by Cory Herndon
Kos wasn’t sure whether it was the extra weight of the metal around his wrists or if his feet had just lost so much blood that they’d shrunk a full size, but he noted with mounting panic that his ankles were slipping free of his boots. He drove his toenails into the leather and stopped the slide, but he couldn’t stay that tensed forever. His tendons were screaming.
“Kos!” Golozar shouted across the Cauldron. “You’re slipping!”
“Really?” Kos shouted. “Hadn’t noticed!”
“Just trying to—”
“Shut up! Can you get free? You carry rope, right? All Gruul carry rope. You have to—Oh, damn it, I’m slipping.” Kos snarled in frustration.
“No, I’m still bound,” the Gruul replied. “I don’t have your luck. And yes, I have rope, but I can’t get to it.”
“I don’t think you want my luck,” Kos said. His toes continued to slip against the insides of his boots. No amount of tensing his toes could stop it now. The clamps had the boots and weren’t letting go, but the boots were ever so slowly letting go of him. Kos instead tried to work his hands carefully free of the rack fragments and pulled his wrists apart as hard as he could, until the wires and jagged metal edges sliced into his skin and blood slicked his hands.
“That’s not going to work! Try to land on the drake,” Golozar said, “on your back. It might cushion your fall.”
“Thanks,” Kos said just as his toes lost the battle, and he dropped headfirst toward the floor of the Cauldron.
* * * * *
Teysa had managed to stay atop the dromad for the remaining charge, even as the deluge drowned the guards in the eastern quarter of the Cauldron and rose to the beast’s flanks. The virusoids loped easily through the water, though she had concerns about the zombies keeping up.
The goblin workers weren’t fighting much at all, and she’d already ordered her forces not to attack them unless the workers attacked first. As she broke into the foggy interior, she saw how wise that had been. Most of the workers had not panicked and abandoned their posts but scuttled all over the nest, fighting fires, closing off vents and sealing cracks.
The place was a mess. A huge platform listed to one side, suspended in midair. Steam and smoke mingled in great drifts, spewing from shattered pipes and who knew what else. Teysa almost didn’t take notice of one of the goblins but did a double take when she realized the goblin only had one arm—and that it was shrugging off a robe identical to the one she had worn the last time Teysa had seen her, on a lokopede, moments after she’d … well, after she’d earned her inheritance. This goblin was the messenger. With her memories restored Teysa recognized her clearly.
Nayine Shonn wheeled her dromad and doubled back to Teysa’s side. “Baroness, you may be able to tell your taj to stand down. We’re not meeting much resist—” Teysa cut her off with a gesture, pointing at the goblin.
“The messenger,” Teysa said.
The next moment Crix thrust her remaining fist into the sky and blasted off on twin columns of fire that shot from the soles of her feet.
“Did I really just see that?” Shonn asked.
“If she could do that, why didn’t she—I mean, she could have been in the township in hours!” Teysa sputtered.
“Baroness, with all due respect, we have bigger trouble than that,” the Devkarin said. “And you owe me ten zinos. We have a winner.”
Teysa looked at the nest and saw her Devkarin lieutenant was right—the dragons had begun to hatch.
“You win,” Teysa said. “Remind me to pay you if we live.”
* * * * *
Kos only had a second or two to yell before he ran headlong into a flying goblin. Crix thrust her arm under Kos’s shoulder and locked them together in an unexpected aerial collision. The jolt knocked the broken pieces of rack from his arms. They splashed into the rapidly draining pool below, just missing a few goblins struggling to keep a generator going, and took a great deal of the skin on his wrists and hands with them. Nothing seemed broken, however, and Kos could still clench a pair of fists, if painfully.
It struck him after a few seconds that they were traveling upward.
“Crix!” he shouted. “What are you—How are you doing this?”
The goblin got a better grip on Kos’s arm—when had Crix lost one?—and muttered a few calculations the ’jek wouldn’t have understood even if he had heard them clearly.
“One moment,” the goblin said. “Need to adjust our vector if we’re going to catch him.”
“Catch who?” Kos said. He answered his own question when he saw the magelord land heavily on the upward side of the transparent flight sphere that bobbed in foggy air. “Oh,” he said.
“To answer your previous question, I’m doing this by violating one of my most sacred oaths,” Crix said.
“There’s fire shooting out of your feet!” Kos said. “That’s violating more than an oath. There’s got to be some kind of natural law you’re—”
“Experimental courier augmentation. But I’m not authorized to use it without a direct order, unless my lord himself is in mortal danger. I’m probably going to be immolated for this. Now hold on, this is going to get tricky,” Crix replied. “I’m going to drop you next to him. Try to keep him at bay until I can bring Golozar. Together the three of us might be able to stop him from reading those words.”
“‘Keep him at bay,’” Kos repeated. “How exactly am I supposed to do that?”
“Brace your legs. You’re going to land hard,” Crix said. “Sorry. I’ll be right back.” As they passed over the magelord’s head she unhooked her arm from Kos’s with a whip-crack movement.
Kos struck the magelord in the chest with both feet, but Hauc saw him coming a moment too soon. He hooked an arm around Kos’s ankles and let himself roll back, completely negating the impact and making the old ’jek’s desperate off-balance uppercut miss by a mile. The magelord rolled and used his entire body to swing Kos down sideways. Hauc smacked the wojek face-first against the platform, but that gave Kos just enough leverage to drive his bare feet into the magelord’s ribs. Hauc released Kos when he doubled over in surprise, retching and gasping.
Kos was an old man, but Hauc was not used to fighting like a street brawler. They both carefully got their footing on the platform, slick with mist and blood, mostly Kos’s. The magelord gazed for a second at the glowing goblin arm and the glowing, fractured sky overhead and laughed in Kos’s face.
Agrus Kos had come to Utvara in large part to get away from glowing things, especially glowing things that wanted to destroy the world.
He roared and charged the distracted Hauc, who turned too late this time. Kos slammed into the ribs he’d just kicked and drove another fist into the magelord’s gut. There had to be a reason Hauc wasn’t using his fire magic. Kos couldn’t figure out why Hauc insisted on fighting like this. It wasn’t the magelord’s style at all. Entangled, the two skidded across the listing landing pad, Kos’s arms latched around the magelord’s neck while Hauc pounded at the old ’jek with Crix’s arm. He stopped only when Kos managed to jam a bare heel into the gap between two bolted plates that had come apart at the seams.
The ’jek stopped short as Hauc kept going, but Kos brought him to a halt with an elbow to the groin. Hauc doubled over wailing, and that was apparently enough to get the magelord to remember that, among other abilities, he could burn holes in people with his eyes. Kos saw the flash just before it happened and shoved a palm against Hauc’s chin, barely avoiding a pair of blazing beams that would have neatly sliced the top off of his skull. The fire ricocheted off of the flight sphere and into the platform, where it burned a pair of smoldering holes that sizzled in the moist air.
“Who are you supposed to be?” Hauc snarled.
“Kos,” Kos said. “League of Wojek. Retired.”
“What?” The magelord said, baffled for the briefest of moments.
“You asked,” Kos said. They circled each other as best they could, but neither could reach hig
her ground than the other. “So why do you want to do this, Hauc? Niv-Mizzet hurt your feelings? This place just starting to get to you? Because I understand how that could happen. Sometimes it drives me crazy: the dust, the plague, that flower crud that gets in your nose and ears. But come on. You don’t want to burn it up, do you? Turn those things off. Don’t do this.” Kos extended one hand.
It was enough of an opening for Hauc to swing the severed arm and connect with a mind-jarring clang to Kos’s jaw that knocked him back against the side of the hovering sphere. The severed arm was not made of flesh and bone. It was metal, but not as heavy as iron or even mizzium. The lightweight material was probably the only reason the blow didn’t cave in the side of Kos’s skull. The ’jek barely had the sense left to brace himself against the flight sphere with one arm before he rolled down the slope.
Kos spat out a tooth, one of his few remaining originals. “That hurt,” he said. “Who am I? Who the hell are you? Twelve years I had here, twelve years of almost nothing to do but sit and relax. And here you come along and it’s the end of the damned world again.” On “world” Kos brought a knee around that caught the magelord in the side of the leg and sent him skidding underneath the sphere, where he stopped, caught in whatever magic kept the thing floating, Kos guessed.
“Why the beating, Hauc?” Kos said. “Where’s your big, flashy magic? I expect big flashy magic if you’re going to try and destroy everything. Do it with some class. Where’s the assembly? The war? The armies marching through the streets and the hordes of hideous, gibbering things? This is barely a skirmish.”
Hauc’s eyes flashed, but Kos had enough warning to duck behind the Pyraquin.
“Is it something personal, mage? Hey, you don’t know any of my ex-wives, do you?”
The magelord’s eyes blazed. Kos pushed himself off the sphere just ahead of another blast. This time Hauc didn’t hold back, and Kos wondered anew about the wisdom of acting as the diversion when he didn’t know the entire plan of attack. The old ’jek wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid a searing burn across his back, but it was a glancing shot that didn’t get to the bone.
I really need a line of work where a wound that isn’t bone-deep isn’t the bright side, Kos thought dizzily as he went down on all fours, his body tingling with deep pain. Kos crawled up the slope, doing his best to put the flight sphere between him and the magelord.
“I’m wasting time,” Hauc said, “and power. Nothing more to waste.” He strode past Kos and gave the ’jek a kick in the stomach as he passed. Kos rolled, groaning, onto his side. Hauc strode to the very edge of the platform and raised Crix’s arm overhead. From this angle, Kos couldn’t see the egg beginning to crack underneath him, but he could hear it popping. It was unlike any sound he’d ever heard before, like a crumbling mountain that rang like metal and left an odd, lingering hum in the air that chilled his bones.
The magelord started to read the spell that would grant him dominion over the first dragon hatched on Ravnica in at least fifteen thousand years, but Kos spotted something more interesting from the corner of his eye. There was movement overhead, and through the haze he could make out the last of Golozar’s clamps coming apart under a concentrated blast of flame from Crix’s left foot.
“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” Kos said. He coughed up some blood and hoped that Hauc’s incantation would not be too short.
* * * * *
Teysa had her hands full. Fires had erupted on all levels of the Cauldron’s interior, fed by broken pipes spewing volatile gasses and magic, which burned through more pipes, which started more fires … and everything, it seemed, was connected to the nest in some way, because as the coils and tubes came apart, so did the rest of the place. Pieces of the Cauldron dropped into the pooling water around her dromad’s feet and narrowly missed the Izzet goblins who were everywhere, some working to keep what wasn’t burning from catching on fire, others trying to keep what was functional running, and a few just screaming in panic and fleeing. The wailing deserters splashed through the smoldering pools and out into the Schism-lit morning, but Teysa did not order any of her forces to pursue. Not that she had as many forces left as she used to.
The goblins were no threat, but there were other holdouts. Her immediate problem was a band of hydropyric weirds, their liquid exteriors unharmed by the deluge Teysa had arranged for their fiery kin. The watery elementals had torn the living daylights out of the virusoids and left two of the ogre zombies in pieces—the weirds could harden parts of their bodies at will, and turn liquid with a thought. They always had a weapon, and you couldn’t hit them with anything. The hydropyrics stood between Teysa and the three problems she would have to deal with soon—the eggs. The red and blue mottled ovoids now showed signs of fissures, and the purple one was already missing a few chunks completely. Skin like wet leather was exposed to the air in three places. The skin pulsed with life.
The baroness was down seven virusoids so far, and nothing they’d tried seemed to harm the hydropyrics in the slightest. Weapons went right through them and out the other side without visibly harming them. The water obviously hadn’t worked, and the zombies were only igniting their fists driving them through the weirds. Fire didn’t work. They simply absorbed it into their blazing cores. Teysa wished she had some idea where the shadewalkers were but had to trust that wherever they were they were doing what she’d ordered. Shadewalkers did not violate agreements, and all they had to do was cover her forces from outside. With her now were the last two Golgari zombies, a few faceless, voiceless virusoids, and Dreka-Tooth.
Unfortunately, she’d had to set the minotaurs and Shonn to the task of distributing the cure to the goblins—the minotaurs running interference, the Devkarin administering the cure whether the patients wanted it or not—and that left Teysa with only Dreka-Tooth as a bodyguard and a dromad that grew more skittish with each passing moment.
The taj were the only thing she hadn’t tried against the weirds. The taj were more ghost than alive. Maybe their spirit nature could be effective. What she had in mind might be as bad for the taj as it was for the weirds, but she was running out of options. As if to illustrate the point, a weird took an eighth virusoid apart with a liquid arm that ever so briefly became an ice axe. She made a snap decision.
“Dreka-Tooth, fetch the taj,” Teysa commanded. Now she wouldn’t even have Dreka-Tooth, but he was the only one who could deliver the message to the Haazda communication line. And she needed the taj. She would go herself, but the others would surely break and flee without her leadership. Her “troops” were simply too stupid, by and large, to be trusted with a fight like this unsupervised.
Besides, she’d come this far. Turning back now, even to fetch reinforcements, felt utterly wrong to Teysa. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the eggs or the magelord who appeared at the crest of the tilted landing pad and held an arm—Crix’s severed arm, from the look of it, which barely surprised Teysa—over his head and began to shout ancient, blunt syllables aloud.
Dreka-Tooth patted her dromad on the flank, whispered a few calming words in the creature’s ear, and bolted back toward the entrance to deliver Teysa’s call.
She didn’t turn to watch him go. Another chunk of purple eggshell dropped away, and Teysa was fairly certain she saw a yellow, catlike eye gazing at her hungrily. The eye was big enough for her to stand between the lids and still have room to stretch. It blinked once, and Teysa got the unnerving impression that it gazed right through her.
The dragon’s eye shattered whatever remained of the dromad’s nerve. It reared and tossed Teysa backward in a short arc that ended in an abrupt and wet stop just behind the beast. It turned on its hind legs and bolted back out the east entrance, making noises she didn’t know a dromad could make. It almost collided with the raging, elephantine Barkfeather on its way out. Teysa was surprised. She hadn’t expected the Selesnyan to last this long in a fight, but even elementals had trouble with several tons of elephant in close quart
ers.
From her prone, half-submerged vantage point she found herself gazing through the gaping circle cut into the domed roof, its edge roughened and bent by the effects of Teysa’s first unofficial military command. But the roof wasn’t what drew her eyes to the gap—it was the sky itself.
The Schism had continued to grow unabated while she’d been occupied and must have been changing every moment. From where Teysa sat, it turned the sky into a cosmic stained-glass window as life itself, stolen at the moment of death (or close to it) flowed unimpeded along its fractal seams. The white ectoplasmic tubes—which Teysa recognized as an Orzhov design—pulsed more strongly than ever and poured invigorating energy into the dragon’s nest. With every syllable from Hauc’s mouth, the Schism released the accumulated souls of almost fifty years, and the Cauldron, damaged as it was, had been designed to absorb much more than that.
A shadow helped her get to her feet, and another handed her a cane found floating in shallow water nearby where it had slid free of the rearing dromad’s saddle.
“We are here. What would you have us do?” The voice came from one direction but had three distinct layers. The shadewalkers had returned after all, which must have meant that the reserve forces no longer needed to be covered. Dreka-Tooth had gotten through.
Teysa looked over the elementals’ heads as they faced off against the last of the Simic members of her retinue. The landing platform was clearly visible now, and it hung precariously over the edge of the nest.
“I doubt you can do anything to the weirds either,” Teysa said, more a question than a statement.
“You did not just see us try?”
“No, but I don’t really see you now,” Teysa replied. She pointed to the remaining cables and the single beam that were the only things keeping Hauc’s landing pad in the air. “I would have you get up there somehow. In two minutes I want that thing dropped,” she said, pointing to the suspension work. “Cut there, there, and there. I think should do it. Those eggs must be destroyed.”