any more mana on you.'
'I can walk,' she snapped at him.
'Good. Go. I'll watch until you're gone; no sense in us both being helpless at once.'
'Feeling chivalrous, Beleren?' she asked as she climbed unsteadily to her feet.
'Not even remotely. It's just that I wouldn't trust you to fight off a senile kobold in your current condition.'
Baltrice somehow managed to snarl even further without her jaw falling off. 'And I'm trying to decide if I'd rather be dead than owe you for this!' She began to concentrate, and Jace turned away to begin his own spell. Again he poked a hole in the skin of the world, reaching into realms of vicious frost. From the gap poured a flock of razor-beaked raptors, their feathers glistening beneath coats of crackling ice.
Jace dispatched them in groups, to cover the door and every window. Not the most potent minions he might have summoned, they would still be sufficient to slow any nezumi soldiers who might intrude while he prepared for his own walk between the worlds.
Long moments passed, each more nerve-wracking than the next, until Baltrice finally faded from sight. Jace strode to the center of the room, very deliberately not looking at the fur-covered body on the floor, and concentrated once more, struggling to complete his efforts before some new enemy appeared.
For just an instant, as he neared the end of his ritual, he thought he might not make it.
The enemy didn't come through a door or a window. An entire wall of the hut simply vanished, torn from its roots by a strength Jace could scarcely imagine. Standing in the gap was a nezumi, far more bent and twisted than the chieftain had been. His fur was bone-white, covered in scars and festooned with piercings. He carried a staff that appeared to be made of petrified moss, and he wore nothing but a skirt belted at his waist and a headband of snakeskin.
But it was not the shaman who had torn the wall from the hut. Something loomed behind him, bits of steam still streaming from its mouth where it had eaten Baltrice's fire elemental. Jace had a brief sense of a body made up of multiple cypress trees, with twisted wooden talons and a great gaping maw from which swamp-water fell in a never-ending rain. The shaman shrieked, revealing rows of teeth engraved with mystic runes, and pointed toward him with a quivering paw. The frost raptors swarmed about the intruders, for all the good they would do.
And then the world melted away, a curtain of smoky light parting before him, and Jace could not remember the last time he was so relieved to find himself in the maddening chaos of the Blind Eternities.
'… known some blind goblins who could've planned things out better than that. What sort of brain-damaged monkeys are orchestrating our operations these days?'
Jace hunched in a chair the middle of Kallist's quarters, idly fidgeting with the hem of his cloak, while the chamber's true occupant sat across from him, drinking a cup of fruit tea that had long since gone cold. On the table between them stood an unfinished game of guilds, one on which they had wagered a bottle of elven wine. Kallist, eying the territories on the board, couldn't help but notice once again how many more of them were marked in his colors than Jace's, and wished he'd never brought the subject up.
'I know, I know,' he said, his voice calming, 'but if we could just get back to-'
The edge of Jace's wadded-up cloak fell from his fist, hitting the edge of the board and scattering the pieces across the table. He continued to fidget, utterly oblivious; Kallist could only sigh.
'Look, Jace,' he said, straightening in his chair, 'it could have gone worse.'
'Really? Short of my dying, name one way.'
'Well, you could have d-oh. Um, all right, maybe not.' 'It's absolutely appalling, Kallist. It-''
'All right. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but you're not the only one to think so.'
'I…' Jace blinked. 'What?'
'Word in the dining hall-'
'That would be the hall occupied by people who don't know a damn thing about off-world operations, and have never heard of planeswalkers?'
Kallist sighed again. 'Fine. Paldor confided in me after you left; I found him drunk in the hall. Apparently this isn't the first time the Kamigawa cell has failed to confirm information before passing it along to Tezzeret-though this is the first time it was anything of import. If he'd known how big a community you were dealing with, or just how deceptive the prince was being…' He shrugged.
Jace nodded slowly. 'All right. But I'm surprised he'd put up with a cell leader being that careless.'
'My understanding,' Kallist said carefully, 'is that he's not. When it was just a few minor bungles here and there, that was one thing. But now? Our illustrious leader is not happy with the Kamigawa cell. Or with Baltrice, or with you either, for that matter.'
'Fantastic. I can't wait for that conversation.' A pause, then. 'But I guess this should at least make negotiations easier for the Kamigawa cell, since they've only got about half as many nezumi to deal with.'
Kallist grinned. 'Oh, come on. Half? I understand Baltrice killed a fifth, tops.' Then, when Jace's glower suggested that he wasn't finding the situation amusing, the swordsman turned serious.
'Jace, what's really bugging you about this?'
'I — '
'Skip the part where you deny it.'
'I — '
'And skip the part where you claim it's guilt over the collateral damage. I know that's bothering you. I also know that's not the whole of it. We've worked together for too long.'
'You planning to let me finish this time?'
'Possibly.'
Jace slumped even deeper into his chair, so bone-lessly that Kallist half expected to find him puddled on the floor. 'Have I ever mentioned Alhammarret to you?' Jace asked, his voice distant.
'Only in passing. A teacher of yours, right?'
'More than a teacher.' Jace recollected. 'I grew up in a village called-well, we called it Silmot's Crossing, but that's what we called every village within ten miles. One big community. The name really only applies to the largest. The rest were just-hamlets.
'Anyway, I grew up in one of the smaller ones. Until one…'
Jace shook his head. 'You don't need my whole life story. The short version is, my father made me leave when it became pretty damned clear that the townsfolk weren't taking kindly to some of the abilities I was demonstrating. Alhammarret took me in at my father's behest. He taught me how to use the magic that came naturally to me and introduced me to a whole slew of spells that didn't. He also made me feel welcome, which was a pretty nice change of pace after the last few years.
'I was happy for a few years, with Alhammarret. Then, one day I decided to see if I was strong enough to read his thoughts.'
Jace smirked, an expression of disdain clearly directed inward. 'I'd never done that before-to him, I mean. I'd read plenty of other people's minds and never thought much of what I found. One of the first lessons I'd learned was that he'd sense it if I tried, and I guess I had too much respect for him, or too much fear of his implied threats, to challenge that. But you know how teenagers get.
'So I waited until he was distracted, to make sure I'd have at least a few seconds before he could react, and went in. I didn't mean any harm by it; I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to know if I could.'
Kallist could see, at least in part, where this was going. 'What did you discover?' he asked softly.
'That I was a planeswalker.' He nodded at Kallist's shocked look. 'My Spark had manifested over a year earlier, but I'd never understood what that meant. I found myself drifting in the Eternities when it happened, but only very briefly, and only the one time. Alhammarret explained it away as some sort of delusion, something to do with my own illusions messing with my mind. And after that, he kept me busy enough learning new magic that it never happened again.
'I remember… I remember a sensation in his mind that my father knew, that Alhammarret had talked with him about it. I don't know exactly why they kept it from me; maybe they thought they were doing me a favor somehow.
'But I was angry, so angry that he'd lied to me for so long. I'd been furious before, Kallist, but I'd never felt
