A shudder of misery trembled through the massive bulk of the machine. It rang in metal plates and made the Thran-Tome powerstone gleam weirdly. Another blast had struck home.
Karn gazed up toward the dark ceiling and imagined more crimson death showering down. “What good can I do down here?” Again, the ship shook. Karn reached out to steady himself on the engine.
Through his fingers came a small but unmistakable sensation—a desperate and lonely cry.
Karn dropped his gaze and saw with utter astonishment that the twin ports remained on the side of the transformed engine. Despite all her other alterations, Weatherlight had kept these two ports. She had left the door open to speak again to Karn.
He knelt. The action was entirely natural. His knees made new crimp marks on the floor. He extended his hands into the ports. With trembling fingers, he took hold of the bars in front of him and turned his hands to engage. A familiar tingle came to his knuckles as thought conduits insinuated themselves. The narrow filaments contacted his own neural networks, and suddenly the voice that had been quiet became loud.
Karn! What took you so long?
The silver golem blinked. I didn’t think…I thought I couldn’t help….You have your own mind now—
All the more reason not to abandon me. What do you think of this?
Everything else ceased to exist in that moment. There was only Weatherlight and he—and the hundred thousand secrets the two of them shared. Have you tried planeshifting to the Stronghold?
That was the first thing. It’s warded against intrusion, like Phyrexia. Besides, the repulser field produces a spaciotemporal distortion much like the ones caused by a planeshift—much like the ones over Benalia on that first day.
You remember that? Karn asked wonderingly.
I remember more than you realize.
He nodded absently. His mind moved across the Skyshaper, the Bones of Ramos, the Thran Crystal, the Juju Bubble. If these fields are really just planeshift phenomena, they themselves can be shaped like any other shift. Instead of manipulating your own shift envelope, you’ll simply recalibrate your target vectors to the repulser fields.
Somehow, through the mass of metal before him, Karn sensed a smile forming on the Gaea figurehead. The voice of the ship came, delighted, What took you so long, Karn?
* * *
—
For every Phyrexian gun they blasted away, two more hurled killing flack down from above. The deck was spotted with holes, and one of Karn’s abandoned cannons steamed from a direct hit. The shift envelope that once had guarded them all sank and failed beneath the torrid assault.
“We can’t take much more of this,” Tahngarth howled above the blistering shrieks of his weapon. “Either we go down, or we go up.”
“Karn’s working on it!” Sisay shouted back. “He and the ship, both.”
Orim cried out, “Too late!” Her cannon jutted skyward like an accusing finger. Out of the mountain’s throat descended an all-out assault. Black webs and red beams dropped on the ship.
Weatherlight delved suddenly downward. She had divined the magic of the repulser fields and now sliced through them with eager speed. Those on deck could only stand and gawk like seamen on a sinking ship as Weatherlight plunged beneath waves of distortion. The cannons and bombards could no longer reach her. Their flack splashed across the surface of the repulser fields, red blood and black oil on a tossing sea.
Weatherlight meanwhile sailed smoothly down into darkness. All around her, the repulser fields robbed the air of heat and light. Suffocating cold and terrifying murk—most ships that coursed such depths never rose again. Perhaps Weatherlight wouldn’t either—a wreck in sunless depths. The descent would have been horrible except that Gerrard waited below.
“There it is!” cried Orim, standing and pointing over the portside rail.
From absolute blackness below, a shape took form. It seemed a pile of bones, bleached and threatening, joined by jerkied sinews long since dead. As the ship dropped nearer to the apparition, an organic logic suggested itself—horns jutting along vulnerable walkways, hunks of carapace sheltering the more spacious and sumptuous apartments, iron balconies beneath folds of bone. The whole massive thing seemed the skeleton of the Leviathan.
The Stronghold.
These were uncharted depths, yes, but Weatherlight had approached that awful place once before. Sisay, Tahngarth, and Karn had been captives aboard that fortress. Gerrard, Crovax, Ertai, Squee, and their comrades had come to save them. Now, every role was reversed. The saviors had become the captives and the captives the saviors.
Sisay stepped back from the helm, feeling Weatherlight plot her own course down to that deep and horrid place.
Into the speaking tube, the captain said, “Tahngarth, Karn—whatever you’re doing, enlist someone else to do it. You’re my boarding party. We’ll find Gerrard and Squee.”
“What about me, Captain?” asked Orim.
Sisay gave a fierce smile. “Why, when the captain, the first mate, and the engineer are on the Stronghold chopping up moggs, you’ll be in charge, won’t you?”
Even through the speaking tubes, Orim’s whispered prayer was audible. “Cho-Manno, help me.”
CHAPTER 18
Battles Without and Within
Nothing so thrilled Crovax as battle. Even here, in an invading forest and beneath the blazing sun, Crovax was happy as long as he got to kill. By jingo did he get to kill.
His axe cleft an elf from neck to navel and emerged before the thing had time to scream. Its two halves peeled away like the skin of a banana. Crovax rammed his blade into the voice box of another elf. It failed to shriek its death, though air bubbled red around Crovax’s blade. His foot shoved the thing off. His hand broke the neck of another. His axe bisected two more with a single stroke.
Battle thrilled.
Crovax’s zombie army literally ate through the elf infantry. Finger bones made remarkable forks in elf bodies. Zombie teeth bit elf heads like crunchy apples. Hungrily, the undead fought and with a fury that was Crovax’s own.
Atrocious! A forest where swamps should be! He would burn every tree and slay every green critter. Already, Crovax had ignited fires all along the perimeter of the forest. Black columns of smoke spiraled into the sky. Crovax and his undead troops meanwhile slaughtered saprolings and Kavu, woodmen and druids and elves in their hundreds. He would fight until every last one had fallen.
There was a singing greatness in his axe as it slew, a keen joy. Crovax worked as a sculptor, carving air and skin and blood and bone. He fashioned a self-portrait in severed flesh. There were his fiery eyes, those two woodmen whose heads flamed with his spell. There was his rumpled nose, the kneeling druid in brown robes and severed neck. There were his jagged teeth, that Kavu corpse with the flayed and sharp-shorn ribs. In the thousands dead, Crovax saw only a wide feasting table. In the manifold shrieks and moans, Crovax heard only the glad cacophony of his own heart.
Until an odd sound came—a shout of fear not from outside the evincar but from within. He half-turned, listening to the dread in that voice. The words came from a weak creature—one mentally powerful but otherwise weak.
“Ertai,” Crovax muttered.
The moment’s reverie nearly cost him his neck. A woodman—one of his own Phyrexian shock troopers transformed into flora—swung a cudgel his way. Crovax stepped out from under it, braced the thing’s leg with one foot, and idly broke its knee with the other.
“What could Ertai need?” Crovax mused as he cleft a saproling that landed in his path. “He’s in my throne room, for the love of—” A sudden, terrible realization came to Crovax. “My throne room!”
He loved nothing more than battle and loved nothing less than being torn from battle. That’s what was happening to him. Yes, he summoned the magical sac. It enfolded him and teased his solid body into spirit. The beaming thing lifted him off the bloody volcano and whirled him into the sky. Down the caldera he went and to the Stronghold.
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The throne room was in danger. Ertai—impotent to handle the problem—had summoned his master.
Once I get my claws on you, little Ertai, Crovax thought as his spirit fled down the corridors of the Stronghold and sought the throne room below, you’ll think twice before you drag me out of battle again.
When Crovax took form in his throne room, though, he was the one who thought twice.
Moggs hung from the stalactites in drippy bundles, seeming victims of Crovax’s own hand. Who but he had the power to hurl them there? Vampire hounds carpeted the floor with boneless pelts. Who could have crushed them so? Black walls oozed blacker goo that Ertai had sprayed everywhere. Who had he been trying to slay with all that ink?
Just now, the four-armed sorcerer hovered near the door and cast glances down the hall. He seemed almost impatient for Crovax’s arrival.
Even before the evincar was fully formed, Ertai spoke to him, “Master, I will destroy the immortal goblin,” he hitched a pair of thumbs down the corridor, “unless you wish help with the other one.” He gestured toward the center of the room.
There, greatest atrocity of all, sat the severed head of Urza Planeswalker on the evincar’s throne. Even in death, Urza stared out with his damned, all-seeing eyes. Blood pooled on the seat and ran down its front face. Urza’s blood, though there was more. Two il-Vec warriors hung from the horns on the throne’s back.
“He did all this?” Crovax asked, finally solid enough to speak. The evincar jabbed his axe toward the throne. “A head did this?”
Ertai shuddered with the desire to stalk his own quarry. “Not the head. Him!” He pointed emphatically beyond the throne and then retreated down the hall.
Crovax let the whelp slink away. He was too busy staring into the obsidian shadows of his throne and making out the nightmare figure that loomed beyond.
Gerrard Capashen! He looked as he always had—lean in his leather waistcoat and pants—but a new, vicious light shone in his eyes. Gerrard bore not a sword, as had been his habit, but the head of a halberd. It was large and razor sharp, and it scintillated the deadly magic of Yawgmoth.
Gerrard advanced.
“You are Phyrexian now,” Crovax said, realizing.
Gerrard smiled ferociously. “Yawgmoth has seen fit to enhance me, yes.” He spun the weighty blade easily in his hand.
Crovax raised his own weapon in an attack posture. He sent impulses to the floor under Gerrard’s feet, turning it as soft as mud, and then as hard as iron, trapping him. “What have you done to my throne room?”
“I’ve rearranged,” Gerrard replied cockily. He tried to advance another step, but his feet were stuck tight in the flowstone. He seemed unfazed. “After all, this is no longer your throne room. It is mine.” He punctuated this assertion with a wave of his hand, making the floor liquid again. He stepped from the trap and strode toward Crovax.
Despite himself, the evincar retreated. Not since Volrath could another man manipulate the flowstone of the Stronghold. “How did you do that?”
“It is mine,” Gerrard replied coolly. He reached out, as if intending to seize Crovax’s breastplate. Before his fingers came anywhere near the evincar, though, another hand pressed itself out of the walls of the chamber. It was a huge hand, and powerful, and it reached for Crovax.
He whirled away and sent his own will into the stone. The reaching hand shrank and smoothed itself into the wall.
“Your powers are not compleat,” taunted the evincar.
“Even so, Yawgmoth has said I will rule over you, that I will command the rest of the invasion.”
Crovax sneered. “You will never rule over me until I lie dead.”
Nodding deeply, Gerrard said, “That’s precisely what I had in mind.”
In a silent accord, the two men charged. Gerrard’s halberd head cut a white loop through the air, seeming unstoppable. Crovax’s axe whirled out to deflect the blade. Metal clanged against metal. A cold shiver moved through Crovax’s hand, his axe jangling. He thrust again, trying to skewer the Benalian’s heart.
Gerrard was too quick. He turned to one side, allowing the evincar’s blade to jab past him. Then he lashed out with his hand, grasped the blade, and hauled on it.
Crovax tried to twist his axe, to sever the man’s fingers, but Gerrard’s hand was a vise. If the evincar held on, he would be pulled down beneath the halberd. If he let go, he would be disarmed….No, not disarmed. While Crovax was in his throne room, while the throne room was yet his, he was never disarmed.
Crovax did not merely release his blade. He shoved it at his attacker.
Gerrard staggered back. He gaped at the axe in one hand and the halberd blade in the other.
Crovax also stepped back. A simple flourish of his claws sent tendrils of power to the boneless meat bags that had been his vampire hounds. They suddenly lurched. Their bones were still shattered, their organs were still wet pulp, but they moved. Pain meant nothing anymore. Contusions crackled as the shaggy beasts lurched toward Gerrard. Broken fangs grinned at him.
The young savior of Dominaria spun, hacking into the monsters. His halberd bit deep, cleaving fur and all beneath. The blows would have stopped any living thing, but not these dead hounds. They bit his legs. They clawed his sides. They climbed him with a back-broken, humping motion.
Crovax smiled proudly. “You say that Yawgmoth has given you dominion over me? It hardly seems so. What undead creatures fight for you, Gerrard? You control flowstone, yes, but what of dead flesh? Who but a necromancer could truly rule the Stronghold?”
Gerrard fought like a badger. He sliced and chopped with axe and halberd.
The vampire hounds came to pieces. Hunks of flesh no larger than stew meat pattered to the ground. Still, dark magic animated them. Like bloody mice, these chunks wriggled over to climb the battling man. Bone shards bit into him. Muscle fragments bled their poisons into his wounds.
Gerrard roared. He turned the flowstone floor to churning liquid. Every hunk of hound flesh sank into the floor, sucked away.
Seeing his pets so euthanized, Crovax swept his hands out to either side. His fingers sent necromantic tracers into the dead-where-they-stood il-Vec guards. Corpses twitched and shuddered. Eyes that had gone gray became glinting black. Gelid fingers grasped swords and axes. Il-Vec zombies shambled eagerly toward Gerrard.
“Kill them again, Gerrard,” Crovax crowed. “You did it once. It is not enough to be a ruler of the living. To hold the Stronghold, you must also rule the dead.”
The young savior did not stand and wait. He charged the nearest il-Vec zombie. It acquitted itself poorly. Its dead nerves were no match for Gerrard’s enhanced reflexes. He feinted to one side and drove Crovax’s axe through the thing’s head. The zombie fell back against the wall, its legs folding up.
Its comrades closed in.
Gerrard climbed the zombie’s body. He launched himself up the wall and just out of reach of the next sword that pursued him. It struck the flowstone, sank in, and stuck. Gerrard caught a foothold on it and turned a back flip. His boots came down on the head of his second attacker and crushed it like a melon.
Even while he was suspended there in midair, Gerrard whirled his halberd around to decapitate a third guard. Its head bounded free and arced up into the air. Gerrard landed astride the messy body, got his footing, and swung his blade broadside. Steel and skull connected. The zombie’s head sailed across the room to smash one of its compatriots to the ground.
In a matter of moments, Gerrard had killed four of the undead—had granted them the second death. In the next few moments, he dismantled the others. They fell with no back flips or glory, only the inarguable reason of a keen and weighty blade.
When the killing was done, Gerrard glanced about the throne room. He had bloodied it once with red humors. Now, black fluids oozed from his victims.
In a nearby archway, Crovax stood, grinning ferociously. His claws came together in feigned applause. “So, you can destroy the undead—that’s better
than being destroyed by them, but it’s not as good as controlling them.” His gaze swept the stalactites overhead. “I control them.” He lifted hands as though to rip the belly from a great beast. Instead, he pulled down mogg after impaled mogg.
The monsters plunged to ground in a green ring around Gerrard. Whole legs caught them. Whole arms raked out before them. Claws and teeth were as sharp in unlife as in life. Only their shoulders and necks had been modified, gored by thick spikes. As one, the goblins lunged at Gerrard.
He swung his halberd. It cut temple to temple through one skull and continued on to lodge in the eye of the next. There were ten such beasts, though. While his blade was hung up, the other eight ripped at his arms and legs and back. They were sharks tearing apart a piece of meat.
The Evincar of Rath could only watch with disbelief. What had Yawgmoth seen in this man? Courage? Skill? Anger? And what good were any of these when a man lay torn to shreds?
Gerrard fought. Where other men would have lain down and died, this man fought. Even as goblins plowed his back with their claws, he slew. Mogg heads fountained. Their necks slumped. Their arms ended in shivering ruin on the floor. While moggs bit into his legs, he chopped their backs in two. It seemed no one could survive those combined attacks, yet Gerrard not only survived but brought his attackers down to death.
How had he done it? A mogg’s teeth could bite through a stone. A mogg’s claws could eviscerate a gargantua. How could a single man with a single, broken halberd have slain them all and risen in their midst?
Yawgmoth. He had granted Gerrard inhuman strength and speed and intelligence. He must have even tuned the man’s natural healing abilities. Though deep furrows sliced down Gerrard’s back, none yet bled. The muscles and flesh stitched themselves together even as he yanked his halberd from the skull of the final goblin.
Crovax shook his head, nostrils flaring. He had chosen wrongly. He could not overcome Gerrard by main strength. The power of a god was in him. Crovax would have to defeat Gerrard by preying upon some part untouched by Yawgmoth. Something such as the man’s goodness, his compassion.
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