Agnate stared down at the split head of the thing. He had delivered Thaddeus's mercy blow the same way and for the same reason. The work of vat priests was irreversible and unbearable. Agnate's axe was not a destroyer but a liberator.
That was the joy of this battle. It was not war but salvation. He was not slaying souls but freeing them. When he and Dralnu were done this day, even the mud would be clean.
Such are the fleeting fancies of warriors between axe blows.
Agnate's weapon swung toward a Phyrexian crab. On a tripod of bladelike legs, the mechanism had only one vulnerable spot- a trio of fleshy heads grafted to its back. The heads were fused in back, three sets of eyes staring in three separate directions. Agnate's axe fell. It bisected two of the heads, but the third lived. One of the thing's claws flung back the axe. Another grabbed Agnate's free hand. The last gripped his weapon arm, dragging him toward pelvic scythes.
Agnate had one option. Instead of struggling to break free, he hurled himself inward and head-butted the remaining face. It collapsed like an egg. Agnate reared, his head flinging glistening-oil, but he could not break free. He butted the creature again. This time, something gray mixed with the gold, and the creature slumped.
Agnate escaped. He wiped oil back along his pate.
To either side, Metathran troops formed a blue wave across the mudflats. Where their tide rolled, monsters fell. In muddy graves and thrashing seas, Phyrexians lay dead.
Agnate's axe sang above the heads of his foes. Here it clove the skull-shield of a scuta. There it chopped through the waist of a Phyrexian trooper. It bashed back claws and bashed in teeth. It liberated scores of souls from the Phyrexian prisons they called their bodies.
Then blade met blade. Agnate's axe rebounded. A Phyrexian slasher advanced to kill him. He couldn't do likewise. There were no soft spots on the artifact engine. It was all razor edges. Three knifelike legs supported a body that bristled with whirling steel.
Agnate backed away, swinging. His weapon only clanged on the foremost scythe. The machine scuttled toward him. Agnate swept his axe downward but nearly tripped over a dead body. The axe bit deep in the mud and was mired. He yanked on it. The machine leaped at him. Agnate released the weapon and retreated beyond the corpse.
Reaching down, he lifted the body he had stumbled over-a Phyrexian trooper. Hoisting it overhead, Agnate hurled it down on the slasher. Its main blade impaled the corpse, while side blades shredded the body. The Phyrexian's weight shoved the slasher's legs into the mud. Hefting another corpse, Agnate flung it down atop the machine. Deeper the thing went. Two more bodies, and the slasher was hopelessly stuck.
He had to laugh.
Striding past the machine, Agnate worked his axe free from the mud. The battle raged ahead of him. Only a narrow wedge of monsters remained between the closing halves of the army. Eager to deal the final blows, the Metathran commander leaped back into battle.
He reached the front lines at a run, axe lifted high. It came down with a profound stroke that entered the crown of a bloodstock's head and exited its belly. The cloven monster fell before him as if in a deep bow. Agnate's axe decapitated a monster beyond-a ghoul with dripping sores across its flesh. Like a man hewing wood, Agnate swung again, slaying a zombie in rotten rags. He raised his blade and began another attack, but something stayed his hand.
Thaddeus. No, not Thaddeus-Lich Lord Dralnu. The necromancer gripped Agnate's forearm in an implacably powerful claw. His mouth opened, and words that smelled faintly of rot emerged.
"Hold, Agnate. You do not slay Phyrexians but your own troops. The foes are gone. The day is won."
Beneath a brow that streamed sweat, Agnate blinked. "What?" "The day is won," said the lich lord simply. Agnate lowered his axe and took a deep breath. He looked at the zombie and ghoul he had destroyed. "I did not realize-"
"War has its casualties. I have lost ten thousand in this fight, and you perhaps five thousand."
"That many?" Agnate wondered aloud. He glanced back at the battlefield. Most of the corpses there were Phyrexian, but there were many Metathran among them. The thought grieved Agnate. The bloodlust of battle was draining from him. "We've slain many Phyrexians today. I would guess thirty to forty thousand. The five and ten thousand that we lost died valiantly."
"Oh, your troops are not lost, my friend," Lich Lord Dralnu said. A strange smile showed on his face. "Not while we are allies. I will merely raise them to fight again.
They are perhaps lost to you, but they are gained by me. That way, each of us has lost only five thousand."
Agnate nodded, feeling vaguely unsettled. "Will you raise also these?" He pointed to the zombie and ghoul. "And your other slain troops?"
"No. The twice dead can never rise again."
* * * * *
Bone fires burned high along the mudflats that night.
Fatigued Metathran and indefatigable undead had worked side by side to drag the corpses into funereal pyres-nine for the Phyrexians and five for undead. The latter had been laid out ceremonially on wood soaked in glistening-oil. The former had been tossed in heaps on the mud. Even now, the monsters' bodies burned with alacrity. Fires melted the metals within them. Hearts sizzled and burst in sudden gushes of oil that made flames leap and pop. The undead gave their bodies to the wind more gradually. Lying decorously on their pyres, they surrendered to flame. It licked away their hair and skin and muscle down to bone.
Not so the Metathran dead. On litters fashioned from nearby trees, they rode toward Vhelnish. Lich Lord Dralnu went with them, eager to restore them to life.
Agnate wished the lich lord had remained. He peered out the flap of his command tent.
The ocean was steel-blue beneath a sky veiled in sunset. The tide had crept slowly in across the mudflats. It had slid a mirror of water beneath the burning pyres. Pillars of fire stood on the waters and sent their reflected blaze down in them. It was a beautiful, feral scene, the dead giving light and heat to the living.
Agnate peered out along the ridge where his troops camped. Their fires were pale imitations of the pyres, flickering like lightning bugs. In the woods beyond, undead stood guard. Ever vigilant, ever faithful, those ancient warriors would keep Agnate's troops safe tonight.
Still, he felt uneasy. Withdrawing from the tent flaps, he sat on a camp chair. It was time to shuck the weary armor of the day. Agnate drew the boots from his feet and the shin guards from his legs. He removed his breastplate and the sweat-soaked tunic beneath. Everything itched. That was the cost of hard-fought battle in good armor. The salt water would cleanse his skin. It would sterilize his wounds.
Stripping bare, Agnate emerged from his tent. He strode down the embankment and onto the mudflats. Water splashed about his ankles. It stung his feet, but the sensation was warm and good. He strode out among the still-burning pyres. Their radiance bathed his skin in heat and light. Through the flames, he glimpsed Phyrexian skulls. Eyes of fire flickered in their sockets. Agnate nodded to them. He'd grown comfortable among the dead.
Always before, death had been inviolable. Lich Lord Dralnu had changed all that. Warriors brought death, and lich lords brought new life. The walls of eternity were breached, and Agnate and Dralnu marched through.
The Metathran commander strode out beyond the pillars of fire, toward the dark and deep waters beyond. No longer did the water sting. Now it welcomed him. Sand replaced mud beneath Agnate's feet. It sloped quickly away. He descended the bank. Water rose to his shoulders. It slid up his neck, across his bald scalp, into his pores. It closed over him.
The roar of fire was gone, the camp sounds, the night noises of the jungle… A numb silence settled over Agnate. He felt only the nudge of waves as they dragged over him.
This must be what it is like to be dead, truly dead- dead for the second time, as Dralnu had said. Numb silence. Darkness. Nothing. It would be welcome after all the striving. It was a mercy that even Dralnu could not reach past the second death.
All too soon, the bre
ath in Agnate's chest grew hot. It ached to be expelled. His lungs pleaded to breathe in. Life was insistent, impatient. Agnate turned reluctantly back toward the shore. He walked upward. His head broke the surface. He breathed. Water rolled from his ears, taking the placid silence with it. Angry flames and muttering men and nocturnal cries intruded on his reverie. It was not his time to die. Not yet.
The steps were few between total immersion and ankledeep water. The dead blazed to every side. Fire dried Agnate's skin. Salt left fine lines of grit across his muscles. Every cell seemed to ache. It felt like Agnate's own flesh burned. Had he been stung by jellyfish while he waded?
Spreading his arms out, Agnate peered down at his body. Only then did he see the dark spots on his legs. They began at his knees and thickened as they descended his calves. Lifting one foot from the water, he saw that the blemishes covered his feet. Mud?
Agnate reached down with his thumb and rubbed a large black spot on his ankle. The darkness bunched up before his thumbnail and tumbled away, as if it had been mud, but it left a deep divot in his flesh.
It was his flesh, turning to rot.
Agnate knew every ailment that could afflict a soldier. This was different. This was no simple gangrene, eating away dead flesh. This was a disease that ate away healthy tissue.
Amputation. It was the only solution. He could do without his lower legs. He could even rig stilts to let him run and fight. It would save the rest of his body.
Except that, when he looked closer in the firelight, he saw smaller spots had spread up his thighs, and pinpoints of corruption rose even to his ribs.
The walls of death were not meant to keep the living out but to keep the dead in. Soon, all too soon, Agnate would be among the dead.
Chapter 18
Twilight Falls
The Necropolis blazed, a second sun beneath the first. Its light erased the basalt cliffs on which it sat and fused the citadel with the sky. From horizon to horizon, the heavens were the color of lightning. Nothing impure could remain in them.
Everything impure covered the glacier below. They were all the same-living Keldons and dead Keldons, Skyshroud elves and Steel Leaf elves, doyen and doyenne and Phyrexian-all killers. Blood and oil gushed across dazzling ice. Bodies plunged into mile-deep crevasses. Keldon warlords battled Keldon legends. Phyrexians slew elves. All fought in the blind fury of the end of times. Into the sea of death sailed a long ship with full-bellied main. Keldons and elves swept aside gratefully as the warcraft roared up in their midst. The ship surged on into Phyrexians. Prow spikes impaled the bugs and their undead allies. They writhed, struggling to pull themselves free.
Other monsters clawed the gunwales. The first were dragged beneath its skating keel. Their severed bodies clung on and became footholds for the next, and they for the next, until at last the great ship was swarmed with beasts. It ground to a halt. Phyrexians and undead climbed. They reached the rails only to have colos on deck ram them. Phyrexian heads cracked. Their bodies slumped but were borne upward as shields for the next killers. The monsters gained the deck.
There they met even more ferocious resistance.
Eladamri brought his sword down in a moaning, overhand blow. It caught a snake-headed beast in one eye. The cut opened that orb and the socket that bore it, the nasal structures beneath, the throat, chest, and all three of the serpent's hearts.
The tip of the sword cleared the dying form only moments before Eladamri rammed the blade in a vicious thrust into the belly of another monster. He felt the slimy cascade of innards as he turned to kill again. In a powerful lateral blow, Eladamri's sword sheared through the shoulders of a Phyrexian trooper and lopped off the monster's head. A shadow at his back brought him whirling around but too late.
A bloodstock reached with four arms-two mechanical and two biological-to grab Eladamri at neck and shoulders. The grip was unbreakable. His arms were pinned to his side. His throat was squeezed shut. As blackness shaded his vision, Eladamri felt his feet lift from the planks. The bloodstock hoisted him high to dash him against the deck. A brutal gleam showed in the monster's eyes.
It sprouted a metal crest between its eyes-not a crest, but a blade. Eladamri knew that blade-the flying cleaver of Liin Sivi's toten-vec. Just beyond the bloodstock, she wore a brutal expression of her own. Never before had Eladamri been so happy to glimpse his comrade. She yanked the chain of her toten-vec, chucking the blade free. The Phyrexian fell, with Eladamri atop it. He struggled from the double embrace and stood.
Liin Sivi gave him a moment to breathe. She staved off the foes, fighting in a whir of steel. Her toten-vec leaped from her hand and struck with the speed of a falcon. It was not so much battle but dance. Liin Sivi's natural beauty was only augmented in a fight.
On Eladamri's other side, young Warlord Astor battled alongside Doyen Olvresk. The two warriors fought as one. Their scythe and axe gleamed in a tandem attack, entering either side of a trooper's rib cage and meeting at the creature's heart.
Beyond them, most furious of all, fought Doyenne Tajamin. No blade for her, but her ancestral cudgel. It glowed with the preternatural light of the sky. Its runes bled fire. The head of the club struck the head of a Phyrexian and opened it. Oil streamed from the cudgel. The club's metal prongs rammed into the teeth of another Phyrexian. It bit her with bleeding gums, but she staved its head, and the beast went down in a mess.
Another foe charged her. She struck it between the eyes. This was no Phyrexian monster. This was one of the Keldon dead. The moment she hit it, she knew. The moment metal smashed dead flesh, the cudgel itself knew.
It was an abomination that the Twilight Cudgel should slay a Keldon legend. It meant that the bearer had turned traitor against her own people, or worse, that the dead had turned on the living. It meant life was death, evil was good, and Twilight was blinding bright.
The runes of the cudgel flared brilliantly. They projected their figures out on the black mountains. The ancient truths of Twilight shone in contradiction to the battle on the ice below. The cudgel moaned. Its complaint grew louder. It sang. It roared like warriors in full charge- the shriek of outrage.
Metal shuddered in Doyenne Tajamin's grip. Sound turned to heat. Fire formed a corona around the cudgel's head. Flames blistered the doyenne's hand and face.
She was no stranger to pain nor to death. She could have borne death by fire, the most honorable for a Keldon, but not death by falsehood. To think the ancient prophecies of Twilight were lies was enough to slay the Keeper of the Book of Keld. If she held onto that false and furious artifact a moment more, it would destroy her and everyone on the ship.
With a despairing shout, Doyenne Tajamin hurled the cudgel out before the bow. Like a shooting star, it soared through quicksilver heavens. Its fire lashed Phyrexian heads. The cudgel came to ground with the weight and force of an asteroid.
Ice shattered. The glacier shuddered. Razor shards blasted up in concentric rings. Nearby beasts were torn to shreds. A huge crater formed. In its center, the fiery cudgel sank through ice. Steam and water geysered upward. The deeper the cudgel sank, the higher and more ferocious the geyser became. Already, boiling water made a hundred-foot column.
The crater widened. Phyrexians fell into it. They slipped down the icy slope and into a boiling lake. Currents surged. Thrashing, the monsters were dragged below only to rise again, dead, in the geyser.
"What is happening?" Eladamri shouted above the hiss of water and the roar of retreating soldiers. No one fought now- not Phyrexian, not Keldon, not elf. All fled back from the widening crater. Instead of climbing aboard the long ship, Phyrexians and their allies streamed away from it. "What did you do?"
"Prove it!" Doyenne Tajamin barked in sudden realization.
"Prove what?" asked Eladamri, uncertain.
"That is what the cudgel is doing. It is accepting the most ancient challenge of the Keldon people. It is proving the prophecies it bears."
Staring out past the bow, Eladamri said, "What?"
"The cudgel is turning the false Twilight into true Twilight."
The glacier leaped. It was as though a gargantuan creature beneath the ice shoved upward. The geyser spewed higher. Its superheated waters rose to the height of the Necropolis. Then, as though the world itself bled, the watery column turned from white to brilliant red. Crimson stuff spattered across the ice, eating it away.
"Lava!" Eladamri realized.
The cudgel had sunk right down through the glacier, even through the rock beneath, to awaken the fire of the world. It had ignited a volcano. The searing lava that jetted from the crater was only the smallest portion of the stuff that gushed out below. In moments, the ice would lose its integrity. They all would plunge into the volcano.
The true battle of Twilight had begun-not a fight between Keldons and Phyrexians, but a battle of ice and fire.
Sheathing his blade, Eladamri strode toward Warlord Astor. "Turn the ship around! Get us out of here!"
The young warlord stared fore, a strange light in his eyes. "This is Twilight. This is our battle-"
"It will be your grave, a mass grave, unless you turn this ship around!"
Astor did not seem to hear. He spoke in a faraway voice. " 'All the warriors of Keld will fight in the Twilight, but only the true warriors of Keld will survive.' "
Growling, Eladamri turned toward Doyen Olvresk. He too stared with the blindness of belief. Doyenne Tajamin and every other Keldon wore the same beatific expression. Even the dead Keldons watched in awe. It was as though they hoped to be consumed by fire.
"Sivi!" called Eladamri.
She tapped his shoulder. He spun, startled. Always she knew what he was thinking.
"Gather up the elves who live. I'll bring our colos. We've got to get our people out of here," Eladamri said.
"Yes," Liin Sivi said simply as she headed out across the deck toward a pair of elves.
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