As extensive as this digging was, it was shallow—six to ten feet deep. On the far side of the mountain, other diggers had been equally industrious, except that their shaft was now two miles deep.
Eladamri crouched in a lightless space beside Liin Sivi, Grizzlegom, and their elf, Keldon, minotaur, and Metathran troops. The tunnel was pitch-black to Liin Sivi’s eyes, though her comrades could see heat signatures. Soldiers packed tightly into that alcove, in the lee of a ragged shoulder of stone. Sweat ran down their faces, and they fairly gulped for air. It was nerve wracking to wait this way, like shot in the belly of a bombard.
Just beyond the stony corner, Sister Dormet and her rock druids performed an ancient rite. The sibilant sound of their chants seemed the hiss of a shortening fuse. In moments, there would come a tremendous, mountain-shaking explosion. The cave would fill with flying rock shards. How the dwarfs survived the blast was an utter mystery. No one else dared watch to see.
“This will be the last one,” Eladamri said quietly to Liin Sivi. “They say there’s just sixty more feet of rock, and this blast will do it. Then you’ll have light again.”
“Yeah,” she replied flatly. “The light of lava. And it won’t be just lava in that central chamber. It’ll be Phyrexians. They’ll pour down this shaft just as they do down the main gate.”
“It’s our job to make sure they don’t.” Eladamri smiled in the darkness. “It’s another assault on the Stronghold. Just like old times.”
Liin Sivi shook her head grimly. “Too much like old times—”
“Plug your ears,” warned Eladamri. “Here it comes.”
They hunkered down farther, their ears covered and their eyes clamped shut. Even so, they heard the chant reach its fevered pitch.
The ground leaped. A sound shoved painfully against their breastbones, as if each warrior were being squeezed in a giant’s fist. Light beamed through clenched eyelids. The shadows of the dwarfs were cast in stark outline against that blinding glare. Then the light vanished, blocked out by a swarm of rock chips filling the hall. Most of the shards pelted straight up the corridor. Many others ricocheted multiply against opposite walls. A smell like lightning charged the air, and dust crowded past. That brutal hail continued for some time. At last when it let up—blinding, deafening, gagging, crushing, suffocating—there had come a definite change to the passageway beyond. Liin Sivi opened her clenched eyes to see—light.
A red luminescence danced along the cave wall. It streamed through dust-charged air. The shadows of the dwarfs loomed large, making them seem the size of men and minotaurs.
While Eladamri, Liin Sivi, Grizzlegom, and their troops breathed once more and eased themselves away from the jagged stone wall, the dwarfs who had enacted the spell stood stock still. It was as if they had expended all their energy in quickening stone and had turned to stone themselves.
“Now’s…our time,” gasped out Eladamri. The air no longer smelled stale, but sharp with brimstone. “The Phyrexians will come soon. We must defend our diminutive brethren.”
He stepped away from the wall and drew his sword. Liin Sivi came up beside him, her toten-vec considerably more compact than the blades around her. As warriors gained room, they armed themselves and strode toward battle.
Eladamri rounded the shoulder of stone and peered toward the origin of the blast. A long, ragged passageway extended from that spot to a place that glowed in red—the Stronghold cavern. Already, the dwarfs who had instigated the blast trundled up the corridor. They strode, heedless of the molten rock that clung to the ceiling, walls, and floor all around them. They seemed equally oblivious to the Phyrexian monsters that scrabbled into the far end of the passageway and bolted straight toward them.
“Vampire hounds!” Eladamri growled. He remembered the beasts from his first assault on the Stronghold—pony-sized canines with shaggy fur and teeth like poniards. “The dwarfs haven’t a chance.”
Blinking, Liin Sivi said, “Better look again.”
The first vampire hound, its jowls painting the ground in drool, leaped at the lead dwarf. Instead of lifting a weapon or turning to flee, the stalwart fellow only stiffened and stood his ground. The vampire hound came down, its gleeful teeth spread wide.
A clang resounded. Teeth shattered. The hound’s maw jammed on the dwarf’s head. Momentum hurled the creature forward, ripping off its jaw.
The second hound did little better. With its head bowed, it crashed into the stolid dwarf. What little brain occupied the head of that dog was utterly scrambled by the impact. The beast went down, its clawed feet kicking spasmodically.
Advancing, Eladamri said, “How do they do it? How do they stand up to these monsters?”
“Rock is their element,” reminded Liin Sivi. “When threats come, they merely turn to stone.”
Eladamri nodded, hands tightening on his sword hilt. “An excellent defense, but we are running an offensive here.”
“So are they,” Liin Sivi replied.
A third vampire hound bounded around the corner and hurled itself down the passageway. It leaped the bodies of its comrades and the stony dwarf that had laid them low. Instead, it focused its ire on the second dwarf, who surely would not bear the same wards.
Not the same wards, but even more powerful ones. The second dwarf happened to be Sister Nadeen Dormet. Instead of ducking away from the assault, she merely lifted red-glowing hands. There was only one substance that shade—hot lava. Sister Dormet grasped the vampire hound by the throat. Black fur sizzled away. The monster screamed. Sister Dormet’s lava hands sunk in until her fingers met around the monster’s spine. It slumped to one side, its tongue lolling from its mouth.
Sister Dormet flung away the hound and strode onward with quiet confidence. Soon, she and her comrades reached the end of the corridor and descended into the broiling space beyond.
“Stony statues and hands of hot lava,” Eladamri said, marveling. “Who’s protecting whom here?”
“Let’s just get to the Stronghold,” advised Liin Sivi.
Close behind her, ducking to fit through the dwarfish passage, Commander Grizzlegom strode with axe foremost. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this moment. A real fight at last!”
“There’ll be a thousand real fights in the next few hours,” Eladamri replied, though he strode forward with equal glee. He took a deep breath. The air smelled of explosions and power. He smiled savagely. “I’m ready for this too.”
Liin Sivi quirked a grin, “I’m glad to be in such ready company. Here we go.”
The mouth of the tunnel ahead was suddenly darkened by black shapes—triangular and terrifying. Piggish eyes, uncouth fangs, a thicket of claws, all set in motion by masses of green muscle.
“Moggs!” hissed Eladamri. His folk had eked out a noble existence in the shadow of these hunchbacked brutes, and Eladamri had developed a knack for killing them. “For the Skyshroud!” he shouted and charged the foremost beast.
“For the Vec!” Liin Sivi added, rushing up behind him.
“For Hurloon!” Grizzlegom bellowed as he ran.
Their troops added their own cries as they surged like lava up that tube.
The lead mogg—no doubt a sergeant, whose rank was based on weight and viciousness—launched itself with a roar. The thing’s dubious honor required of it the first kill in its company, and a mogg believed a kill was best gotten by berserker attack. With claws thrust below and teeth spread above, the thing fell on Eladamri—
Or on the place Eladamri should have been. He merely melted away from the onslaught, leaving the mogg to bite and maul the air. Sliding to one side, he slashed. The sword passed through ropy muscle, through entrails, through a cartilaginous disk and the spine within.
The mogg came to pieces. Claws and fangs ceased their work in the air. The fiendish light in those squinting eyes went out. By the time Liin Sivi reached it, nothing remained of the sergeant except two lumps of flesh. Eladamri’s sword was not greedy, though. He left the next beast for her toten
-vec.
The Vec weapon—a curved blade joined to a hand grip—was infamous for ranged attacks in a twenty foot radius. Only its wielders knew it was even more deadly while held in hand.
Liin Sivi met the mogg’s teeth with a wickeder blade. Steel shattered enamel. The mogg roared through stumps of tooth. Liin Sivi rammed the blade in the palate and wrapped the chain around the creature’s neck. She climbed its thrashing arms, stood atop the hunched shoulders, and yanked. The beast that a moment before thought to bite through her head now only bit the rock floor. Liin Sivi rode it to the ground and hunched over so that Commander Grizzlegom could leap over her.
The minotaur did, too eager to wait his turn. Unlike his two Rathi comrades, Grizzlegom was not well versed in the demeanor of moggs. Also unlike them, he could defeat his prey at their own game.
Grizzlegom lowered his head and charged a mogg. He struck the beast, goring it deeply, and then lifted his head. The impaled mogg smashed against the ceiling of the corridor. Grizzlegom strode on, letting the jagged rock grate the beast down to the bone. By the time he reached the central chamber of the volcano, the creature across his horns was a dead rag.
“Chamber” was too small, too casual a word for the vast expanse where the Stronghold resided. A conic cavern easily ten miles across and ten miles high, the interior of the volcano was lit by a volcanic glow at the center of its floor. Across that rumpled floor, the dwarf druids trundled, heading for the open lava. They had defeated all the beasts that had assaulted them and now passed beneath their notice en route to the column of magma.
Eladamri, Liin Sivi, Grizzlegom, and their troops had a different objective—the Stronghold. It hovered above them like the pelvic bones of a titan. The lowest level of the Stronghold was an arching mass of ivory that stretched into bristling clumps of horn. Atop it rested metallic decks affixed to more organic architecture. The whole of the structure, brutal and barbaric, occupied eighty cubic miles there in the heart of the mountain. The center of all that horrific power was the throne room of the evincar, the throne room of Crovax.
The smile on Eladamri’s face grew only more vicious. He turned to Liin Sivi, who emerged with toten-vec coiling about one arm. “Do you remember doing this once before?”
Her teeth showed as well. “This day will not end as that day did.”
“It will start much the same way,” Eladamri remarked, pointing to the wide causeway that led to the gate called Portcullis. The flowstone bridge bristled with moggs and vampire hounds and il-Vec and il-Dal warriors eager to engage the invaders.
Grizzlegom charged out into the cavern and, panting happily, joined his comrades. “What’s the prospect?”
“Excellent,” Eladamri quipped, “if you like fighting.”
“Excellent,” echoed Grizzlegom.
Nothing more needed saying. There was too much battle ahead. Already, the sloping wall of the volcano, from the flowstone bridge to the outcrop where the three commanders stood, swarmed with unwholesome beasts. Eladamri, Liin Sivi, Grizzlegom, and their troops dug into the monsters like starving folk into a feast.
Eladamri’s blade sang in the air. It chunked into mogg flesh. Metal rang on bone as it passed through the creature’s rib cage. The monster fell. Eladamri, half a stride later, brought his sword up to split an il-Dal warrior from navel to neck.
Near him, Liin Sivi lashed out with her omnipotent edge. The toten-vec sliced air and muscle with the same ease. It cleft a mogg head from its brawny shoulders and continued on to bisect the traitorous brain of an il-Vec. She hauled on the chain, and it yanked its latest kill into the path of a vampire hound, which ran into it and sprawled. Winning her blade free, Liin Sivi stomped on the canine’s head while simultaneously whipping her toten-vec out to the other side. The chain wrapped the neck of one mogg even as the blade severed the neck of another.
But even the fury of a woman scorned could not match the battle frenzy of Commander Grizzlegom. He whose homeland had become an inferno during the Rathi overlay fought toward the heart of the overlay. Some beasts he merely trampled, his hooves catching them in the chest and bearing them down and punching through like mallets into rotten wood. Those creatures beyond were caught and strangled in hands with two opposable thumbs. Past them were beasts that got gored on massive horns. With bodies draping his ivory, Grizzlegom started again with hooves.
The coalition forces fought just the same way, inspired by their leaders. Minotaurs and Metathran, elves and Keldons, they mowed down moggs like wheat and threshed il-Vec like chaff. In mere moments, hundreds of Rathi lay dead. The Dominarians, with but a handful of dead, had reached the head of the bridge.
“Slay them!” Eladamri demonstrated on one unlucky mogg. “Cast them over! On to the throne room of Crovax! On to victory!”
The shouts were taken up behind him, and the coalition forces surged across the flowstone bridge. There was naught but victory ahead.
CHAPTER 15
Of Axemen and Heads
In utter victory, Gerrard strode among the roaring, screaming hordes that packed the arena. In one bloodied hand, he lifted high the severed head of Urza Planeswalker. It blinked in death spasms, its gemstone eyes seeming almost to glow with preternatural light. In the other hand, he lifted the halberd blade that had done the slaying—a broad and brutal, soul-reaping weapon.
In truth, though, the real weapon was Gerrard. Drawn from iron and purified to steel, forged by the hand of Urza and hammered out by a lifetime of loss, sharpened to a keen edge and given the will to kill, Gerrard was the true instrument of Urza’s demise.
“Urza is dead! Urza is dead! Urza is dead!”
Even Gerrard said it. On smiling lips, he chanted it. “Urza is dead….Urza is dead….Urza is dead….” It meant something different to him. It meant that his past—the long damnation he called his life—was finally done. It meant he could begin again. He had risen up at last and slain the tyrant who had sired him, had schooled him, had sacrificed him. Gerrard had killed the killer, and now the killer was dead.
“Urza is dead! Urza is dead! Urza is dead!”
It was even more than that. Urza’s death meant the life of another.
She stood there on the imperial balcony at the far end of the arena. All through the fight, Gerrard had looked to her. While Urza gazed with rapt devotion at the enormous dragon by her side, Gerrard could see only Hanna. She was nearly nothing—one tenth the dragon’s height, one hundredth the dragon’s weight, one thousandth his mind, his malicious mind—and yet she was everything. Gerrard had descended to this hell only to win her back from the grave. Urza’s death meant he had done just that. He had died that Hanna might live again.
Gerrard marched through their midst, the shrieking incarnations of Yawgmoth. How mad all this was. He should have shrunk from these horrid beasts—even if they were only natural creatures and not splinters of a god—but he did not. They flinched from him. He batted back their claws as they reached for a strip of flesh from the head. He spat into the gibbering maws that sucked at the red life dribbling beneath. He swept his god-killing halberd before him to clear the way through the crowd. What monsters did not retract their arms got them lopped off. What creatures did not withdraw their heads got them split. The god who was in all and none of them seemed not in the slightest enraged by these attacks, but almost aroused. The thrilled shrieks grew only louder.
None of these things mattered, only the one on the balcony.
Gerrard strode toward her. The demonic crowd became a field of wheat, parting between the immortal lovers. The grisly trophy in Gerrard’s hand became a bouquet of wild roses, gathered so vehemently and heedlessly that blood streamed from their jealous thorns. The halberd in Gerrard’s other hand became a gleaming lantern to light his way. Gerrard approached his lady.
She stood at the edge of the balcony, a maiden cloistered by a jealous father, watching the arrival of her deliverer.
Gerrard reached the stony rail. There, shoulder to shoulder with an infinite
throng of keening devils, he dropped to one knee, bowed his head, and lifted high his offering of love.
The response from the Yawgmoth throng was deafening. Clenched in that sound, Gerrard hunkered down and waited. At last, the ovation died away.
Through a hundred thousand throats, Yawgmoth spoke. “You have prevailed, Gerrard Capashen. In prowess and ferocity and sanguine will, you have proved yourself worthy of bowing here before us.”
A cheer broke this pretty speech, a cheer from the mouths of the speechmaker. All the while, Gerrard kept his own head bowed and Urza’s lifted high.
“We bestow upon you the office of first servant. You shall serve us and only us, and Crovax shall serve you. Your powers shall be greater than his. We grant you strength tenfold….”
Gerrard felt the sweeping motion of the dragon’s claws above him. Hot cerements of magic descending to enwrap him. His muscles hardened like steel cables. Sudden, awesome power came to them.
“We grant you endurance tenfold.”
His bones transmuted into a substance that could stand beneath crushing force and deal deadly blows.
“We grant you knowledge tenfold.”
Suddenly, his thoughts shot in kaleidoscopic array and intensity, and ran to depths he had never before imagined.
“We grant you will tenfold.”
This last boon, most surprising of all, took Gerrard’s already formidable determination and made it indomitable.
Yawgmoth must think me an absolute slave, Gerrard thought. I am, yes, but not to him.
Gerrard rose from his knee and stood before the imperial balcony. Lowering the head of Urza, he raised his own. Though he spoke to Yawgmoth, Gerrard’s eyes fixed upon the slender, beautiful face of Hanna. Beneath tossing blonde hair, she returned his loving gaze. Her eyes followed every contour of his face as he spoke.
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