Gatecrash

The messenger looked shaken. “It’s as bad as we’ve ever seen. And potentially about to get much worse.”

Niv-Mizzet drew back his wings and looked down at Ral Zarek. “Let’s depart. It’s time we made a little announcement.”

ARMIES IN THE STREETS

Jace heard what he thought at first was a rumble of distant thunder, but it was too rhythmic and too deep to be thunder. It was the sound of a distant chant, two syllables repeated like drums.

“Berrr-rumm. Berrr-rumm.” The chant sounded like the voices of a vast lynch mob, their shouts merging into a cadenced thump, repeated over and over, layered over the sounds of marching feet. There was something oddly familiar in the chant that made a cold twinge in Jace’s subconscious, but he couldn’t place it.

Jace tried to focus on searching the ogre’s minds. But the sound was getting closer. “Berrr-rumm, Berrr-rumm,” they chanted.

The Gruul war party heard it too. “Someone’s coming,” said Thar.

“A lot of someones,” said Jace.

“War chant,” remarked Ruric, still holding a hand over his head. “Not Gruul.”

At that moment Jace felt a promising echo from Ruric’s mind, a hollow proto-thought that didn’t quite take shape, but that had the contours of what Jace was seeking. It was a wisp of a memory that Jace had passed over at first, because the ogre himself had assimilated it into his own thoughts. But Jace sensed that the cellar of the ogre’s mind echoed with a purpose that was not his own, a subconscious mission that originated with one memory.

The memory was of tearing down the sanctum where Jace had done his research. The ogre had wrecked the entire building, and Jace’s research with it, at the same time that Jace was busy destroying his own memories of it.

It was not enough to go on. Ruric Thar was an ogre of the Gruul Clans—he was not known for his attention to detail, or for his proclivity to stop and study that which he was about to pulverize. Only thin strands of details remained—a glance at a scribbled diagram, or a flash of a sheet of notes, before the memory of setting them aflame and collapsing the building on them. Not enough to get a coherent picture of the research.

“Berrr-rumm. Berrr-rumm.” The voices were getting louder. Whoever it was would round the corner in minutes.

“Time to go,” said one of the Gruul warriors, and they readied their gear to leave.

Ruric Thar got to his feet. “You done?” asked Thar, looking down the street toward the sound.

“Wait a moment,” said Jace. “Almost.”

The detail of the sanctum was lacelike, riddled with holes, but he was only considering one of the ogre’s minds. Jace quickly hastened his inner eye over to Thar’s memories, now looking for similar traces of the sanctum.

He found more. A snippet of a code that Jace and Kavin had deciphered—an old Azorius script. A path through a series of gates—guildgates, the ancient territory markers set up in the guilds’ distant past. He even detected a memory of when Jace first hired the ogre, and when he used mind magic to communicate with him—clues from Jace’s own speech pointed to the need for secrecy, the importance of the information stored in the sanctum, and the urgency of the need for thorough destruction. Jace’s mind assembled the scraps of memory from the ogre’s two brains and lashed them together with leaps of deduction. He saw it now. It was enough. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

“Rakdos!” cried the Gruul war party.

Jace turned. He saw a vast mob of Rakdos-guild rioters, jabbing at the sky with their spiked spears and jagged swords, led by the blood-witch Exava. And at that moment he realized what the crowd was chanting.

It wasn’t “Berrr-rumm.” They were chanting “Berrim,” the alias Jace had given in the Rough Crowd. They were here for him.

“Run,” said Thar. “We’ll slow them down.”

“By breaking some legs,” added Ruric.

“You’ll be overrun in seconds,” said Jace.

“Just go,” said Ruric “We owe the Rakdos a lesson.”

“I’m not just going to leave you—” Jace began, until he was interrupted by Thar grabbing him around the throat with his one meaty hand, and drawing him up to look him in the eyes.

“You learned nothing about the ogre mind?” asked Thar. “We say it? It’s done.”

Ruric only grinned, his tusks gleaming.

The ogre dropped Jace back onto his feet, and the ogre’s axe-arm rose to a battle-ready position, still edged with his own blood. The Gruul warriors gathered around Ruric Thar’s flanks, weapons raised. They roared in defiance, outnumbered dozens to one, as the Rakdos crashed into them.

Jace wiped his bloodied mouth and gathered a tidal wave of mana.

***