Gatecrash

Jace focused on the imagery in the minds of the spectators around him. They weren’t just radiating raw fury and bloodlust—they were imagining how they would attack Ruric Thar if they were in Jace’s place. They were a barrage of combat ideas. Jace let the punches and rolls and throws swirl around him, choreographing an attack plan.

Jace somersaulted at Ruric Thar and grabbed at a leg, clamping onto it. The ogre tried to shake him off, but he bit the thin-skinned area behind the knee, ripping tissue with his teeth. Ruric and Thar roared and kicked Jace off their leg.

More of the Gruul’s battle imagery poured into Jace. He darted back and forth, relying on the warriors’ split-second assessments of the fight to guide him. Ruric Thar swung intermittently with fist and axe, but Jace sensed the impulses of the warriors, and used their unintended warnings to dodge out of the way in time. Ruric Thar was not fighting just Jace, but all of his war party at once. Jace was letting the warriors beat the ogre for him.

When the ogre overcommitted to a lunge, a desperate move flashed in one of the warrior’s minds, and Jace executed what he saw. He leapt onto the ogre’s bowed shoulder and, using a huge tusk for leverage, clambered up onto his back. Jace’s cloak came loose, so he threw the hood over the head of Ruric, the side with the axe. Then, hanging onto Ruric’s head, he beat his fist onto Thar’s cheekbone, as the Gruul’s minds urged—once, twice, three times.

The ogre’s axe flailed, apparently controlled by the head that couldn’t see. The free arm grabbed Jace by the hair, and pulled. But Jace hung on, focused on pummeling Thar’s increasingly bruised and puffy face.

When the axe blade came arcing toward Jace, he didn’t see it, but he felt it through the reactions of the Gruul onlookers. He leapt off of Ruric Thar, landing on his face, but in one piece, on the park lawn.

Jace heard a truncated yelp. Jace recovered and turned back to see the ogre’s own axe blade embedded a few cringe-inducing inches into the top of Thar’s bald head. The ogre held his breath, frozen in uncertainty, both sets of eyes looking up at the axe-arm that had missed Jace and hit Thar.

Thar began to hyperventilate through his teeth.

“You win,” said Ruric, pulling Jace’s cloak away and wincing.

Jace collapsed with relief. The Gruul warriors cheered.

Ruric Thar pulled gingerly with his axe arm, and the blade came free from the left head with a sickening wet sound. He clapped his hand on the wound and slumped heavily to the ground. Both of the ogre’s faces winced as blood trickled out from between his thick fingers, and his breathing was heavy.

Jace broke his connection to the minds of the other Gruul warriors. Their current of battle-obsessed thoughts began to ebb from his mind.

One of the Gruul compatriots, an extensively tattooed man with hair and beard that resembled coarse beaver fur, approached Ruric Thar and began murmuring a shamanic spell. The shaman’s outstretched hands trembled like windblown leaves, and pale light issued from his forearms and swirled around Ruric’s wound. The ogre kept his hand pressed on his head wound, but the bleeding stopped.

“You have some Gruul in you,” said Thar, between heavy breaths.

“Not as much as you might think,” said Jace. “So now, you’ll let your guard down, so I can find what I came for?”

“As you wish,” said Thar.

The ogre took a deep lungful of air, and let it out, closing their eyes. They nodded slightly.

Jace carefully cast his mind out to the ogre, letting his thoughts seep in slowly. He chose Thar first. As his mental senses began to perceive Thar’s thoughts, Jace felt no backlash, so he moved in deeper.

The ogre’s mind was like a museum of prizefights. Thar remembered triumph after triumph in battle, how his axe cleaved through this Gruul upstart or how he wrung the neck of that Orzhov cartel boss. It was an emotional landscape rather than a deliberative one, built on fervor and violence and laughing in the faces of the defeated. This was to be expected, but it made it harder for Jace to locate information about the maze.

He found nothing. Thar had no recollection of anything that Jace might have been researching at the time he lost his memories. Maybe this was all a mistake, a hunch that went nowhere.

He moved over to Ruric instead. Ruric’s mind, under some understandable surface-level shame of the duel with Jace, was also a timeline of clan battles and Azorius head-butts and street brawls with Rakdos hoodlums. Ruric was, if anything, even more savage, more nonverbal and instinctual. Ruric, too, remembered nothing of Jace’s research. Jace’s thoughts must not have transferred into the ogre.

That was it. That was his last lead.

***

“I don’t understand,” said Ral. “We divined everything. That mage’s research was the last key to the puzzle. We traveled the route, just like the code said to. But there was nothing. Just an old forum.”

“The Forum of Azor,” said Niv-Mizzet, after swallowing the remains of an underling.