Invasion Cycle - Planeshift Part 13

Szat's firestorm dismantled her. Skin, skull, and brain- brain was the thing, whether with a millipede or a planeswalker. If she couldn't think, she couldn't step away from danger, couldn't rea.s.semble a new body. She was gone. Obliterated. An eternity over in an instant.

Szat stood gaping while another beast attacked. This was no Phyrexian but a more deadly mechanism-Taysir, onetime love of Kristina. He fell like a mountain on his fellow t.i.tan, hurling him to the sc.r.a.p heap and landing on top.

You careless b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You d.a.m.ned vicious monster!

Taysir was proving himself little better, furiously battering the t.i.tan engine of his foe. It was his mistake. Szat was not helpless like Kristina.

Flipping over, Szat hurled Taysir's t.i.tan off him. She killed herself. She got in my way.

Both t.i.tans were knocked back by a sudden presence between them-Urza Planeswalker in the largest, most powerful engine of all. Hold, both of you. Have you forgotten our mission?

Taysir's suit flashed in rage. Have you forgotten Kristina?

Szat sneered. Urza always forgets the dead.

You're implicated in this, Urza. You're the one who insisted on bringing this ... this ... murdering monster. Maybe you needed somebody else who would love this place, Taysir roared.

Urza stared from his pilot bulb with bald incomprehension. What are you talking about?

Oh, don't kid yourself, Urza. You love Phyrexia like a man loves a woman. You love her lines. You love her machines. You love the perfection of design through constant war. You don't want to blow up this place. You want to take it as your own!

Enough! Urza shouted. Enough! This was an accident. It shows how vulnerable we all are without our t.i.tan suits. Keep them on. In the meantime, I will prove to you what little love I have for this world. On! On to the stone-chargers.

The three had been so immersed in their argument that they hadn't realized the other five had fought on toward the munitions factory. Bo Levar and Commodore Guff led the charge.

Have you seen this one? Bo Levar asked as new defenders rose in a swarm about him. The mechanisms had the configuration of tadpoles, though instead of tails they had single lashing wings. Their main body consisted of gnashing teeth. Bo Levar easily grabbed the wing of the first creature and swung it in an arc before him. The t.i.tan engine's glove glowed with a blue radiance that proliferated out across the body of the defender. It seemed to draw the other defenders magnetically inward. They con-verged around the first beast. The chattering jaws chewed each other to shreds of metal. Twenty in one blow.

I'll be jiggered, said Commodore Guff in genuine amazement. Combining martial sciences with magical ones....

The wave of the future, Bo Levar said. You watch. Once this business is done, this kind of stuff will be huge.

Let me have a go, the commodore replied. He grappled a huge, spidery construct that rose in his path. Various colors of magic flashed from the t.i.tan and raced along the rodlike legs of the beast. The first spell managed to produce an odd odor, the second to cover the spider in rampant ivy, and the third to send it floating away toward the smoggy ceiling of the sphere. Ah, perfect, little happy to write about that one.

As Bo Levar and Commodore Guff blazed the trail forward, the other t.i.tans loped afterward, Urza last of all.

Taysir had sounded so like Barrin. The mage master had once joked that the only difference between Urza and Yawgmoth was a four-thousand-year head start. Such comments were not helpful, and Barrin had been full of them.

Taysir and Szat had been wrong. Urza didn't forget the dead. Every day since he'd killed his brother Mishra-it was a mercy killing, yes-Urza remembered him. He remembered Xantcha and Ratepe, who had been Mishra for him and had helped him reclaim his mind. He remembered the students and scholars of the first Tolaria and of New Tolaria. Most of all, though, he remembered Barrin. That was a loss Urza would never recover from. Barrin, Xantcha, Mishra-they had all become a single beloved other lost for all time. Urza remembered all too well.

His dark reverie was broken by a bright vision. He and his team had reached the ammunitions factory. Before them, row on glorious, gleaming row, stretched thousands of stone-charger sh.e.l.ls.

Beautiful.

Chapter 17.

The Twice Dead.

His own warriors had thought him insane. They had wondered how Agnate could ally himself with a lich lord and march a division down into the world of the dead. They hadn't seen the virtue in Dralnu's vile breast, hadn't heard the words of life in a mouth that smelled of death.

The doubters were proven wrong. In sunlight and cypress break, they saw the truth. The five hundred troops Agnate had led down among the dead had emerged again, accompanied by a hundredfold allies. Agnate's forces now marched with an undead army of fifty thousand. Dralnu had taken Thaddeus's portion. His ghouls and skeletons and zombies and revenants had replaced Thaddeus's warriors. At last, Agnate had a counterpart toward whom to drive in the deadly Metathran pincer. How right he had been. How perfect this felt, to fight so.

Reaping Phyrexians like gra.s.s, Agnate and his vanguard topped a low ridge. Beyond it opened a wide mudflat beside the sea. Phyrexians in their mult.i.tude crowded the spot. They had nowhere left to flee. Voda warriors tore apart any who sought escape in the water. It was a fitting trap for the arrogant beasts.

Agnate peered down the ridge. It swept in a long curve around the flat. On the opposite side, a mere mile distant, appeared Lich Lord Dralnu with his contingent. The timing could not have been more precise if it had been Thaddeus who stood there. It was time for the pincers to close. Agnate gave a sharp hand signal. As one his Metathran and the armies of the dead descended the ridge at a charge. They crashed into the mud-caked Phyrexians.

There was pure joy in this. Agnate's battle-axe batted away a bloodstock's raking claw. The Phyrexian centaur reeled back. Following through, Agnate brought the axe downward to sever the beast's forelimbs. The bloodstock fell before him but still clawed. Agnate's axe ended its struggles.

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-b.u.t.ted the remaining face. It collapsed like an egg. Agnate reared, his head flinging glistening-oil, but he could not break free. He b.u.t.ted 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 bloodl.u.s.t 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 breath 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 ankle-deep 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 creva.s.ses. 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 p.r.o.ngs 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.