by Cory Herndon
Memnarch stood a few feet away, staring into the long, dark tunnel that led to the forests the elf girl called home. Malil noted that his master locked two of his eyes on his lieutenant as soon as the latter appeared.
“It must learn part of your grand plan, my Creator,” the Guardian said, beckoning Malil but still looking down the lacuna. This was as close as Memnarch would get to telling his lieutenant to listen. “Malil has a destiny to fulfill, as do I. Malil will make my destiny possible. And Malil will die, along with everything on this world. When the time is right.”
Malil looked at Memnarch impassively. “I have never expected to die anywhere but in your service.”
“Will it miss its life, do you suppose?” Memnarch asked the absent Karn. Malil was a bit taken aback at the question.
“My life? My life is yours to do with as you please, master. How could it be anything else?” Malil dodged. He had not taken a vial of serum with him, and now that his supply was a mile in the air over his head, he found he was unable to concentrate on anything else. Of course I’ll miss my life, Memnarch, he thought. You can’t drink the serum when you’re dead. He felt the patches of skin on his face and arms begin to sweat.
“As it should be.” Memnarch scuttled sideways and finally gave Malil his full attention. “Life should not be on this world, I am convinced of this now, Karn. You left this world pure, and despite my efforts, it became tainted with the flesh. As have I. I shall make this right when I ascend. And the removal of life from this sphere shall be a glorious cleansing.” Memnarch rocked his head slowly right and then left, and shivered as serum pulsed into his system from the massive tanks on his back. The Guardian’s gaze lifted to the mana core. “Malil shall lead the armies that I have created as you instructed, Karn, and take control of the surface world.”
“Master? I do not understand. The elf girl has devastated the leveler ranks, and—”
“The magic! I have bathed in its power, as you surely intended, my Creator,” Memnarch said. “Behold.”
The Guardian spread his silver, humanoid arms wide, and all six of his eyes took on an emerald sheen. A glossy silver field enveloped Memnarch, who clenched both hands into fists. The Guardian’s veins bulged along his forearms and temple, and Malil saw spots or reddish blood seeping onto his master’s bandages.
“The army shall rise!” Memnarch cried, and swept his arms to the sky. The silver glow grew into a translucent sphere then rapidly grew, dissipating into the surrounding interior of the plane like ripples on a quicksilver pond. Malil’s sharp eyes—mercifully as yet untouched by the spore—followed the edge of the shockwave until it completely disappeared over a mile away.
The ground swirled like quicksilver seen through fogged glass, then burst to life. Thousands of small, segmented creatures that hadn’t been there before simply grew from the metallic ground.
Malil saw myr, some as small as a goblin, others that would tower over the heads of the cursed golem that had fought at the elf girl’s side. Wicked levelers of cruel design, their whirling rotary chopping blades sending an eerie buzz echoing through the interior, grew to mammoth size within seconds. Arachnoid constructs armed with spiked clubs and scythe blades clanged noisily against the ground, the mycosynth spires, and each other. Sleek, predatory ebony shapes that vaguely resembled the beetle-like nim shambled among them, taking wide swipes with hooked talons at the air and filling the interior with a chorus of low, metallic growls that echoed weirdly off the inside of the great sphere. Lupine creations with tusks sharpened to a molecule’s width were covered in metal fur lined with barbs. A sterling airborn serpent with iridescent platinum scales swooped low over the growing crowd of bizarre constructs, hissing like shattered glass. Mycosynth dust swirled up in clouds as the artificial reptile flapped lustrous wings of membranous silver and joined its brethren.
“Your orders are simple, my Creator, simple enough for Malil to understand. There will be more of my children. Armies born of a single thought.”
“Orders, master?” Malil asked, more than a little awestruck by the forces that the Guardian had handed to him.
“Yes, great Karn, simple is best. He has not yet touched the faces of gods.” The master began to mumble and hum, then whirled on Malil. “Malil shall find the elf girl and return her to me. Surely this is simple enough for the first order.”
“She will be yours,” Malil finally replied. “And what else do you—does the Creator ask of the Guardian’s army?”
The master laughed like a cawraptor about to make a kill. “Malil is going to retrieve all of the soul traps and return them to me. Then he shall take the surface world in the name of Memnarch.”
FLARE UP
Bruenna, Glissa, and Lyese rode golden zauks over the glittering fields of razorgrass. The leonin domesticated the large flightless birds as mounts. After years of breeding the creatures were incredibly tough, agile, fast, and most of all versatile. They could outpace a flying pteron over open ground, climb vertical cliffs with their foot-long, hooked claws, and swim a mile underwater without taking a breath. Odd, Glissa thought, that with all that, these birds still couldn’t fly.
Still, the three of them needed fast transportation that wouldn’t waste magical energy or give them away to anyone watching the skies. The zauks had been one of Raksha’s gifts. Considering the jobs he was asking them to perform for him, it was the least the Kha could do, in Glissa’s opinion.
Fortunately, Raksha Golden Cub was not the sort to do the least of anything. Though far from Taj Nar, he allowed them to choose armor, weapons, and other gear from his personal supplies. The trio had found complete sets of fine pteron-bone armor, enchanted to improve the wearer’s swordsmanship, prompting Lyese to cast her Tel-Jilad armor aside, adding she wasn’t working for Yulyn anymore. The armor was accompanied by polished helms that carried no magical enhancements, but were remarkable lightweight and exceedingly durable.
Naturally, Glissa found herself most impressed by the weapons. Silver longbows now hung from the saddles of each elf, while Bruenna had passed over the unfamiliar bow for a bandolier full of knives. Raksha had told her they had been blessed by Great Dakan himself, and could not miss their target. Lyese had been awestruck that the Kha had let her take a short sword engraved with an image of the Golden Cub and encrusted with protective crystals. Glissa reminded herself that for all her protestations, her sister was still a youth in many ways. Glissa also suspected her sister was beginning to develop a bit of a crush on the leonin Kha.
Glissa was stunned to find a flawlessly preserved elven longsword among the weaponry on hand, and Raksha had insisted she take it. He claimed it had been a gift to Great Dakan from the elves of old. Glissa didn’t bother to point out that a lot of the elves of old were still in the Tangle, they just forgot everything once in a while. The sword was perfectly balanced. Glissa even used it to disarm Raksha during a brief sparring match.
A wave of vertigo made Glissa list in her saddle, and she let out an involuntary groan as flashing lights and stabbing pain erupted in her temple. She saw shadowy shapes, Bruenna and Lyese, whirl on their mounts in alarm, but could not make out what they were saying. Her ears felt filled with quicksilver, and a dull roar was increasing in pitch somewhere in the back of her head.
Then Mirrodin was gone, and Glissa floated in a cold, empty, utterly silent void. She realized she was moving through the inky black when a tiny pinprick of light appeared up ahead. Glissa felt herself moving more quickly, and the light steadily grew, gradually gaining definition. The light became a sphere, the sphere a world, familiar features became clearer. Glissa flew through the shadows toward Mirrodin.
There were the glittering hexagonal plates that covered the Glimmervoid and provided purchase for dozens of different species of razor grass, running to the edge of jagged, rusty scabs that could only be the Oxidda mountain range, whence came Slobad and his goblin kin. The Tangle she felt in her bones before she saw it, the forests pulsing with the magical energies t
o which she was most closely attuned. From this distance, it looked like an especially large hunk of moss clinging to a tarnished silver ball. The Quicksilver Sea shone like a glittering mirror, reflecting the light of the moons, while the dark stain of the Mephidross seemed to devour the glow of four satellites—the green moon was absent—spewing a huge cloud of brownish-green ochre into the atmosphere. From her godlike point of view, Glissa could see that those fumes spread much farther than anyone below suspected, dissipating across the plane in a thin haze.
And they were moons, not suns. She saw that now, there could be no doubt. Four glowing balls of energy, each spinning around the hollow world that spawned them, twirling in a complicated, unpredictable dance. Mirrodin reflected and absorbed the energy the orbs projected.
She wondered if this was what it really looked like when one flew through the heavens, or if this was the best her imagination could muster. She was beginning to suspect this was more vivid hallucination than flare, for this was not a vision of the past. There were simply too many moons.
Glissa felt an unbidden urge to swoop down close to the Tangle. The forests of home rapidly grew before her into a rich carpet of green, then crystallized into the familiar verdigris foliage she’d hunted for decades. There was something there she needed to find, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Something she’d lost, or maybe something that had lost her. Or someone. She pulled her focus down and watched the world move by below her, scanning the ground. She became a moon of Mirrodin herself, soaring around and around the great metallic sphere in an expanding orbit, taking in the entire surface. And everywhere she went, everywhere she looked, whether skimming the Quicksilver Sea or knifing through the thickets of the Tangle, she noticed one thing was absent from this living metal world.
There were no people. Every settlement, from Taj Nar to the Vault of Whispers, from Lumengrid to Viridia, was completely devoid of anything walking on two feet.
No, there was one thing. A small silver dot that ambled over the dream-Mirrodin on four legs, like a crab. Memnarch walked the surface of the metal world, and he was utterly alone.
Glissa felt a pang of sympathy, then quickly buried it. Served the twisted monster right. Alone on an empty world, with no one to worship him as a god, not even his favored vedalken. The metal monster’s face turned up to stare at her with six glittering eyes, and he opened his mouth as if screaming, yet Glissa could not hear.
The globe below her began to visibly shake, vibrating impossibly fast as Memnarch’s wail reached into the heavens, eventually striking Glissa’s keen ears. What appeared to be simple vibration from her vantage point became massive tectonic quakes on the surface as the hollow sphere began to crack. And still Memnarch screamed, as white light sliced through the widening crevices in Mirrodin’s skin, raw magic that erupted violently now.
The latticework of cracks finally gave way. The globe of Mirrodin collapsed inward in a colossal implosion, then the mana core exploded. In a conflagration of energy and power never before seen by mortal eyes that lasted no longer than a heartbeat, Mirrodin suddenly ceased to be.
“Glissa?” Lyese said, “What happened? Can you stand?”
Glissa blinked. The flare was over. She shook her head and allowed Lyese to pull her to her feet. “I’m fine.”
“Was this a ‘flare’?” Bruenna asked as she pressed a silver cloth against Glissa’s forehead. The stabbing pain that had preceded the flare disappeared instantly.
“Either that, or I’m losing my mind,” Glissa said. “But this one was strange. I’d seen other worlds before, this seemed—almost like someone was trying to give me advice.”
“Is it good advice?” Bruenna asked.
“I think so,” Glissa said. “Something along the lines of ‘keep doing what you’re doing.’ So right now, that means we help the Kha with his immediate problems, which are also our problems, and somehow we all might come out of this—whatever ‘this’ turns out to be—alive.”
“Makes sense,” Bruenna replied in a tone that indicated the matter was anything but settled, but she wasn’t going to push the point. She eyed the sky and saw the small group of skyhunters who were heading out to meet the mage at the edge of the Mephidross. “It’s time we split up if I’m going to keep my appointment.”
“You’re right,” Glissa said. “Good luck with Geth. Don’t trust him. Not even a little bit. And protect your neck at all times.”
“I can take care of myself,” Bruenna said. “And what I can’t take care of, the leonin will,” she added, nodding at the approaching riders.
“I’m sure of it,” Glissa said, though she was anything but. The flare had shaken her, but she still wasn’t sure why. The Mirrodin she had watched die had no green moon. The Mirrodin she lived on did and so far hadn’t imploded. What kind of message was that? ‘Stay the course’ had been her best guess for the others’ sake but Glissa knew that was an evasion.
Fortunately, she would have plenty of time to mull the matter over on the long ride out to the leveler cave, where they would hopefully find the Krark. “Okay, Lyese, you’re with me. Let’s go find some goblins. And remind me not to stare straight into the green moon.”
Glissa bit off a strip of dried djeeruk meat and handed the rest to Lyese. She wasn’t that hungry, and the thought of coming to Dwugget as a leonin ambassador—to say nothing of the residual effects of the powerful flare—already had blinkmoths fluttering chaotically in her abdomen. It wasn’t unlike the way she used to feel those rare times she and Kane been free of duties and studies long enough to enjoy each other’s company. Except Kane had never put her off her food.
Maybe that’s why I wanted Bruenna to do this, she thought. She’s a leader. Leaders negotiated. Negotiation was not Glissa’s style. Glissa liked problems that could be solved with a sword, or in exceptional cases, a construct-flattening explosion of magic. Still, they needed information to stop Memnarch, and the Krark seemed to know more about the inner world than anyone else on the surface, except perhaps the trolls and the vedalken. That the leonin might receive aid from the goblin cultists against the nim was secondary to Glissa, though ostensibly the main reason the Kha had sent them on this mission.
They had reined their zauks to a trot so they could eat while moving, giving the elf girl a chance to really take in the landscape of the Oxidda foothills. Their surefooted mounts easily navigated a collision of rocky outcroppings, flat, ferrous mesas, and corroded iron boulders. Here and there, magnetic energy held similar boulders floating above the ground, adding an air of unreality to the landscape.
The tall, rustling razor grass of the plains was gradually giving way to hardier varieties, and clusters of silvery scrub became thicker, rustier, and more frequent the farther they went. Corroded gullies cracked the dusky ochre ground, but the zauks easily cleared them with one step even at this pace. Glissa patted the bird on the neck, and it cawed affectionately. Or hungrily. Or angrily. The elf girl really wasn’t sure.
Glissa slipped the seeksphere from a pouch on her belt and held it up to inspect the fine markings. The silver ball was no bigger than a goblin’s eye and bore tiny notches and symbols that remained fixed in position no matter which way she turned the object. Shonahn had shown her how to enchant the seeksphere to home in on a single individual, but Glissa had been called on to perform the spell herself, which consisted of simply saying the name of the person you were searching for three times while holding the ball close to one’s lips. The trick was that only someone who had seen that person could activate the device. Bruenna had one too, also enchanted by Glissa, to find Geth.
Despite Shonahn’s assurances that the seeksphere was such a simple artifact that it was virtually impossible to fool, Glissa was beginning to suspect the gadget was broken. At first, they’d seemed to be going in the right direction, but they’d veered off into the rocky foothills and now it seemed as if they were headed straight into the mountain caves ruled by the despotic goblin shaman and his fanatic followers.
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“Lyese, this can’t be right,” Glissa said, waving her sister to a halt. She shook the seeksphere with frustration, but it still pointed straight into the iron peaks. “The Krark were not this far into the mountains. And the goblins that do live in the mountains aren’t friendly with the Krark or anyone else.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Lyese said with a game attempt at maturity. “Okay, maybe that’s an understatement. But is it possible your memory might be, I don’t know, a little knocked out of alignment?”
“Don’t be—” Glissa began, but the suggestion gave her pause. Who knew what toll the last few weeks had taken on her mind? What had the flares done to her sense of self? For that matter, what had the frequent loss of blood done to her brain? “You could be right, I guess. Or maybe they just left. Or maybe … damn.”
“What?” Lyese asked.
“Or maybe I’m overlooking the obvious answer—they’ve been taken by the shaman’s followers. The mountain goblins might have attacked Dwugget’s people just out of spite.”
“You think they’re captured?”
“It’s the most logical conclusion,” Glissa replied. She cast her eyes back over the foothills to the open plains. “Those leonin had better show up soon.”
“Why?” Lyese asked.
“Because this just turned into a rescue.” She patted her saddle to reassure herself that her bow and quicksliver arrows were close at hand. “I’ll go without the leonin if I have to. You can stay here and let them know where I’ve gone.”
“No way!” Lyese objected. “I can fight just as well—okay, maybe not just as well as you, but I am Tel-Jilad Chosen, you know.”
Glissa turned her mount around to look her sister in the eye, and came face-to-face once more with the mutilation and injury Lyese had suffered. She was young, yes, but no younger than Glissa had been when she bagged her first djeeruk. And she was fairly certain that Lyese, young as she was to Glissa’s eyes, was much older than Slobad or Bruenna in actual years. What right did she have to keep her sister away from a fight? None, she knew. It was entirely selfish. She just couldn’t stand to put her sister in danger again. It wasn’t fair, but it was true.