Dragon's Maze

The shapeshifter smirked. His legs became like liquid for a moment, easily shedding Emmara’s vine spell, and he stepped toward her. Behind him, the guard’s eyes went wide.

“You’re not necessary,” the doppelganger said. “I was doing you a favor by allowing you to rot in here. You know I can take your form just as easily as I took his. Now I see that I should do you the same way I did him. It was with his own sword, by the way. This sword.” He unsheathed Calomir’s sword.

“You look like him. But you can never be him, Dimir deceiver.” Emmara did not look at the guard at the door for fear of alerting the shapeshifter to his presence, but she pronounced those last two words for his benefit.

The shapeshifter shifted his spine, and tendrils spread out from his back as his flesh rearranged itself. The shard of glass dropped out of his back and shattered on the floor. The shapeshifter stalked toward her, raising Calomir’s sword. She had no power to summon her elementals anymore. She had very little magic that could constrain a being with such a fluid form.

“It’ll look bad if you kill me,” she said.

“I’ll tell them the traitor tried to esc—” the shapeshifter began, but then he toppled forward and collapsed on the floor. Not dead, but not moving.

The red-bearded guard stood there, holding an artifact in the shape of a carved branch, an item designed to hold a spell—a stunning spell. The man looked terrified.

“You’ve done well, fellow soldier of Selesnya,” said Emmara.

The guard blinked at the prone shapeshifter. “That’s not Captain Calomir.”

“No. It’s a shapeshifter. A face-taker. And that spell won’t keep him down long. Give me your sword.”

“I—I don’t know … I can’t …”

“Quickly! He’ll kill us both. He might even steal your face, and kill anyone who learns his secret.”

“I can’t kill a superior officer.”

“He’s not—” Emmara began. She stopped herself, and sighed. “It’s all right. Can you let me out of here? Trostani needs to know.”

The guard unlocked the door and let her out. Emmara slammed the door closed behind her. “I doubt it will do much to lock him in there, but it might slow him down.”

But when she looked back through the window in the door, the shapeshifter was melting into the floorboards, his liquefied body finding fine cracks in the wood and descending out of view. Emmara didn’t even have time to shout—he was gone, and she couldn’t detect which way he had slithered.

The ruddy-bearded Selesnya guard stood agape, taking in the barrage of new truths about Calomir and therefore about her guilt. “I … I’m sorry I doubted you, ma’am,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said.

The guard bowed his head, this time not from disgust, but with respect. “I wish there was some way I could repay this slight against you, Dignitary.”

Emmara brushed house dust from her robes. “I could use a witness when I speak to the guildmaster.”

***

When Jace opened his eyes, he lay on a pebbled shore by a river. Gray-barked trees flanked the river, admitting a strip of bright gray sky above them. Jace put a hand on his neck, feeling the ragged holes left there. He kept his hand squeezed against the wound, but blood trickled through the gaps between his fingers and down his arm. He tore a strip of cloth from his cloak, wadded it, and pressed it against the wound, and used another strip to tie the bandage fast to his neck.

Jace stood and walked along the riverbank. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had been to Zendikar. It was as good a destination as any, as different from Ravnica as any world he knew, barely touched by the hand of civilization. It was too savage a plane for conspiracies and intrigue, too changeable for permanent nations. There were no guilds, no streets, no scheming guildmasters. Still, the shifting, smooth pebbles under his feet reminded him of a cobblestone street.

It was conspicuously quiet. When he walked along the riverbank, the stones under his feet scraped against each other in an imitation of company, and the river murmured continuously. But these simple nature sounds were not Ravnica’s urban bustle. They were not Emmara’s voice in his head. If there was a way for him to communicate with her from one plane to another, he didn’t know it. The link was broken. He was cut off.

The gray trees gave way to a clearing, and the land fell away into a broad valley. The landscape looked like it had been torn by claws. Gorges traced across the valley, like roads of ruin. The soil had turned ashen, brittle, lifeless. Even the stone rubble looked pitted and porous, as if it had been drained.