"Order, order! I call the first bi-weekly meeting of – hey!" The man brushed angrily at his hair, worn long and uncombed in the style of Selesnyan initiates. It would be smelling of smoke and cheap booze for weeks after tonight. "The first bi-weekly meeting of the Utvara Adventurer's Guild is in order. Now shut up and listen to me!"
"Take it off!" The young woman had the cheekbones of an aristocrat, the fingerless gloves of a safecracker, and enough alcohol on her breath to fell a minotaur. Laurel knew this because she fell over onto the table, laughing right in her face, then slapped her on the shoulder much too hard. "Is this a party or what? Hey, sister, maybe later we'll take it off too!"
"Please don't touch me," Laurel coughed.
Long ago, this building had been a safehouse for Gruul insurgents fighting the Church of Orzhova's developers. After that, it had been converted into a restaurant and tavern popular among Laurel and her fellow – former fellow – ledgewalkers. The last time she'd been here, almost five years ago, Rakdos enforcers had been leaning on the franchise holders, though it wasn't clear whether they were late with the rent or the guildmages just liked the sound of steel-capped boots on people's spines. She swore she still found ash from what had once been the common room in her clothes every time she did the laundry.
"We'll open," the long-haired man was saying, "with a couple of stories from our intrepid members. Who'd like to go first?"
There was no sign of the Rakdos or the fire now. The walls had been replastered, a skylight put in near the bar, and the furniture was brand new and made of some kind of alchemical alloy that looked like wood but was smooth and light, so light that it would have been of limited use in the brawls that used to break out. She chuckled to herself at the memory. There was always some cocky bodyguard who thought one of the spire mice was breathing on his fat master. The place was much too respectable for that kind of fun now.
"I was at work the other day on the big cathedral in Teysa Plaza," someone was saying. Laurel picked out a goblin near the bar, dressed more like a chimney sweep than a sellsword. "When I came out of the chimney," he continued, confirming her analysis, "I noticed there was this scarf was snagged on the weathervane. It must have blown away from someone in the street. So I climbed up and got it." And he held it up, smiling at the oohs and ahhs of the other guild members.
The second speaker of the night stood up. "Last week, me and Yuri – this is Yuri, by the way – went swimming in the old quarry near where the Boros garrison used to be, and he saw something shiny on the bottom of the pool. Well, I thought it was just scrap metal, but he dived down and found this skull with a real gold tooth! We weren't scared or nothing, no sir. Here's the tooth, but we didn't keep the skull."
"Nice!" shouted the long-haired man. "These'll be the first two exhibits in our museum – where are you going?"
Laurel froze, half-standing. "I'm leaving. This isn't a secret meeting, is it?"
"But you haven't told your story yet." Everyone was looking at her now, except the woman with the fingerless gloves, who had laid her head down on the table. The scar on Laurel's neck suddenly felt itchy, as though it were reacting to their stares.
"Well, I'm not a member," she replied. "I just came here for the skullmead, but they don't serve it any more." Her hand leapt awkwardly to her neck, which did not encourage anyone to stop looking at her.
"Look at her clothes," someone whispered loudly. "I've never seen a jacket like that before."
"You [i]look[/i] like an adventurer," another person called out.
"Please!" Yuri begged, "you must have stories to tell." A rabble of voices added their assent.
Laurel rubbed absently at her temple. The chairman tried to get everyone quiet, first by shouting, then by pounding on the bar, nearly breaking an expensive-looking bottle in the process. "C'mon! Give her some space."
"And this better be more interesting than the last two," the woman with the fingerless gloves added without raising her head.
Forty eyes waited expectantly. "We were two days from the Hagra Cistern," Laurel began softly, "when the vampires stopped us. But Ayli, the expedition's leader, had already been to see the mayor of Malakir, and they let us through when she showed them his seal. Also, we had to promise them half of whatever we found in Hagra.
"Problem with Malakir is, not everyone listens to the mayor," she continued. Some of the members were whispering, rolling the unfamiliar-sounding names back and forth between them. "And the Ghet clan hates him with a passion. Somehow, a few of their braves got around in front of us. We never saw them coming."
Laurel ran her fingers over the scar, staring at something a plane away. "The advance scouts went down first. Arrows at long range. Next thing we knew, they were coming at us out of the bushes. Aloran, our lullmage, never had a chance – they stuck a katar in his back before he could even get a leatherskin spell up. My friend Farah was holding them off with her bow, and this right at sunset. I've never seen a marksman like her. But there were too many of them, and Ayli called a retreat. Me, I found the surprise they'd left back on our path."
She chuckled mirthlessly. "My job was listed as 'trapfinder,' and I guess I did my job, but not quite the way I'd expected to. If the needlebite had hit a half an inch to the left, I wouldn't be standing here now."
The woman in the fingerless gloves was watching her in wide-eyed silence. "I guess it was poisoned, because I didn't come to for a couple of days, and by then we were back on the coast. Ayli and Farah were taking turns carrying me over their shoulders – we were the last ones left." Laurel fished a silver seal out of her jacket pocket. The mayor of Malakir's emblem, a clawlike hand and crescent moon, was just visible under the grime of Guul Draz.
"Why don't you keep this for your guild's museum? I'm not going to need it. And maybe it'll work better for you than it did for me." A lot of people she'd known would have sold the seal, bought enough beer for an army, and never gone looking for the kinds of places you found things like it. She hoped they had enough sense to do that.
Laurel went outside. Utvara's shanties and shacks had been demolished over the last five years, replaced by gleaming glass and steel towers that reflected the pale moonlight. The one across the street seemed to be a hotel. She walked down the restaurant's front steps and let her trained eye wander up its smooth walls, noting handholds and ledges. Perhaps the next time she was in town, she'd climb it – or check in and order roast pheasant. And skullmead. If there was still any left, the bellhops at a ritzy place like that would know how to find it.
She put her hands in her pockets as an image of the inscrutable sky ruins of Emeria formed in her mind. She concentrated on the sight, the smell, the inimitable bone-deep feel of Zendikar. As Laurel took the last step to the sidewalk, her foot slid sidelong to the three dimensions of Ravnica, and she plunged into a maelstrom of sightless color and glittering darkness, twirling towards her next adventure.