Apocalypse Page 3

  Karn had been right. The place was in shambles. The joists overhead ran with condensed steam. Droplets plunged down onto a shattered engine. Fissures snaked across the fuselage. Seven of the twelve mana batteries seeped green superfluids onto the planks. Power conduits smoked. Manifolds crackled with heat stress. The Skyshaper was half crushed by the impact, and the Juju Bubble was as opaque as a cataracted eye.

  Beside it all stood Karn, both engineer and engine component. He seemed somehow deflated, standing there in the presence of the ruined engine. He clutched the Thran Tome as though it were a shield.

  Captain Sisay led her crew into the engine room. She stopped and stared at the wreck.

  Sisay let out a groan. She laid her hands on the ragged mechanism. It seemed Weatherlight’s pain traveled up her body. Her head drooped, and her knees buckled.

  “What good is the Legacy when Weatherlight is in pieces?”

  Karn’s voice was solemn and low. “In pieces, yes—Weatherlight, and all of us. It had to be broken down to be rebuilt into something new. My memories have been transforming me.” He lifted the Thran Tome. “Here are the memories of Weatherlight. Let them transform her.” He reverently laid the Thran Tome atop its manifold. “If Weatherlight’s engine yet lives, she will remember and be transformed.”

  Light awoke along the edges of the book. Every page beamed. A fiery glow licked up across the leather cover. From orange to blue, the radiance intensified. Soon, the Thran Tome was fully engulfed. Seeking arms of energy ran from the book onto the engine manifold. Where the fire went, cracks fused. Dents smoothed. Metal thickened. Glass sealed. In mere moments, the dancing power had spread to envelop the whole engine.

  The fire twisted metal into new configurations. It forged new connections. It widened the firebox and deepened the mana batteries and reshaped the whole mechanism.

  The crew could only stand back and gape.

  Sisay muttered, “What is it doing?”

  “Transforming,” Karn said. “It is becoming what it must become.”

  A voice came from the wooden walls all around—the voice of Multani. “I will do the same with the hull—infuse it with the memories of the ages. I will transform it into what it must become.”

  “Soon, Weatherlight will attain her final configuration,” Karn said.

  Sisay nodded, eyes wide. “But still, she is only a tool. Still, we must decide what to do with her.”

  “Yes,” Karn said. “We must transform as well.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Defenders of Dominaria

  “They must not reach Weatherlight!” shouted Eladamri from the back of his greater Kavu.

  Just ahead of the elf commander, a flood of Phyrexians crested a gnarl of stone and descended toward the wrecked ship. Eladamri dug his heels into the giant lizard’s sides. It galloped on six gargantuan limbs across curled embankments of lava. Its three-toed hooves cracked rock as if it were dried mud. It hurled up a glittering mineral cloud, a cloud redoubled by the steeds of Liin Sivi and minotaur Commander Grizzlegom.

  Eladamri lifted his sword. “Charge!” The command was needless. The coalition forces—minotaur and Metathran, elf and Keldon, Benalish and Kavu—already thundered across the mountain. Still, the shout felt good in Eladamri’s teeth.

  “Charge!” Liin Sivi cried, whirling her deadly toten-vec overhead. The chain hummed in the furious wind. The axelike head sang its own battle song. The Vec woman had grown up ever in the shadow of Rathi and Phyrexian overlords, and now to ride against them in battle felt magnificent. She grinned, a look that matched the snaggle-toothed mien of her Kavu.

  “Charge!” bellowed Grizzlegom. The minotaur commander leaned beside the lizard’s head and clutched his axe near its ear.

  These Kavu had joined the coalition armies only a scant hour before. At first, they had seemed monstrous horrors—until they had demonstrated their appetite for Phyrexian flesh. With darting tongues and teeth like palisades, they had made a quick meal of the forces they encountered. In the midst of battle, Liin Sivi had accidentally befriended one beast by throwing a toten-vec strike that sent a severed Phyrexian head into a Kavu mouth. The lizard beast had rubbed up against her, and she had climbed on its back. Eladamri, Grizzlegom, and a hundred-some others had done likewise. On foot, this coalition army had been formidable. Aback Kavu, they were unstoppable.

  In the vanguard, Eladamri, Liin Sivi, and Grizzlegom drove their steeds into a sea of Phyrexians.

  The slope was filled with scuta, beasts that seemed giant horseshoe crabs with legs that dragged prey beneath their shields. There were also bloodstocks, humanoids made into centaurs by mechanical forelegs and a second set of arms. The Phyrexian shock troops were the most human of all—their legs metallic talons, their ribs subcutaneous breastplates, their shoulders jagged blades, and their faces little more than skulls covered in sacks of skin.

  To Kavu, all were merely crunchy snacks.

  Tongues lashed from the lizards, smacked upon shields and skulls, and drew creatures into scissoring jaws. Kavu teeth punctured the thickest Phyrexian armor. Huge chunks of bugflesh tumbled down the beasts’ gullets. Their hooves slew even more. At full gallop, Kavu crushed cringing Phyrexians. Glistening oil drooled from their mouths and painted their legs.

  Grizzlegom’s own appetite had been whetted. He leaped from his steed and landed in the midst of a Phyrexian throng. His hooves made the first kills—a pair of shock troopers whose spiny shoulders were vacated of heads. The dashed-out skulls pitched forward, and Grizzlegom rode them down, hurling the spiked bodies into two more Phyrexians. Those four beasts collapsed, forming a platform of flesh upon which Grizzlegom could launch his attack. His axe flew. It severed three heads from bloodstock necks and rose golden to cleave the skull shield of a scuta.

  Already, his sovereign territory had doubled in size—eight Phyrexians beneath his feet, and more with each second. Grizzlegom’s white-furred shoulders worked like steel bands. He was proud of those shoulders and of his twisted horns, signs that marked him as a hero in the tradition of Tahngarth. Who but Tahngarth or Grizzlegom could have felt so at home in the bloody midst of this horde? Already, he stood on twelve Phyrexian corpses.

  From the back of her mount, Liin Sivi did just as well. Her toten-vec was as long, fast, and deadly as a Kavu tongue. She chucked it free from her latest victim, a goat-headed Phyrexian who now had a deep part between his horns. As he fell, Liin Sivi let out a ululating cry and grasped her weapon. She let fly again. Chain paid out perfectly through the sulfuric air. The oily blade flung golden beads as it hurled across the emptiness and buried itself in a shock trooper’s breast. Just between the ribs the blade passed, slicing the creature to the heart. Always Liin Sivi had been a deadly creature, reared in a crucible of war. Only in these last weeks, in these last days, had she become a creature whose own heart had been pierced.

  Eladamri watched her. The two of them had fought side by side in the Stronghold on Rath. Together, they had battled at Llanowar and Koilos, and on and beneath the Necropolis Glacier. Somewhere in the cold black heart of that ice sheet, the final barrier had fallen between them. They were one now. They completed each other as no Phyrexian was ever compleated.

  While Liin Sivi’s toten-vec opened a corridor to one side, Eladamri’s sword battered beasts to the other. Despite the slaughter of Kavu hooves, the Phyrexians climbed. They clambered up the lizards’ legs like roaches up a table. Had Eladamri’s blade been less quick, they would have overwhelmed him too.

  He slashed. His sword sliced through a shock trooper. From collarbone to sternum, the thing was laid open. Where there should have been a heart was only a scabrous cluster of nephritic tubes. They filtered the oil blood, and without them the trooper would surely die. Still, it would live and kill for hours. Drawing forth his blade from the weeping wound, Eladamri rammed its tip through the thing’s skull.

  As it fell away, Eladamri kicked loose another Phyrexian—this a spider-configured critter that seemed it could ha
ve been a child of Tsabo Tavoc herself. Just behind it rose another shock trooper, whose mechanical fingers dug into the flesh of the Kavu. Eladamri chopped the shoulder of the monster as a man might chop a wooden stump. He severed one arm and then the other. A simple kick to the forehead was enough to send the creature to the ground. Before it had even struck the side of the volcano, Eladamri’s greater Kavu snatched it up and ate it.

  Eladamri spared a moment to glance toward Liin Sivi. Mantled in battle and blood, she was at her most beautiful. Indomitable. Fearless. Relentless. Beyond her, down the tumbled slope, lay Weatherlight. No Phyrexian had come anywhere near the inert hulk. The coalition forces had stemmed the tide of the attack.

  Eladamri peered up the hill. Phyrexians poured in a black deluge down the mountainside. They emerged from a deep tunnel in the volcano. Their base was within. Here in the open, the defenders had to fight tens of thousands of monsters. If they could seal that gateway in the mountainside, they would fight only a handful.

  “Drive upward!” Eladamri shouted over the din. “Drive toward the gates!”

  Liin Sivi heard. She drove her steed up the talus slope. Phyrexians tumbled like scree beneath her Kavu’s hooves. Her toten-vec flew and sang with the fury of each strike.

  “Do you recognize it, Eladamri?”

  Dragging his sword tip from the vitreous humor of a bloodstock, Eladamri replied, “Recognize what?”

  “The gateway.” She needed say no more. He understood.

  It was unmistakable, with its tall walls of poured lime, its wide-paved staging grounds, its guard towers and trenches—even the garrisons that stood to either side of the entryway.

  Eladamri’s stomach soured. “The main entrance to the Stronghold. I already gained that spot once in battle. Must I do it again?”

  “We must to win this war,” replied Liin Sivi. “We must to capture the Stronghold.” For these two Rathi, there was no more enticing possibility than capturing the Stronghold. Such a victory would banish every terror of the Skyshroud elves, the Dal, Vec, and Kor. It would fulfill the prophecies of the Korvecdal, the Uniter who was to come and destroy the heart of evil. “Life will be worth living if we win this war.”

  Eladamri gritted his teeth and shot a glance over his shoulder. Below lay Weatherlight—untouched. She was in ruins, but her crew survived, and they were the scrappiest fighters Eladamri had ever encountered. Above him yawned that black gash in the mountainside, streaming Phyrexians onto the world. Yes, he had gained that gate once. Had he shut it down before, he would not be staring at it again now. It was the gate then. Victory or death.

  “Get up there,” Eladamri barked at his steed.

  The greater Kavu leaped eagerly, charging with Liin Sivi’s mount. A third beast joined them. Commander Grizzlegom clambered up its side.

  “What’s the game?” asked the minotaur as he dragged his bloodied legs up to straddle the lizard’s neck.

  “We’ll close the gate,” replied Eladamri. He rode on. His Kavu crunched beasts beneath its feet. A creature with the mouth of a leech scaled the lizard’s flank. Eladamri lanced his sword through the mouth. He lifted an oily blade upward to point at the gateway above. “We’ll stem the flood of monsters then kill those that have already emerged.”

  Grizzlegom’s lips drew back from bloody teeth. “It’s a fight. That’s all I need—a fight.” He skewered a shock trooper through the heart. His Kavu crashed upward aback a platoon of scuta. Only broken shells and white muck remained. Whistling shrilly, he waved the troops forward.

  They came. Minotaur and Metathran, Benalish and elf, Keldon and Kavu, the army followed. It clove through the swarming Phyrexians.

  Liin Sivi was the edge of that cleaver. She drove the beast over a way paved with monstrous heads. Dozens of the creatures died with each footfall. Dozens more were unmade by the vicious whirl of her toten-vec. She would reach the objective, yes—the gate in the side of the volcano—but she would also enjoy the journey.

  Eladamri rode up beside her. A sweeping stroke of his sword hewed heads from a Phyrexian phalanx. On her side, Liin Sivi drove her Kavu against Eladamri’s. The two beasts smashed together and killed whatever was between. Their feet rubbed up against each other.

  They made their way—Eladamri who was dreamed into being by Gaea, and Liin Sivi who was dreamed into being by Eladamri. The truth of those dreams would be proved ahead. If Eladamri were the true Uniter, he would prevail at the main gate. If Liin Sivi were his true soul-mate, she would prevail as well. Neither could succeed unless they both did. They were no longer two separate creatures, but the beginning and the end of a single dream.

  They topped a wide-spreading plateau, a great shelf of obsidian, black and smooth. Razor striations radiated from the main entryway.

  The first ranks of Phyrexians fell swiftly and helplessly to the thundering Kavu. Behind the three steeds of the commanders came a hundred more beasts. Many bore riders. Others bore only fury. They stomped scuta and bloodstocks and shock troops to puddings.

  Less helpless beasts approached ahead—monsters so eager to reach battle that they galloped over their own people. They were as large as Kavu, though they strode on two talonlike legs. Their arms ended in grasping claws that could segment a rhino in a single squeeze. With a bone-dense head, scimitar teeth, a barrel chest, and a leather hide, each Phyrexian gargantua fought like a whole army.

  One beast vaulted across the obsidian ground just before Eladamri. With a scream, it hurled itself into Eladamri’s Kavu. It grappled the lizard in a headlock. The arms of the monster wrapped the spine of the steed. Gargantua nostrils sucked a deep breath as its fangs sank into the Kavu’s throat. Claws dug through scales. Reptilian blood welled from the wounds.

  The Kavu released its own scream. It reared up on four hind legs, lifting the gargantua into the air.

  Tenacious, the monster sank its teeth only deeper. It seemed a bulldog on a bull’s throat.

  The Kavu flailed, struggling to break the beast’s hold. All its fighting only deepened the wounds on the Kavu’s neck.

  Eladamri climbed from the beast’s back. Reaching one of the gargantua’s claws, he dug footholds for his boots. With two hands on his sword, he swung the blade in a great overhand chop. The strike severed two fingers from the gargantua’s claw. The digits tumbled away. Twin wounds poured oil-blood across the Kavu’s shoulder. With another hack, Eladamri removed the two other claws, leaving the gargantua only a stump.

  It shrieked, its teeth releasing the Kavu’s shoulder. Rearing back, the gargantua opened its mouth to swallow Eladamri whole. It lunged. Its jaws snapped.

  Eladamri was too fast. He leaped away and landed on the snout of the monster. He’d been watching that horrid, wet spot, sucking air and flopping. It was the only part of the monster’s skull that was devoid of bone. Eladamri tested his theory by ramming his sword up the thing’s nostril and into its brain. There came a pop as the tip pierced some sack of fluids, and then a horrible gray gush.

  The gargantua sagged. Its eyes spun crazily in its bony head as the beast shuddered toward the ground. A whoosh of vile gasses escaped the settling corpse.

  Giving an elven victory cry, Eladamri raised his sword skyward. Only then did he see that his own mount lay, dead already, beneath the dying bulk of the gargantua. Eladamri blinked, unbelieving. It had been a greater Kavu, an ancient creature, dead in a matter of moments.

  “Climb up!” came a shout from above. Liin Sivi, mounted on a Kavu, extended her hand toward him.

  Nodding, the elf commander strode up the scaly leg of her steed and swung into place behind her. “I hope I don’t cramp your fighting style.”

  Her only response was a lightning-fast strike against a bloodstock. Her toten-vec darted out, slew the monster, and returned to her hand before it had ceased ringing. It had been too fast even to gather glistening oil.

  “You’re in fine form.”

  “The fight’s up there,” she replied, pointing ahead. The rest of the coalition a
rmy had flooded up past them while Eladamri had paused to engage the gargantua. Now, Keldons and Metathran and minotaurs fought a pitched battle, hand to hand, on the obsidian fields.

  Despite its tremendous size, the Kavu stepped gingerly among its own troops, careful not to crush them. Its clawed feet came to ground kitten soft, though it drove like a bull toward the front lines.

  The mountain suddenly leaped.

  “What was that?” asked Liin Sivi.

  Eladamri lifted a hand to his ear. The mountain leaped again. “It’s almost like a heartbeat. It’s almost as if the volcano were alive.”

  “Perhaps it’s nearing eruption,” Liin Sivi responded. The mountain jolted a third time. “Volcanism? Or some Phyrexian plot?”

  “We won’t know until we take the gate,” Eladamri said. “Forward.”

  Already the Kavu had reached the front. Already sword and toten-vec were whirling in a steely cloud.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Steely Cloud

  Blood painted the arena, the blood of immortal Urza and all-too-mortal Gerrard. Too much blood. Had this been Tolaria or Benalia, each man would have been dead ten times over. This was Phyrexia. Here, Mishra had lain for four thousand years beneath a flesh shredder. Here, Yawgmoth had lain for nine thousand years, transforming from a man into a monstrous god. Here too, Gerrard and Urza could bleed buckets and yet fight on. They had painted the arena like saturated brushes.

  In slick fingers, Gerrard clutched a war hammer and swung it overhead in a braining blow. The hammer crashed through a late parry. It bashed aside Urza’s sword. He winced to one side. The maul slammed into his shoulder. Bones cracked. Muscle slumped above a ruined joint. The sword jangled free. Urza recoiled, staggered against the wall, and added figures to the red mural.