Ari Marmell - Agents of Artifice

Liliana shook her head. "Obviously, there's more to this world than desert. Carrying enough material to build this thing from other worlds would have taken centuries."

"Right. So?"

"So the same is true of supplies, Jace. Tezzeret's got to have people delivering food, building materials, and whatnot. Carrying supplies across a desert means caravans. Dromads or camels, wagons, you name it. You think he's teleporting entire wagon trains through those walls?"

"Ah. Fair point. So where's the damned door?"

"What, I have to answer everything?"

Again they lapsed into silence.

Ultimately, it proved to be a far simpler matter than they were making it out to be. Inspired by their successful efforts to track Baltrice, Liliana finally called up the smallest, weakest, and least offensive phantom she could muster-the better to avoid setting off any alarms or safeguards-and sent it through the walls to wander the structure's passageways. It took the ghostly entity only a short while to find a hall, occupied by several guards, that appeared to dead-end against the outer wall, and to report back with its location.

Of course, that still left them without a means of opening said door-but now, at least, Jace was in his element.

"Ask your phantom," he said to Liliana, gathering his own concentration and beginning the first stages of a clairvoyance spell, "to point me in the direction of the guards."

As it turned out, the "door" was a section of the wall itself, enchanted to fade away at the command of the guards inside. Jace's and Liliana's nomad garb wasn't sufficient to get them to open that door; but the illusion of a Consortium guard uniform beneath that robe, which Jace casually pulled aside, did the trick. One of the guards now lay senseless at Jace's feet out in the shifting sands, a second dead in the hallway where Liliana's specter had caught him before he could reach the speaking tube to report their arrival.

The whole affair had taken roughly half a minute.

"You know you might have triggered an alarm sending in that specter!" he snapped at Liliana as he dragged the fallen guard out of sight of the doorway. "There's a reason we sent the weakest spirit we could to do our scouting, remember?"

Liliana shrugged. "As opposed to what would've happened if I'd let that man report us? We're invading Tezzeret's sanctum, Jace! I think we're past the point of mincing about, don't you?"

Jace grumbled, which she took-correctly-as a sign that he knew she was right but didn't want to say so. "What now?" she asked him.

"Well," he said, after taking a moment to calm himself, "nobody's running to attack us yet, so we'll assume the alarm's not capable of detecting phantoms after all."

"Or that there is no alarm," Liliana suggested.

Jace, remembering the setup on Ravnica, didn't believe it for a second. "Have your specter drag the body out here," he ordered.

"Not sure one of them can do it alone, Jace. They're not real comfortable manipulating solid objects."

"Fine." Jace grimaced, and the unconscious guard rose unsteadily to his feet. "He'll help." Even as the mismatched pair set about dragging the other soldier to join his fellow outside, Jace was shoveling aside heaps of sand, preparing a secret, shallow grave. Once the corpse was outside, Jace raised a second illusion-one that, he hoped, would convince anyone inside that the wall was still closed.

"Assuming there is an alarm," Liliana said a moment later, "how do we get in?"

The guard stood motionless as Jace rifled through his thoughts. "It's like the alarm on Ravnica," he confirmed. "It's designed to detect the presence of unauthorized entrants."

"All right. So what do we do?"

"We have a polite little conversation," Jace said with a smile, as the soldier strode back into the hallway and lifted the speaking tube from the wall, "with someone who has the power to authorize us."

It proved no harder for Jace to overpower the shift commander, a gold-skinned desert elf named Irivan, than it had been any of the others. Carefully he commanded the unconscious fellow to rise, to move to the alarm controls and authorize the planeswalkers to pass. Liliana nodded at Jace and turned away, watching the elf as he spoke into a strange gemstone inlaid into the wall-and thus she missed the darkening of Jace's gaze as he looked upon her.

For Jace had learned something within Commander Irivan's mind, something that worried him far more than any alarm. Surely the Consortium's ranking officers, if not the average soldier, would have been briefed on the organization's many enemies. And indeed Irivan knew full well who Jace Beleren was. He knew, too, of Kallist Rhoka; of Nicol Bolas; of the fey Oberilia Zant, who had stolen from Tezzeret's minions many a valuable artifact; and of half a dozen others whom Tezzeret had deemed a threat to his empire.

But despite her claims so long ago that she too was hiding from their mutual foe, Jace found no knowledge at all of the sorceress Liliana Vess.

Commander Irivan strode purposefully down the metal corridors. Following several steps behind came a pair of Consortium soldiers, or so it would appear to any passerby. Trying desperately to behave as their illusory guises suggested they should, Jace and Liliana struggled to neither gawk at the iron-and-steel perdition through which they passed, nor to wince at the perpetual thumps and whistles and hums that echoed through those passageways.

Walls and ceilings of gleaming metal were lit by recessed globes that glowed without emitting the slightest trace of heat. Some floors boasted tiny patterns in the steel, providing some amount of traction, while others boasted thin layers of carpeting, and still others were nothing but grates that allowed a distorted view of the levels below. Though pristine in appearance, the halls smelled cloyingly of smoke and burning oils.

Doors that were themselves mere sheets of metal either slid aside or irised open as they moved through, or as other guards and workers passed them by, complete with a faint hissing somewhere inside the walls. Heavy windows allowed occasional glances into chambers full of animated metallic limbs, of precarious platforms that rose and fell of their own accord, of glowing spheres that pulsed in patterns Jace could not begin to comprehend. That there was some method behind the mechanized madness he did not doubt, but he couldn't hope to guess what it might be.

Only slowly did it dawn on Jace and Liliana both that, despite their fear and consternation, they were actually feeling better than they had outside. At first Jace attributed it to being out of the desert heat, but no, it was definitely something more. It almost felt as if…

That was it, then. Mana flowed through the walls, the floors, the essence of the Consortium sanctum. And not just any sort of energy but all sorts, from the soothing auras of the ocean to the burning soul of the mountains to the deathly magics of the swamplands. Something in the building, some ingrained magic or alchemical-mechanical process, transformed the ambient mana of the world into any form imaginable. It was subtle, it was difficult to access-as though the walls themselves sought to keep the power contained within-but it was there. Jace almost slumped in relief as he devoted a portion of his attentions to tapping into that source, as he felt his strength slowly but surely rise once more. He could only imagine Liliana felt much the same.

And then they passed a great chamber just as the pistons inside began to pump. Any relief Jace had been feeling evaporated into so much mist, and he couldn't suppress a gasp of unmitigated revulsion.

He'd known there must be not only mechanical ingenuity but mana driving these machines, but he hadn't realized what sort. As they passed, he felt the ambient energies in the air turn dark and cold. Just barely, beneath the clatter and the hiss, the rumbling and the rattling, Jace thought he heard faint screams of living essences bound within the machine, providing the pseudo-sentience it needed to follow its master's commands.