Part 5 (1/2)

THE PATH BELOW.

An elderly vias.h.i.+no 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 vias.h.i.+no turned his head toward the sound. His eyes stared ahead. ”I can't help but agree,” grunted the vias.h.i.+no. ”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 decor 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 vias.h.i.+no 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 vias.h.i.+no 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 vias.h.i.+no man offered.

”I'm currently invisible to the senses,” said Jace. ”A mind-cloaking spell.”

The vias.h.i.+no 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 vias.h.i.+no 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 deja 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 s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s, 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.

Ral Zarek stood in the middle of the busy plaza, scowling at the scroll he held between two mizzium metal rods. Around him, other Izzet researchers conducted experiments, chattering among one another, drawing some strange looks from pa.s.sersby. Ral looked over the scrawled figures on the scroll. They were a series of demands from his guildmaster, but the dragon's words often seemed like riddles. Communicating with the draconic genius was never easy. Niv-Mizzet wasn't a mentor or a role model for Ral-he was a nuisance. It forced Ral to expand his thinking, but he knew more than Niv-Mizzet ever could: he knew of the existence of other planes.

”Excuse me, Guildmage Zarek?”

One of the researchers, a woman with a multi-lensed contraption on her head, was indicating her gauntlet. The gauntlet was made of the alchemical metal mizzium, and crackled with energy, making her white-streaked hair stand on end.

”Yes? What did you find?”

”The mana braid is interrupted near here,” she said.

”Where does it go?” Ral asked. ”Into the sewer?”

”No, we already checked. Skreeg explored three levels down. This one just seems to disappear.”

Ral scowled. ”Can't just disappear,” he said.

They had tracked the twisting thread of mana through half the district. This was a new development. This invisible cord of mana seemed to be a way to discern the route of the Implicit Maze. The phenomenon had traced its way down main thoroughfares, then zigzagged away in apparently random fas.h.i.+on, cutting through buildings, up over the foliage of an urban park, through smog-choked industrial districts, and down into the tunnels of the undercity. But now the trail had run cold.

Ral looked at the riddles on the directive again. The obsessed dragon clearly thought this was an important area to search. The way the scrawls swooped and turned across the scroll, vertically and horizontally and every direction at once, looked to Ral like a knowing smirk. He wadded up the scroll and shoved it into his sleeve.

Ral paced across the brick pavers, peering into the patterns, half-hoping that some message would be spelled out in the street. It was not. The other mages watched.

Ral blinked. He squinted up into the sun, which ringed a tall spire like a halo. Birdlike shapes soared in loops against the sky. ”Check the tower,” he said.

The other mages all looked up, covering their eyes with their hands. They murmured.

”The mana braid may indeed go vertical here,” said the researcher whom he had been questioning, looking into her gauntlet. ”But Guildmage Zarek, we're unable to proceed.”