Gatecrash

The vampire Mirko Vosk stood in a cavernous corner of the undercity, deep below street level in a structure that had been built centuries before. Vosk had guessed it had probably been a library or archive at some point; the texts were long gone, but the smell of moldering pages soaked the walls. As usual, he could not see his guildmaster, but only cast his answers to the air around him. Not only had Vosk never seen Lazav, ruler of the Dimir guild, with his own eyes, he had never met anyone who had. But Lazav’s omnidirectional voice had a special closeness to it tonight, a hostility that Vosk felt as a chill on his neck.

“Our information was wrong, Master,” Vosk said. “Beleren knew nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Beleren knew everything,” rasped Lazav’s voice. The last word rebounded around the chamber, ringing with accusation. “You dare tell me my information was incorrect? You dare come here without Beleren and without the elf, with nothing but a mealy-mouthed apology? How am I to utilize their secrets if you never deliver them to me?”

A shadow darted along the wall behind a heap of crumbled marble. It was too quick to identify, and it disappeared into the darkness.

“His memories had a hole in them,” Vosk said to the air around him. “He had lost everything he had learned. I don’t know how. Someone … someone else must already have drained him.”

“Someone else? You think there’s some other Dimir-trained psychic vampire stalking Beleren for the secrets of the maze?”

“No, Master.”

Shadows coalesced into the silhouette of a man, a hooded figure that stepped forth. Vosk could not see the face of the man under the dark cloak, but when the figure spoke, it was Lazav’s voice.

“You have failed me, my once-promising agent, and now I must see to matters on my own. But I have devised a fitting punishment for you. I trust you will find it poetic.”

The cloaked figure of Lazav moved silently forward, like a shadow unmoored from its host. Vosk stepped instinctively backward as it approached.

“You will be … forgotten.”

Clawed hands emerged from the sleeves of the cloak, and Lazav pulled down his hood to confront Vosk face to face. Vosk saw Lazav’s face and gasped.

Mirko Vosk saw his own face grinning back at him.

It was himself, down to the last detail. Every line of his forehead, every eyelash, every curve and vein of his neck was repeated in the other’s visage.

“Shapeshifter,” Vosk breathed.

“Take him,” Lazav said.

The rasping voice, the voice he had heard giving him orders for years, sounded so wrong coming out of his own leering face. He was so struck by the incongruity, by the violating horror of seeing his own skin stolen, that he hardly noticed the figures shimmering out of the shadows.

Dimir guildmages emerged through the walls and took hold of his arms and neck, clamping some cold, enchanted metal against his skin. They blindfolded him and dragged him, his heels scraping along the uneven floor, as Lazav, snickered at him. The laugh reverberated around the chamber, scattered by acoustics and illusion magic, sounding sourceless and omnipresent and terrifying. The sound penetrated Vosk’s brain as hands pulled him, blind and helpless, into the undercity.

Where will they take you? asked Lazav’s voice, now spoken in frozen words inside of his mind, feeling even closer than it had felt before. Where will your prison be?

The guildmages pulled him through rancid puddles, down staircases, through curving and sloping tunnels for what felt like days. His captors lifted him over unknown obstacles and carried him through windy, echoing spaces. They escorted him over creaking, unstable boardwalks and dropped him in stinking water. They tied rope around him and lowered him down a pit that felt miles deep, and then dragged him through pipes and tunnels again. At all times, an uncertain number of hands retained their iron grip on him, other agents of House Dimir, just like him.

Finally Vosk’s captors used magic to push him through tunnel walls—and he knew by the duration of the sensation of passing through stone that the walls were thick. He fell against a flat, cold, stony surface, and the hands released him all at once. His bonds dissolved, and he was free to move his arms and head again. He removed the blindfold from his face but he saw nothing. The darkness around him was complete.

He felt around. The boundaries of the floor were quickly apparent, and the ceiling was low. His cell was uncertain in dimension, but featureless other than the smooth stone. Vosk’s sensitive fingers felt nothing in the stone, not a crack, not a ridge, not a single fissure of any kind. He pounded on the walls with his fists, but they were so solid that they barely registered the blows. He was in a black, featureless box in some unknown place far below the district.