Ari Marmell - Agents of Artifice

They walked arm in arm so Liliana could catch Jace when his sporadic weakness overtook him, lest he fall to the earth amid the marching feet of the thick city crowds. His jaw was clenched in a grimace of constant discomfort, and Liliana felt his arm tremble on more than one occasion.

"When you think about it," she said, hoping to keep his attention focused, "Emmara owes Paldor her life."

Jace blinked. "How do you figure?"

"Had he not shot you, we wouldn't have been at her home. And without us there, without the forewarning that something was amiss, how much attention would she have paid to a courier at her door?"

"You may be right. I'll be sure to thank him the next time he's actually a person."

She chuckled, more so than the comment actually warranted, and Jace found himself smiling. They walked in silence-well, without speaking, as the crowds around them hardly qualified as anything less than deafening-for several more moments.

"How did they find her?" Jace finally asked. "They didn't know to question her when I first disappeared, so why now?"

Liliana could only shake her head. For a long while, Jace said nothing more, concentrating purely on putting one foot in front of the other while his companion searched the streets for a tavern or hostel where they might lay low until his strength returned. Only when they'd firmly ensconced themselves in a small, dusty room did he speak again.

"I…" He cleared his throat, trying to keep the worry out of his voice. "Liliana, I need you to do something for me. It may take a few days, even as fast as your specters travel, but I can use the time anyway."

"Of course," she told him. "What do you need?"

He'd been right; it had taken a while, almost four days. By the time the last of the spectral spies had returned with news, Emmara's magics had completed their work and Jace was feeling almost himself again-despite three nights of sleeping in a bed so fragile it seemed a particularly weighty dream would collapse it entirely.

"How did it go?" he asked, almost afraid of her response.

"You were right," she told him gently. "It wasn't just Emmara."

Jace hung his head, slumped down against the far wall, ignoring the furniture entirely. "Who?"

"Gariel's fine, at least," she told him. Of course, she'd already known he would be; she hadn't given

Tezzeret his name.

"Who?" Jace asked again, almost pleading.

"Rulan, Laphiel, and Eshton. They're all gone, Jace."

Jace buried his face in his hands, too exhausted even to weep. "I'm running low on old friends to get killed," he told her.

The look she turned on him was one of pity, yes, but tinged around the edges with a growing disdain. "This won't stop until we make it stop, and you know it. So cut it out!"

"You're right," he said after a moment to catch his breath.

"I don't understand," she said more softly. "How could they know?"

Jace jerked his head up, staring at her, but she had turned away, peering through the filthy window at the abstract shapes moving outside. For just a moment, a dark and terrible suspicion crept from the depths of his mind and lodged itself in his thoughts.

But no; no, that couldn't be. Jace shook his head, as though trying to physically shake the notion loose. He knew her intimately; he'd been inside her thoughts. It simply wasn't possible, and no trace of the foul thought remained in his expression by the time she turned back to face him.

"I don't know," he answered. "But it stops now. You were right, Liliana. Obviously, Tezzeret's got sharper eyes than I thought, and now he's turned them on my friends. He doesn't want to let me run? Fine. No more running. No more hiding."

Liliana crossed the room, squeezed his shoulder in reassurance. "We can beat him," she promised. "But we have to find him."

Jace turned to meet her gaze, and his eyes flashed a deep, inhuman blue. "Watch me," was all he said.

Of course, Jace hadn't the first notion of where to find Tezzeret. But it had occurred to him, during his restless nights waiting to learn the fate of his friends, that he just might know how to find someone who did.

Wearing his accustomed black suede outfit and burgundy coat, and his even more accustomed arrogant smirk, Mauriel Pellam swaggered up the steps to the second-floor gallery. It was always his first stop when he returned to his lavish penthouse after more than a few days away from home. Setting eyes on the various portraits and tapestries, the small gold busts of famous men and the great bronze sculpture of Razia-breasts thrust forward in an awkwardly erotic pose that the angel herself would undoubtedly have found both ludicrous and personally offensive-all this reminded him why he did what he did. Why he worked for such people as he did, delivering goods and messages whose import he scarcely understood. It was all worth it, to afford such luxuries as these.

He had just passed beyond that sculpture when something flashed out from behind it, something that had waltzed past the building's guards and even its eldritch glyphs and alarms without so much as breaking a sweat. Pellam found himself flat on his back, staring up into a pair of unblinking ice-blue eyes.

"Let's talk for a moment," Jace Beleren said to him, "about the messages you carry on behalf of Nicol Bolas…"

The chain was a long one, with nearly a dozen links. Pellam received his instructions from this man, who got them from that vedalken, who in turn received them from that other fellow… But each led him one step farther, and none could keep their secrets from him.

Until finally, near dusk some days later, Jace found himself standing at the gate of a vast estate, located just beyond the borders of Dravhoc District. The surrounding iron fence was high, topped with jutting spikes that each boasted a rune of not insubstantial power. At that gate stood a pair of guards; one merely human, the other loxodon, the gray leathery flesh of his arms and his trunk covered with tribal scars, his tusks capped with iron blades and carved with religious runes. Those tree-thick arms hung crossed over his armored chest, and a flail with a head roughly the size of a small continent hung from his waist. Beyond the guards, the path wound its way through a garden of flowers that should not have been in bloom this time of year, to the home of a man Jace knew to be one of Ravnica's greatest sorcerers. That he was also Bolas's chief agent and contact on this world had come as no great surprise.

"I'd like to see the magus," Jace told the guards as he came to a halt before them.

"So would a lot of people," the loxodon told him. "Not going to happen."

Jace, who had spent hours drawing as much mana as he could from the shores of Dravhoc's slope for just this purpose, sighed dramatically. "I just knew you were going to say that…"

He found Liliana waiting in the corner of the cold and dusty room they'd rented, adjusting the pull on her stolen crossbow and sitting in a rickety chair that was so close to giving up the ghost that she almost felt she could reanimate it. The glare she aimed at Jace as he stepped into the chamber could have flattened a herd of aurochs.

"It worked," he told her, shutting the door behind him.

She continued to glare. "What's wrong?"

"I don't appreciate," she said icily, "being kept in the dark like this." And I definitely don't like not knowing what you're up to! "Especially," she added, taking note of the holes burned into his tunic, the bits of blackened flesh on his arms and chest, "when you're obviously walking into danger. We just got you healed up, damn it! I should've been with you!"

"Wouldn't have been a good idea," he said, grunting with pain as he removed his cloak and the tatters of his tunic. "The point wasn't to kill or even mindwipe anyone. I needed information. I did not need to make a new enemy in the process."