CHAPTER FOUR
Kallist glowered about as though hoping to cow the rain into submission. The rain petulantly refused to be intimidated, however, and he had to settle for running his fingers over his face, flinging another handful of water to the sodden earth.
'At least it keeps the worst of the stench and the mosquitoes out of the air,' Liliana told him, her voice cheerful enough that it made Kallist very seriously consider hitting her over the head with the first loose brick he could find.
He glared at her instead. 'Maybe if you'd take one of these packs for me, I'd be a tad less miserable.'
'I have what I need. It's not my fault you pack like a girl.'
'And I suppose that means you pack like a man, then?'
'I, my love,' she said, with a seductive twinkle in her eye and just a faint touch of her tongue on her lips, 'do not do anything like a man.'
Kallist, still not emotionally steady enough to broach certain subjects, kept walking.
The both of them were clad in heavy cloaks, designed not only to keep the elements off but to hide the fact that their clothes were clearly of poor, peasant stock. Though the only routes out of Avaric took them through alleys, sewers, and under-streets that made even that poor district seem classy, they would soon enough be wending their way through neighborhoods of far greater affluence. They could acquire new outfits easily enough, but until then, it wouldn't do to stand out as yokels.
Kallist had topped his outfit with a broad-brimmed hat, Liliana with a deep hood, and neither had done much in the way of keeping the pair dry. Their shoes were all but unsalvageable, the rain-soaked mud of Avaric having been replaced by the much purer garbage and excess sewage of Ravnica's most foul under-streets.
A few more moments of silence, a few hundred more yards. The rains increased marginally, but enough to soak through what few spots of Kallist's outfit were still dry, and he could only shake his head.
'This is not an auspicious start to our journey,' he muttered.
'Why, Kallist. You're not superstitious, are you?'
The expression he turned on Liliana was utterly bland. 'I'm accompanying a sorcerer who was born on another world, on our way to warn a third that he's about to be assassinated, possibly at the behest of either an inter-planar criminal organization or a spirit-binding rat. As far as I'm concerned, what you call 'superstition,' I call 'paying attention.'' 'Fair enough. You should try that, then.'
Kallist squinted, not entirely certain if he was imagining the insult there or not, but Liliana's smile suggested that she hadn't seriously meant it anyway. At least, he assumed that's what it meant.
Another few moments of silence, save the persistent rain and the squelching of boots.
'Liliana,' he began hesitantly, 'about our talk last night…'
'No.'
'Fine.' Kallist couldn't keep the anger or a touch of petulance out of his voice. He began to pull ahead, but a soft hand on his shoulder stopped him.
He turned, and the wide eyes into which he gazed glimmered with more than the rain.
'Kallist,' Liliana said gently, 'not now. After we're done with this-when we've found Jace and we're done with whatever we're doing in Favarial-if things have changed, ask me then. But not now. There's too much to deal with.'
He could only nod, unable to form anything resembling a coherent word, and resumed his pace.
Struggling to keep his voice steady, he asked, 'Assuming we can find him, do you think Jace'll be willing even to see us?'
'I doubt it,' Lilian a told him seriously. 'But I wasn't planning on asking. You said it yourself, Kallist: He's never forgiven either of us. We're going to have to save him despite himself.
'And who knows?' she added, voice far more hopeful than it was certain. 'Maybe saving his life one more time will help balance out the books where he's concerned.'
Kallist smiled a grim, sad smile. 'And when you're through with that delusion, I've got a pristine castle with a mountain view on Dominaria that I can sell you, cheap.'
Again they walked in silence. As their footsteps drew them inexorably farther from Avaric, their surroundings grew ever filthier, ever more gloomy. At least the huts and shops in Avaric had no pretensions; these, however, stretched as high as those aspiring to the glory of other, far wealthier neighborhoods. Narrow windows and tall arched doorways provided ingress through walls of stone; but that stone was cracked and encrusted with dirt and droppings, those windows boarded over, those doors rotted away. Cobwebs grew thicker than curtains, and the sounds of what few inhabitants remained within were furtive and scurrying. The cobbles were colored in all manner of molds and mildews that rarely saw the sun, feeding off the runoff and waste.
His attention locked on that nightmare of abandoned, dying buildings, half-blinded by the precipitation that hung in the air like a mist, Kallist all but leaped from his skin as Liliana's fist clenched on his shoulder.
'Holy hell, Liliana! What are-'
'Shush!' The rasped whisper shut him up faster than any shout. 'Listen!'
Indeed, he heard it now, cursed himself for missing it. Drums in the sewer tunnels, a dozen or more.
'Sewer goblins,' he hissed at Liliana, hand dropping to the hilt of his broadsword.
'I don't understand,' she admitted, even as she stepped away, clearing him room to draw. 'I thought they didn't come out during the day?'
'They don't.' But Kallist's voice was distant, for something else had begun to disturb him, something that tickled at the back of his mind. Something about the drums themselves, about the tale Jace once told him of the Kamigawa ratmen…
'Liliana,' he rasped, throat suddenly dry, 'I think we have bigger things than goblins to worry about…'
Did the goblin shamans, or the demoniac night-creeps who sometimes ruled them, call it forth from the toxic mire in which they dwelt, shaping mind and body and soul from fungal growths and human wastes and rotting, caustic refuse? Or had their primitive call been heard farther away, worlds away, summoning a vile soul to manifest through what foul materials they had to hand?
Ultimately, it made no difference. The beat of the drums rose, growing ever louder, ever more frenetic, and the worst of the sewers rose with them.
The fetid waft of methane was its herald, vicious gouts of sludge and slurry its outriders. Taller than the house Kallist and Liliana had left behind, it oozed up and through the storm drain, jaws agape in a silent bellow. Thick mud and foul slimes sluiced from its body, and always there remained another layer of corruption beneath, bubbling up to take its place. Its arms were broken boards, its claws bits of stone and rusted nails, the fangs within its cavernous maw ancient and filthy shards of glass. It was the worst of Ravnica's filth, the feces and flotsam and decay, given a terrible, primeval life. And hate.
And hunger.
The sounds within the surrounding structures turned to sudden screams, to pounding feet and slamming doors, as the destitute took what shelter they could from a menace they could not comprehend. In older times, more ordered times, such an abomination would have been met swiftly by the Legion of Wojek, or at least the forces of one of the other great guilds. But today, only those districts that could afford their own defenders, or the exorbitant fees demanded by the Legion's successors, had any such protection. Here, in the dwellings of the poor, the filthy, and the forgotten, no one cared.
Kallist, his waking mind reduced briefly to gibbering horror, reacted without conscious thought. Through instinct alone, he summoned up a shroud of magic even as he charged the abomination, blade held high. Poor a mage as he might be, his desperate illusion should have rendered him briefly invisible. He should have reached the shambling form unseen, gained precious seconds to hack away at it while it remained unaware of his location.
But Kallist was not thinking clearly, and Kallist had never faced a beast such as this. Without eyes within its face, without brain within its skull, the creature possessed no purchase on which his illusions could take hold. Even as he neared, the shambler lashed out with a fist of muck and refuse. Agony flashed across Kallist's body as a dozen jagged edges traced a dozen lines of deep red through his flesh. He barely had time to note the alleyway
