Liliana - Summons ghosts that rip out a man's soul

  He rose on shaky legs, chair creaking, in time to see the air between him and the door turn black. A swirl of inky fog rose from the stones of the floor, obscuring all vision, all light. The air in the chamber grew colder still, until Albin’s terrified gasps steamed in the frigid air, and his teeth chattered like the sound of falling marbles.

  Two pinpricks of light, and then two more, formed in the whirling shadows. They glowed sickly yellow, emanating the heat of swift decomposition, as they formed themselves into pairs of eyes that gazed unblinking from opposite ends of the office. Beneath and behind them, the shadows ceased to writhe but instead hung limp, forming the faintest suggestion of long-taloned hands, bulging wings folded close, legs that trailed away into the ethereal birthplace of night.

  They drifted forward, impossibly still; Albin could not shake the horrid impression that they hadn’t moved at all, that he and the world itself had somehow shifted nearer to them. Fingers that were naught but wisps of deepest darkness reached out, and the corrupt guardsman found himself drawing breath to scream.

  “Do not cry out …” A gleaming, jagged chasm of a mouth had opened beneath one pair of eyes, but Albin heard no speech in his ears. He felt it in his gut, remembered it from long-forgotten dreams. Though a low whisper, it was nigh deafening, for it was the voice of a thousand restless dead. “Do not cry out, or we shall raze the house of flesh from around your soul, and leave your five disembodied senses to linger, forever helpless, unknown, and unseen in this wretched room.”

  Albin bit down on the scream welling up in his throat, and all but choked on the blood he drew from his tongue.

  From each side, he felt the fingers of the abyss wrap tight about his upper arms. His flesh burned as with the prolonged touch of ice, his vision blurred, his chest and head pounded as though he suffocated.

  And then he was moving! Locked in a grip as unbreakable as death, he felt himself sliding backward through the wall itself. A moment of hideous nausea, as the world turned inside out and he felt the rough texture of the stone passing through his flesh, and they were on the other side. The ground dropped away beneath his feet, as he was borne aloft in the bone-crushing and soul-numbing grasp of the shadow things.

  His arms were numb, but the icy burn had spread below to his fingers, upward through his chest and shoulders, until he could scarcely draw breath. Higher and higher the spirits carried him, until a wide swath of Ravnica was nothing but a map of intercrossing bridges and roadways below, until wisps of cloud mingled with the wisps of darkness that carried him.

  The thing on his left tilted its head, and Albin could swear he heard an obscene chuckle even as it spoke.

  “Now, if you wish, you may scream.”

  But he no longer had the breath.

  As swiftly as they’d risen into the cold night air, they dropped again, plummeting into a neighborhood halfway across the district from the watch-house. With a bruising jolt, they stopped at the precise height of an old warehouse down near the lakeside docks, where the buildings were lower and the rooftops flatter. There they waited, hovering several feet from the roof.

  And Albin, who had thought he could never again be surprised by anything, gawked at the pair who awaited them. Kallist stood at the very edge, a watch-issue long sword dangling from his fist. Behind him sat Liliana, legs and arms crossed. Her lips moved constantly in a sonorous mantra, and from beneath her closed eyelids leaked faint traces of the same sickly yellow luminescence that defined the features of the shadow-men.

***

  The guardsman felt a surge of hope, warm enough to melt through the icy lump in his throat. “If I do, will you let me go? Will you let me live?”

  Kallist smiled a sad little smile. “I don’t think you understand, Albin. The specters already killed you.” Slowly, inexorably, he raised the sword, waved it through Albin’s arms, his legs, his torso.

  The blade touched nothing, nothing at all.

  Finally, Albin found the strength to scream. Kallist, tapping the flat of the blade against his leg, waited patiently for him to finish.

  “Your body,” he said, and his voice was actually gentle, even sympathetic, “is lying on the floor of your office. I imagine it’ll be morning before anyone finds it.

  “No, Albin, your choice is not whether to help us and live, or refuse us and die. Your choice is to help us and be allowed to pass on—or to refuse, and find your soul given over to the specters for their own amusement.”

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 6