Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel (21 page)

“Whose idiotic idea was it to send two humans to infiltrate a ratman warren?” Baltrice snapped.

Jace shrugged, though he was pretty sure she couldn’t see the gesture. “Just as soon as you manage to recruit a nezumi planeswalker for the Consortium, you be sure to let me know. Besides,” he added after a moment, “we both know exactly whose idea this was. If you’d like, I’ll be happy to take your complaints to Tezzeret when we get back. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear how committed you are to his vision.”

Baltrice gave him a look that threatened to set him alight without the benefit of magic, but said nothing.

They lay crouched in a slimy, viscous gunk—fluid enough to seep into everything and thick enough to stick. It sloshed across the skin like the touch of a living disease. The water flowed steadily despite the lack of breeze, suggesting the presence of subsurface currents moving among the reeds and towering cypresses whose greedy wooden fists gathered in all possible sunlight, leaving none for the swamp below.

Jace twitched as an insect that must have been the size of a small drake bit him behind the ear. He swore that this was the last time he’d go anywhere near a swamp if he had any say in the matter.

They lay there for hours, covered in muck and leaves. Lay there, and watched, and thought, and argued, and watched some more, because neither was entirely certain what to do next.

The nezumi village stretched across a broad swath of swamp. Twisted huts carved from the husks of trees and bamboo plants stood at various levels, all raised above the muck of the marsh below. Although primitive, they showed a level of craft and skill that Jace found surprising. The doorways and windows were not rough
and random holes, but perfectly shaped ovals and circles; the steps that wound their way around the largest trunks were solid and even, albeit clearly carved for nonhuman feet. Lanterns and an occasional banner hung on bamboo poles that jutted from the sides of the structures, and though most of the swamp around here was shallow enough to wade through, many of the homes had skiffs tied up at their base.

None of which was their problem. No, the fact that the sprawling village hosted several hundred individual nezumi, and that the ratpeople appeared to follow no recognizable schedule, nor to acknowledge the rising or setting of the sun—that had them stumped. “Minimal impediments,” indeed! Baltrice had spent their first five minutes here cursing Paldor for his faulty intelligence.

So they waited for nightfall, hoping to make their approach in the dark. They watched as nezumi poled their rafts between buildings, conversing on whatever topics might interest a tribe of humanoid rats. Farmers trudged back and forth, waist-deep in the muck, carrying sacks of harvested rice. Soldiers in boiled leather armor, carrying tae yari spears, wicked daggers, short recurved bows, and even the occasional katana, guarded the borders of the community. Some stood post on tree branches or platforms built high in the bamboo, while others traveled on high-walled skiffs.

The sun fell, the stars once again flickered, and the coy moon showed only a sliver of his face. The farmers retired for the night but the hunters emerged in droves, baiting traps and stalking the nocturnal beasts of the swamp. Lanterns cast an aura of light over the community that was barely enough for Jace and Baltrice, but probably more than sufficient for the rodent’s eyes of the nezumi. And still the village refused to sleep.

“That’s it,” Jace said when it became clear that night was no more an ally to them than the day had been. “This is beyond stupid. We can’t do anything without
more information. Wait here.” Without pausing for acknowledgment, he slithered forward through the muck, crawling on knees and elbows. He gave brief thought to cloaking himself in the image of something that belonged here, but decided that appearing as an alligator or a great constrictor would probably get him perforated by an overzealous hunter, and he wasn’t familiar enough with Kamigawa to know what other forms might be equally appropriate but less appetizing. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if Kamigawa had alligators or constrictors. He chose, instead, simply to wrap the shadows around him, making himself invisible even to the senses of the ratmen.

He whispered as he drew near, drawing on the lore of an ancient spell he rarely had opportunity to practice, one that would solve the language problem entirely. Many mages sought such magic, but they came far more easily to planeswalkers; something about the Spark, their connection to the world beyond all worlds, opened their minds more readily to the magic of meaning.

His clumsy, filthy course took him just near enough to the outermost patrol of soldiers to hear their words. At first they were unintelligible, a language he didn’t know spoken in voices that were far from human. But the words passed deep into his mind, filtered through his spell, and grew clear. He still heard the Kamigawa tongue, but the meaning of the words sprang to mind half an instant after the sounds reached his ears, as though he remembered definitions he’d never actually learned.

“… meat,” one of the guards was saying as Jace’s mind finally tuned in to the language. “It’s been a while since I’ve had any good salamander. The day patrols always take the best cuts.”

Jace briefly congratulated himself on his wisdom in not choosing an animal as a disguise, and settled in to listen.

“Not sure I learned much of use, though,” he told Baltrice roughly an hour later, “except to confirm what
we were already afraid of. The village pretty much never sleeps. I have no idea how we’re supposed to get to the chieftain without being discovered. My illusions are good, but I’m not sure I can fool an entire community.”

“He lied to us, Beleren. The filthy little rat-prince lied to us.”

Jace nodded. “I’d noticed that, yes.”

Baltrice’s eyes began to glow a faint red, her lip to curl in angry disdain. “We’re being set up, used as some nezumi’s pawns. And by someone who’s either an idiot or who deeply believes that
we
are. I mean, the ‘intelligence’ he provided isn’t even close to accurate.”

Again Jace nodded. “We should go, then. Report back to Tezzeret, let him decide—”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she proclaimed, her expression abruptly flipping into a horrid grin. “We both know what Tezzeret thinks of betrayal, don’t we, Beleren?”

Covered head to toe in clinging mud and bits of decayed plant matter, a spirit of the swamp rising to vent its wrath, Baltrice stood. Flames danced openly in her eyes, her entire body quivered with a sudden strain.

“Baltrice? Baltrice, what are you doing?”

And then, though she spoke not a word in response, Jace had his answer.

T
he sky above the swamp brightened. Almost unnoticeable at first, through the umbrella of heavy branches and dangling moss, the strange light swiftly grew. A second moon appeared in the heavens, red and crackling and angry; and then it was no moon at all, but an artificial dawn.

Even as the nezumi peered upward from their posts, or emerged blinking from their huts, the ball of fire plummeted from the sky and burst on the village outskirts. Entire houses evaporated at a stroke, and the flames fanned outward, carried over the stagnant waters on the back of burning winds. Cypress, bamboo, and nezumi pelts ignited in a terrible conflagration—but the trees and the stalks didn’t scream. Smoke rose between the surviving branches, blotting out the stars and spreading the choking, sickening scent of cooked flesh.

Jace screamed at Baltrice to stop, but his voice was lost in the crackling of the fire and the shrieks of dying nezumi. The smoke burned his eyes, and despite the blazing heat, he found himself shivering with a sudden horror.

One murder.
One
. That he could live with. To that, he had long ago resigned himself.
But this …

Unseen behind Baltrice, who exulted in the release of her most devastating spells, Jace raised his hands as though to wrap them physically around Baltrice’s essence. He held her mind in those fists, and for an instant, Jace knew he could kill.

Still she was casting. Even as the carnage from the fireball spread, her muscles tensed once more, her lips parted with something like a screaming grunt. His skin tingled, and he recognized the feel of something forcing its way into the world from outside.

It erupted from the swamp at the heart of the fireball’s impact, a volcano of fire and fury, and the shallow water around it vanished in a hiss of steam. Humanoid only by the most generous use of the term, it towered above the bamboo stalks, above even some of the trees. It glared about it with eyes of fire, lashed about with hands of the same, for that was all it was. Fire: raw, primal, elemental.

The crackle of its flames was the cackling of Baltrice as it advanced on the village, an inexorable titan of agony and death. Turning their attentions away from the burning huts, the soldiers of the nezumi clan formed a defensive line before the oncoming terror, but few had any illusions that they could do more than die with honor.

“Baltrice!” The dam blocking the flood of Jace’s horror finally burst. “Gods and demons, woman, what are you doing? There’s supposed to be a tribe left for us to treat with!”

She seemed past understanding. Her arms were spread as she soaked in the heat of the inferno she had ignited. Her eyes gleamed red with fury and fire.

Even so, she calmly turned her head to face him. “Relax, Beleren. I have a plan.”

“Really? How’s that working out for you?”

She smiled, and it actually looked to be the expression of a rational human being, rather than the guise of
pyromaniacal glee she’d worn a moment before. “Why don’t you take a look?”

Jace looked, and he had to admit she might have a point. For all its initial fury, the fireball had obliterated only a handful of huts, and most of the others it had ignited could probably be saved. And the elemental itself, though tearing through the ranks of nezumi soldiers as though they truly were nothing but rats, seemed uninterested in advancing into the village proper.

“This isn’t about wiping out the tribe, Beleren. Just making sure the prince understands the price of lying to the Consortium, understands the power of those he’s tried to manipulate. He’ll be a lot more honest with us from now on, wouldn’t you think?”

Jace felt sick. “How many did you burn to death, Baltrice? Three dozen? Four?”

This time, she truly didn’t hear him, or chose not to respond. All she said was, “We won’t have a better opportunity than this. Come on; assuming anything the little rat told us is true, the chieftain’s hut is the one in the center.”

Not knowing what else to do—or else unwilling to do it—Jace followed.
At least
, he thought morbidly, staring up at a handful of burning trees that had become little more than the torches of titans,
we won’t have any trouble seeing
.

Baltrice darted through the dancing shadows, wading through water up to her thighs. She made at least a cursory attempt at stealth, not that it mattered. Every face in the village was turned toward one mass of flame or the other. Jace was certain that the two of them could have marched on the center of the community with a battalion, a full company of drummers and trumpeters, and possibly a war-elephant, and still had an even chance of going unnoticed. He nevertheless took the time to wrap himself once more in a cloak of shadows, just to be sure.

As they neared the large central hut, Jace found his attention drawn to a smaller structure, rising beside the main house. It stood atop an impossibly narrow trunk, one that appeared utterly incapable of supporting the bulk of the structure. It lacked windows, boasting instead a single door and a chimney that protruded from the roof at a sharp angle. But it wasn’t the house itself that drew his notice, but rather the sounds emerging faintly from within. Even over the surrounding cacophony, Jace was certain he heard the rhythm of a tribal drum, accompanied by an inhuman, hissing voice raised in an ongoing chant.

Even as he recognized the cadence as the basis of a potent spell, a heavy rain began to fall. The conflagration that had spread from the fireball’s impact sizzled and shrank. The elemental seemed largely unconcerned, though puffs of steam shot from its body in random wounds. But behind it, the water of the swamp began to bulge, to shift, and to rise, as something equally primal struggled to be born.

Jace concentrated briefly as he mounted the first of the steps leading to the chieftain’s hut.
We’re definitely going to have to watch out for the shaman
, he sent in warning.

Baltrice froze in mid-stride, her feet on two separate levels of the stair. Her shoulders tightened as though she’d been stretched on a rack, and when she twisted about to glare at Jace, he was certain those muscles must snap.

“I don’t give a plague-rat’s ass what our situation might be,” she hissed at him furiously. “You put your thoughts in my head one more time, I swear I’ll put my fire in yours!”

Jace shrugged and tried to pretend he hadn’t leaped back off the stairs in reaction to her sudden turn. “Just thought you should know,” he said aloud.