INVASION mtg-1

by J. Robert King

  The Web of Tsabo Tavoc

  Agnate was stalled out. He and his forces battered an immovable wall of Phyrexians. The front was a slaughterhouse.

  Metathran blood-vermilion from the air that suffused it-crazed across the ground in ankle-deep puddles. Higher than ankles it rose, up armored calves, past massive thighs and powerful stomachs. The Metathran were baptized in their own blood. They gave as good as they got. Powerstone battle-axes flocked in the sky, darted like eagles, and cleft Phyrexian heads. With Metathran blood mixed the humors of Phyrexia. Glistening-oil, gray matter, orange acid, black venom, pink lymph, yellow bile-the Metathran had cloven every tissue and organ in the vile monsters. They had cut their way straight through but could gain no ground for all of it.

  "Forward!" Agnate growled as he hauled his battle-axe down from overhead.

  The blade chunked through a scuta's cranial shield. It found paste within-only a shallow layer of vestigial nerve. The axe bit deeper, sliding between bony plates. It macerated white-matter but did not stop the scuttling beast. There were no pain receptors in the organ, and the motor cortexes lay deep beneath the knobby crest. The scuta drove on, a gigantic horseshoe crab, and rammed Agnate.

  He fell atop the scuta's skull shield. Blood-slick, he would have slid down to be picked apart but for his axe. Yanking on the haft, Agnate climbed the beast. He kicked a foothold in the vestigial face. Agnate rose and chucked his axe free.

  The scuta bucked, struggling to throw him off. Agnate crouched and caught a handhold in the bony wound. He swung his power-stone axe again. It clove into the thing's head. Metal stuck in bone. It was just what he wanted. Gripping the axe haft with both hands, Agnate hurled himself off the beast's back. He hauled hard on the weapon. The axe quivered in the bony cleft but did not pull free. Agnate's weight flipped the creature. Its thin legs lashed the air, struggling to roll over.

  This was how you killed a pill bug.

  Since his axe was mired beneath the beast, Agnate drew his sword. He hacked between the rows of legs. Viscera within fountained black. Legs spasmed in agony. Agnate struck again, slicing through flesh and straight back to grind along the skull shield. A final attack divided the wriggling beast in half. Agnate strode through the severed middle. He reached through streaming muck and yanked his axe out.

  It was a victory, hard-won, but Agnate had not gained an inch of ground for it. Scuta lay all around. In their midst lay dead Metathran. What good was such slaughter?

  Hewing a Phyrexian trooper, Agnate sensed sudden jubilation. He lifted his head above the horrible tumult and saw a glorious sight.

  Thaddeus and his command core had broken through. They ran in a thick pack through the inner ranks of the Phyrexian soldiery, killing as they went.

  Agnate's growls turned to cheers. He could kill forever in this awful battle if only Thaddeus could advance.

  * * * * *

  The charge was glorious. Thaddeus ran at the head of a hundred of his best fighters.

  Most of the warriors were members of his personal guard. They had survived the trench worms, spinal centipedes, and Metathran zombies to charge beside their commander. Others were fleet-footed grenadiers who pulled hand-bombs from their shoulder sashes and hurled them in their line of charge. They paved the way with shattered hunks of Phyrexians. The rest were heavy infantry-massive Metathran bred with extended shins, knee caps, pelvises, and ribs, so that their own bones formed subcutaneous armor.

  In addition to the Metathran fighters were Urza's war machines. Tolarian runners loped like metal emus and shot exploding quarrels from ports along their sides. Dog-headed su-chi warriors pounded in their midst, with hands powerful enough to tear the mechanical forelegs from a Phyrexian bloodstock. Falcon engines shrieked down in waves overhead, impacting monsters, grinding in their guts, blasting through the far side, and rising to swoop down on other beasts.

  It was a glorious charge. These hundred warriors and two score machines were cut off from the main army, yes, but they tore the belly out of the Phyrexian lines. They each killed hundreds. Every slain Phyrexian brought them ten running paces nearer to the Caves of Koilos.

  There, the Phyrexian command center lay. In those tight confines, a hundred Metathran would be equal to ten thousand Phyrexians. Thaddeus and his troops would plunge through to the command core, slay the land-army's leaders, and press on to shut down the portal. This bloody business could be concluded in the next few days.

  "To the caves!" Thaddeus shouted, lifting high one of the swords he held. "Break through to the caves!" His forces took up the call.

  A wave of Phyrexians swept toward them, perhaps five hundred strong. Falcon engines screamed into their midst, impaling one in five. They flopped to ground as their innards were ground away. Four hundred more rushed onward. Grenadiers hurled their bombs in great overhead arcs. The crude devices fell in the midst of the running wave. Gray smoke belched out, shrapnel tearing through the Phyrexian lines. Many fell in pieces. Others struggled on with stumps of leg or arm streaming golden. Two hundred more came, unaffected.

  So, it would be two to one. Thaddeus smiled. His teeth were limned in vermilion. It was for fights like this that he bore two swords.

  The first blade struck a charging bloodstock. Thaddeus sidestepped the attack. His sword lanced with the precision of a marksman's arrow. It clove between flattened ribs and speared through the bloodstock's heart. The beast opened its mouth to scream. Only blood emerged. It pitched forward, dead as it ran. Its mechanical forelegs did not need a heart to live, and they struggled on. The bloodstock's head dragged on the ground, battered bloody by its own thudding hooves.

  The other sword tangled with that of a Phyrexian trooper. Slower, more humanlike, this vat-grown fighter was cunning, trained in the arts of sword work. Blades clanged. Horned shoulders crashed. Both warriors halted in their charge, unable to win past. Steel raked steel. With depthless snake eyes, the infantryman studied its foe. Through a segmented mouth, it hissed. Something that smelled like creosote oozed from chitinous lips.

  Thaddeus flung the thing back with one sword and brought the other to bear. The Phyrexian blocked the attack with a quick backhand parry. Thaddeus followed the block with a stab that should have eviscerated the beast. It spun easily aside. Thaddeus plunged forward, catching himself. The Phyrexian turned, sword high, and brought it down to cleave Thaddeus. Twin swords caught the blade in air and hurled it away. The two blades fell in a scissoring motion, catching either side of the creature's neck and slicing through. The monster's head bounded free.

  Thaddeus drove onward. He had fallen back in his column.

  They carved through the wave of death, near to breaking through. Thaddeus ached to be in the vanguard.

  Vaulting the dead, he shouted again, "To the caves! To the caves!"

  * * * * *

  Atop the Caves of Koilos, Tsabo Tavoc had arranged a kind of tea party. There was no such thing as tea among Phyrexians, of course, and no notion of a party-which was why the spider woman had to borrow a human term for this experience. To sit on this high spot-breathing the fetor of battle, seeing compound deaths in compound eyes, witnessing the killings by her children and the murders of them-it was a banquet of sensations that could only have been akin to fine tea and pleasant banter.

  That one, there-Tsabo Tavoc had thought, gazing down on the speckled blades as they rose and fell in the opening attack-that man-monster Thaddeus, he gives me greater diversion than any of you, my children. I would like him to come to me. I would like him to win his way to the caves.

  A simple wish, it was. For Tsabo Tavoc, wishes became realities. Her will went out to her children, her killers. They held Commander Agnate and his contingent to a single plot of land, hurling themselves suicidally into that meat grinder just to keep the meat grinder in place. Before Thaddeus, though, Phyrexians melted, their will bowing to the will of Tsabo Tavoc. They fought as they fought because they wanted what she wanted.

  He came. Mustering five score of hi
s warriors, he broke through and charged, just as she wished.

  Tsabo Tavoc felt every blow of his swords. Her consciousness lurked within each of those bashed-out brains. She fled away in the dying moments, only to surge up again in another warrior. He killed her countless times, each death freshly excruciating. Normally, Tsabo Tavoc enjoyed the anguish of others, the killing, but with this one she enjoyed the dying. Her mind swept out through her folk like a wave, crashing whitely against Thaddeus and his warriors and then retreating before him. She channeled him inward. Each loud assault was followed by an inexorable undertow that dragged him deeper.

  There was such pleasure in the battle. Tsabo Tavoc was awash in regret as she pulled her mind away from the carnage.

  Why draw the fly in unless the web is ready?

  My children. I call to you.

  Their response came in a quickening of pulses, in deep breaths in deep caverns. Her minions at the portal lifted their heads. Tsabo Tavoc saw what they saw-the wide, dark portal chamber. It centered on a pediment stone that shone like a mirror. The gleaming pediment radiated wires to the ceiling. Mechanisms it had powered six thousand years ago still huddled in the dark reaches.

  This site was devised by the Ineffable himself in ancient days, when he was not yet a god but only a Thran. On one side of the shiny pediment, the darkness was filled with Phyrexian troops in rank and file. They marched toward the ascents and the battle. On the other side yawned a wide portal. Phyrexia lay there, beautiful and verdant beneath a blazing sky. Fields of metallic grass held great armies.

  Tsabo Tavoc sought no warriors just now. She wanted more powerful denizens. Her will crowded through the streaming portal and sank down through the ground. She wanted creatures that lived deep in the Fourth Sphere of Phyrexia, amid mile-high furnaces and belching fire. She spotted them.

  They were unnaturally tall, unnaturally thin, their flesh clinging like old paper to their bones. In red robes, the creatures walked metal causeways. They dipped long poles into pits and poured jerkied flesh into vats, feeding overlarge fish. These were vat priests. They compleated every newt, making it a perfect war machine.

  Spheres and worlds away, Tsabo Tavoc smiled.

  Her vat priests lifted their heads.

  It was simply enough done. She needed only place the image of Thaddeus in their minds. She felt the saliva run along their withered jaws. They would obey her summons. The vat priests would send their most sanguine minds to Koilos to have a look at Thaddeus.

  Satisfied, Tsabo Tavoc's consciousness sifted back upward. Her mind withdrew into the Caves of Koilos. When the Ineffable had walked the world as a Thran, these had been called the Caves of the Damned. As she returned to the delicious battle, Tsabo Tavoc thought how right that name had been.

  Certainly for Thaddeus, they would once again be the Caves of the Damned.

  * * * * *

  My sword unmakes another. I see the tip chop through the thing's belly. It splits wide like a shirt ripping. Out spill strange, dark, wet shapes. The monster comes to pieces. It seems not even to have the will to live.

  They cannot kill me. It is almost brutal to slay this way. They are no match for me and mine. It is like cutting grain to kill these Phyrexians. It is like chopping wildflowers, except that these flowers shriek and gush.

  Another goes down. It seems to be almost bowing to me. I split its back. My sword cuts through, separating meat from bone as if filleting a fish. I charge through the muck of it. My foot crushes a panting lung.

  I am too well made. Urza has done too much to make me. He has winnowed away humanity, knowing his foes will destroy all that is human. Urza perfected my inhumanity so that I could fight Phyrexians and not be destroyed. I am a greater monster than these things I slay. I am a vat-grown monster whose leash is held by Urza instead of Yawgmoth.

  The sword hacks through a scuta's shield and the knob of bone beneath. It splashes brain on my feet and chops through to the monster's spine. The creature slumps atop scuttling legs. Dust rolls up around the settling beast. I vault over it and cut through a Phyrexian trooper. It is so surprised by my assault that it stands, gaping, though its shoulder is cut through down to the sternum.

  I am too well made.

  * * * * *

  Thaddeus and his hundred had broken through. They drove like demons through the Phyrexian hordes.

  Agnate was still mired in the slaughterhouse of the western front. He fought amid encroaching corpses. Dead Metathran lay in lurid intimacy with dead Phyrexians. Legs and arthropods jutted in heaps, part redoubt, part hazard. Killing another beast, Agnate peered beyond the thing's bulk.

  Thaddeus fought in the sere distance. Oh, to battle at a run, so fast and free! It must have been glorious.

  Agnate reached out his mind to his counterpart. Above the mad din, he sought. In all that killing lunacy, Thaddeus was lost. Agnate could not touch his comrade. A greater presence filled the battlefield-a greater mind in jealous possession.

  It mattered little. Thaddeus would prevail. They knew each other's minds even when they could not touch. Thaddeus was too busy in the running battle.

  It must have been glorious.

  Chapter 23

  The Dreaming Caves

  This place was not fit for the elves of Llanowar. They were accustomed to colonnades of quo-sumic trees, to hanging vines in vast highways, to leaves among the clouds and days beneath the sun. This place had no trees but columns of tortured stone. It had no vines but giant blind serpents that crawled the cave floors. In place of heavens, there were groins of rock. Instead of sunlight, there was blackness. It was worse than that. Crowded here in these haunted caves, the elves knew that even now trees and vines and skies were decimated. This place might not be fit for elves, but neither was their home, anymore.

  Eladamri walked among the refugee rabble. They sat shoulder to shoulder in a large, dark cavern. Liin Sivi strode in silent watchfulness behind Eladamri. She kept at bay the refugees, who teemed about him in their terror. They had feared to come here. It was a place that lived in their common mind-the Dreaming Caves, the underworld home of the dead.

  True enough, since they had arrived, strange, moaning spirits seemed to flit all around them.

  Eladamri was no prophet. He was a warrior. For him this was not an underworld but a bunker, not a place of the dead but of the living.

  Were these the only survivors in Llanowar? Could they even be considered survivors? Perhaps a hundred had died in the palace. Perhaps a hundred more had died in the flight downward. How would these thousand die? Starvation? No, they would not last so long. They would die in a trampling stampede.

  One old elf, clutching a squalling child, had summed up all their fears-"The Dreaming Caves… bring nightmares… to life!"

  The refugees had brought a wealth of nightmares with them. Visions of hurtling plague bombs shone in their wide eyes. Shrieks of dying countrymen echoed through their ears. Shame at leaving their dead nobles… royal rings unclaimed on stilled fingers…

  Perhaps the Dreaming Caves did have that power. Here, beneath miles of root, the air was charged with green mana. Merely breathing it induced a waking sleep. The very rock hummed in sympathy with the hearts of the people. Perhaps these caves did pluck thoughts from their mind and send them spinning through air.

  One man's private terrors paraded before whole families. The very real deaths of hundreds above were recombined into the surreal deaths of hundreds of thousands below.

  Refugees staggered about the caverns, wringing their hands and wailing. Others fought their comrades, thinking them ghosts. Still more fled shrieking into deeper places. They fell into nests of white serpents, which awoke to find warm meat. They dropped into wells that plunged to the boiling core of the world. They fled into the manifold stomachs of Dominaria, where she devoured her own children.

  Terrors came true.

  Eladamri had to stop all this. He had not saved these people yet. He had brought them out of one death and into another.r />
  Not for long. If they could dream of horrors, they could dream of beauties.

  Lifting high the lantern he had brought from above, Eladamri strode with sure and measured step among his folk. He headed for a prominence of rock on the far side of the cavern. To reach it, he would pass through the main mass of refugees. The staging was perfect, as if he had dreamed it into being. As Eladamri went, he sang an ancient ballad of the Skyshroud elves, his people on Rath:

  I walk the groves of Damherung.

  Below a dappled sun go I

  And sing of Volrath's coming doom

  Beneath a brilliant sky.

  O forest, hold thy wand’ring son

  Though fears assail the door.

  O foliage, cloak thy ravaged one

  In vestments cut for war.

  The refugees did not know this hymn, but they would think they knew it. The caves carried his voice among them like a breeze that promised rain. Music swallowed remembered shrieks. Echoes became memories. They knew this hymn, and as he walked among them, they put aside jangling terrors to sing.

  For what are leaves but countless blades

  To fight a countless foe on high,

  And what are twigs but spears arrayed

  To slay the monstrous sky?

  O forest, hold thy wand’ring son

  Though fears assail the door.

  O foliage, cloak thy ravaged one

  In vestments cut for war.

  The murmur of the song rose, drowning the last of the moans and shrieks. Even Liin Sivi, walking behind him, sang. Voices joined, strengthened, grew, until it seemed the throat of the world sang with them.

  Though death has guile and kilting power,

  Though bloodlust rules the steaming tides,

  It's life that wrestles hour by hour

  And finally abides.

  O forest, hold thy wand’ring son