Liliana strode the halls of the Consortium, death dancing in her wake. Wraiths, phantoms, even a swarm of disembodied eyes flitted through the nearby air, darting around corners, to drink the life from anyone foolish enough to stand in her way. Far behind, in the bowels of the complex, plumes of smoke choked the passageways as the Ravnica cell's extensive archives-years worth of magical arcana-were reduced to ash and cinder.
Just as she reached the door to the office, standing out of sight of both Paldor and Jace, Liliana overheard the tail end of the conversation and the threatening tenor of Jace's implanted challenge. Instantly she furrowed her brow in concentration, wisps of black vapor trailing from her hair, her breath turning to steam as the air around her grew cold with darkest mana. Half a dozen smaller phantoms appeared from the surrounding shadows and vanished through the nearest window. One would remain hidden in the skies above this very building; the remainder made haste toward the other Consortium safehouses throughout Ravnica. There they would watch, and hopefully report Tezzeret's or Baltrice's actions, once they finally arrived.
"Bold words," she told him with a faint smile as she stepped into the room, a smile that Jace returned more faintly still. "But I thought you said you weren't willing to take him on?"
Jace shook his head. "No. But if he's… if he's on guard, thinks we're coming for him, he… uh, should take longer to start looking for… for us elsewhere." His breathing had quickened, his face fallen pallid.
"Jace?" Liliana moved swiftly to his side, fear chewing at the base of her spine. "Jace, are you all right?"
"No. No, I… I don't think so."
Only then did Jace allow his heavy cloak to fall open. Liliana gasped, hand flying to her lips, at the sight of the fletched bolt protruding from Jace's tunic, and the bloodstain spreading rapidly around it.
"Paldor…" Jace said with a sickly grin, "was actually a pretty… good shot."
She caught him as he collapsed, barely preventing him from slamming to the floor and perhaps jarring the bolt into a vital organ. She marveled, even as she moved to stanch the bleeding, at the strength and self-control it must have taken to hide his pain long enough to leave his message.
"Jace," she begged, "stay with me." Her hands worked, pressing the hem of her own tunic to the wound. "I don't… I don't know how to treat this! I'm not a healer!"
"I know… know someone here who is," he gasped between clenched teeth. "But I'm not sure… I can manage to get there."
"The sphinx?" Liliana asked. Such a creature soaring over the peaked towers of Ravnica would draw a few eyes, but it wasn't any more unusual than a dozen other sights the citizens would see that day.
"Dismissed her… after she dealt with the guards. Brilliant… wasn't it?" Jace chuckled, then shuddered as the bolt shifted against his ribs.
Liliana stood. "All right. Whatever you do, don't fight this." Her voice was clear as ever, but her lips quivered of their own accord, as though reciting a litany separate from the words she spoke.
Something rose from the floor by Jace's side, something wispy and insubstantial, a fume on the air that clung only vaguely to a humanoid shape. It reached out, not with a hand, but with its head, on a neck that stretched ever thinner, impossibly thin. A mouth that wasn't brushed against the young man's skin, and his body quivered with a shudder that had nothing to do with the pain of his wound.
"Don't fight it," Liliana had said, yet how could he not? Its touch was unnatural, a blight as it flowed through flesh to caress him from within.
At his strongest, Jace could have resisted easily, kept the phantasmal thing from infecting him. But as the pain flared in his wound, as his blood spilled across the floor, Jace struggled to gather his thoughts, to muster what power he had remaining… and failed.
He felt it pour, liquid and cold, through his body, across bones and muscles. His every limb went numb, and the world grew subtly distorted, as though a gossamer veil had somehow unfurled between his mind and his eyes.
"What did you do to me?" Jace demanded. He was startled to find that it hurt less to speak than it had moments ago-but also that a full second had passed after he thought the question before his lips and tongue formed the words.
"You're possessed," Liliana told him in much the same tone of voice she might have used to tell him he had something in his teeth.
"I-what?" "Relax, Jace. I've told him to obey your thoughts. You're still in control of your own body."
"Why would you…?"
"How do you feel?"
Jace took a moment. The torment had indeed lessened, though he still winced at the feel of the inches of wood currently inside him. "A little… better," he admitted.
Liliana nodded. "He'll keep you insulated from the worst of the pain, try to hold your body together so that walking doesn't cause any further damage. You won't be able to go far, but we should be able to get outside, wave down a carriage."
"All right." Slowly, perturbed at the odd delay between intention and movement, he rose to his feet. He felt a faint surge of deja vu, staggering wounded from the complex. "We'd better get… get out of here. Liliana?"
"What?" "Paldor. Left sleeve."
Liliana took just a moment to kneel beside the catatonic man, and rose clutching the manablade in her fist. "What in Urza's name…"
"Manablade. Powerful, could be useful." And I'll be damned if I'll let Tezzeret have it back!
She nodded, handing him the dagger, which he fumbled into his belt. She reached down once more to grab Paldor's small crossbow and a handful of bolts. No telling when they'd prove useful, especially with Jace helpless as he was.
"Where are we going?" she asked as they moved toward the door. "Where's this healer of yours?"
"Ovitzia District," he said.
"Well," Emmara said, craning her neck to look up at the two newcomers on her porch, faintly luminescent in the orange glow of the setting sun and the magic streetlights flickering gradually into illumination. "This is a surprise."
"Emmara!" Jace greeted her, his words growing ever more slurred. "It's great again. You… I mean… He blinked once, languidly, reaching out toward her. "I can't find my hands." His eyes rolled back, their lids fluttering shut, and Jace went limp, dangling upright like a coat on a hanger thanks to the possessing spirit within his unconscious body.
Emmara circled Jace once, as though looking for the wires that held him erect, then knelt to examine the obvious wound. For the entire circuit, Liliana watched with an expression hovering between hopeful and darkly suspicious. A pall of silence hung over them, broken only by the trundling wagons and passersby on the street beneath, the occasional boat passing even farther below, and Jace's labored breathing.
"Can you help him?" Liliana asked, even as Emmara brushed the cloak aside for a closer look at the protruding bolt.
Emmara rose again to her full unimpressive height. "Who am I helping?" she asked blandly. "Berrim? Or Jace?"
Liliana didn't even blink. "Which one gets your help faster?"
The elf narrowed her eyes but nodded. "Bring him inside."
At Liliana's command, the spirit within Jace plucked at tendons and muscles, driving his body into a shamble as awkward as any newly animated zombie. Emmara cast the necromancer a look of profound disgust and found herself reviewing a suite of her own defensive spells-just in case-before following them in and slamming the door shut behind her.
Darkness gave way to a muddled gray, and then to a fuzzy image of an off-white room.
No, not a room. Rooms had walls. This had pillars, with only a single wall whose window looked out on the street below. He'd made it.
Jace all but gasped in relief, then groaned as agony danced across his ribs with stomping feet and iron shoes. The world went gray yet again, and when it finally resolved itself once more into Emmara's home, Jace saw a beautiful face and a halo of black hair staring down at him.
"Miss me?" he asked, his voice weak.
"More than Paldor did," she said, sitting beside him-no mean feat, considering how narrow the bed was-and wiping the sweat from his brow. "How do you feel?"
"Like someone-"
"If you say 'like someone shot me with a crossbow,' I may just get the bolt back from your elf friend and stick it back in you."
"Uh… I hurt," he concluded lamely.
"I know," she said softly. "And I don't want to see it happen again. But Jace-"
Jace recognized the tone, felt his lips press together in a flat line. Don't say it. At least give me a few days-a few minutes-to recover First! Don't say it.
"They'll find us again," she said firmly. "They'll keep finding us, if we don't make them stop."
She said it.
Jace opened his mouth to argue, then froze as the question finally sank home. How had Semner found them? The man had no magics, they'd done nothing to give themselves away, or at least nothing he could think of. Nobody of any import traveled through Avaric, so how…
He realized Liliana was still talking, and shook off his reverie as best he could.
"Liliana, look at me! This was just one cell, and I've got a hole in me! There's no way we're taking on the entire-"
"Damn it, Jace, listen to me!"
"No."
Liliana leaned forward, staring him in the face. "We can beat him!"
Jace barked out a laugh, then wished he hadn't as the room swam and his chest seemed to catch fire. "Liliana," he insisted through clenched teeth, "you're wrong. You have no idea how powerful Tezzeret is!