Various

Have your specter drag the body out here," he ordered.

"Not sure one of them can do it alone, Jace. They're not real comfortable manipulating solid objects."

"Fine." Jace grimaced, and the unconscious guard rose unsteadily to his feet. "He'll help." Even as the mismatched pair set about dragging the other soldier to join his fellow outside, Jace was shoveling aside heaps of sand, preparing a secret, shallow grave. Once the corpse was outside, Jace raised a second illusion-one that, he hoped, would convince anyone inside that the wall was still closed.

"Assuming there is an alarm," Liliana said a moment later, "how do we get in?"

The guard stood motionless as Jace rifled through his thoughts. "It's like the alarm on Ravnica," he confirmed. "It's designed to detect the presence of unauthorized entrants."

"All right. So what do we do?"

"We have a polite little conversation," Jace said with a smile, as the soldier strode back into the hallway and lifted the speaking tube from the wall, "with someone who has the power to authorize us."

It proved no harder for Jace to overpower the shift commander, a gold-skinned desert elf named Irivan, than it had been any of the others. Carefully he commanded the unconscious fellow to rise, to move to the alarm controls and authorize the planeswalkers to pass. Liliana nodded at Jace and turned away, watching the elf as he spoke into a strange gemstone inlaid into the wall-and thus she missed the darkening of Jace's gaze as he looked upon her.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 27