by Peter Archer
Ilcaster broke off his recitation from the book and looked up at his master. “So they did manage to get to Rath. And did they rescue Sisay?”
From beyond the window came the faint echo of cries, as if others had seen the destruction wrought by the lightning bolt. The white-haired librarian sighed.
“Bar the door, boy, so we won’t be disturbed!” he said. “I don’t feel like rushing about outside on a night such as this.”
Ilcaster lifted the solid wooden bar with some difficulty and slipped it into the large metal staples on the iron-studded doors. He stared at them for a moment, then turned abruptly to the librarian. “Well, what happened?”
The man looked at the boy with the first signs of tenderness. “Very well. As the ship entered Rath, the crew came upon a strange and violent world. Clouds stretched from the heavens to the earth in swirling columns of black and violet. Far below the very ground seemed to sway and flow below the ship, as her sails flapped in a raging storm.”
The Master fumbled for a moment through the pile of documents through which the boy had sorted, then finally plunged his hand into the middle and drew forth a slender volume, bound in black leather. On its cover was the faded title, The Book of Rath. The librarian ran his hand lovingly over the spine. “Here,” he remarked, “is the most complete account of Rath.” He held it out to the boy with both pride and trepidation. “Be careful now.”
Ilcaster took the book cautiously and looked somewhat suspiciously at the dense columns of writing. The librarian leaned over his shoulder, flipping expertly through the fragile pages.
“Ah, yes. Here.”
Ilcaster squinted at the heading on the page. “Flowstone.” He traced the faded letters with a slender finger as he read aloud.
“The entire realm of Rath is comprised of this artificial substance, an aggregation of cell-sized Phyrexian devices. These nano-machines collectively form a material that is malleable, ultra-tough, and responds to mental commands, usually given by the current Rathian governor. Phyrexia constructed a titantic mechanism to produce this substance in vast amounts. This factory created the vast mountain in which the Stronghold, seat of the evincar of Rath, is located. Waves of newly created flowstone are constantly spewed from the top of the peak and hurtle down the mountainside, creating enormous flowstone plains.”
The boy finished the passage and looked rather helplessly at his mentor, who sighed and took the book from him. “Flowstone,” he said severely, “is—or rather, was—produced on Rath by a factory located within Volrath’s stronghold.”
“But what did it mean, Master, about responding to mental commands?”
“Just what it said. The flowstone moved, flowing from one place to another, even engulfing unwary intruders, at the psionic orders of the evincars of Rath. That made it one of the most dangerous hazards with which Gerrard and Weatherlight had to contend.
“As the crew gazed over the side of the vessel, they saw the seacoast below gradually give way to forest. Trees clung to one another so closely that the ground was hidden. Starke told Gerrard that this was the very edge of the great Skyshroud, a vast canopy of trees that hid a swamp beneath. But, he warned the new commander of Weatherlight, the true dangers of Rath often came suddenly upon the unwary from those things not seen.
“As if to confirm his words, Tahngarth the minotaur, first mate of the ship, cried aloud in warning. And from out of the clouds above the ship, plunged a dark and menacing vessel. It was Predator, and on its bridge Weatherlight’s crew, if they looked closely, might have been able to see its captain: Greven il-Vec.”
Vhati il-Dal knew that he was about to die. The rough, sickly purple hands of his captain, Greven il-Vec, held Vhati’s coiled locks in a grip like a steel trap, and the first mate didn’t bother to struggle. He knew he was going to die, but that didn’t make the prospect any less terrifying. He tried to scream but only opened his quivering lips to his furious master’s face in a tormented rictus of desperation.
“Ambition, Vhati il-Dal,” Greven hissed at him, the evincar’s face so close to Vhati’s own that their breaths mingled even in the sharp warm wind of the skies of Rath, “is a meal that oft times bites back.”
“Damn you,” Vhati managed through his tight chest.
Greven laughed, and Vhati imagined that hideous sound ripping into his chest to freeze his exploding heart. “Damn me,” Greven growled through the shrieking hiss of his own laughter. “That’s a good one!”
Vhati felt his feet leave Predator’s deck, felt the frigid Phyrexian metal of the rail slide down his back. His master, his captain, his murderer was a huge man, twisted and distorted—a horrid parody of the human he had once been. Greven wore black Phyrexian armour, all graceful spikes and flowing metal that gave him the appearance of a monstrous crab. His bare arms were corded muscle and twisting veins of purple against pale flesh. The commander was drenched in the mingled blood of scores of mogg goblins and humans. A thin trail of red trickled from a corner of Greven’s small, tight-lipped mouth. The evincar’s face seemed grafted onto a steel-hard skull. His glaring eyes sloped in sharply to meet a flat nose.
The blood was beading on Greven’s face, the skin—if it could be called skin—shining whitely beneath the scarlet. The fingers that held Vhati’s hair were long, powerful, and tipped in pointed caps of the same black metal as his armor. Vhati wanted to scream, almost cried, but still he managed, as his leather clad rump slid over and off the rail, to say: “I die for my failure, Greven, not for my treachery.”
“The fall,” Greven told him, smiling as he always did when he was about to kill, “will give you time to think on your failure.”
Vhati had time for a scream and four last, gasping breaths as he fell through the roiling gray skies of Rath. Tumbling end over end he saw but couldn’t understand the bulking horned form clinging to Predator’s black keel. If he thought at all it was to wonder what Greven would do now that the fight with Weatherlight was over and his first mate had been tossed over like the morning’s chamber pots. The Legacy, the pieces of which they had sought, was safely stowed in Predator ‘s hold, along with Karn, the strange silver creature whom Greven’s goblins had captured in the course of the fight, and whom Greven had ordered hauled aboard with every appearance of glee. Now the commander’s ship would make for Volrath’s Stronghold, and no one would ever speak the name Vhati il-Dal again.
Vhati felt the wind whistle through his ears, and saw his long braids streaming by his face. Lightning flashed around him, and he screamed again and again, his cries lost in the sound of the storm. Then, against the dark background of Rath’s sky, he caught a glimpse of a figure of infinite grace and beauty: the fallen angel Selenia, wings outstretched. Her hands seemed to gesture toward him, and for a brief, eternal moment Vhati imagined he was saved. Then he realized her face was smiling, that she was mocking him, rejoicing in his downfall and impending death. Her wings beat, and she was gone.
He felt the top of the tree puncture leather then skin, and he knew it came out his back. Blood exploded before him in a red haze. Sliding down the penetrating branch hurt him the worst, but it was a pain that lasted only the space of a single grunt.
Vhati il-Dal was dead.
* * *
—
Greven didn’t bother watching his former second-in-command fall. One more death, one more tiny, hollow victory, and it was back to the task at hand.
“Bring us about,” he shouted into the confusion still winding down on Predator’s wide deck. He didn’t bother waiting for a response and didn’t look to see that his order was carried out. His crew knew how high they were. “Back to the Stronghold. We have a package to deliver.”
A package indeed, Greven mused. Most of the Legacy had been brought aboard and as the commander moved amidst a flurry of scurrying moggs to the stairs that would take him to Predator’s vaults, he smiled at Vhati’s obvious timing. The second
-in-command had waitied until Weatherlight’s exquisite booty had been brought aboard to begin his feeble grab for power.
Greven had been aboard the enemy vessel, crossing swords with its captain: Gerrard, whom they had been warned of and told to sieze the moment he entered Rath. Vhati, who had stayed behind to look after Predator—look after her, not sieze her, Greven thought angrily—had spun the mogg cannon around on its mount himself.
* * *
—
On board Weatherlight, Greven hacked and slashed at Gerrard, watching his opponent’s sword carefully as it parried the thrusts of his polearm. For a moment he got past the man’s guard, and Gerrard staggered back. Greven moved in for the kill. Around him he heard the war cries of the moggs and the shouts and screams of Weatherlight’s crew as they battled the invaders. Greven gave a shout of triumph. Victory was before him, and he closed his fist around it.
Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw Vhati shove the slavering mogg into the cannon with hands Greven thought must have trembled. Vhati was a coward, but he was an ambitious one. With shaking hands, he lit the cannon, and the mogg came at Greven with a speed no natural thing had ever achieved before the invention of this cruel and effective weapon. The mogg overshot Greven, and Vhati screamed a command to the other gunners aboard Predator, a command that Greven had not time to countermand.
The human’s sword rang out again on the Phyrexian steel shaft of Greven’s black polearm, less than an inch from the commander’s temple. Greven saw his triumph dissolve in a flurry of flashing steel, and now it was Gerrard who was laughing.
The human had fought well, Greven remembered. The sword shrieked off Greven’s polearm with a shower of blue-white sparks, and a mogg behind Greven screamed at the sound. The commander swung the pole around, letting it roll through his long fingers. Another mogg raider came out of Predator’s cannon, then another in the eye-blink it took for Greven to bring his blade to bear. There was a blast of heat and that lovely sound from the weapon that had first brought to heel. Vhati was using everything Predator had, and that was a lot. Weatherlight’s deck shook again from a mogg cannon barrage, and for the first time Gerrard, the stupid, courageous human, faltered. Greven’s night-black blade traced a razor line across Gerrard’s pink, sweating face, and the human let out a sharp hiss.
Greven’s polearm spun around again, and Gerrard took a step backward, his sword coming to the ready, to defend or attack as openings presented themselves. None did.
Neither Greven nor his enemy had time or opportunity to strike again before a mogg goblin fired from Vhati’s own cannon ripped one of Weatherlight’s fragile stabilizers and the ship slumped into a sharp starboard list. Greven held his feet in a wide stance, and Weatherlight began to spin. It was going down by the bow. Crewmen—silly, screaming humans in shirts the color of their own spilling blood—staggered across the deck like autumn leaves before a storm. Some of Greven’s moggs continued to grapple with the humans and were slain.
Now two of Weatherlight’s crew members lost their footing. Together with one of the moggs, they toppled over the narrow railing that ran around the ship’s decks. Their screams faded, as they fell toward the Skyshroud forest far below.
Gerrard’s foot slipped. He’d already backed away from Greven who had slid a bit himself on the deck, now awash in human and mogg blood. The human put a hand up to his slashed face, trailing tendrils of hot blood into the whipping wind. “Too high, Commander,” Gerrard snarled. “You won’t kill me today after all.”
Gerrard came at Greven then, all at once, his blade raised high and his face twisted in anger. Greven growled, bringing his polearm up across his chest to meet the human’s downward arching blade. The deck bounced from another mogg cannon barrage and Gerrard, his face a comical mask of surprise, went over the side.
The moment came and went so quickly that Greven’s shock, delight, and disappointment at being deprived of his foe manifested as an absurd squeal. He advanced in three quick strides down the listing deck and clutched the rail as he stared over it, searching for the falling body. Blood from Gerrard’s wound streamed from the blade of Greven’s polearm to splatter against Greven’s face, and the commander grinned at the iron taste of it.
He pulled himself back to the present. There was no time to savor the moment; Volrath would want to know as soon as possible of the death of Gerrard and the capture of the Legacy. Greven shouted the order to withdraw and turned back for Predator.
His spine tingled then blazed to life. Greven let out a grunt. Volrath was displeased. The spine that Volrath had grafted into Greven’s back was an alien, torturous thing. It couldn’t move Greven, but it could nudge him with pain. It could hurt him, punish him, and most of all remind him. Captain and master he was, but only at the whim of Volrath.
Greven, accompanied by those mogg raiders who survived, poised on the rail, balanced above the void. Then he leapt. As he did so, he felt Weatherlight fall away beneath him. His hands reached out for his own ship, scrabbled vainly for a moment, then found something to grasp, to help him haul himself aboard Predator. A few of the moggs were not so lucky, and he heard their shrieks die out of earshot below. Greven told himself that when he’d come aboard his enemy’s vessel, he’d had only a bit less trouble.
* * *
—
The difference between tactics and cowardice is decided by the victor. If he’d lost the Legacy and failed to kill Gerrard, Greven’s following a horde of slavering, rampaging, inept little moggs onto Weatherlight’s deck would have been described as cowardice. Instead, Greven told himself, the moggs had been there to soften the human defenders and cut a wedge into Weatherlight’s desperate, fearful crew, a wedge that Greven could walk through, straight to Gerrard.
The tactic worked almost according to plan. The wedge was thinner than Greven had wanted, and he found himself having to push many of his goblins back into the fray. A human’s spear came nearly close enough to take the commander’s nose off, but for his superior reflexes. Greven had to trip the mogg to his left to get his polearm up in time to kill the not-lucky-enough human. Hitting the deck on its rump led to a slightly faster death for the mogg he’d tripped. The human who beheaded the mogg couldn’t get his battle-axe free of the deck planks in time to deflect the three simultaneous blows from mogg swords that ripped him to shreds.
Mogg goblins, by anyone’s estimation, were pathetic creatures at best, monsters at worst. Only the tallest of them were eye-level with Greven’s chest, but they were solidly constructed beasts. Green skin was stretched tight over their rippling muscles. They wore no clothes—probably couldn’t work a button or clasp to save their lives—or armor, but all of them were armed. Uncharacteristically delicate picks set atop black metal poles were favorite weapons, as were the wide, curved cutlasses or simple short, straight swords. Their heads were dominated by huge, red, saliva-soaked mouths lined with rows of teeth meant for rending flesh from bone. To say that a mogg goblin has a sloping forehead is an understatement, thought Greven dryly. A ridge of bone capped their neckless heads. Greven had always wondered what that bone was meant to protect until he saw a mogg goblin kill a mountain goat by butting it head to head.
The moggs had ears more like an elephant’s than anything else’s, and they could hear as well as they could fight. Greven had so many at his disposal he’d lost count of them weeks ago. Volrath’s stronghold held no limit of them. They bred, or were produced, like maggots.
* * *
—
From his position in the center of the fray Greven saw waves of howling moggs mobbing, overtaking Weatherlight. The smaller ship was awash in goblins faster than Greven had dared hope, but the humans were fighting back. He could see the moggs now flooding into Weatherlight’s hold like water draining. The smell of the moggs—sweat, anger, fear, and urine—was as nauseating as it was exhilirating.
Greven killed only a few humans in the next fe
w moments and shouted fewer orders. The moggs had made it to the holds and were now starting to emerge, beaten, bloody, some even missing an arm, an eye, or an ear. Two of them emerged clutching a stick with a tangle of wire at one end. The Null Rod. Greven allowed himself a smile to accompany the grudgingly appreciative tingle in his alien spine.
“To Predator with it,” he screamed over the din of battle. The order was unnecessary. The goblins knew what to do and were too stupid to change theirr minds.
Just then Greven caught sight of Gerrard’s sweating, angry face and spared only a glance at the mogg who emerged from Weatherlight’s hold, bearing a small sphere shining like sunlight in a dark place. The mogg carried the delicate artifact in its right arm and its severed left arm in its teeth. Greven advanced on Gerrard, smiling.
The human captain cut down two moggs, but soon found himself hard pressed by three more; now Greven was only a few paces from his enemy. Something wet, hot, and soft hit him across the side of the head and nearly caused him to misstep. It was a dead mogg, its head crushed. A sailor wielding a cutlass had cut down the goblin and flung it through the air.
Instinctively protecting his flank, Greven looked toward the source of this grim projectile. The sailor moved away, slashing at a crowd of attacking creatures, and Greven could easily see the surreal form of the silver golem Karn towering over a cloud of moggs. It almost appeared to Greven that the golem was intentionally allowing itself to be overwhelmed by dozens of fear-soaked goblins. One more part of the Legacy to be added to Predator’s haul.
Greven didn’t have time to rejoice, even if he would have considered such behavior. Gerrard was now free of his moggs, who had begun to part to allow their captain his prize. The captain of Weatherlight advanced on Greven, his sword at the ready and his fear pushed back enough to be dangerous. Gerrard was only angry now, Greven could see it. The human knew he was losing, but he must have know all along that he would. Gerrard must have known that the moment Weatherlight appeared in Rath, the second that its presence was detected. Predator had come at Weatherlight like a hawk—from above.
