"Arrows?" Barrin wondered to himself.
The first longships at last ran aground, a thousand yards inland. From the rails leaped massive Keldons in their hundreds, but also others-lithe, quick, slender. Elves. Urza must somehow have arranged their passage with Barrin's Keldon warriors. Strange coalitions. Brawny and scrawny, arrogant and elegant, Keldons and elves rushed side by side into battle.
Beyond their lines, Phyrexian shock troops rose from rock grottos to slay. They were as thick as maggots on a corpse and outnumbered the Keldons and elves a hundred to one. At their head, gliding aboard wedge-shaped airchariots, rode black-armored commanders.
"They'll need help down there," Barrin decided. Helionauts and dragons ruled the skies, but Phyrexians ruled the ground. Barrin lifted his hand in an attack signal and sent his winged steed into a steep dive.
Angels swept down behind him. Their song rose an octave into a shrill whistle. The music lost none of its glory, only becoming more inhuman.
In moments, they had dropped from the blue heavens to the black swamps. Dead trees flashed past in gray stripes. Angels darted like silver blades in their midst. Depthless water churned below the hurtling hooves of Barrin's steed.
Ahead, a Phyrexian commander roared forward atop his air-chariot.
Barrin gathered the power of islands and seas and sent a blue enchantment ripping out from his fingers. It twined in air and grasped the chariot. The vessel flipped over and drove downward, ramming its driver headfirst into a mud embankment. The chariot bounded up to crack against a tree and rattle to ground. Only the driver's legs jutted from the mound, and they were broken and still.
The shock troops beyond continued their charge.
Angels jagged out before Barrin. Their magna swords sliced Phyrexians. Blades bit into spiky shoulders and cut clean through to hunched legs. They cleft heads and gutted chests. Magna swords ran black and golden with guts and oil. The angel song had become a bloody thing, part battle hymn, part requiem.
Barrin lashed out with a rainbow of sorceries. His first spell turned Phyrexians on each other. His next sorcery infected hundreds more with carbuncles of rust. Catching his breath, Barrin unleashed a simple but effective fireball, melting metal and bone and flesh. As he gathered another enchantment, Barrin's steed smashed hooves atop Phyrexian heads.
Still, there were so many shock troops-too many. Phyrexians rose from every hollow and every deadfall. Plague-infected claws sank into angel throats. Pincers ripped wings from their sockets. Stingers pumped venom into pure hearts. Serrans dropped like moths.
The Keldons fared even worse. They held a nearby ridge but were surrounded by Phyrexian slashers. Elven arrows did nothing against the metal beasts, all legs and blades. Keldon swords only clanged helplessly against them. Shoulder to shoulder, the strange allies were being ground to pieces.
"Break through!" Barrin called to the Serrans. "Break through to the Keldons!"
The battle shifted. Angels gathered up behind the winged steed. Barrin and his beleaguered troops rose from the swamp. Black-mana spells followed them up, claiming two more Serrans. The rest escaped. It was a tattered group, angry and wounded, that broke from one overwhelming battle only to enter another. They had lost many comrades already and would lose more in moments.
Barrin's winged horse punched through curtains of moss. Angel wings tore the rest to ribbons. Sloughs beyond teemed with mosquitoes. Leather-backed shapes moved darkly through the water. Perhaps they would keep the Phyrexians from pursuing.
The dead forest gave way to a stinking lake, beyond which rose the ridge where the Keldons and elves stood surrounded.
Barrin led his aerial units out across the inky waters. They would be too late. Shock troops and slashers closed in. Even now, the shores boiled with black figures rising to join the Phyrexian ranks. They surged up eagerly behind the pressing armies and lent their putrid claws to the killing.
Except they were killing Phyrexians.
Ghouls climbed in their thousands from the rank water. The remains of their former clothes and skin and muscle draped in tatters from their skeletons. They shambled with a hungry will up among the Phyrexian troops and piled atop them. Horns pierced their rotting flesh. It didn't matter. Blades chopped limbs from their bodies. It made no difference. Ghoul flesh clambered onto Phyrexians, gumming up every joint, choking every throat, burying every beast.
Mouth hanging open in amazed horror, Barrin diverted his troops up and away from the carnage. Angels jagged skyward behind the winged steed. As Barrin gazed down at the strange tableaux, he glimpsed, in the crest of a rotten stump, the black-garbed necromancer that had raised the ghouls. Its face was a patchwork of desiccated flesh over white bone. It was a lich, an undead creature itself-but it was Dominarian. It mustered its minions to fight Phyrexians.
Just before the winged steed carried Barrin beyond a stand of trees, he glimpsed a small, acknowledging nod from the lich, the sort given by comrades in the thick of battle.
Strange coalitions.
Barrin leaned down against the glimmering neck of his mount and clutched it, panting sickly.
Chapter 26
A Plaything for Tsabo Tavoc
They did not expect us to penetrate this far, Thaddeus told himself.
He climbed a dust embankment and crashed against a new wave of Phyrexians. His sword rammed deep into the jowls of one beast. The blade sliced upward alongside a four-foot fang and to the root. With a violent, wet lurch, the tooth was pulled from its socket and fell into Thaddeus's grasp. Flipping the thing over, he clutched the root like the hilt of a sword.
The Phyrexian bowled into Thaddeus. Rolling onto his back, Thaddeus set sword and tooth side by side on the creature's thorax. It impaled itself on the twin spikes. Amid a gush of glistening-oil, Thaddeus kicked out and flipped the monster over. The corpse tumbled down the hillside. Thaddeus rose, sword in one hand and tooth in the other.
They had not expected us to penetrate this far. No trench works, no palisades, no defensive batteries. All they have are these suicide squads, hurling their bones on top of us. It will not be enough.
"Forward!" Thaddeus commanded, tooth lifted high. His sword lanced into the olfactory cavity of another monster, hewing into brain. The stuff sluiced like gray pudding down the nasal shaft and poured over Thaddeus. The beast slumped. Beyond hackled shoulders, the cave appeared. "Into the caves!"
Striding up the fallen hulk, Thaddeus hacked the head from a snakelike Phyrexian and ran down its twitching body. His corps followed, perhaps fifty fighters. He had lost half his troops in the mad, mile-long charge to the caves. The Phyrexians had lost hundreds. The Metathran that remained were the best fighters Thaddeus had. They would carve their way to the command core and down to the portal and set off enough bombs to seal it. Victory at Koilos was almost in hand.
* * * * *
Thaddeus and his strike force were but glinting helms in the distant fighting. They couldn't have penetrated so far. Something was amiss.
Agnate peered at the scene from atop a mound of dead. More died each moment, adding to the cairn of flesh. Phyrexians and Metathran fought ferociously, spilled each others' blood, and lay down side by side like brothers- huge and twisted brothers. The adversaries this day seemed descendants of the first feuding brothers who had battled over this same dirt clod six thousand years before.
A Phyrexian foot soldier scrambled up the mound of dead. It was humanlike, its torso shot through with metal struts that reinforced its biological spine. Gray muscles torqued among gears. It smiled as it came, teeth like a line of bones.
With a yell, Agnate brought his axe down on the soldier's head. It had expected the attack. It turned an armored shoulder to the blade. Steel met steel instead of flesh. Agnate's blade clung to the magnetized shoulderpiece. The soldier lunged back, ripping the axe from Agnate's grasp.
It clutched the hilt and brandished the blade with a yell.
The Metathran commander drew a dagger and hurled it. The
knife clanged against magnetic struts and clung there, shuddering.
"More weapons?" the beast taunted, clutching the dagger.
Agnate stepped backward down the hill of death and stared incredulously. "It speaks."
"It thinks too. It plans. It uses your weapons against you." The four-armed thing hurled itself at him, swinging axe and dagger in a dual attack.
Agnate ducked under the axe-the worse of the two blades- but took the dagger in the shoulder. Clasping his hand atop the weapon's hilt and the beast's claw, Agnate ran beneath the Phyrexian's arm and rushed up the hill. The dagger anchored the monster's arm, forcing its joints into unnatural alignments. The wrist popped first, then the twin bones of the forearm broke, the elbow yanked out of joint, and the shoulder separated from the metal framework. One final surge, and the arm came off altogether.
Agnate wheeled, pulling the dagger from his shoulder and flinging the severed arm away.
The Phyrexian crouched atop the dead pile, its life streaming from the amputation. Still, bonelike teeth gleamed with a smile.
"Commander Thaddeus is doomed. Tsabo Tavoc wants him. Tsabo Tavoc gets him."
Agnate coldly approached the creature and drove his dagger into the thing's skull. Fingers eased from Agnate's axe, and he retrieved it.
It thinks… it plans… it uses your weapons against you…
Agnate hissed, standing. The whole thing was a trap. Thaddeus was being drawn in, his strike force decimated and he…
Tsabo Tavoc wants him… Tsabo Tavoc gets him…
Taking a moment to chop his axe into the flank of another Phyrexian, Agnate flung his mind out across the battlefield. He reached for Thaddeus, an instinct since the moment of their creation. Twins, identical in body and mind, they had forever fought in tandem. Always, they had known each other's mind-
Not in this battle. A greater mind interposed itself between them. Agnate could only batter his thoughts against that solid and seamless presence.
Tsabo Tavoc wants him… Tsabo Tavoc gets him…
* * * * *
He fights beautifully, magnificently. He fights like a lion.
Tsabo Tavoc took a deep, satisfied breath. Lids closed over compound eyes. She had no desire to see the cave that ensconced her. It was the battle beyond that she watched with inner eyes. Distally, she experienced the slaughter of thousands of Metathran and felt the murder of thousands of her own children. Proximally, she sensed armies of warriors arriving even then through the portal, red-robed vat priests among them. In the middle distance, she felt Thaddeus.
He kills with such grim pleasure.
Tsabo Tavoc shifted her legs. A tremor of ecstasy moved through the mechanisms as Thaddeus clove the head of a gargantua. She had not intended to sacrifice that one. Gargantuas were hunched things of gray muscle, their feet as wide and rooted as trees. Flesh like rhino hide plated their torsos. Scythe claws could divide a man into five sections. Grotesque swells of bone covered their bulbous heads. Within lurked brains built for bloodlust and obedience. It took a century to grow a gargantua-a century and implants from ten separate species. Thaddeus had killed it in a moment. That was a costly loss-and yet all the more piquant because of it.
Thaddeus and his forty stormed the cave mouth. The gate guard lined up before them, claws and teeth at the ready. She would not thin their blood. If Thaddeus were to gain his way within, he would need to gain it honestly.
Tsabo Tavoc propelled another gargantua up before Thaddeus.
It raked its claws outward and caught Thaddeus as though he were a grasshopper. One simple squeeze and-
Tsabo Tavoc took a shuddering breath as she felt Thaddeus's sword slice the tendons of the beasts wrist. Flexors balled up beneath the elbow and extensors, splaying the claws uselessly back. It was a glorious strike. The pain was exquisite.
Thaddeus dropped to the ground.
The gargantua had another arm. It grabbed Thaddeus. It clenched its fist. There would be a brief spray and the gurgle of meat between claws-
Except that two of those claws were lopped off by the Metathran. He vaulted through the bloody space and ran up the gargantua's scaly arm.
Tsabo Tavoc smiled. He was good. What would it be next? Heart? Spine? Throat? Brain?
The gargantua's dead claws flailed at Thaddeus. They cut shallowly into him.
He reached the beast's shoulder. There was something in his hand-long, white, and curved. It shone point-on for a moment before the tooth plunged into the gargantua's eye. It sank through cornea and humors, up the optic nerve. The tooth bit into brain, cracking out the top of the skull.
Tsabo Tavoc did not withdraw from the gargantua as it slumped down in death. She wanted to feel that tooth through her mind, that black welling tide of death in every tissue. She wanted to suffer Thaddeus's victory. It would make her own triumph all the more sweet.
Thaddeus was inside the cave. He and twenty of his warriors had fought their way in. They would strike for the command core. They would all die but one. Thaddeus would be hers.
Ah, war is a glorious enterprise.
Tsabo Tavoc opened her compound eyes. She stood on eager legs and ambled out into the cavern beyond.
* * * * *
The gargantuas were fearsome beasts, but they died as had the sand worms, spinal centipedes, Metathran zombies, scuta, blood-stocks, and shock troops. Thaddeus's hundred had been winnowed to a simple score, but they had carved their way into the Phyrexian fortress. Now it was only a matter of discovering the fortress's heart, and tearing it out, and feasting on it.
"Gather up!" he shouted. The Caves of Koilos picked up his voice and hollered it back at him. Thaddeus smiled. The sound was good.
As they advanced, the twenty warriors converged on Thaddeus. "We drive for the portal. Once it is closed, we'll clear out the command center. How many pikes remain?" Four of the warriors lifted high their pikes. "Good. Take the vanguard. Axes take the rear. Swords take the flanks. Slay only those beasts who give battle. This is their beachhead. They will defend it furiously. Don't be drawn away from the main group and the main objective-the portal. How many grenades?"
Eighteen of the twenty had bandoleers.
"Excellent. That will bury the mirror podium in a halfmile of rock. Downward."
The final word was not spoken before pikes bristled across the vanguard and axes gleamed at the rear. Thaddeus himself took to the right flank, knowing the first turn would cast him in a blind corner. Muscular and vicious, the strike force rushed to the gap. Pikes rounded the corner, intent on whatever lay beyond.
Flesh lay beyond-flesh and horns and fangs. Pikes sank into the shrieking wall of monsters. Impaled, they came on.
Jaws as large as a bear trap clamped the head of one pikeman. Triangular teeth converged, closing in an inescapable bite. With a crunch, they severed the man's spine. His body dropped away, hands yet holding the haft.
A man in the vanguard released his pike, drew his sword, and stabbed. The blade buried itself in a beast's belly. It sliced through scales and muscles and plunged into some black organ beneath. The Phyrexian shrieked. Acids sprayed from its stomach. They ate away the man's hand and arm to the elbow. He died beneath his falling foe.
The tumbling monster dropped sideways, crushing the third pikeman.
The fourth vaulted up the beast and drove his sword into the head of another. Steel cracked bone and brain. The monster- what seemed a giant ground sloth but could have been almost anything in that murk-was unimpressed. Its fist pounded its own head, crushing the pikeman and driving the sword deeper.
The vanguard was gone, and only ten feet gained into the cave.
"Forward!" Thaddeus commanded, taking the van.
His sword cut between two huge eyes. They peeled back on opposite sides of a split visage. Thaddeus kicked a foothold in the bisected sinus cavities and vaulted atop the hissing beast. He climbed the thing.
"Forward!"
Thaddeus's sword hewed a path through beasts. Slick with gliste
ning-oil, his boots reached ground. He advanced into the dark.
Battle sounds suddenly hushed. Thaddeus whirled. Even the light of the entrance was lost. It was as though a door had slid silently closed behind him.
Thaddeus kept his sword at the ready. He reached to his belt, grabbed a flare, and broke the thing in half. A red flame shot from each edge. The light gleamed dimly off walls of smooth stone.
How did I get separated?
He spun, glimpsing movement out of the corner of his eye. Turning fully around, he watched for shadows against the dark wall. No one was there.
He should have looked up.
A metallic spider leg knocked his sword away. Crushing weight flung him to his back. His flare skipped angrily across the floor. Thaddeus struggled to grab a grenade. It was no good. His hands were pinned. He was trapped.
In the sulfuric half-light, a voice spoke. It was as omnipresent and alien as a cicada chorus: "Tsabo Tavoc wants you. Tsabo Tavoc will have you."
Chapter 27
She is So Light
Where once rot and death had filled the treetops, now music and life reigned.
Of course, the ravages of war remained-whole crowns had been eaten away, whole villages destroyed, whole families wiped from the face of Dominaria. The heights of Llanowar were gashed open to the skies. It would never be the same. Even after suckers grew to twigs and branches to boughs, the forest would forever bear the taste of glistening-oil. It was the curse of the cure.
The celebrants were not blind to all they had lost. That knowledge only deepened their joy. The disease had been stopped. One cure had come from below with the Seed of Freyalise, the other from above with the Scion of Benalia. Gerrard had granted immunity to those who were healthy, and Eladamri health to those who were sick. Between the two, they had saved Llanowar.
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