The Fifth Dawn

by Cory Herndon

  “It’s him, Glissa!” Slobad hissed.

  Glissa brandished her makeshift scimitar. “What do you want, Malil? You’re in my way, and you don’t want to be, trust me.” She hoped the stolen leveler’s scythe blade looked menacing as she added, “I’m here for Memnarch.”

  The metal man’s response was unexpected as it was perplexing. He tossed his head back and laughed. The sound was tinny, and betrayed something that bordered on mania.

  “Oh, you’re ‘here for Memnarch,’ is it?” Malil sneered, and stepped a few feet into the lacuna toward Glissa and Slobad. “You are right. Just not the way you think.” Memnarch’s lieutenant raised his right arm with a clenched fist, and flicked his silver hand at the wrist. In less than a second, a blade that rivaled Glissa’s stolen weapon slid into place, extending from the metal man’s forearm. The quicksilver blade glowed faintly in the dim light of the lacuna.

  It seemed like ages since someone had challenged her to a fair fight, and Glissa was sick of battling armies, judges, and mindless machines. She twirled her weapon and grinned. “Well, why don’t you correct me, then?” With her empty hand she threw a subtle wave to Slobad, hoping he would get the message: Stand clear.

  Artificial being though he might have been, Malil was easily goaded. With a metallic roar, he charged, the blade that his right arm had become raised high.

  Glissa once again focused on the spark. Malil was as much an artifact as the levelers. He didn’t know what he was getting into. Glissa’s inner eye saw the spark, saw magic dancing around it in her heart, and willed destruction at Memnarch’s charging lackey.

  Nothing happened. Again.

  Malil’s sword arm whistled through the air at Glissa’s skull, and she was able to raise her own weapon in time to deflect most of the blow, though the metal man drew first blood when his blade clipped Glissa’s shoulder on its way past her head. The powerful strike threw Glissa off-balance, but she recovered quickly and danced back, tossing her blade back and forth in her hands, taunting her foe. She hadn’t wanted to destroy this one quickly, anyway. And it would be good practice for fighting her true enemy.

  Glissa waited for Malil to relax slightly then swung in with an uppercut that her enemy blocked easily. She slashed back with the not-quite-balanced ersatz scimitar. She could handle it well enough by instinct, but her specialty was the longsword.

  Malil’s unreal speed caught her off guard. The elf girl couldn’t believe how fast Memnarch’s servant was on his feet and with the blade. Malil moved in again, but Glissa caught his sword-arm with her curved blade, spun her arm to envelop the blade, then snapped it back in a disarm move. With an ordinary foe, she might have won then and there, but her attempt only snapped off that end of the quicksliver sword. The rest was still attached to Malil.

  “You are here for Memnarch,” Malil said as new quicksilver flowed into place in a heartbeat. “You are here for his reasons, and to suit his purposes. You are here for him. And so are you, goblin.”

  “Yeah, wanted to ask someone about that….” Slobad began.

  “I thought I was Daddy’s favorite,” Glissa said. “He doesn’t need the goblin.”

  Malil and Glissa’s duel continued for several minutes with neither gaining a clear advantage. Glissa tried to press the metal man to the lip of the tunnel, hoping to knock Malil off balance long enough for a fatal strike. But Malil turned her attack at the last second and drove Glissa back. Malil matched her strike for strike, parry for parry, and didn’t even seem to be breaking a sweat. Not that he would, Glissa supposed.

  “How long can you keep this up, elf girl?” Malil taunted as their blades locked and the pair grappled for advantage. “You will tire. I will not.”

  “You might be surprised,” Glissa said. “I get a lot of exercise.” She let loose a yell and swung the leveler weapon with all her might at the metal man’s abdomen. The blade slid through Malil easily, like a knife through a quicksilverfish, and came out the other side with a slurping sound.

  The slash hadn’t even left a mark on Malil. One second, he’d been solid, the next he’d been liquid, and it was as if she’d tried to slice the sea in half with an oar. The metal man’s chest swirled and solidified before her eyes, and her foe chuckled.

  “Oh, I enjoy surprises,” Malil said. “Did you like that one?”

  “Not so much,” Glissa replied, dodging Malil’s sudden lunge. How was she going to fight this creature?

  That, Glissa thought, was the problem. She was relying too much on this single blade, but she had other weapons: imagination, creativity, her own limbs…and, if she could concentrate for a few seconds, magic. Unfortunately, Malil wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to concentrate if he could help it.

  Okay then, the limbs. Glissa danced back out of Malil’s reach, blocking a strike only if she couldn’t dodge it. The metal man pressed what he thought was his advantage, and Glissa soon had to block as many thrusts and slashes as she dodged. She had to try something soon, she thought as the tip of Malil’s blade sliced neatly through her cheek. Glissa ignored the sting on the side of her face and made ready. The metal man was definitely close enough now.

  Glissa caught Malil off guard as he followed through with an especially ferocious strike, and brought a knee up into his groin. The metal man doubled over and staggered back, stunned, then dropped to all fours, coughing. Guess you’re not all metal, Glissa mused. She followed up with a boot to Malil’s face that knocked him onto his back.

  “Surprise,” Glissa said.

  On a good day, at full strength, she would have followed through and taken Malil’s head. But she wasn’t sure the blade would work any better on the artificial man’s head than it did on his ribs, and she was emotionally and physically exhausted. It was time to make a break for it. If they could get into the interior, they might have a chance. She realized now, though, that facing Memnarch might be suicidal. She was having enough trouble with the Guardian’s henchman.

  Glissa spared a quick glance at the spot she thought she’d left Slobad—the shape of the lacuna and lack of landmarks outside made it tricky to be sure she was looking at the right place—but the goblin was gone. With one eye on Malil, who was clutching his abdomen with one hand and struggling to get back to his feet, she scanned the inside of the lacuna, trying to find some trace of her goblin friend. Nothing.

  “Lose something?” Malil asked.

  “Where is he?”

  “I told you. He was here for Memnarch. Memnarch has taken him.”

  “No!” Glissa cried, and rushed the smug, grinning, mockery that had taken her last friend. The ferocity of her attack caught Malil by surprise, and he steadily gave up ground, backing slowly toward the end of the lacuna. Sparks flew as their blades clashed. Still Glissa pressed on, driven by fury. Malil reached the lip of the tunnel and teetered on the edge.

  With a yell, Glissa swung the heavy scythe-arm like a hammer, causing Malil to jerk sideways to avoid the blade. The elf girl’s leveler scimitar came down on Malil’s wrist, and she felt the blade connect with flesh and bone. Yes, definitely not all metal.

  The makeshift sword cut clean through her foe’s wrist. Malil’s sword-hand clanged against the floor, and the blade melted into a puddle of silver. Scarlet blood sprayed from the stump of Malil’s wrist, and the metal man gaped in shock. He obviously hadn’t expected this, yet he didn’t scream. Didn’t make a sound, in fact.

  “Well, what do you know,” Glissa said with a smirk. “Like father, like son.”

  Malil slowly clamped his remaining hand over the bleeding end of his right forearm, and squeezed. The flow of blood slowed to a trickle. The metal man winced.

  Glissa couldn’t ask for a better opening than that. She took three steps toward her stunned enemy and drew the scimitar back for a clean cut through Malil’s neck. The metal man simply looked up from his stump, smiled, and twitched his intact hand in an imperceptible movement. The elf girl heard a sound like a knife scraping a whetstone, and a sec
ond sword-length blade popped into existence, this one extending directly from the stump of Malil’s wrist.

  Unfortunately for Glissa, by the time the weapon had fully extended, the business end was sticking out of her lower back.

  DIVIDED

  Since he’d met Glissa, Slobad had been in danger on countless occasions. The goblin had been shot at, stabbed, cut, singed; gained and lost more friends than he wanted to think about; endured leonin threats and shamanic torture; found himself imprisoned by crazy elves and put on trial for a crime he hadn’t even seen, let alone committed; and was once briefly buried under a stump by a giant beetle that had mistaken Slobad for baby food.

  The goblin would have rather have gone through all of those experiences, one after another, all over again, than be where he was right now. He wriggled in the iron grip of three strong hands, each big enough to cover the goblin’s head. As if to confirm his assessment, a fourth hand clamped over his mouth, forcing him to take deep breaths through his pointed nose. Held fast, Slobad assessed his predicament as best he could.

  The goblin had expected some changes, but was stunned to see what had happened to the interior in the short time since the explosion that created the green lacuna. Things had changed, all right, but not for the better. The interior of Mirrodin had gotten noisy. That was the only word for it, Slobad decided. The clanking and clacking of millions of sets of silver legs reverberated weirdly in the atmosphere, scattered by the spires that grew like stalagmites toward Mother’s Heart—the seething mana core at the world’s center described in the holy Book of Krark. Everywhere Slobad looked, he saw movement, and spotted at least a dozen different varieties of constructs of all shapes and sizes. Millions of living machines climbed up and down the crystalline towers, filling every crack and crevice of the inner surface. It looked to Slobad for all the world like a bug’s nest turned inside out, except the smallest of these bugs was still big enough to swallow the average goblin’s head in one gulp.

  Most were built on the arachnoid model Slobad had grown intimately familiar with in the form of levelers, harvesters, and worse. But the variety and specificity he saw in the design of each one was fascinating. The goblin would have given a bag of fire tubes and might even have thrown in a toe for good measure if he could just get his hands on some tools, break into one of the bizarre creatures, and see how it worked.

  Or maybe not. Slobad got a good look at one chittering insectoid that dashed in along the edge of the lacuna in front of him, and saw it was not entirely metal. Patches on its back and legs showed where pink flesh had replaced cold metal. Just like Bosh, Slobad thought.

  The death of his golem friend had almost shaken Slobad’s faith in his own peculiar luck, which despite his oft-repeated claim to being cursed always seemed to come through. But Slobad had more immediate concerns than his faltering fortunes. He wasn’t in the clutches of a machine—something he might have been able to deal with—but a vedalken warrior. Hundreds of them ringed the edge of the mile-wide hole, standing with what felt to Slobad like palpable anticipation.

  There was something very different about the globe-headed villains. For one thing, they had gotten bigger—judging from the one that was holding him aloft in vise-like hands, most were at least fifteen feet tall.

  Their increase in size was no more bizarre than their change in appearance. The silvery glass “feesh-boals” the vedalken wore over their natural heads were no longer spheres, but had been replaced by fierce-looking translucent battle helmets topped by a fin-shaped crest. The helmets topped a full suit of armor similarly adorned with sharp fin-blades and unfamiliar runes. The familiar vedalken robes were gone.

  They also weren’t saying anything, which in his experience with the vedalken was downright inexplicable. The masters of Lumengrid loved the sounds of their own voices. Yet not one of these vedalken had said a word to him. They stood there, clutching wicked-looking hooked spears, breastplates glittering under Mother’s Heart.

  Were these a different kind of vedalken, some warrior caste he hadn’t seen before? Or were these the vedalken he knew, transformed by Memnarch?

  And where was Memnarch?

  Slobad heard a strange, garbled sound like a goblin maiden singing her wedding vows in a tar pit. The giant vedalken holding Slobad in a visegrip tilted the goblin’s head upward. Huh, so you’re reading minds now, too? the goblin mused.

  Of course. Now look, a cold voice sounded inside his skull. Slobad looked. And blinked. He’d been so caught up in the wild variety of machine life he’d missed the enormous, gray-black structure that towered over his head. The Panopticon had seen better days, and looked like it had been welded together by a goblin apprentice—and not a particularly talented one. From his vantage point below, Slobad could really only see the underside of the structure. Four enormous struts, each as tall as the lacuna was wide, supported a ring shape that might have been a platform, but for all the goblin could tell might just be the underside of a huge cylindrical tower. The gaping hole in the center of the ring lined up right over the green lacuna, which had given Slobad and Glissa an unobstructed view of the mana core from inside the tunnel.

  Well, not quite unobstructed. Half a mile over his head, the goblin saw a tiny diamond shape, improbably suspended in the exact center of the ring. No struts or lines supported it; it was just there, and almost impossible to make out against the light of Mother’s Heart.

  “Oh, there’s Memnarch,” Slobad muttered.

  Glissa’s eyes goggled in surprise as she stared incredulously at the blade that neatly skewered her through the gut. The pain hit, and her makeshift weapon clattered to the floor as she doubled over the blade, flailing at Malil’s twisted, bloody stump.

  The metal man slid the blade out of Glissa’s belly as easily as he had inserted it, and the sword disappeared into his wristbone. The elf girl dropped to her knees, coppery green blood pouring from her wound. It felt like he’d definitely hit an organ. She grasped vainly at Malil, but dizziness soon won out, and the elf girl fell over sideways.

  “Do not fear, elf,” Malil said calmly. “My master will not allow your death, but you really must stop breaking his playthings.” He picked up his severed hand, which lay inches from Glissa’s face. She struggled to keep drawing breath, and thrust a fist into her gut to staunch the bleeding as she watched the metal man.

  Malil pressed the severed end of his hand into his wrist and whisper a few strange phrases that reminded her of the lilting tongue she’d heard among the spires of Lumengrid. Then a bluish-green glow wrapped around his wrist like a bandage for a few seconds, and dissipated just as quickly. When the spell was done, Malil’s hand appeared as good as new.

  Glissa knew she was on the verge of passing out, and as soon as she lost enough blood, she would never wake up again. She dragged herself with one hand to Malil’s feet. She tried to raise a hand to grab his shin, but the metal man simply stepped back, depriving her of even that last defiant act.

  “She is fading, Orland,” Malil called over his shoulder. “Be a good minion and bandage her up, won’t you?”

  Glissa blinked, trying to stay awake. She pushed her fist hard into her gut, amplifying her pain but also her determination to be ready for this Orland when he came for her. She wasn’t going down without a fight, and she wasn’t going to be Memnarch’s tool. It would be better to die here than see the so-called “Guardian” take her spark and use it to spread his madness at will.

  Glissa gasped as Orland rose into view at the lip of the lacuna. First, she saw the toe of a black, shiny boot. Then the vedalken swung his bulk over the edge, not unlike a door on a hinge, and he stood towering in front of her. “Vision going fast,” she muttered. “No vedalken’s that big.”

  The only answer Glissa got was two vise-like hands that clamped around her shoulders. She couldn’t hold back an anguished scream as the giant vedalken jerked her to her feet. She felt warmth spread over her belly as her fist slipped from her open wound and blood began flowing fr
eely again.

  Orland didn’t say a word, but held Glissa firmly in his upper set of hands. She felt the vedalken’s second, lower set of palms press firmly against the entry and exit wounds. Without warning, something flat slithered around her abdomen, binding her wound but not so tightly that the pain made her pass out. She gazed down at her belly and saw wide, silvery cloth encasing her torso. A few spots of blood peppered the cloth, but the bandages seemed to have slowed considerably, if not stopped, the hemorrhaging. The cloth glowed with a faint blue corona.

  Glissa’s head rolled back, and she stared up at Orland. The helmet that encased the vedalken’s head looked more martial than before, and a lot bigger. Slobad would have been able to tuck himself completely inside one of the helmets with ease. As her head bobbed like a child’s toy, she mumbled, “Don’t you get dizzy up there?”

  The helmet cocked to one side.

  No.

  What the—? Unlike the voice that had taunted her while they were in the Tangle, this one was cold, mechanical, but without a hint of deception to it. Had the word come from the vedalken?

  Yes.

  You can hear my thoughts, Glissa projected, still fighting the haze in her brain that threatened to consume her.

  Obviously. With that, Orland released his grip on her shoulder, and Glissa dropped to the floor like a rag doll, sending new lances of pain jabbing through her gut. The towering vedalken was already heading back out of the lacuna and into the interior.

  “Better?” Malil asked innocuously, and kicked her in the side. Glissa moaned pitiably and rolled onto her stomach, hacking up clots of blood. She needed real medical attention soon, or she really was going to die. Now that she’d seen the giant vedalken, the prospect no longer seemed such a favorable option. What good would it be to stop Memnarch’s ascension through her own death, if it meant everyone on Mirrodin faced enslavement at the hands of magically mutated vedalken?