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“Your jurisdiction is now the care and guardianship of these spires. You are to provide all documents and materials pertaining to Beleren to the presiding investigator of the Boros Legion.”

Lavinia’s chin dropped to her breastplate. “I’ll be a glorified house guard.”

The sphinx didn’t blink. “I see no glory in it.”

THE ROUGH CROWD

As Jace stood before the door, he felt a hot blast of air from below him. He stood on an iron grating in the street. Before him was the notorious nightclub he sought, where all manner of strange desires could be satisfied by the Cult of Rakdos. Sulfurous fumes and flickering firelight rose from the grating below, as did echoes of cackling, screaming laughter and inhuman snarls. The sign above the entrance displayed the name of the club: THE ROUGH CROWD.

He knocked.

A creature opened the upper half of the door. He was the size of a child, but with stumpy tusks and a sloping cranium. He wore a collar decorated with something that looked like teeth. He leaned his pasty forearms on the sill of the door and looked him up and down, tonguing his tusks. “Pain or pleasure?”

“I have business here.”

“Come on now, sunshine,” the creature said. “You know that ain’t an option. You wanna get hurt? Or you wanna stay outside?”

“It’s an urgent matter that involves your cultists.”

“Run along.”

The doorman sneered and slammed the door shut. Jace readied a spell, and knocked again.

The creature opened the door again and sighed. “I believe I told you—”

“Your shift’s over.”

Jace let loose his spell, and the doorman fell into a sudden and total sleep before dropping to the floor. Jace leaned over and opened the door from the inside. Instead of legs, as it turned out, the creature had a rusty unicycle as his lower half.

Jace walked into the Rakdos club, pushing into a wall of scents and sounds. The ceilings were surprisingly high inside, draped with banners and spiked chains. An impish creature hooted as it dangled from a high wire while a man in leather chaps swallowed orbs of fire and breathed them back out through his snaggly teeth. Scarred, black-scaled drakes fought viciously in cages that swung from the ceiling, and the stink of sweat and singed flesh wafted from adjoining alcoves.

Against the wall stood an enormous sentry, somewhere along the spectrum between rotund man and compact giant, dressed in what looked like the motley of a harlequin jester crossed with barbed wire. He was a Rakdos spiker. Jace knew spikers were fierce in battle, largely because they didn’t care whether more harm came to them or their foes. The spiker eyed Jace as he came in, squeezing the handle of a spike-topped mace the size of a cart axle.

Jace wanted to stand on a table and challenge the entire club. He wanted to threaten everyone he saw, demanding to know where Emmara was. But if he got himself killed, he would never find her. He had to find a way to locate those who took her. He couldn’t very well ask the patrons of a Rakdos club whether they knew any kidnappers. But he had to act before anyone noticed that he had knocked the doorman unconscious.

All around him, people of all shapes and sizes drank and danced and indulged. He didn’t see any who looked like Rakdos leaders here—these were clients and patrons, here to satisfy wanton desires. Nearby, a snake-tongued woman whispered into the ear of an Orzhov cleric. A viashino competed in a drinking contest with a goblin—from the bleeding arm of a well-dressed man. Jace stepped through a doorway hung with a beaded curtain, but he didn’t look too closely at what may or may not have been beads.

The back room was full of harder-looking characters lit by flickering torches. Horned warriors stared at him and sadistic imps snickered. Laughter and screams emanated in equal measure from private alcoves at the edges of the room. And through thin slits in the alcove doors, Jace could glimpse hints of glistening flesh. There was a small platform in the middle of the room, currently empty, but stained with dark, dried blood. Jace felt even more out of place in this room, like an actor stepping onto the stage without knowing his lines—or worse, knowing that it was a career-ending performance.

Jace slanted his way through the murky crowd and let his magical senses slip outward. He concentrated on the thought of Emmara, trying to find a mind that had any kind of connection to her.