Exava’s heels clicked against the cobblestones as she approached. Jace’s breaths heaved. Stretching the pain out of his muscles, he strained to put one foot on the ground, and push himself up to a standing position.
“Stop this now,” he said. “Tell me where she is, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Oh, honey, no,” she said. “You can’t leave without this.”
The Rakdos mage let loose another torrent of agony that crashed into Jace. He arched his back and fell sideways, slamming against the street. As the spell lasted moment after moment, he forced his lungs to breathe through the pain. He wheezed spittle through his teeth.
Exava’s spell ended, and he panted.
“All right,” he whispered. “That’s enough. We’re even now.”
Exava laughed his words. “Even? Enough? What are these words you’re saying, little man? I’m starting to think this is your first Rakdos party.”
Exava gathered power again. She made a cage of her long-nailed fingers, dripping blood from her own wound. She clenched her hands in toward each other, forming a sphere of anguish that flickered like the fire in her eyes. Her shoes clacked their way closer and closer to Jace’s prone form. Finally she raised her hands high above her head and brought the spell down like a hammer, but Jace’s hand whipped up, and the sphere of pain froze between them, halted halfway along its path, swiveling and hanging, weightless in the air. Jace turned and rose, keeping his hand out toward the Rakdos spell, fingers clawed to keep it immobile in space. He gathered himself up to his full height, stretching his stiff muscles. With the clench of a fist, he focused his countermagic, and the pain-spell evaporated.
Exava gave a derisive snort. She launched a barrage of arcane attacks, each one like a rocket made of electric death homing in on Jace. But Jace moved swiftly, parrying each spell with negating magic of his own, and the full force of the Exava’s malice never quite reached him. He walked toward her bombardment, and she took a few matching steps backward as she threw more spells at him, pushed back by his deft defense. In a lightning quick movement, she threw a tri-bladed dagger, an unexpected physical attack. The dagger spun through the air and caught Jace’s cheek as it whizzed by. The other Rakdos cultists roared with laughter, and encircled the two of them.
Jace counterattacked the blood witch with mind magic. He hurled his consciousness into hers, holding nothing back. He became her, let himself be absorbed by her, shared her mind and saw through her senses. He felt the power in her, the fierce freedom untainted by law or morality or restraint.
Finally, Jace saw a series of images, wordless sense impressions unfettered by rational thought. He saw a dank chamber down in the undercity, found only by a twisting course through torch-lit tunnels. It was an area claimed by the Golgari, but was a place where the Rakdos occasionally made covert deals with other guilds. He saw a cloaked figure there in that mossy-draped chamber, hiring her to procure a certain Selesnya dignitary. He saw her traveling back to the Rough Crowd, selecting a gang of Rakdos ruffians, and leading them to the Cobblestand to acquire the Selesnya elf. He saw her instruct them to return her to that underground chamber. And he saw her reminding them that the elf woman should remain unharmed.
Thank you, he said inside her mind.
Jace separated their two minds, returning to himself again. The two of them stood there opposite one another, chests heaving from the effort of their magical duel, still in poses of battle.
With the last of his effort, Jace summoned the simplest but most far-reaching illusion he could muster: the voices of Azorius officers.
“By order and authority of the Azorius Senate, I order you all to halt,” came the booming voice, as strongly as Jace could project it into all the Rakdos warriors’ minds. “Cease all action forthwith, and prepare to be detained in accordance with all governing laws and statutes.”
It wasn’t much, and he was pretty sure he was getting the legal wording wrong, but it was enough. There was a moment of confusion as the Rakdos swiveled around, looking for the Azorius officers and hissing with bloodlust. Jace shoved aside a couple of the Rakdos warriors, blended into the night, and disappeared.
THE PATH BELOW
An elderly viashino with whited-over eyes stood slumped against a streetlamp. His scales had once been burnished red, but were pale and chipped by age.
“Evening,” said Jace.
The viashino turned his head toward the sound. His eyes stared ahead. “I can’t help but agree,” grunted the viashino. “All the evidence does point that way.”
The encounter with Exava at the Rough Crowd had led Jace here, to the gloomy, Golgari-controlled part of town. The décor matched what Jace had seen in the shreds of the blood witch’s memory. Somewhere near here, he could enter the undercity and find the chamber where the Rakdos had taken Emmara.
Jace blinked at the viashino man. “You wouldn’t happen to know—where’s the nearest entrance to the undercity?”
“I would happen to know,” the lizardfolk said. “Yes.”
“Am I close?”
“A better question would be—are you alone? Not a place to go out seeking without a good entourage. The shadows down there are alive, you know. They’ll call your name. Spiders you can’t even see will crawl all over your skin. Biting things will eat your mind.”
“I can handle myself alone.”
“Can you? Well, then. I am honored to be the last living thing you’ll ever see. Are there any last words you’d like me to remember?”
“That’s all right.”
“That’s what you’re going with?” The viashino turned his chin vaguely back and forth, his reptilian lips pursed. “Suit yourself. Not that it matters. I wasn’t going to remember them anyway.” He shifted his weight against the streetlamp. His eyes stared at nothing.
“So, please, sir, the entrance?”
“I expect you’re standing on it.”
Jace looked down. He was standing in the middle of the street, but the zigzagging pattern of the cobblestones changed to a subtle spiral just where he stood. Jace could now sense an enchantment on the road, a mystical trigger mechanism that could be activated by any mage. What exactly it triggered was unclear.
Jace prepared himself. It was time to put up stiffer defenses. He summoned up a spell and let it wash over his body. He watched his multiple shadows under the streetlights vanish, and then his own body along with them.
“You’re going to want to get yourself ready before you go down there,” the viashino man offered.
“I’m currently invisible to the senses,” said Jace. “A mind-cloaking spell.”
The viashino coughed. “Lotta stuff down under’s like me,” he said. “They don’t need eyes to find you. And certainly not a mind.”
“It’ll have to do.”
Jace directed a wisp of mana toward the spiraling pattern in the street. Stone scraped against stone, and the street uncoiled downwards, forming a kind of spiral staircase that descended into darkness. The undercity emitted a gasp of foul air.
“Well … evening,” said Jace.
The old viashino nodded, and Jace walked down the steps, leaving the surface behind.
Invisibility or no, Jace felt naked. His feet were transparent to his own senses, a trick of his spell, but they still made spreading concentric rings in the large, stagnant puddles that blanketed the tunnel floors. His body reflected no light, but his surface area still tore body-shaped outlines in the curtains of spider webs. His breath still warmed the chill air, leaving footprints of fog in the air.
He could sense the Golgari magic in the undercity lurking like a persistent spore. He looked to be moving through the fungus-overtaken ruins of some great library, broken white marble columns overcome with shelf fungus like fallen logs, slabs of shelving heaped into nests to shelter who knows what, brackish pools collecting in the pits and hollows of the chamber as the remains of a hundred thousand tomes decomposed into sludge.
The undercity teemed with black, chitinous insects the size of Jace’s fist, clambering over the ruins. Some of them unsheathed multiple pairs of scissoring wings and buzzed around Jace’s head, flicking their antennae. Shadows moved with too-heavy sounds, attached to unseen anatomies in the darkness. Bioluminescent plant-creatures crawled from puddle to puddle, stopping to nurse from the muck. Somewhere, the rungs of a metal ladder clanked, the sound echoing like drops of water through the tunnels.
It was odd, navigating like this. He used the fleeting details from Exava’s memory as a kind of map, but it was a poor one. He had to backtrack several times as he grew more and more lost. But when he found himself in a huge dank chamber lit by a few bouncing rays from overhead gratings, a sense of déjà vu embraced him. The water inside the crazily angled bronze pipes whispered like hushed voices. Jace recalled the musty smell of the flooded chamber through the blood witch’s memory, but experiencing it in person had a dreadful immediacy. This was the place where the Rakdos warriors were to bring Emmara. But there was no sign of her. He walked on.
Jace stepped from one raised stone to another, avoiding the dark puddles of water. Despite the clear Golgari influence, the presence of the Izzet guild was just as strong down here. The half-mad inventors of the Izzet League had threaded miles of pipework under the city, providing essential elements to the districts. Somewhere there were enormous thrumming generators, the pumping organs of the plane, where task teams of mages and elementals plied practical magic to maintain Ravnica’s infrastructure.
Much of the pipework, bolted over lichen-covered masonry with shiny brass, looked new. Jace thought about the rising strife between the guilds, and here it was: Izzet engineering running through Golgari tunnels, a physical manifestation of the guilds’ struggle for dominance. Jace followed the pipes into adjoining tunnels, listening to the liquid inside as it murmured and gurgled like voices.
Beetles crawled over Jace’s invisible body. It wasn’t clear whether his invisibility spell, which relied on manipulating the mind, worked on them, or if they simply didn’t care, and were perfectly happy to clamber over invisible surfaces, such as his legs. His wet cloak clung to his body, visible or no, and the stench of this place was overpowering.
Jace traced his transparent hand along the new Izzet pipes that traced along the tunnel. It wasn’t just water that flowed inside the pipeline. He could sense mana, raw and strong, flowing through them as well, perceptible only to his faculties as a mage. More accurately, he sensed that the mana was flowing parallel with the pipes—the magical energy was not tamed by the metal conduits. The pipes had been built around the flow of mana. The mana was not just a simple directional current, but a complex braid of magical potential that wound through the tunnel and into the next chamber, carving its own path.
As the chamber opened up again, the mana current rose to the ceiling, tracing along an archway that was crowned by an ancient stonecarving of the Golgari guild symbol. Jace wondered if Ravnica had always had such odd mana currents running through it, and how many mages knew of it.
That’s when he saw the bodies.
Judging by their horned masks and spiked, harlequin-painted armor, they were Rakdos warriors. One was crumpled against the wall of the chamber. Another was face-down in a mound of decomposing rubble. Another had been torn in two at the waist and tossed in different directions. They couldn’t have died more than an hour ago; blood still oozed from their wounds, and their flesh had not begun to decompose.
The bodies held his attention so completely that he didn’t notice the huge sewer troll that almost walked over him.