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

his flesh. He barely had time to note the alleyway dropping away beneath his feet before he slammed hard against a wall across the way. Bright lights flashed before him and the breath rushed from his lungs, leaving him gasping as he slid to the base of the house. Only sheer luck prevented his spinning body from landing across the blade of his own brutal weapon.
    Nor was the beast through with him. Even as Kallist settled to earth, propped upright only by the wall, the shambler’s maw split apart. First like a snake with jaw unhinged, and then farther still, it gaped wider, impossibly, bonelessly wide. And from that portal to some squalid hell, the creature vomited up a putrescent mass of sewage, a deluge that slammed into Kallist as brutally as the fist itself. It clung to him, choked his lungs, hardened about his joints and glued him to the ground.
    Liliana, who had far greater experience dealing with such violations of nature, still found herself stunned. Frantically her gaze flitted from the shambling mass to her fallen companion and back again, conflicting needs tearing at her soul.
    The horror started toward her, not even bothering to turn its sightless head in her direction, and the time for indecision was past. Mouthing a funereal chant, lower, more somber, more soul-churning even than that she had voiced in the Bitter End, she raised both hands and circled right, forcing the creature to move ever farther from Kallist if it meant to reach her. The runic swirls tattooed across her back began to glow, a sickly bruise-purple, pulsing in time with her heart.
    With agonizing sluggishness, light returned to Kallist’s eyes, feeling to his limbs. He saw only smatterings of the wall that rose above him, or the cloud-laden skies beyond, for he could scarcely turn his head. His legs and back began to itch, then burn, as the caustic fluids of the sewage seeped through his clothes. The hardenedmuck held him fast, and he feared he would simply lay there, helpless, until something awful appeared to claim him, or until he suffocated in the waste’s poisonous effluvia.
    When he felt the muck begin to break away, first from about his wrists and arms, then from around his neck—when he saw the tips of pale and slender fingers—he nearly sobbed in relief.
    “Liliana!” he gasped, sucking in great lungfuls of air, “how did you—”
    And then Kallist saw precisely what had rescued him. The blood drained from his face until even his lips were fishbelly-pale, and he could not help but wonder what cost Liliana had paid to cast such a summons.
    The common folk of a hundred worlds believed angels were the servants of gods, beings of light who dwelt on high, graceful and beautiful, pure and righteous. The common folk here on Ravnica knew angels as their neighbors, dwellers in the same cities where lived humans and vedalken and viashino.
    Nowhere on Ravnica, or on any others of those worlds, had anyone imagined an angel such as this.
    She straightened the moment Kallist was free enough to extricate himself, revealed in all her nightmarish glory, this angel that certainly came from nowhere near “on high.” Wings of midnight feathers, dull and grim as the blackest crow, blotted out what little sunlight had forced its way to the alley’s floor. Corpse-pale skin was girded in leather armors harvested from the hides of demonic and mortal foes alike, and a deceptively dainty fist clutched a jagged, rusted shaft, less a spear than a lightning bolt of forged steel. Where she stood, even the stone-coating mildew died, overcome by the angel’s essence of desolation. Beetles, rats, and other crawling things emerged from the sewer grates and the cracks between the cobblestones, desperate to flee her deathly presence, only to wither away at her feet.
    Eyes, empty of anything but a need for destruction beyond Kallist’s imagining, turned away to gaze with naked lust upon the conflict raging down the street. Sitting upright, digging frantically