The Secretist Part 3

"You have to. Just think about it for a moment."

"I have," he said. "Please stay." And then he cast a spell he never thought he would use on himself.

THE REACH OF THE LAW.

Jace jerked awake on the floorboards of an unfamiliar room. He had an ugly throb in his skull and a hole in his memory. It didn't make sense to him that he was p.r.o.ne, or why he was on the floor, although he did not remember why he shouldn't be. He had the sensation of the pa.s.sage of time, but couldn't remember why.

He realized someone was speaking to him.

"Sir," said a hesitant male voice. "Sir, are you all right?"

As Jace pushed himself partway up, using the wall to brace himself, he felt stab of pain near his hairline. By reflex he put his hand to his head, and when he drew it back, there was blood on his fingers. A man was standing over him, hands folded. Jace tried to recognize his face. It felt strange to apply effort to a task that had always come automatically before, like simply recognizing a face.

"They took your friend, I'm afraid," the man said. "Very sorry for your loss."

"I'm sorry, what's your name again?" Jace asked. His voice cracked as he spoke, as if he hadn't spoken for hours.

"Andrek. I'm the innkeeper."

Innkeeper. "The Cobblestand," Jace said.

"That's right, sir."

Jace rose to a standing position, regretting the action when he felt his mind roiling with pain. He lurched to the window. He was on a high floor in the building, overlooking a street at night. He recognized that he was across the street from his sanctum building, which was, alarmingly, on fire.

That was not how Jace remembered leaving it.

"You'll be charged for the damages, I'm afraid," said Andrek the innkeeper.

Scanning the room, Jace realized the place was a wreck. The bed was upside-down and broken against the wall, a chair lay splintered, and angry knife marks were torn across the wainscoting. Flakes of ash from some unknown pyromantic spell littered the floor like black confetti. Jace noticed a dirty coin on the floor-not a piece of the usual currency used in the Tenth. It looked like a cheap novelty token. One side had a picture of a leering demonic face, and the other bore the words RUN WITH THE ROUGH CROWD.

Jace absently pocketed the token. "What happened here?"

"As I said, sir. They took your friend. The elf woman."

Emmara. He remembered she had been with him, although he couldn't remember why. "Who took her?"

"They were Rakdos, sir. A whole mob of them. I'm very sorry."

Jace took the innkeeper's shirt in his fists. His next four words were deliberately delivered, nose to nose. "Where did they go?"

"I couldn't say, sir. Also, there are some Azorius officers downstairs, asking questions. Do you know anything about that burning building across the street?"

Jace only got to the stairway before he ran into the Azorius officers coming up from the bottom floor of the inn.

"Sir, are you Jace Beleren, the man who lives at the building across the street?" asked the officer, a tall woman in shining plate armor. The signet on her cape was a runic circle inside an equilateral triangle, the sign of the Azorius guild. Behind her, two knights blocked the stairwell, their hands on their scabbards.

"There's been a kidnapping," said Jace. "A gang of Rakdos cultists has abducted my friend from this hotel."

"The innkeeper informed us of that incident, and a claim has been filed with the minister of investigation," said the officer. "You are Jace Beleren?"

"My building is burning, yes, and I don't know why. I've ... I've been attacked, I think. I can try to answer your questions about that place later. Right now I need your help finding my friend."

Jace's head throbbed, and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead and reached his brow.

"I am not authorized to investigate that at this time, sir. An officer will be a.s.signed, in accordance with all applicable laws and statutes. Could you come with us?"

Jace wondered how the officers had found him, how they knew his name, and how long it had been since the building caught fire. Usually it took weeks for the Azorius to steer the proper forms through their baffling system of permits and regulations. Yet here they were, intent on questioning him. He squeezed his fists, wishing he could remember what events brought him here.

"If you're not going to find her, then I will," said Jace.

Jace lashed out with magic that would incapacitate the Azorius officers, but they only frowned their stern frowns at him. His spell had failed. One of them must be a lawmage, and they must have dampened spells in the area already-exactly what he would have done if he thought a mind mage would be here.

"Suspect Jace Beleren," said the Azorius officer, bringing her hands together to form a tight spiral of glowing magical runes. "Your actions meet a reasonable definition of resistance, and the use of magical force has become authorized. Come with us, now." She stepped toward Jace. "Your compliance is obligatory."

Jace was out of time and out of options. It was time to give himself up. But instead he found himself dashing for a window on the opposite end of the hallway of the inn. He launched himself against the pane, breaking through onto an upper-story rooftop. He rolled down a length of sloping roof, dropped onto a lower platform, rolled down another shingled slope, and fell half a story into a stand of bushes. He stumbled out, spitting out a mouthful of brambles.

Jace expected to see Azorius officers already in the back of the inn, but instead he saw huge feet. As he scanned upwards, the feet turned out to be connected to muscular, tree-trunk legs, which were in turn attached to a ma.s.sive body that blocked his path. The ogre that stared down at him did so from two angles, due to the fact that it possessed two heads. One of the two-headed ogre's forearms had been replaced by, or possibly upgraded with, a ma.s.sive prosthetic axe, and crude clan tattoos ran up and down his limbs.

"It's you," said one of the ogre's heads, with a guttural grunt.

"It's him," agreed the other head, the words rumbling through his tusks.

Jace did not have time to process this. He scanned for exits, but the Azorius caught up with him, streaming around the building and closing in on his position. Their numbers had increased, but when they caught sight of the two-headed ogre, they hesitated. Each of the brute's heads looked back and forth with a pair of sneers, a deep growl rumbling in their chest.

"I am Officer Lavinia of the Tenth," said the Azorius officer, the same woman who had confronted him upstairs. "Jace Beleren, you are under arrest by the authority of Supreme Judge Isperia and of the governorship of New Prahv. You, citizen," she added, indicating the ogre, "will stand back at this time and not interfere."

Jace scanned the ring of armored Azorius officers and lawmages. None of this was helping him find Emmara, but he could see no way out. He walked forward, wrists out, and the leader Lavinia took him into custody simply by putting her hand on his shoulder. Her touch was cold through the material of his cloak, and made him feel instantly sluggish and compliant. If he had had any fight left, it was leaving him quickly.

At this, the ogre strode right up to Lavinia and headb.u.t.ted her with both of his heads simultaneously, clanging against her helmet from two directions.

As Lavinia collapsed, he Azorius lawmages hurled their restraining spells at the ma.s.sive ogre, but they barely slowed the brute down. Soldiers moved in to engage the double ogre with sword and spear, but one swing of his axe cut them down, sending their armored bodies clattering like tin cans.

With the Azorius leader down and the entire unit distracted, Jace took a tentative step to the side, angling for a way out of the fray. The ogre roared with both heads, and slammed another Azorius soldier against the wall. Jace gave a momentary thought to helping this fortuitous ogre warrior, but thought the better of it, and slipped away in the confusion of the melee.

Jace put the Cobblestand Inn and the wrecked sh.e.l.l of the building that had been his sanctum behind him, and struck out into the Tenth. As he walked, he played out the scene in his mind, trying to retrace his steps and recover what happened before he awoke. He watched himself awaken on the floor, touch the wound on his head, and look up to see the innkeeper standing over him. The moments before that were black, empty-just a roaring nothingness. It was as if a sheaf of days had been ripped out of him by force.

Jace found an empty alleyway and staggered into it. He made his way into a kind of an urban cave, walled by tall brick buildings and wooden bins of refuse. He slammed his back against the brick and let himself slide to the ground. He brought his hood up over his head and brought his knees in toward him, as if to bring every part of him as close as possible to his own center of gravity. If he could become small, he thought, he could fall through the cracks somehow. Everyone could ignore him, and he could believe that none of this was real.

He stared at his knees. The seams of his pants were worn. A rough sc.r.a.pe was visible through a hole in the knee, from his wandering through the district. He gathered himself up and tried to think his way through the glutinous murk of his memory. But the blankness persisted. He could recall a year ago, and several months ago-and then his mind slipped over patches of uncertain time. He could barely remember a day he had spent in that sanctum, or what had happened in the moments before Emmara's apparent disappearance.

Jace pressed his palms into his eye sockets. He fought for breath, but could only find air in short gasps.

He opened his eyes and scanned around him. He could sense people walking across sky bridges in the towers of the Tenth, hear them shuffling past the alleyway, see them glancing his way. This place was not his adoptive home anymore, not a sanctuary against the vastness of the Multiverse. It was a labyrinth of accusing eyes. It struck him that he should simply leave the plane and cast himself into some other existence. For a planeswalker, retreat was almost always an option.

A window slid open in the wall four stories above him. A pair of hands reached out and dumped the slop from someone's dinner-he hoped it was dinner-out of a pot. Muck dropped through the air and slapped against the pavement near him, close enough to splash his cloak. It was a bit of meat and tuber stew, cold but home-cooked-a sign of life and normalcy. He looked up to the window, where light shone out, the shadows of moving figures pa.s.sing every so often.

Jace sent his senses up to that window, feeling out the shapes of the minds inside the building. Details flooded into his mind. He sensed two people, unguilded humans. They were a couple who owned a nearby bakery. The two of them worked different shifts. Jace couldn't hear their voices with his ears, but he could read their words in his mind as they spoke them.

"You haven't even said how it was," one was saying.

"I don't know," said the other. "Long and dull, just like any other day. Business is better now that the guilds are back. But still not as many customers as I'd like if we're going to pay off the new oven."

"I meant the stew. You said nothing about it."

Jace clung to their words, balancing the two minds in his consciousness, huddling around the warmth of their conversation.

"Well, it was cold. And the beef was stringy."

"You were home late."

"The streets were crazy. The guilds were out in force again tonight. Boros enforcers, Rakdos rioters ... I could barely get home."

Jace snapped his consciousness back to his own mind. He pitied this couple, two of the countless innocents whose lives were impacted every day by the activities of Ravnica's guilds. His mind flashed with imagery of Rakdos freaks bursting into his room at the inn, with Emmara standing defiant before them. Were these actual memories or fabrications-his imaginings of an event for which he had only seen the aftermath? Jace put his fingertips to his temples and pressed, as if he could wring the thoughts out of his head, or as if he could plug the gaping holes in his memory. He stared forward at nothing, trying to ignore that the edge of his cloak was lying in an unidentifiable puddle.

He shoved his hands in his cloak, and felt something in his pocket. He took out the finely crafted wooden leaf that Emmara had given him. It had the faintest fragrance of Emmara's skin. She had told him it was a way to contact her, but he didn't know if she would be able to respond. He didn't even know if it would tell him if his message had reached its target-whether Emmara was alive or dead.

He let the artifact balance on his palm. It was so delicate that it moved slightly with his pulse.

"I need you," he whispered.

The artifact blazed with white light for a moment, the intricately carved veins shining like white-hot wires, and Jace felt a tingling on his skin. Then the artifact faded, the veins attenuating to threads as fragile as ash, and it crumbled in his hand.

He hoped she could hear it, wherever she was. He hoped that if she had heard it, she knew that it meant he would find her. At least if she heard it, he thought, it meant that he had said the words.

Then he reached into his other pocket for the novelty coin he had found in his ruined room at the inn. It might have been dropped by the attackers. He examined the smirking demon's face on the token-probably a sign of the Rakdos, considering their a.s.sociation with demonic forces. He read the other side: RUN WITH THE ROUGH CROWD. Maybe it was a kind of rallying cry for the Cult of Rakdos, he thought, or a recruitment slogan. Or something else.

He stood abruptly. Suddenly, he knew where to look.

Officer Lavinia stood before the enormous double doors that led into the highest spire of New Prahv, the lair of the guildmaster. To look at her, nothing would seem out of place: her cape spilled elegantly from her officer's armor, her sword shone like a decorative piece one would hang above a mantel, and her three-sided medals displayed her district-spanning rank. But her brow trembled, more with frustration than with fear. And she clutched at a folded note in her hand, worrying it with her fingers. It read "Her Honor the Supreme Judge would have words with you."

When the hussars opened the doors for her, she stepped up onto the azure-carpeted dais and gave the traditional nod of respect. Under the enormous Azorius signet, with its mazelike runes bounded within a perfect triangle, was her guildmaster, the Supreme Judge herself: the sphinx Isperia. A robed scribe who had almost more gray eyebrows than face stood nearby, holding a quill ready over a long roll of paper.

"Your Honor," said Lavinia.

The scribe wrote on his paper, making a sharp scratching sound, and stopped again.

Isperia's huge feathered wings were folded against her lionlike flanks, and she sat with her back arched n.o.bly. Her paws flexed, p.r.i.c.king bits of the carpet with her claws.

The sphinx's eyes focused directly on Lavinia. Some said the guildmaster never blinked, and Lavinia found no evidence to the contrary.

"You have returned from investigating the suspect," said Isperia.

"Yes, Your Honor," said Lavinia. "And yet Jace Beleren is not here before me now. Why is this?"

The scribe continued scratching. Lavinia couldn't help flicking her eyes to him in annoyance.

"He has eluded our patrols. We need more hussars, more lawmages."

The sphinx ruffled her great wings. "I do not foresee you succeeding with more resources."

Lavinia's teeth clenched. It did not do to contradict a sphinx, let alone her guildmaster.

"You've learned what you can from the scene?"

"The evidence appears clear, Your Honor. We have witnesses who'll testify that the suspect fled the scene after attempting to use magic on our officers."

"This man sounds dangerous, Officer Lavinia. How did you pursue?"

"Our pursuit was delayed by an altercation with an unrelated party. By the time we were extricated from that situation, the suspect had escaped. But we will find him."

"One person delayed your entire investigation?"

"It was an ogre, Your Honor. One of the Gruul. A fearsome warrior."

"And he, of course, was apprehended in accordance with protocols?"

"Yes, Your Honor. We confined him temporarily."

"Temporarily?"

"He broke the detention spells."

"By unweaving your law-runes?"

"By ... punching them, Your Honor. He, too, remains at large."

Isperia glowered. "Officer Lavinia," she snapped, "when I ask you a question, you will volunteer nothing less than the perfect, most transparent truth. Do you understand?"

It took all of Lavinia's will not to take a half-step backward. The scribe wrote, his quill wiggling back and forth, and he murmured softly to himself.

Lavinia kept her shoulders straight. "Yes, Your Honor."

"What information led you to this building?"

"We received a tip from a courier. The message was sent anonymously. No investigation has yet been performed of the origin of the tip, but I will see to that next."

"Officer Lavinia, are you aware that Beleren's acquaintance, Emmara Tandris, was reported kidnapped that same night?"

"I am."