Agents of Artifice

Writer - Ari Marmell
Cover Artist - Aleksi Briclot
First Printing - February 2009

SUMMARY

We open with Kallist Rhoka & Liliana Vess living together (she's just turned down his offer of marriage) when a bunch of thugs attack them looking for a mister Jace Beleren. Kallist and Liliana used to be Jace's friends but are on the outs with him at the moment. Still they (well, mostly Liliana) feel they have to go warn him. They're too late though, and Jace is killed.

...and there was much rejoicing, because remember: a large chunk of the storyline community hated the new planeswalkers at this point. We're only now covering the book that made everybody like Jace!

Except of course Jace isn't dead. Killing who we think was Jace undid a memory swap spell, and we discover that the Kallist we've been following is actually Jace, and it's the real Kallist has just been killed. Shaken by the return of his memories Jace runs out into the street. Meanwhile Liliana kills the thugs... but then we learn she was in on the plot!

Yeah, kinda like that.

Before we hear what that plot is though... flashback time!

Three years earlier, Jace is recruited by the Infinite Consortium, an interplanar criminal organization run by Tezzeret, in exchange for good money and an opportunity to train his powers. There he meets Kallist and becomes best friends with him.

Jace and Baltrice, Tezzeret's pyromancer second in command, are send to Kamigawa to kill a nezumi shogun because he wont make his mana-rich swamp available for the local Consortium branch. The missions fails because the traitorous son of the shogun was discovered before they arrived, and Baltrice burns a large swath of the village down as a diversion. Jace is forced to kill the shogun to save her life, which brings back unhappy memories of his former mentor Alhammaret (whose story isn't quite like in Jace's Magic Origins story, but we'll get to that in the continuity section).

Shortly after that fiasco a message arrives from Nicol Bolas, who used to lead the Consortium before Tezzeret wrested control over it from his, and who now runs an (unnamed) rival organization. Bolas supposedly wants to set up a meeting with Tezz over mining rights in a disputed region. Tezz takes Jace along to protect his mind, but Bolas easily overpowers him. The two barely escape with their lives, and Jace is tortured as punishment for failure.

...sort off like that?

When his next mission is to mind control the leader of a church that worships planeswalkers so their resources fall to Tezzeret, Jace rebels and flees the consortium with Kallist (who doesn't want to leave, but would otherwise be tortured for punishment/interrogation due to his friendship with Jace.) Forcing his best friend out of his life of luxury puts a strain on their relationship, which gets even worse when Liliana tracks them down, claiming she's hiding from the Consortium as well. Both men fall for her, but she's only interested in Jace.

In reality she is manipulating him, and lets the Consortium know where he is. When their warriors show up Kallist tells Jace and Liliana to planeswalk away. Jace realizes Tezzeret would hunt Kallist to the ends of Ravnica forever. So he tries to take Kallist's mind into his own so he can take him with them while 'walking (planning on putting his mind in the body of some horrible person who wouldn't be missed). It turns out to be far more difficult than he expected though, and their minds become mingled and swapped, leading to them living half a year thinking they're the other person.

End of flashback. (That took up almost half the book)

In the wake of Kallist's death Liliana tries to convince Jace to go after the Consortium. Together they eliminate the heads of the Ravnican branch to leave a message for Tezzeret. Liliana pushes Jace to go further and take over the Consortium. When he refuses she goes to Tezzeret and gives him the name of several of Jace's friends and acquaintances. Emmara Tandris survives, but several others die, which is enough to get Jace to act. He contacts Bolas, who points him towards Tezz's hidden sanctum.

Their initial assault goes terrible though. Jace discovers Liliana has been manipulating him, but before he figures out the why and how, Tezzeret attacks and captures him. Liliana ingratiates herself with Tezz, then goes to the imprisoned Jace to fess up: she's in debt to four demons, and she needs to get control of the Consortium (or have influence over Jace while he is in control of the thing) to get out of the deal. She was also behind the thugs from the beginning, to get Jace back to being Jace. She claims she's really in love with him though. Jace figures out that she's still keeping one more secret from him: that she's been working for Bolas all along. It's not control of the Consortium that gets her out of her demonic deal, the Consortium is the prize Bolas asked for to do that for her.

Lili frees Jace, who attacks Tezz and leads him to Kamigawa, where the nezumi capture him. In the fight Jace cuts Tezz's etherium arm off with the swordsmanship memories he still has from having been Kallist for half a year. He crushes Tezz's mind for good measure. Lili deals with Baltrice in the meantime. Jace refuses to take Tezz's memories of how to run the Consortium though. He planeswalks away rather than meeting up with Liliana, but makes a promise to himself to find a way to get rid of her demons.

In the epilogue Lili goes to Bolas, but he says their deal is off due to her failure. He offers to remove her demons anyway if she steps into his service, but she tells him no. As she leaves we see Bolas has acquired Tezz's corpse and is rebuilding him.

REVIEW

Ah, here we go! After a few reviews that were mostly me complaining about dropped plotlines, finally we're back to covering a full story! And a good one at that! Not that there aren't a few things introduced here that will slip between the cracks between the early planeswalker era and the Gatewatch era, but I'll save my moaning about that for the Test of Metal review.

Agents of Artifice really is the ideal way to kick off the post-Mending storyline. Not only does it make us immediately love Jace and Liliana as characters, and Bolas and Tezzeret as antagonists, it gives us a story that couldn't have been told before the Mending. A high stakes crime story about interplanar smugglers couldn't have worked with the previous nigh-godlike 'walkers. I guess we've had Thane Du-Morris style wizards-who-know-how-to-planeswalk-but-who-aren't-actually-planeswalkers in the past, but it was always made clear that it required a lot of effort to get to that level, and Agents of Artifice would be very different if characters like Jace and Baltrice were elderly archmages who spend years researching planar travel.

On top of that we get clear continuity with the previous stories in the form of Nicol Bolas as the storyline's new archenemy, this book giving us his famous "We were gods once, Beleren" line. It's actually kind of funny to see how Bolas became the link between the old and new storylines considering he wasn't that important before, only having appeared in Legends II and Time Spiral block. (Really only showing up in person in Champion's Trial and for two big scenes in Time Spiral and Future Sight.) Still, his presence here is a clear statement to the old school fans that this isn't a full reboot, while at the same time being subtle enough that this was a great jump on point for new readers at the time.

And of course it's a just a good book on its own. Fun characters, plenty of drama but with enough funny moments in between, and loads of great action, intrigue and mystery. And at nearly 400 pages it's a chunky book for a Magic publication. The next novel will have paired that down to about 300, which is pretty similar to what happened between The Brothers' War (409 pages) and subsequent novels (~350 pages). Always good to give people a bit extra on their first visit.

All the characters are different shades of grey, as is befitting a crime story. Well, Bolas and Tezzeret are pretty out and out evil, but in interesting "love to hate 'm" kinda ways. They're brutal, not above torture as punishment for failure, but they're believable bastards, not moustache twirling villains. As for the grey characters, they range from Paldor, who runs the Ravnican Consortium branch, who is clearly a nasty crimelord but has a jovial side, to Emmara Tandris, who is mostly a kind healer, but clearly has had enough experience in the corrupt world of the Ravnican guilds that she doesn't protest too much when Jace joins a criminal syndicate. She just worries for his safety. The book doesn't even shy away from the dark sides of Jace and Kallist, who remain very likeable characters even after we've seeing them act as assassins. It helps that Jace is very conflicted about this and eventually turns on Tezzeret, while we only see Kallist killing other criminals (though he's been working with the Consortium for a while, so who knows what he has on his record). Still, by the end Jace is killing Tezz's guards to get to him. There are no clear heroes in this story.

The one character who doesn't get the best introduction might by Liliana. Not that she'd badly written, she also comes across as believable and likeable, being trapped between powerful forces due to a mistake in her past (again, fitting for a crime story), but I can imagine people not liking her role as a seductress who drives a wedge between two best friends who immediately fall for her. It fits with her flirty personality from The Hunter and the Veil and later depictions of her manipulative side, but I think it's not what everyone wants from their one female main character. She also gets the least screentime of the main cast, suddenly showing up after Jace and Kallist go on the run after only being mentioned in the flashback portion once before as someone who had done freelance work for the Consortium at some point. This is of course a clue, a hint that she's come looking for Jace rather than actually being in hiding like him, but it does mean there is very little time to develop the love triangle. Instead Jace and Kallist just fall for her instantly.

The one thing that rather turned me off on this reread was the allusions to some nasty sexual violence. The thugs at the start threaten to do bad things to Liliana if she tries to escape, later a guard with a "licentious grin" pats her down, and worst of all was the paragraph from the point of view of the murderer send after Emmara, who gets horny over getting to kill a pretty girl. And he just gets off scot-free, thinking he succeeded in killing her! (Jace let's him go so Tezzeret will think Emmara is dead and thus won't send another assassin. At least give us a scene of Jace and Liliana tracking him down to take him out at some later point or something!) It only comes up a handful of times and is only referenced, but it's the sort of nastiness you don't expect from a cardgame tie-in novel, and stands out even among all the magical violence. So you've been warned.

Other than that I'm happy to report that Agents of Artifice very much holds up. It's a very good introduction to some characters that are with us to this day, and just a strong novel on its own. There was a time when it seemed to be slipping into obscurity, but I'm very glad the Kaladesh story called back to it in major ways, cementing its place in continuity.

CONTINUITY

The last time we saw Ravnica, the place was having a go at a non-magical Guildpact that was mostly written by Teysa Karlov, "an agreement that works on true interdependence, negotiation". Here we learn that didn't work out. In fact, the story opens during a "Thralldom's End celebration", and the first chapter makes mention of "Golgari fungus-creatures leftover from the struggles that ended guild rule". We don't get more explanation on what happened, and only a street level view of Ravnica, so no news on Feather or Niv-Mizzet. Agyrem isn't mentioned, though that means it's also not explicitly mentioned as being gone. We'll have to wait till Return to Ravnica to learn that.

This is the second instance of a massive change in the status quo of a plane that will have to be walked back when WotC decides to start revisiting worlds. In this case things work out a bit better than with Mirrodin, which required a rather egregious ret-con where the Vanishing went from "there's just one man and his dog left" to "only the elderly have disappeared", since we'll at least get an actual story about the reformation of the Guildpact. Still, there appear to be some hairline fractures nonetheless. Here we're told that the Orzhov have fallen and that the Wojek are gone, that new organizations are taking their places, and that Emmara is only rumored to have been a member of the Selesnya once. It certainly sounds like all the guilds are dead and gone and have been for a while. In Return to Ravnica they're on the defensive, but all of them are pretty much still around and looking mostly like they were originally. Luckily Agents of Artifice is just vague enough, and focusses mainly on backwater locations, allowing us to say the guilds just aren't around anymore in the places Jace and Liliana visit, and that they're clinging on elsewhere until they get to make their comeback. It's still quite a turnaround in just three years, but it just about works.

A little non-sequitur: in my part of the Netherlands our version of "one man and his dog" translates as "two men and a horse's head", which would be a much more fitting description of Glissa, Slobad and Geth's noggin!

Also a stretch to fix is Jace's origin. Here, after the mindswap with Kallist is undone, we're explicitly told Jace "remembered his childhood, before the dreams and visions came. He remembered discovering that the voices in his head were not his own, but belonged to the people around him." Later (eh... earlier? During the flashback!) Jace tells Kallist all about his hometown and apprenticeship to Alhammaret. This clashes badly with his later origin story, in which he remembers nothing but the symbol Alhammaret wore, his own name and "Silmot's Crossing", the name of his hometown (named for the first time here in Agents of Artifice). Which leaves us in a tricky spot, since him getting more memories back is a massive plot point in Ixalan!

And about that origin story... Here Jace says his dad sent him to Alhammaret after the villagers "weren't taking kindly" to his telepathy. At some point his spark flared, but Alhammaret told him it was just a delusion. A year after that he tries to read his mentor's mind on a whim, and discovered he and his father were keeping his planeswalkerhood secret from him. In anger Jace lashes out, wiping Alhammaret's mind, which he obviously feels enormously guilty about. In the Magic Origins story Alhammaret is much nastier, not only actually wiping Jace's memories of his planeswalkerhood, but also using his apprentice as a pawn to keep a war he's profiting from going. Oh, and he's a sphinx in that version. No mention of a species here, so presumably we're supposed to picture a human.

On first glace it seems we can easily explain away any contradictions by invoking Jace's messed up memories. In practice though it gets a bit more complicated. We'd have to assume that between the end of his origin story and Agents of Artifice he gets some memories back (albeit muddled, to explain the differences between the two origin stories we hear), then somehow loses them again somewhere between AoA and the Gatewatch era. I don't think we ever get indication that Jace's memory is supposed to be in flux, just that he can't remember his youth, but it pretty much has to be if we want all the stories to line up. In this book Jace does tell Kallist he used magic on himself to forget Alhammeret's face as he choked due to having forgotten how to breathe, so maybe at some point that spell needed recasting and he way overdid it for some reason?

Also worth mentioning: neither of these versions really lines up with the one bit of Jace's backstory we had before, from the Lorwyn Player's Guide. Nothing here about being a prodigy at an elite mages' academy, or getting expelled for a crime involving mind-control.

Some more minor points:

• The Rubblebelt got its name from destruction caused by a summoned siege wurm, but the neighborhood is now rebounding. The Consortium is one of the greatest investors in the place though, so I guess them getting taken out explains why it still all seems to be rubble by the time we get to Return to Ravnica.
• There is obviously no trace of Kamigawa being in its modern Neon Dynasty form. But it's a big plane and we're only seeing one swamp. Presumably that's one of the more traditional places. 
• The events on Kamigawa are Nashi's origin story, but he is a later addition to the storyline, not showing up until the Kaladesh story.
• To understand the nezumi Jace needs a language spell, but luckily those apparently come easy to planeswalkers. Occasionally the question how planeswalkers can understand people on other planes came up on Doug Beyer's Tumblr, well, this seems to be the reason.
• Liliana tells Jace little about her demonic pacts, just that she was young and stupid when she made them, that payment is due, and that the demons will demand "terrible things ... in order to keep my magics - and my soul". We'll later learn she was actually quite old when the pact was forged, but she clearly doesn't want to give away any details, so we can easily dismiss the version given here.
• Tezzeret also gives his origin story, but unlike Jace's it lines up perfectly with other sources. Probably because those other sources are a Planeswalkers' Guide and a webcomic released around the same time. We'll get to those soon. 
• Liliana says "What in Urza's name" at one point, which is the first hint she's from Dominaria. It's subtle and doesn't set anything in stone, as Urza is hardly a one plane-specific person. I think most people missed it at the time.
• Nicol Bolas is hanging out on Grixis and namechecks Malfegor at one point, which used to be relevant timeline information, before we could just look things up in the Visual Guide.
• Jace loses a toe while and he and Tezz are hiding from Bolas on a frozen plane. This gets brought up from time to time as a useless bit of continuity we're not supposed to care about if it gets contradicted, like in this interview with Nic Kelman. Of course, brining it up ironically cements it as continuity trivia people remember and are going to complain about it gets screwed up! (note that in that interview Kelman seems to be talking about adaptations of the story in other media though, which I would expect to have an alternate continuities anyway.) 

There is a Scryfall tag for bare feet. Because of course there is. No sign of Jace in there though.

TRIVIA

• A whole bunch of places on Ravnica get named, most of which have made their way onto the wiki. The ones from my notes that aren't on there are Glahia district and the Nalatras alchemical slums, both of which are mentioned once without further elaboration.
• There's five planeswalkers working for the Consortium, including Jace, Baltrice and Tezzeret, with three they occasionally hire. Liliana is among the latter. Tezz boasts that this means they have more planeswalkers working for them than "any other organization I'm aware off, on any world."
• There are Consortium cells on at least Ravnica, Kamigawa, Aranzhur (wherever that is) and Mercadia.
• The non-'walkers working for the Ravnican branch of the Consortium have also made it onto the wiki, though they get no description. Paldor is the jovial but ruthless leader, Ireena is an elf that use strange smoke magic, Gemreth summons demons and has an imp called Ignixnax hanging out with him all the time, Sevrien is a vedalken warrior who Jace had to test before he was allowed in, and Xalmarias is a big centaur. When the Consortium comes after them, Kallist kills Xalmarias and Jace kills Gemreth (with a summoned drake that causes a lot of collateral deaths, all of which Jace experiences directly through his telepathy.)
• The only named member missing from the wiki is Kaori, the third leader of the Kamigawa cell in as many years. Tezz "fired" one leader after the fiasco with the nezumi shogun, and the next one was captured by the shaman who took over from the shogun and tortured to death. We don't learn much about Kaori, except that she has some moonfolk ancestry.

I'm running out of relevant illustrations...

• Jace at one point summons a "sky blue eel", which will later get a card, and uses the name Berrim on Ravnica, which will be remembered in later stories.
• Emmara, "the first mage Jace had met in Ravnica", lives in a very weird house. It's entirely open plan, but with pillars everywhere which you can use to teleport from place to place. It's populated by constructs of marble or woven fabric she likes to animate.
• Baltrice is over 6 feet, "broad-shouldered as a small orge", grey eyes and ashen hair. I'm still waiting for her and Kallist to show up in cardboard form some day!
• Marmell has some fun describing the Blind Eternities, filling it with descriptions like a place that's not a place, and ground that is not ground, which is constantly shifting and in which other planeswalkers are shown as archetypical avatars (Baltrice being "a dead tree that crackled and flamed but was never consumed", for example).
• The nezumi shogun Jace is forced to kill is called Bonetooth, son of Swamp-Eye, the daughter of Moon-Hand the Third. Leader of the Nezumi Katsuro gang "as were my fathers and mothers before me unto the tenth generation".
• There's apparently a game on Ravnica simply called "guilds". There's no description, but these fantasy games are usually riffs on chess. Though now that I think about it, it would be neat if a fantasy game in a card game IP is more original than that.
• Nicol Bolas has a bunch of contacts on Ravnica, the main one being "one of Ravnica's greatest sorcerers". The only named one is an envoy called Mauriel Pellam. When Jace goes to his house to get in touch with Bolas he discovered a statue of Razia "in an awkwardly erotic pose that the angel herself would undoubtedly have found both ludicrous and personally offensive".
• There's a bunch more characters who only show up for short bits or are only named. A few examples: Gariel, a friend of Jace during the time he thinks he's Kallist, Rulan Barthaneul, a banker who launders the money Jace makes from blackmailing rich people before the Consortium recruits him, Eshton Lavar, the owner of a bar Jace and Kallist frequent, and the fey Oberilia Zant, an enemy of the Consortium who stole many valuable artifacts from them. None of these people ever show up again. Well, Rulan and Esthon are assassinated by Tezzeret in an attempt to flush Jace out, alongside a Laphiel Kartz who is apparently a friend of Jace but who never gets mentioned outside of the death list. Oberilia should still be out there somewhere though. 
• Tezzeret owns a mana blade that used to belong to the Church of the Incarnate Soul. This church believes that you can achieve godhood by mastering magic, and that planeswalkers are "on the verge of divinity", which sounds a bit similar to very old school explanations about planeswalkers like those given in Shattered Chains. Tezzeret sends Jace to mindscrew the August Questor of the church, but touching the mind of someone who thinks he is holy is what finally gets him to rebel.
• The meeting between Tezzeret and Bolas is supposedly about mining operations in the Kankarras mountains (No idea where that is, but there's a river Ashadris on the same plane), where you can get mana infused ore that Tezz hopes might help him create etherium.

Okay, this one really is a stretch. But I need something to break up all that text!

• Tezzeret took the consortium by simply killing everyone not on his side who knew about Bolas. All the lower minions didn't even know there was a coup.
• Upon meeting them Liliana asks if Jace and Kallist are lovers. Kallist laughs at the idea. later she asks the same of Jace and Emmara. Emmara is disgusted at the idea of being with a human.
• In a neat use of their powers, Jace & Lili find Tezz's sanctum by having one of her phantoms posses a box of supplies Baltrice has to bring over to there. Then Lili summons the phantom again, it possesses Jace, and then with his spark and its memories he can go there.
• Another funny "trick": Tezzeret poisons Jace, so what does Liliana do? She summons a vampire to drain his blood! Jace then restores himself with a healing spell he saw Emmara use earlier. He just about manages to cast it, so I don't think we're going to see a GW Jace anything soon.
• The sanctum is called the Iron Tower and is located in a desert. We never learn on what plane it is. Jace and Liliana run into a dromad drawn caravan while there, which would be the first sighting of those creatures outside of Ravnica.

TIMELINE

To start off: the Visual Guide puts this story in 4556 AR. For a whole lot of reasons involving upcoming books and webcomics (which I've talked about a bit in the continuity section of the Fuel for the Fire review) the current day part of AoA has to happen pretty close to the Alara, Scars of Mirrodin and Zendikar blocks (which the guide puts in 4556 and 4557), so that lines up.

Which leaves us with the flashbacks, though luckily the book is reasonably clear about those. After Jace regains his memories he leads into it by saying "He remembered the day it began, three years ago and more." The "and more" bit introduces some uncertainty, but I'm going to assume it's closer to three years than four (otherwise he'd have said "almost four years ago", right?) and put Tezzeret recruiting Jace (the first thing that happens in the flashback) at 4553 AR. 

When "Kallist" runs into "Jace" the text says "for the first time in half a year, Kallist stood face to face with Jace Beleren, the man who had once been his best friend", which puts the end of the flashback half a year before the main story. Since the Visual Guide puts The Purifying Fire in the same year as AoA, and that book opens with one of Jace's last missions for the Consortium (again, see the Fuel for the Fire review) that half year must still fall within 4556, and The Purifying Fire must happen concurrently to Jace and Kallist hiding from the Consortium.

Two more minor points:

• Nicol Bolas is called "a twenty-five thousand-year-old dragon and bigger than an ogre's barn", which fits with his age given in Future Sight.
• At one point Jace says "Me and my wonderful gift of mindreading that's done nothing but get me reamed over and over for the past half a decade". Since Jace's life seemed to be pretty okay until he learned about Alhammaret's deception, this might indicate that his confrontation with his mentor happened 5 years ago, so 2 years before Tezzeret's recruited him. I'll hold off on putting that on the timeline until we've covered Jace's Magic Origins story, as well as the Duels of the Planeswalkers character bio that lists his age. I haven't checked yet, but I'm expecting the dates given here to get contradicted by those later sources.

And that is Agents of Artifice! Next up, we finally delve into Alara.