and appear at the Forum of Azor.
Jace pushed himself up out of the deepening puddles. As he stalked forward, the downpour hissed against the shoulders of his cloak, and his eyes glowed in the dark of his hood. Jace did not flinch as Zarek punctured his body with a stroke of lightning; he merely walked toward Zarek, holding his stare. As he neared Zarek, he stepped around him and marched up to the gate.
Jace walked directly through the lightning barrier and disappeared into the darkness of the archway.
The diversion worked. Zarek spun with disbelief, looking through the gate to find Jace, but he saw nothing but the dark passage beyond. He waved open an aperture in the bars of lightning and ran after him.
That’s when Jace—the real Jace, the invisible Jace who had sent his illusionary self through the gate before him—slipped through the barrier. He had to crouch quietly in the shadows in the passageway, his cloak dripping, concentrating on maintaining the illusion and letting Zarek get some distance ahead of him. All his urges told him to follow Emmara as quickly as he could, but he waited there, crouched in the dark. He sustained the illusion long enough to Zarek, then stood once more, and raced after them.
FOR THE SAKE OF THE GUILD
The path had led Emmara to Rix Maadi, the palace that served as the center of the Rakdos guild’s brainsick celebrations. She followed the images that Jace had flashed into her head, taking a turn down an obsidian staircase whose steps sagged in the middle from centuries of use. She passed under a series of grandiose but lurid archways, carved in red stone in the shapes of nightmarish faces and leering, cherubic imps. No one stopped her as she delved deeper, and she caught herself wondering whether any of the arches she passed might have been the Rakdos guildgate. Perhaps she might be done already, and could leave this place without seeing a soul. But Jace’s instructions told her the true gate still lay ahead, and her sense of dread told her it was not going to be as simple as she hoped. She marched on, deeper into Rix Maadi, trying not to think about what dark liquid might be dripping down the walls.
When she entered the large chamber, she knew she had arrived. It was a subterranean chamber, but it had more in common with an opulent throne room than a cave. Braziers burned, their flames rising toward the ceiling like lush tapestries. Cords of iron chains were draped from the ceiling, and a hot stench blew up from iron grates in the floor. On the other side of the great hall, up a series of steps, was an enormous arched doorway, crowned with the horned face of the demon Rakdos. That was the Rakdos gate, leading into dark smoke.
And she was not alone.
“Hello, darling,” said Exava the blood-witch. She stepped down the series of shallow stairs. Two Rakdos cultists offered her swords to her by the hilt, and she took them without glancing away from Emmara. “Tandris, isn’t it? I’ve been hoping you’d come to play.” Exava swung her swords in curves, and the metal flashed in the firelight.