The Purifying Fire: A Planeswalker Novel (34 page)
Read The Purifying Fire: A Planeswalker Novel Online
Authors: Laura Resnick
“No!”
Walbert staggered backward, shock and horror contorting his face.
Above them, the ceiling of the cavern started caving in, in response to the power of Chandra’s spell as it pushed skyward with boundless fury.
The mages of the Order were screaming and racing toward the steep tunnel that led back up to the palace and a chance of survival. Some of them would make it to safety. Others certainly wouldn’t. Too many of them had come down here to watch Chandra be stripped of her power so that their Order could commence an era of unchallenged domination over Regatha.
“Bad decision,” she said to their fleeing backsides as they stampeded past her.
“You can’t!” Walbert cried, too appalled by the destruction of his dreams and plans to run for his life now.
“I can,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I’m actually
meant
to.”
Walbert had gone too far. He had tried to use the Purifying Fire to disrupt the balance on Regatha, to trample on the practices of other mages and other ways of life. He had disrespected and dismissed the value of all mana except that which empowered
him
. And now the white mana flow that ran deep beneath the plains of Regatha had embraced and then freed the fire-wielding planeswalker whom Walbert had brought into these ancient caverns to become the key to his conquest.
Now everything would indeed change.
The madness of sudden, agonizing, unforeseen loss twisted Walbert’s face now, and he attacked Chandra, who was off-guard, watching the celebrants run. He was
stronger than he looked, and she staggered backward under the weight of his enraged assault.
Overhead, the ceiling of the cavern split open with a terrible crash, and a portion of the Temple, which had sat high overhead, plunged into the far end of the cavern. Moonlight pierced the big, ragged hole that was growing above the chamber, and dust, rocks, and boulders flew recklessly across the cavern at deadly speed. The walls and floor shook, and the hysterical screams coming from the world above were scarcely loud enough to carry through the thundering roar down here of crashing stone and groaning rock face.
A raging burst of red-and-orange heat roared across the chamber. It flowed over Chandra, mingling with the fire that sparked along her skin and the flames that raged in her hair.
Walbert screamed as the fire that engulfed the two of them consumed him. He tried to fight it off with his power, but Chandra could see that none came to him now when he called on it. The white mana that had spared her had also, it seemed, abandoned the high priest of the Temple. Chandra watched dispassionately as Walbert died like any common man.
“Chandra?
Chandra?”
The sound of her named brought Chandra to her senses. She opened her eyes and wondered why she was lying on the hard stone ground.
The blood that trickled down her face when she sat up, as well as the sharp, blood-smeared rock lying nearby, answered her question. Now she remembered something falling onto her head—
hard
—only moments after she watched Walbert die.
She looked up and saw Gideon stepping through rubble and rock fragments as he approached her. Moonlight shone
down on the far end of the cavern, but this portion still relied mainly on the glowing spires of rock for illumination. Chandra looked around and noticed that some of those spires had been destroyed in the cataclysm.
The Purifying Fire, however, glowed white and strong, enduring, as it always had.
“What happened?” Gideon’s voice was hoarse.
Chandra touched her bloody forehead. “Falling rocks from overhead. I got knocked out.”
“No, I meant …” He leaned down, seized her shoulders, hauled her roughly to her feet, and gave her a hard shake. Her neck snapped back and her aching head protested as he shouted into her face,
“What did you do?”
When she didn’t say anything, he shook her again.
“Chandra!
What did you
do
here?”
“You can see what I did,” she said, feeling worn out now. “It was a boom spell.”
He shoved her away so violently that she bounced off the wall behind her and nearly fell back down.
“I didn’t tell you how to save yourself so that you could do this!” His face was white with anger, pale and stark against the coal black of his hair.
Chandra looked around at the devastation she had wrought. The fire had been so hot, it had turned bodies to ashes, so it was hard to tell how many members of the Order had died here. She knew it must be at least a dozen. Perhaps more. There might also have been people in the portion of the Temple that had caved in and fallen when part of the cavern ceiling collapsed.
“The temple is ruined,” she guessed. “And the Order …” She took a breath and thought it over. “Well, in disarray, certainly. Destroyed?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. The mana flow is still strong here. They’ll regroup in time. But perhaps they’ll remember what happened
here when their reach exceeded their grasp.”
Gideon grabbed her again, and he looked so enraged, she thought he was going to strike her. She didn’t resist or try to stop him. She knew he felt betrayed. In his position, she’d want to lash out, too.
But he let her go and turned away, breathing hard. “How could you do it?” he asked in a low voice.
“In a way, I think Walbert was right,” she said. “I was meant to come here.”
He gave her an incredulous look. When he saw that she was serious, he said, “You don’t believe in destiny. Neither do I.”
“I don’t really believe in visions, either, and yet Walbert had them, and I was in them.” She shrugged. “And even if none of that is true … it
is
true that someone had to stop him, and I was the one who could.”
“I shouldn’t have helped you.” Gideon wasn’t looking at her. He almost seemed to be talking to himself.
“Why
did
you help?”
For a moment, she didn’t think he would answer. Then he said wearily, “Because I learned on Diraden what it was like to be without my power, and to think I might be stuck on one plane for the rest of my life.” He met her gaze. “And because I saw there what that was like
for you.”
He looked away again. “I couldn’t see you like that permanently. I … couldn’t.”
“What Walbert wanted to do was wrong, Gideon,” she said.
“No.” He shook his head. “What you’ve done is wrong. And I …” He sighed and closed his eyes. “I helped you.” After a moment, he said heavily, “You planned this. It’s why you asked me to leave.” It wasn’t a question.
“I knew what I would do if I came out of the Fire with my power intact,” she said. “And I didn’t want to kill you.”
He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I almost wish you had.”
“No,” she said. “I … can’t.”
He let out a long, slow, shaky breath. “You’d better go. No one else was willing to come down here so soon after the … after
that
. But they’ll come soon. They’ll attack if you’re still here. And I don’t want any more deaths here tonight.”
She looked in the direction of the steep tunnel of stairs that led out of here, knowing that soldiers would probably be waiting at the top. “I can’t leave that way.”
And it was the only exit—unless she grew wings and flew out of the gaping hole in the ceiling, high over the far end of the cavern.
“Were you planning to stay on Regatha?” he asked skeptically. “After
this?”
“No,” she realized, “I suppose not. If the remnants of the Order think I’m alive and at the monastery, there’ll just be more trouble.”
It would be better if everyone on Regatha thought she had died in the incinerating blaze that had swept through the cavern.
“You should leave now,” Gideon said.
“You mean planeswalk?” she guessed.
“Start preparing,” he corrected. “After you’re gone, I’ll convince them you died here and your body is ashes.”
Chandra hadn’t thought this far ahead and, for a moment, she had no idea where to go.
Then she realized which plane she most wanted to find now. And, despite her weary, bloody, head-spinning, thirsty condition, she suddenly looked forward to the journey.
“Gideon …”
“I know where you’re going,” he said. “I know what you want.” He shook his head. “You won’t find it. But that
won’t stop you from trying, will it?” He gazed at her without warmth. “You’re a fool.”
Anger flashed through her. She welcomed its simple, familiar heat. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about the night my family were burned alive in front of me.”
“I’m not interested.” He turned away from her.
She grabbed his arm. “The soldiers who killed them belonged to an order of mages that vowed to bring harmony, protection, and law to the land.”
He froze.
“Does that sound familiar, Gideon?” she prodded in a venomous voice.
He turned his head to look at her. His expression was a mixture of suspicion, shock, and revelation.
“I have faced what I did,” Chandra said, “and laid my ghosts to rest. But I will never forgive those men for what
they
did that night. And anyone who believes in the things they believed in is my enemy. Now and forever.”
His breathing was faster as he stared at her, taking in what she was telling him.
“I acted on that here, and I will act on it wherever I go. Do you understand me?” she said through gritted teeth.
“I understand,” he said at last, “what you’re telling me.”
“Then don’t get in my way.” She let go of his arm and turned away, eager to leave this place. Eager to leave him.
“Chandra.”
“What?” she snapped over her shoulder, afraid she would weaken if she looked at him again.
“We will meet again.”
She couldn’t tell if it was a threat or a promise. Either way, and against her will, she held it to her heart.
Chandra heard Gideon’s footsteps behind her, echoing softly in the ruined, charred cavern as he walked away.
She didn’t turn around or look back. And when the echo of his footsteps ascending the stairs that led back up to the devastated Temple faded away into silence, she prepared to planeswalk again.
The threat of domination by the Order was ended on Regatha, and balance was restored. There would still be some friction among the hieromancers of the city, the fire mages of the mountains, and the green mages of the woodlands. But there would be no more threat of one group dominating the others. Not in this lifetime.
Now, as she sat down on the charred stone floor of the chamber of the Purifying Fire, Chandra turned her thoughts to the future. She closed her eyes, concentrating on her breathing as she prepared to planeswalk, and she imagined the rich and mysterious plane of Zendikar … which in her heart, she
knew
must surely exist somewhere in the vast and wondrous Multiverse.
A
s it turned out, the district of Avaric wasn’t any more appealing when one was drunk than when one was sober. The fog of irrimberry wine didn’t make the filthy cobblestones, the half-decayed roofs, or the sludge coating the roadways any more attractive; and the sweet aroma of that libation didn’t remain in the nose long enough to muffle the stagnant rot and the eye-watering miasma that passed for air. The rows of squat houses and shops leaned over the road like tottering old men, and the wide spaces between them resembled gaps left by missing teeth. Perhaps the only redeeming quality of the entire evening was the surprising lack of mosquitoes. Normally the rains brought plague-like swarms up from the swamps and sewers that were Avaric’s unsteady foundation, but apparently even they were taking the night off for the Thralldom’s End celebration.
Kallist Rhoka, who had spent a considerable amount of coin on the journey to his current state of moderate inebriation, glared bitterly at his surroundings and felt that the world’s refusal to reshape itself into a passingly tolerable form was the height of discourtesy.
Then again, the Avaric District wasn’t alone in its refusal to change its nature to suit Kallist’s desires or his drunken perceptions—and between the stubbornness of a whole neighborhood, and that of a certain raven-haired mage, he was pretty certain that the district would break first.
At the thought of the woman he’d left at the Bitter End Tavern and Restaurant, Kallist’s stomach knotted so painfully it doubled him over. For long moments he crouched, waiting as the knot worked its way up to become a lump in his throat. With shaking hands—a shake that he attributed to the multiple glasses of wine, and not to any deeper emotions—he wiped the pained expression from his face.
Not for the first time, Kallist spat curses at the man who’d driven him to such a sorry state. Less than a year gone by, he’d dwelt in the shadows of Ravnica’s highest spires. And now? Now the structures around him were barely high enough to cast shadows at all. Now he’d have had to actually live down in the sewers or the under-cities of the larger districts to sink any lower.
It was enough to make even a forgiving man as bitter as fresh wormwood, and Kallist had never been all that forgiving.
Still, it would all have been worth it, if she’d just said yes…
Kallist, his wine-besotted mind swiftly running out of curses, stared down at his feet. He couldn’t even see the normal color of his basilisk-skin boots, one of the few luxuries he still owned, so coated were they in the swamp sludge that always oozed up from between the cobblestones after the rain. The boots kept swimming in and out of focus, too. He wondered if he might vomit, and was angered that he might waste the expensive irrimberry wine he’d drunk. The notion of falling to hands and knees on the roadway was
enough to steady him, however. He could still hear, ever so faintly, the singing and dancing of the Thralldom’s End festival, back in the direction of the Bitter End, and he’d be damned thrice over if he’d let anyone from the tavern find him pasting a dinner collage all over the road. With a rigid, yet swaying gait that made him appear sober to nobody but himself, he resumed his trek.
Avaric wasn’t really that large a place; none of the local neighborhoods were. It was a backwater district, surrounded by other backwater districts save for those few spots where the underground swamps pooled to the surface, ugly and malodorous cysts on Ravnica’s aging face. Those who dwelt here did so only because anyplace else they could afford to move was even worse, and a few small fungus gardens were more than enough to feed the lot of them. Thus, even though the Bitter End was at the far end of Avaric from the house Kallist shared with the woman on whom he currently blamed his inebriated state, it should normally have taken only about twenty minutes to walk from one to the other.
“Normally,” of course, allowed neither for Kallist’s current shuffling gate nor the fact that he’d already taken the same wrong turn twice. It had now been well over half an hour, he could still hear the faint strains of singing off in the distance; his eyes were beginning to water and to sting …
And he really, really had to find somewhere private to release some of that wine back into the wild. Kallist looked down at his feet, looked over at the nearest alley—filled almost ankle deep with a juicy mixture of swamp-water and refuse—muttered a brief “Hell with it,” and strode off the avenue.
He shuddered at the soft squishing beneath his boots, but tonight, the urging of a bladder growing fuller by the moment outweighed Kallist’s concerns for his footwear. Had
he been either a little more sober, or a little more drunk, he might’ve worried about encountering sewer goblins, or even Golgari fungus-creatures leftover from the struggles that ended guild rule, but as he wasn’t, he didn’t.
With a deep sigh, Kallist relieved himself against the stained wall that was also the back wall of somebody’s house, and staggered back to the road just in time to all but run into a fellow striding the other way.
“Gariel,” he greeted the newcomer, trying to straighten himself into a semblance of sobriety.
“Who … Kallist? What’re you doing in the alleys this late at night? You’re not worried about gobbers?”
Kallist spun, expecting in his drunken haze to see a gang of the foul creatures behind him. When none appeared, he sank slowly to the muddy road, waiting for yet another surge of nausea to pass.
Irritably, he looked at his friend, who failed to suppress a smirk. Physically, Gariel was everything Kallist wasn’t: dark-skinned to Kallist’s natural pallor; heavily muscled where Kallist was wiry; exceptionally tall where Kallist could have been the standard by which average was measured; and with earthen-colored eyes to contrast with Kallist’s own oceanic blue. Gariel even wore a well trimmed beard, not out of any desire to follow current trends—the styles of Ravnica’s affluent meant little here in the backwaters—but simply because the man had an intense dislike of shaving. “Any knife comes near my face,” he’d told Kallist once, “it damn well better have a sausage on the end of it.” Had their hair not been similar shades of wooden brown, they might as well have been of different species entirely.
Something must have flashed across his face, something Gariel saw even in the feeble moonlight and the glow of the emberstone he held in his left fist. He dropped his
hand and lowered himself to the grimy roadway beside his friend.
“This doesn’t look like a celebratory drunk,” he observed, leaning back against the nearest building.
Kallist looked up at him, all but trembling with the effort of keeping his face a stony, emotionless mask. He glared at Gariel as though daring him to say something.
Silence for a few moments, broken only by the call of a spire bat flying low over the few pools of exposed swamp between the wide roadways and cheap row houses.
“She said no, didn’t she?” said Gariel at last.
Kallist’s shoulders slumped. “She said she’d ‘think about it.’”
Gariel forced a grin, though he felt the blood pounding in his ears, furious on his friend’s behalf. “Well, at least that’s not a ‘no,’ right?”
“Oh, come on, Gariel!” The smaller fellow punched the mud. “When was the last time you knew Liliana to take her time to think about anything? Everything she does, she does in the moment.” He sighed, and tried to swallow the lump that had climbed once again into his throat and appeared bound and determined to stay there. “You know as well as I do that ‘I’ll think about it’ means ‘I don’t want to hurt you by refusing.’”
Gariel wanted to argue the point, but the words clung to the roof of his mouth like a paste. “Well… Look, Kallist. You’ve been together—what? A few months?”
“Yeah. Ever since …” He didn’t finish the sentence. In all the time Gariel had known him, Kallist had never finished that sentence.
“All right, a few months. Give it some more time. I mean, she’s obviously not ending it, or she wouldn’t have bothered to spare you the ‘no,’ right? Maybe in another year or three …”
Kallist couldn’t help but laugh, though the sound was poisonous as hemlock. “Right. Because the one thing Liliana does more often than anything else is to change her mind once it’s made up.”
In fact, in the time Kallist had known her, Liliana had done so precisely once.
And again, Gariel knew them both too well to argue. All that emerged from his mouth, escaping like a fleeing convict before he could think better of it and snap his teeth shut, was, “So maybe you’re better off this way.
“I’m sorry,” he added immediately. “That didn’t come out right.”
“Nothing tonight has.” Kallist rose and set his bleary eyes toward the southeast. “I’m going home.”
“Wait.” Gariel rose, too, and placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Where is she, anyway?”
“Where else would she be during Thralldom’s End?”
Gariel actually saw red. “What?” He’d doubtless have awakened half the street with that squawk, if they hadn’t all been out celebrating. “You mean even after your talk …”
Kallist shrugged, and couldn’t help but smile a bit. “She said there was no reason to ruin a perfectly good dance. Even asked me to stay, but—Gariel? Where are you going?”
The larger man was already several yards down the road. “I’m going,” he answered, barely turning his head, “to give your woman a piece of my mind for treating you this way.”
“Gariel, don’t …” But he was already gone around the nearest bend. Were Kallist less exhausted, less depressed, and certainly less drunk, he might have caught Gariel, or at least tried. As Kallist was, he could only drop his chin to his chest and shuffle home, hoping he remembered to get even drunker before he fell asleep.
He did, however, spare a brief thought to hoping that there was still a Bitter End Tavern standing, come tomorrow morning.
Though the guilds were gone, much of Ravnica still celebrated the Festival of the Guildpact, as if remembering the years of prosperity and order might keep them from fading away in these modern, more tumultuous times. Much of Ravnica—but not all. Some of the plane’s districts had suffered rather more than others beneath the guilds, and not a few were just as happy to see them gone.
Some such as Avaric, whose families had long labored in all but serfdom to the usurious patriarchs of the Orzhov. So when the so-called Guild of Deals had fallen, it was the best news the citizens here had received in several thousand years.
The walls, the floor, the tables, and the chairs of the Bitter End shook as though in the midst of an earthquake, as the good folk of Avaric celebrated Thralldom’s End. In one corner, a gaggle of performers pounded on drums, plucked the strings on a variety of instruments, blew through various horns, in a veritable frenzy of activity that should have produced nothing but anarchic noise, yet somehow managed to shape itself into actual music. Around the perimeter of the common room, the people not currently caught up in the dance clapped or stomped to the highly charged beat, and the footsteps of the dancers themselves kicked up clouds of sawdust from the floor and brought showers of dust sifting from the rafters. Before the start of business tomorrow, a handful of floorboards, a couple of chairs, and a legion of mugs and plates would need replacing—but the Bitter End was the largest establishment in Avaric to hold a Thralldom’s End gala, and if a bit of ruined furniture and broken crockery was the price
for such a huge influx of custom, it was a cost Ishri, barkeep and the tavern’s owner, cheerfully paid.
Liliana Vess was a whirlwind sweeping through the assembled dancers, leaving footprints not merely in the sawdust, but on the hearts of a score of hopeful men. Her midnight-black hair moved about her head like a dark cloud, or perhaps a tainted halo. Her cream-hued gown, which was cut distractingly low, rose and whirled and fell, promising constantly to reveal more than it should, but, like a teasing courtesan, always managing to renege.
She breathed heavily from the exertion of the rapid dance, spinning and twisting through the arms of a dozen of her fellow celebrants. Her smile lit up her features—high and somewhat sharp, forming a face that few would envision when imagining a classic beauty, yet which all would agree was beautiful once they saw it—but that smile failed to reach her eyes. For all that she tried to lose herself in the festivities, in the adoration of those who watched her, who reached out in hopes of a simple fleeting touch, she could not.