Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  A hand grasped his shoulder. He whirled around, sword at the ready. His blade clanged aside, blocked by the toten-vec.

  “Eladamri,” said Liin Sivi, “you must see this.”

  Laughing and trembling, he replied, “I can’t see anything.”

  She grasped his arm and brought him to the balcony rail. Even through his tears, Eladamri made out the wan red glow below the Stronghold, an angry eye gazing upward and growing.

  “What do you make of it?” asked Liin Sivi.

  Dashing sweat from his eyes, Eladamri said, “I think we’d better reach the throne room before whatever that is reaches us.”

  All she said was, “Yes,” and her blade was slaying again.

  CHAPTER 20

  To Set the Captive Free

  “It always looked easy enough when she did it,” Orim growled, hauling a reluctant helm to port. Sisay had told her simply to fly in circles and watch for the crew to return. Apparently, flying in circles was not as easy as it seemed. “C’mon, damned ship,” Orim said as she leaned her weight on the stubborn wheel. “Just turn!”

  Weatherlight’s rudder responded sluggishly, but her engines were all too eager. Orim had sent an ensign to crank the throttle near to closed, but the great ship bounded like a skipping stone across the black cavern. Her lanterns stretched fingers of light to probe the underbelly of stone. Everywhere, there was basalt—too black, too hard, too insistent on curving inward and grasping Weatherlight like a gnat and crushing her. In a place like this, an eager engine and an obstinate helm spelled doom.

  “Of course, she never did it inside a mountain,” Orim told herself. Then she remembered the mountain of Mercadia, with its Phyrexian hangar. Sisay had flown the ship out of that fiery mess as if she cruised through open skies. Wincing, Orim snorted, “Well, she never had to do it with a novice crew.”

  That very crew let out a whoop of corporate dread as the ship barely missed a toothy stalactite ten times her size. Orim muscled the wheel while hissing expletives. The ship veered obliquely away, and the crew breathed its relief. These were cabin boys, stockers, and mates who had begun this trek believing Weatherlight a sailing ship—and had never been near a safe enough port to risk escape. Young or dumb or terrified or all three, the remaining crew of Weatherlight was prone to panic.

  Even as the huge stalactite slid to stern, the ensign at the tail gun decided to unload a cannon barrage on it. White fire—blinding in that tenebrous place—jagged out like lightning, cracked against the stalactite, wrapped it in sparkling fingers, and broke it loose. A thousand tons of stone split from the sloped ceiling and plummeted silently away beneath Weatherlight. It was a full count to twenty before the huge and horrible crash of the block came from below.

  “No more of that!” Orim called through the speaking tube. “We don’t want to bring the mountain down on us. Besides, we don’t know what’s down there, and we don’t want to wake—”

  “There’s something down there!” shouted the cabin boy that manned Gerrard’s gun. He stood in traces two sizes too large for him and pointed over the port side rail. “Look down there! Something red!”

  The others looked, and next moment, voices crowded through the speaking tubes.

  “It looks like an evil eye!”

  “It’s hell! It’s the fires of hell!”

  “The mountain’s erupting!”

  “We’re all going to die!”

  “Shut up, all of you,” snapped Orim. “That’s an order! If we’re going to die, at least do it with dignity, and do your job beforehand. We circle until we see the signal!” Angrily, she flipped the speaking tube closed and hissed, “How about a single goddamned ally? Do I have to fight every last one of you?”

  At least I shouldn’t fight myself, she thought. While struggling with the helm, she closed her eyes for a moment and awakened the silver fire of Cho-Arrim magic. It began in her fingers, a healing spell, and sank in toward her bones. It calmed her as it went. The tension ran from her, and the helm turned easily beneath her touch.

  Opening her eyes, she stared in wonder at the wheel. It spun with a gentle ease. Her hands no longer fought it but felt a part of it. Her healing hands had formed a conduit between her mind and that of—

  I’m not a damned ship, said Weatherlight into her mind. But I am your goddamned ally.

  Orim nodded and smiled. Of course. Lead the way. She kept her hands on the wheel, so as not to break the mind contact. And see what you can do to soothe the crew. They’re good folk, really.

  I’ll see what I can do.

  * * *

  —

  Tahngarth, Sisay, and Karn stormed the corridors of the Stronghold. There was no other way to say it. Their feet thundered across metal grates. Their swords flashed like lightning. Their blows sent glistening oil raining through the air. Nothing and no one could stand against them.

  There was cause for their fury. They each had been captive in these halls, in these dungeons. Here, the minotaur Tahngarth had endured the cutting, morphing assaults of a ray that made him monstrous. Here, the pacifist Karn had suffered his body to become a killing cudgel. Here, the skycaptain Sisay had languished in an iron cell while someone else flew her ship. Gerrard had brought Weatherlight to save these three from their torments. Now, Gerrard was the captive, and Tahngarth, Sisay, and Karn were the saviors.

  They were bloody saviors. Karn led the way, not pausing to fight but only running and crushing whatever lacked the sense to move aside. Il-Vec, il-Dal, il-Kor, vampire hound, Phyrexian—all made a spiny mush beneath his pounding feet. His massive silver frame had once again become a killing cudgel, though this time he chose to slay. His mind’s eye saw this passageway, yes, but saw also the Jamuraan boardwalk where Vuel made him slay an innocent, and the Tolarian hallway where negators ran amok. He killed because, after centuries piled on centuries, he knew when to kill.

  Tahngarth slew for an altogether simpler reason—revenge. He was, after all, one of their own, a proto-Phyrexian, physically morphed in preparation for transplants and utter transformation. He fought his former captors, eager to show them what they had made.

  Sisay, in their midst, had the clearest head of the three. She fought for one reason: Gerrard.

  Karn and Tahngarth smashed aside a pair of il-Vec warriors, hurling them down so brutally that the creatures skidded across the floor of metal mesh and were grated down like chunks of cheese. Sisay meanwhile came up between them, seeing a long stair down into a black and odorous place. The walls were venous, as though to pump upward the foul humors of the deviltry below. And there was deviltry, for this was the dungeon where the three comrades had suffered.

  A din of moans and screams rose up the stairs.

  “He must be down there,” Sisay said.

  Tahngarth only grunted his agreement. He was otherwise too busy dragging his striva through a guard that tried to stop them.

  Karn did not answer except by striding down those stairs. Sisay followed next, and Tahngarth brought up the rear.

  A slavering mogg hurled itself down the stairway atop Tahngarth.

  He merely lifted his head and took the beast on his horns. The mogg was impaled, neck and groin, and thrashed so that Tahngarth removed it with a striva through the gut. He flung the beast to the ground, making its body a redoubt against further assaults. Turning, Tahngarth descended the rest of the stairs and reached his comrades among the torture pits.

  The place had a visceral impact. The stench of offal and desperation, the stains of blood and bile, the walls like necrotic tissue—these horrors were not soon—not ever—forgotten by one who had spent any time behind those flowstone doors.

  Karn put his shoulder to one such door and bashed it in. Instead of falling to the ground, the door merely shattered into chunks that pelted inward. The great silver golem stood in their midst, a primordial god. His steely eyes made out a craven wretch in the corner. It once had been a man before its limbs had been replaced by an ape’s and its face had been replac
ed by a metal plate. The thing stirred, and in its polished faceplate, Karn saw his own features reflected.

  Sisay strode through the ruined door beside him and approached the prisoner. “Where is Gerrard?” she asked, direct but compassionate. “Where is the prisoner Gerrard?”

  The thing tried to respond, though the mask had no provision for a mouth. The wet gasping sounds it made suggested it no longer had one.

  Sisay nodded grimly, waving her hand. “Come, then. You are free. Come with us. We are leaving this place.”

  The ape thing leaned back for a moment in mute disbelief before ambling toward its three liberators. Sisay watched the thing come, her eyes filled with pity and a little terror. Had Gerrard not come for her, what would she look like now?

  Karn kicked in the next door. The creature within was a half-spider, with arms lopped off and extra sets of legs grafted on. It, too, could not speak. It, too, longed for freedom.

  On down the hall they went, one horror to another. The ranks of creatures swelled behind them. No longer did the three need to battle Rathi guards. The prisoners did it for them. An il-Vec overlord rushed down the stairs only to find himself awash in twisted, clawing, biting forms. The works of the Phyrexians turned upon them.

  At last, Karn pulverized a door that led to a remarkable prisoner, a young elf child, only just abducted. Surely, she was destined to become another of Yawgmoth’s ocular spies, whose very eyes and senses became those of the lord of Dominaria, but the companions had arrived in time to save her.

  Sisay swept in and took the child in her arms. She held her tight, as though embracing a simulacrum of her own captured self. “You’re all right. Everything will be all right.” She did not know if the child understood her, but the sounds of soothing are everywhere the same. “They can’t hurt you now. We’ll take you away.”

  Wide-eyed and staring, the child only clung to Sisay.

  The captain returned the desperate hug. “I don’t know if you know what I am saying, but if you do, I have to ask you—have you heard of another prisoner, a man named Gerrard? Have you heard where they are keeping him.”

  “Commander Gerrard?” she asked with perfect elocution.

  Sisay puffed. “Yes! Where is he?”

  The elf child’s expression changed not a whit. “He belongs to the evincar. The guard said so.”

  “Yes, but where is he?”

  The girl pointed obliquely up through the ceiling of her cell. “In the throne room.”

  Sisay hugged the child only the more tightly to hide her glad tears. “To the throne room,” she echoed.

  * * *

  —

  What a bloody lane they paved, Eladamri and Liin Sivi and Grizzlegom. Sword, toten-vec, battle axe, they turned bones to gravel and muscles to tar. Down that red-gold highway came sure-footed Metathran and surer-footed minotaurs, Keldons, and elves. Once a band of forty, they were now a band of twenty, but each of the fallen warriors had slain ten monsters before he or she had died. Each of the warriors who lived slew more. With this simple score, Eladamri had pierced as deeply into the Stronghold as he had with thousands.

  They charged. The corridor down which they ran had once been a great vein in the heart of the Stronghold, punctuated with shield doors meant to secure it against such invasions. Grizzlegom had kicked through the first and weakest. A Metathran had rewired the triggering mechanism of the second. Eladamri had slain and retrieved the magic key from the guards of the third. Whatever lay at the end of this corridor, behind three doors and two standing guards, would have to be vital to the invasion. A storehouse of weaponry. An incubation fangy horrors. A room of royal hostages. Whatever lay beyond would shortly be liberated by the coalition forces.

  The final set of doors slid soundlessly inward on huge hinges. Eladamri charged through and bolted to a halt.

  “Ah, yes, the map room.”

  It was a large spherical chamber with walls of irregular green slate. A floor circled the perimeter of the chamber and dropped away to a secondary tier that centered on a deep well. In that well floated a machine, with hawklike beaks above and below. All this was glimpsed in periphery, though. Eladamri’s eye was drawn straight to the center of the chamber, to the bright phantasm generated by the machine.

  It was a huge, gossamer globe beaming with an interior radiance. The sphere was composed of looping light and coruscating magic. Even a native of Rath could look upon that slowly spinning orb and know it was a world.

  Liin Sivi came next, and stared with mute wonder at the spectacle.

  It took Grizzlegom, arriving a moment later, to utter the name of that world.

  “Dominaria?”

  He shook his head. Though some of the landforms were correct—Yavimaya there in its green island fastness, and Keld just where it should be—other nations were missing—Talruum and Zhalfir and Shiv—and other nations were blotted out beneath black and spreading smudges. Benalia was one, and Koilos was another, and Hurloon….Grizzlegom’s eyes swam with visions of the burning capital, of the rows upon rows of minotaurs, including him, laid out before the mutation laboratory. The black smudges made sudden sense.

  “Dominaria.”

  As the globe slowly rotated, it showed more blackness, more obliteration. The creeping tide of darkness stretched across the surface of the world. There was more shadow than light. It seemed a gigantic beast wrapped Dominaria in a thousand tentacles.

  The others had arrived now, the whole bloody contingent. They spread out along the circular platform and stared at their world. Some wore expressions of awe. Others gritted their teeth and glared. All watched those black cancers growing across the face of Dominaria.

  Grizzlegom was first to act. He stepped back through the doorway, hauled up a mogg corpse in either hand, and dragged them back into the map room. He hurled the bodies out over the rail. They soared, streaming gore, and crashed limply into the machine that generated the globe. Instead of extinguishing the image, the bodies only darkened it. They seemed to extend the reach of the shadows.

  Nostrils flaring, Grizzlegom gaped accusingly at the corpses. With an almighty roar, he leaped from the platform and landed beside the mechanism. In the same motion, he brought his axe down. It struck a metal console and bit deep, bringing a shower of sparks. Grizzlegom hauled the blade forth, and it shrieked angrily against the casing.

  That shriek seemed to unite the group. One by one, beginning with Eladamri, they leaped to the lower level to destroy that hateful image. They tore apart the machine. Even as it came to pieces, the world spun heedless above, blackening with every turn.

  * * *

  —

  “Everything’s red! The whole damned floor of the cavern!”

  “Look at that—lava everywhere!”

  “The captain and the others—they won’t get out in time.”

  “We won’t get out in time!”

  Fearful, almost tearful cries clogged the speaking tubes. Every novice at every post clung to his or her call port and poured out frantic laments.

  “What good’s this gun against something that’s already red hot?”

  “What good’s any of this? I never signed on for this.”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Orim shouted. Weatherlight had done all she could to calm these children. Now it was up to their ad hoc captain. “Shut up, or I’ll come out there and throw you all into the lava!”

  From the guns, four nervous sets of eyes peered back at the bridge. There was silence for a cursedly brief time, and then one meek voice said, “You gotta come out here, Orim. You gotta see this. You’ll die.”

  Orim pursed her lips. The speaker was one of her young sickbay assistants. The boy was barely trustworthy with a tongue depressor. Now he wielded a radiance cannon.

  Orim sent a question through her fingers: Can you keep us circling?

  The answer was commonsense: If you crash, I crash. If you burn, I burn.

  Right, thought Orim. She stepped away from the ship’s wheel. Strid
ing to the amidships hatch, she hurled it open and descended. Sisay had done the same countless times, appearing on deck and answering questions simply by staring them away.

  Orim tried. It was hard to stare in that volcanic heat. Beyond the glass-encased bridge, the ship was awash in warmth. It bent the air in avid waves. It tugged at her braided and coin-coifed hair. Orim let out a snort to ward off a sneeze, and she tried to look masterful as she passed among the gunners.

  Her own assistant stood at Tahngarth’s gun on the forecastle and waved her over. “Look! Look! You’ll die. I’m telling you, you’ll die.”

  Orim ascended the steps three at a stride, crossed the forecastle, and reached the rail. She peered over it.

  She almost did die. The heat beyond the rail curled her eyelashes and burned her face. Lava filled the world below. In a bright bubbling disk, a seeming sun lay within the rocky ground. The Stronghold was only a black scar against that all-encompassing, all-destroying stuff. Soon, molten rock would consume the great structure and everything within the mountain. Soon, it would destroy Weatherlight and her crew.

  Orim drew her head back from the rail, and she felt the eyes of her assistant on her. She sensed the watchful attention of all her hopeless crew. Her words in the next moment would have to quell their fears, or risk outright mutiny. But what could she say? They were right. It was hopeless.

  She cleared her throat to speak. There was more phlegm in it than she had expected, due to the raging heat. She hawked loudly and, with no other choice, spit the glob over the rail. It flew out, a viscous wad, and plunged toward the sea of lava. Wide-eyed and still speechless, Orim turned toward her assistant.

  He didn’t see her, instead watching the spit plummet. A grin filled his face. When the thing was boiled away in midair, the young man hawked up his own mouthful of mucous and spewed it over the rail.