none could keep their secrets from him.
Until finally, near dusk some days later, Jace found himself standing at the gate of a vast estate, located just beyond the borders of Dravhoc District. The surrounding iron fence was high, topped with jutting spikes that each boasted a rune of not insubstantial power. At that gate stood a pair of guards; one merely human, the other loxodon, the gray leathery flesh of his arms and his trunk covered with tribal scars, his tusks capped with iron blades and carved with religious runes. Those tree-thick arms hung crossed over his armored chest, and a flail with a head roughly the size of a small continent hung from his waist. Beyond the guards, the path wound its way through a garden of flowers that should not have been in bloom this time of year, to the home of a man Jace knew to be one of Ravnica's greatest sorcerers. That he was also Bolas's chief agent and contact on this world had come as no great surprise.
'I'd like to see the magus,' Jace told the guards as he came to a halt before them.
'So would a lot of people,' the loxodon told him. 'Not going to happen.'
Jace, who had spent hours drawing as much mana as he could from the shores of Dravhoc's slope for just this purpose, sighed dramatically. 'I just knew you were going to say that…'
He found Liliana waiting in the corner of the cold and dusty room they'd rented, adjusting the pull on her stolen crossbow and sitting in a rickety chair that was so close to giving up the ghost that she almost felt she could reanimate it. The glare she aimed at Jace as he stepped into the chamber could have flattened a herd of aurochs.
'It worked,' he told her, shutting the door behind him.
She continued to glare. 'What's wrong?'
'I don't appreciate,' she said icily, 'being kept in the dark like this.' And I definitely don't like not knowing what you're up to! 'Especially,' she added, taking note of the holes burned into his tunic, the bits of blackened flesh on his arms and chest, 'when you're obviously walking into danger. We just got you healed up, damn it! I should've been with you!'
'Wouldn't have been a good idea,' he said, grunting with pain as he removed his cloak and the tatters of his tunic. 'The point wasn't to kill or even mindwipe anyone. I needed information. I did not need to make a new enemy in the process.'
'What are you talking…?' She trailed off, stunned first at the extent of his wounds, and then at the sight of the bloodstained manablade that he dropped to the table. 'Damn, Jace, what have you been doing?'
'Talking to people. The wizard needed some convincing.' Jace had been reluctant-more than reluctant, almost nauseated-to put the knife to the man's flesh. He knew the pain it caused. But he'd had to know, and he wasn't sure he could've won without the weapon to aid him, or broken through the wizard's defenses without weakening the man first.
'All right,' she said, not sounding mollified at all. 'So could you at least explain why you wouldn't tell me where you were going?'
Jace offered an embarrassed smile. 'Because you'd have tried to stop me, and I didn't think we had the time to argue about it or to find another option.'
'Why do I not find that reassuring? Jace, what did you do?'
'I knew we couldn't find Tezzeret on our own,' he told her. 'So I decided to find someone else who could.'
'Oh, sure. You bring back an oracle in your pocket?'
Jace couldn't help it. 'That's not an oracle,' he told her with a leer.
'But no,' he continued hastily when her glare very clearly told him that he was not funny, 'I was actually talking about Nicol Bolas.'
Liliana shot from the chair as though it had grown fangs. The expression she turned on him could not have been more incredulous had he actually puked said dragon into existence on the floor.
'I'm taking you back to Emmara's,' she insisted. 'Obviously, you're delusional with fever.'
'Think about it!' he insisted. 'He's got as large a grudge against Tezzeret as we do-well, close, anyway. And with his sort of power…'
'Then why wouldn't he have gone after Tezzeret himself?' Liliana challenged.
Jace just shrugged. 'Bolas didn't get as old as he is by taking unnecessary chances. And even if he doesn't know where Tezzeret's sanctum is, he can certainly help us find it.' 'Assuming he doesn't just eat us first.'
'You have a better idea?' Jace asked.
'Yes.'
'What?'
'We don't go looking for Nicol Bolas. Besides,' she added as Jace opened his mouth to argue, 'you're just trading one wild phoenix chase for another. You've a better chance of stumbling into Tezzeret on the street by accident than you do of finding Nicol Bolas.'
'But that's just it, Liliana!' Jace crowed. 'I did find him!'
Liliana exhaled sharply, trying to calm her racing heart. It took her a good long moment before she felt steady enough to speak. 'And just where is that, exactly?'
'What do you know,' Jace asked her, 'of a world called Grixis?'
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Even from the shifting wastes of the Blind Eternities, viewed through a storm of undreamed thoughts and unseen hues, it was clearly a world like no other. It was different. It was wrong.
For Grixis was no world at all, but an echo, a shadow, the phantom limb of a dismembered reality. Once, so very long ago, it had been Alara, a world rich in magics. But Alara was sundered, its corpse devolving into five separate shards, each bereft of vital aspects of mana that allowed both the natural and the supernatural to remain in balance.
Some were places of beauty, having left behind the worst of what they once were. Unnatural, yes, and doomed to eventual dissolution, but beautiful all the same.
Grixis was not one of these.
Within the Blind Eternities, the winds that buffeted Jace's soul without so much as touching his skin grew mighty, howling with a voice far beyond sound itself. They rushed inward as though to fill the void to come, swirling about the fading lands that clawed and tore and orbited one another in their slow spiral of decay. Here, as nowhere else in all the known Multiverse, the curtain of color that demarcated the real from the potential, the finite from the eternal, bulged and writhed-a creature in pain, or a birthing caul from which something unholy sought to rise. It twisted inward as though grasped by great fists, pulled and warped by the unnatural essence of what lay beyond. Nigh inaudible beneath the winds, the distant echoes of Alara's death cry still lingered in the currents of potential, and even the Blind Eternities themselves faintly recoiled from this most aberrant of realities.
Amid the chaos, Jace waited, his shoulders hunched against the storm of forces that would have destroyed lesser beings. Within the curtain the five worlds spun; the colors grew lighter and darker, the thrashings of the border calmed or grew fierce, as the shards rose and fell on eternal tides. Only after three full iterations of the cycle, when the planeswalker was certain he knew which hue and pattern, which ebb and flow, was which-when he knew which of the shards lay most immediately before him-did he press through the walls of the world to find himself on the plains of Grixis.
Where, he swiftly discovered, things were even worse.
A shriek, tormented beyond the fragile borders of sanity, pierced the cavern's depths. It echoed, high and harsh, from broad passages and flying arches, returning again and again, melding into a symphony of tones.
Few noticed, for it was just another scream.
The cavern was lit only by a flickering of hellish flame, leaving most of its features submerged in darkness- and for that, any sane observer must have been grateful. What walls could be seen were broken bone, and the ceilings wept tears of blood that smelled of putrescence and formed warm and quivering stalactites of foulest,
