Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel by Ari Marmell Read Free Book Online

stone was cracked and encrusted with dirt and droppings, those windows boarded over, those doors rotted away. Cobwebs grew thicker than curtains, and the sounds of what few inhabitants remained withinwere furtive and scurrying. The cobbles were colored in all manner of molds and mildews that rarely saw the sun, feeding off the runoff and waste.
    His attention locked on that nightmare of abandoned, dying buildings, half-blinded by the precipitation that hung in the air like a mist, Kallist all but leaped from his skin as Liliana’s fist clenched on his shoulder.
    “Holy hell, Liliana! What are—”
    “Shush!” The rasped whisper shut him up faster than any shout. “Listen!”
    Indeed, he heard it now, cursed himself for missing it. Drums in the sewer tunnels, a dozen or more.
    “Sewer goblins,” he hissed at Liliana, hand dropping to the hilt of his broadsword.
    “I don’t understand,” she admitted, even as she stepped away, clearing him room to draw. “I thought they didn’t come out during the day?”
    “They don’t.” But Kallist’s voice was distant, for something else had begun to disturb him, something that tickled at the back of his mind. Something about the drums themselves, about the tale Jace once told him of the Kamigawa ratmen …
    “Liliana,” he rasped, throat suddenly dry, “I think we have bigger things than goblins to worry about …”
    Did the goblin shamans, or the demoniac night-creeps who sometimes ruled them, call it forth from the toxic mire in which they dwelt, shaping mind and body and soul from fungal growths and human wastes and rotting, caustic refuse? Or had their primitive call been heard farther away, worlds away, summoning a vile soul to manifest through what foul materials they had to hand?
    Ultimately, it made no difference. The beat of the drums rose, growing ever louder, ever more frenetic, and the worst of the sewers rose with them.
    The fetid waft of methane was its herald, vicious gouts of sludge and slurry its outriders. Taller than thehouse Kallist and Liliana had left behind, it oozed up and through the storm drain, jaws agape in a silent bellow. Thick mud and foul slimes sluiced from its body, and always there remained another layer of corruption beneath, bubbling up to take its place. Its arms were broken boards, its claws bits of stone and rusted nails, the fangs within its cavernous maw ancient and filthy shards of glass. It was the worst of Ravnica’s filth, the feces and flotsam and decay, given a terrible, primeval life. And hate.
    And hunger.
    The sounds within the surrounding structures turned to sudden screams, to pounding feet and slamming doors, as the destitute took what shelter they could from a menace they could not comprehend. In older times, more ordered times, such an abomination would have been met swiftly by the Legion of Wojek, or at least the forces of one of the other great guilds. But today, only those districts that could afford their own defenders, or the exorbitant fees demanded by the Legion’s successors, had any such protection. Here, in the dwellings of the poor, the filthy, and the forgotten, no one cared.
    Kallist, his waking mind reduced briefly to gibbering horror, reacted without conscious thought. Through instinct alone, he summoned up a shroud of magic even as he charged the abomination, blade held high. Poor a mage as he might be, his desperate illusion should have rendered him briefly invisible. He should have reached the shambling form unseen, gained precious seconds to hack away at it while it remained unaware of his location.
    But Kallist was not thinking clearly, and Kallist had never faced a beast such as this. Without eyes within its face, without brain within its skull, the creature possessed no purchase on which his illusions could take hold. Even as he neared, the shambler lashed out with a fist of muck and refuse. Agony flashed across Kallist’sbody as a dozen jagged edges traced a dozen lines of deep red through