Blood welled up, beading along his wrist in a narrow bracelet. It was a shallow wound, stinging but harmless, and his grimace of pain turned into a savage grin as he realized just how ineffective his target's attack had proved.
But then, Liliana's attack wasn't intended to cause him harm. It was meant only to draw blood-and the attention of the unseen shadowy thing sliding impossibly across the floor. Invisible to all, darkness against darkness, black on black, it stretched forth its talons once more and dipped them into the welling blood. A foul corruption leeched into the seeping wound, intertwined itself around the muscles and vessels of the man's arm.
He screamed, then, an inhuman cry of agony, as gangrenous rot shot through his flesh. The blade fell from limp fingers, lodging itself in the wood by his feet, as the skin turned sickly blue, the blood black and viscous. Flesh grew stiff and cracked, splitting to unleash gouts of yellowed pus. Falling to his knees, the sellsword clutched his dying arm to his chest and bawled like an infant.
Liliana spared him not so much as another glance. His suffering would end soon enough-when the spreading necrotic rot reached his heart.
Growing ever more unnerved, the second bandit had nonetheless recovered from the impact of the table against his leg, swiftly closing to within striking range. Snarling, he raised his chopping blade high and brought it down in a vicious stroke that no parry with the fragile dinner knife could have halted.
Liliana didn't even try to lift her feeble weapon in response. No, lips still moving though she must long since have run out of breath, she raised her left hand and caught the blade as it descended.
The cleaver should have torn through her upraised limb like parchment. Should have, and would have, had it not begun to turn black at the apex of its swing, suddenly cloaked and tugged by wisps of shadow. By the time it should have reached the flesh of Liliana's hand, it was simply gone, drawn away into the nether between the worlds of the living and the dead. The swordsman was left standing, staring at his empty fist.
With a shrug, Liliana bent two fingers into talons and drove them into his staring eyes. Hardly fatal, but more than enough to take him, screaming, out of the fight.
And just like that, the tavern grew calm once more. The eldritch symbols across Liliana's back faded as swiftly as they appeared, leaving her skin pristine. Ignoring the slack faces that gaped silently at her from those partygoers who hadn't already run screaming from the Bitter End, Liliana moved away from the fallen bandit, dismissing the spectral shadow with the merest thought. Only she, of all those present, heard its woeful cry as it spiraled back into the endless dark.
She placed one foot atop the fallen chair and leaned on her knee to gaze meaningfully down at Gariel-who was, himself, staring up at her as though she'd sprouted feathers.
'What… What did… What?'
'All good questions,' Liliana told him. 'Are you all right?'
'I–I'll live.'
'Let's not jump to conclusions just yet.' She reached down to offer the flustered fellow a hand up-then yanked it away as he began leaning on her, allowing him to fall flat on his face once more. The floorboards shook with the impact. 'There's still the little matter,' she said with a predatory smile, 'of you stalking through that door, yelling at me, calling me all sorts of ugly names.'
'I-you…' Gariel wiped a hand across his face, smearing rather than removing the blood that now dribbled from his nose. 'People are watching, Liliana.'
'That didn't bother you when you were shouting obscenities at me.'
Gariel could only gape once more, at the gathered audience and at the injured bandits, and wonder exactly how crazy his friend's girl actually was. He'd actually opened his mouth to ask such a question-only to choke on a spray of splinters as a bolt that appeared roughly as thick as a tree trunk slammed into the floor mere inches from his head.
Liliana heard the whir-and-click of a mechanized crossbow even as she jerked away from the sudden impact, glaring at the figures standing in the doorway.
There were three more, all strongly resembling the pair who had attacked her moments ago. Only these three, Liliana realized as she stared at a trio of self-loading identical weapons, were far better equipped.
'The next one,' the man in the middle told her gruffly, 'goes through his head.' His gaze flickered to the two figures on the floor, one breathing his last, one blinded, and his face hardened. 'I don't think you're fast enough to stop all three of us, witch.'
She scowled in turn. 'So shoot him. He means nothing to me, and even with those fancy crossbows, I promise you'll not have time to reload.'
'Ah,' the man said, voice oily, 'but he means something to someone, don't he?'
Liliana's scowl grew deeper still-but her shoulders slumped, and she knew that they saw it. 'What do you want?'
'What I want is to put a few shafts through you for what you did to my boys,' the bandit told her. 'But what's going to happen is this…'
CHAPTER TWO
A light rain was falling by the time Kallist opened his eyes. It was a slow, soaking drizzle, good for the swamp fungus and sewer slime and not much else, the sort of precipitation that managed to soak everything without forming into actual drops. It ran from the sloped roof, flowing around the broken and missing shingles, to pour in sporadic rivulets past the windows. The mosquitoes, Kallist thought, are going to be murder tomorrow, holiday or no holiday.
That was his first thought. His second was, Why am I stuck to the table?
He winced in pain, and more than a little embarrassment, as he peeled his unshaven face from the wood, recognizing the gluey sensation of his own drool. At least, he realized, glancing around at the familiar surroundings, he had made it home before passing out completely.
He stood up, his back protesting at the slumped position he'd apparently held for quite a few hours. Bleary- eyed, but without the pounding headache he'd expected, Kallist staggered across the room. It was a small dwelling: two interior rooms, one of which included the kitchen, and a separate bathhouse for cleaning and other necessary relief. It was tiny compared to what he'd known elsewhere in Ravnica, but by the standards of Avaric, it was almost palatial.
Rather than trudge out to the bathhouse where their well was located, which would have required getting soaked to the skin, Kallist simply cut out the middleman, threw open the shutters, and caught some of the ambient rain in his hands. The first palm-full went to quench his burning thirst, the second to scrub the sticky residue from the side of his face.
And only then, as he truly began to wake up and as the expected pounding slowly seeped into his skull, like faint hoofbeats from a distance, did Kallist wonder what had awakened him.
He froze, hands still held out the window, and tried to remember how to think. It couldn't have been thunder, but this was a gentle shower, not a storm. Someone's door slamming? Possibly. But someone would've had to give their door a blow sufficient to fell a tree for it to have awakened Kallist from his drunken slumber. It didn't seem likely.
Yet he was certain, in retrospect, that some sort of crash had roused him, a crash that could have been inside the house.
Kallist's mind finally shrugged off enough lassitude to start working at something approaching normal capacity, at roughly the same time he heard the faintest whisper of cloth against wood in the kitchen doorway.
At the best of times, Kallist wasn't a fraction of the mage Liliana was; he'd had training, yes, but his skills had always leaned more toward the sword than the spell. And now, with more than a little alcohol still flowing through his blood, anything approaching a complex incantation was beyond him. Nevertheless, spurred on by a sudden burst of fear, a swift whisper allowed Kallist to cloak himself in the thinnest, flimsiest of illusions. It wasn't much-but it made him appear as though he still held both hands outside, cupped to catch the rain, when in fact one had dropped to the hilt of the dagger he wore strapped to his right thigh. It felt awfully light in his hand, and he had
