by Cory Herndon
“Glissa, she’s dead. She has to be,” Raksha replied.
She stood to look the leonin eye to eye and jabbed a finger in his chest. “Why?” Glissa demanded.
“Because we have a chance to stop what’s coming now,” Raksha said. “If you choose to confront Vektro, you will fail to strike Memnarch when the time comes. That is why she must be dead. If there is a way to force Vektro out, we will do it. But you cannot concern yourself with her now. It’s one life, one life that might not even exist.”
Glissa knew the leonin was right. There was nothing she could do but fail if she tried to save Lyese now. “All right, damn you,” she said. “I’ll set Lyese—I’ll set her aside. But why even carry on this war? Lyese—Vektro—is a monarch. It doesn’t make any sense. She could have simply ended the conflict and let the nim in years ago. Why the bomb?”
“The war serves Memnarch’s ends,” Raksha said. “I do think I was meant to die in the bomb blast, but luck conspired to let me find it, and Lyese—and Vektro’s treachery before it was too late. Vektro only accused me as a last resort. I owe my life to Yshkar, despite what has come since. With Taj Nar destroyed, the nim and leveler armies could have moved on to Krark-Home, and maybe that was the original plan.” He stopped pacing, and placed a hand on Glissa’s shoulder.
“How did you learn all this hiding out in the Tangle?” Glissa asked, still unconvinced.
“Do you remember the name Ghonthas?” Raksha asked.
“Who?” Glissa said.
“She was a Sylvok. One of Vektro’s vessels,” Raksha said. “She knew you.”
“I don’t know any—wait,” Glissa said. “There was a Sylvok judge at my trial. In Viridia.”
“That was Vektro, inhabiting Ghonthas,” Raksha said. “The imposter was, at the time, trying to ensure the Viridians didn’t execute you, which would have spoiled Memnarch’s plans. When you escaped, Vektro was forced to leave the Slyvok.”
“And showed up on the mountain with a pack of goblins,” Glissa said.
Raksha nodded. “A few months after I’d entered the tangle, I encountered Ghonthas while tracking a vorrac. The human had been wounded by a pack of kharybdogs, but she recognized me. She remembered everything Vektro knew, including the length of Memnarch’s hibernation, the Miracore, and the part you were bound to play. And you’ve confirmed everything she told me. That cannot be a coincidence.”
“What made you believe her?” Glissa asked. “A dying human wandering in the woods?”
“She knew things,” Raksha said. “Things about you. The story you told at the trial did not fall on deaf ears.” He flicked his ears in leonin embarrassment. “And perhaps I believed her because my heart wanted it to be true. It gave me hope.”
“Well, it’s a start,” Glissa said.
DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT
Glissa awoke to the sound of Raksha putting on another kettle of homebrew. He offered the elf girl a simple meal of fruit and jerky, which they ate in silence. Neither spoke as they filled their packs with a two-day supply of food. Even Geth remained quiet.
“The journey down the lacuna will take the rest of the day,” Raksha said when they had finished packing, breaking the spell of silence and anxiety. “That will give us the night to reach Memnarch. Will that gemstone of yours work for me too?”
“I think so,” Glissa said. “Bruenna said it had an infinite charge.” She pushed back her tunic sleeve and held the blue stone up for him to see. “Here, try it. Just put a finger on it, then say ‘Fly, fly, fly.’”
“Clever,” the leonin rumbled. “I really must speak thusly?”
“It’s simple,” Glissa replied. “Easy to remember. Stop stalling, your Kha-ship.”
Raksha placed a fingertip on the gem. “Fly, fly … fly.”
The leonin floated a few inches off the ground, as if blown by a gentle breeze. “Amazing!” he said and cautiously floated about the room. “Forget what I said, we can get to the interior in about an hour.”
“We should still be on the move,” Glissa said. “I’d rather have a chance to peek around the corner before we walk in. Ghonthas didn’t say that would ruin everything, did he?”
Raksha did an experimental loop, and a stalactite nearly took his head off. “What?”
“I said we should get moving, and you should be careful,” Glissa said. She hung the Miracore around her neck and tucked it under the leather jerkin, then slung Geth onto her back, eliciting brand new insults as she cinched up the strap. “Are you ready, Raksha?”
Raksha slowly descended from the high ceiling. “Let’s go,” he said and patted his belt to make sure his longknife was still there.
Glissa placed a clawtip on the blue stone and said, “Fly, fly, fly.” Together, they floated out of the cave.
The second major attack against Krark-Home came just as the suns went down on the fourth day and the battlefield fell into blackness. The few scattered stars in the sky provided little light to fight by, but Bruenna had been impressed with how quickly Yshkar scrambled to troops. Jethrar’s unit had joined six other detatchments of leonin warriors and half again as many goblins. The goblins seemed excited about something and were talking animatedly, but she didn’t have time to ask them why.
Fortunately, their enemies glowed in the dark. Finding them wouldn’t be a problem. Seeing her environment and her allies would present a greater challenge. She’d been saving her strength for more aggressive magic, but at the moment they needed light more than energy bolts. Bruenna whispered a few arcane words and described a symbolic pattern in the air, calling up a silvery blue aurora that materialized in the night sky.
As if cued by the light, a dozen aerophins broke in one direction, while a pack of eyeless, bat-winged nim shriekers dove in the opposite. Bruenna’s well-trained zauk squawked in challenge and stood its ground as a pair of shriekers dropped on her from above. She thrust her sword into the sky and twin spheres of crackling blue-white energy flew from the blade, each one homing in on a shrieker and encasing it in writhing worms of electricity before they plummeted, smoldering, to the ground. She kicked the zauk’s flanks and charged into the fray.
Bruenna didn’t have time to cast a spell before the next attack came: twin streams of silver fire that slammed into the ground behind her and threw up shards of hot iron that struck her zauk’s haunches. The bird bolted.
Rather than attempt to regain control of the terrified animal, the mage released the reins, wished the bird luck, and quickly conjured another flight spell, rising from the zauk’s back just before it disappeared beyond the edge of the blue aura that covered the field.
Bruenna felt back in her element, but it wasn’t hers alone. She wove through the swarming constructs and nim, striking with her sword where she could and sent more bolts of deadly magic singing through the air.
The Neurok mage heard explosions below and saw a trio of aerophins flying in a tight formation, scattering the forward defensive lines with energy bolts. As the goblins and leonin ran for cover, they ran into the waiting claws of a line of nim lashers, where they were easy pickings.
Bruenna summoned another energy bolt and wondered how much longer Krark-Home could possibly hold out.
“That’s not good,” Glissa whispered.
“No, definitely not,” Raksha agreed.
They had reached the end of the lacuna without further incident, and pulled up short as agreed. They had crawled the last few yards on hands and knees, and now sat crouched at the lip of the exit.
Glissa had forgotten how dazzling the blazing mana core was after the long, dark descent through the lacuna. And now, the light was reflected from a thousand different silver surfaces that comprised…something. Glissa truly had no idea what she was looking at. Just that it was huge, as big as the interior itself.
The rebuilt Panopticon was still in place. The massive round disk with the hole in the center sat directly below them, attached to the towering structure at roughly midpoint. But other than that, Glissa didn
’t recognize anything.
The crystalline mycosynth towers were gone, leaving most of the interior surface smooth except for scattered shrubbery. In their place, millions, maybe billions of silver needles—the mirror images of those that littered the surface—pointed from the interior surface directly at the core. Five enormous buttress-like structures, each as big around as all of Taj Nar and also a gleaming silver, were mounted to the inside of Mirrodin like gigantic parodies of the needles. They ended not far from the core, where they held the most amazing part of the bizarre structure in place: a skeletal spheroid made up entirely of interlocking pentagonal rings. The mesh completely encased the core.
Glissa cast her gaze back down to the ground, and saw that it was still crawling with billions of small, scuttling constructs. Amongst them walked, crawled and flew much larger construct-beasts, all heavily armed but so far seemingly unaware of her and Raksha’s presence.
That was about to change. Four columns of marching steel centipedes were scuttling right for them, undulating over their kin like quicksilver ribbons. It seemed that Raksha’s prediction about Viridia’s fate was coming true all too soon.
They ducked back into the lacuna, out of sight. “We need a plan, fast,” Glissa whispered.
“Doesn’t change anything,” Raksha said.
“There’s an army about to march in here!” Glissa almost shouted.
“No one sends an army against two people,” Raksha said. “Those are reinforcements or scouts. Trust me, they will ignore us.”
“How can you be sure?”
“They could not have missed us,” Raksha said. “They didn’t react or accelerate their pace. Just get out of the way and wait.”
The elf girl scowled, but Raksha was right.
The first of the centipedes appeared at the lip of the lacuna, flowed over the edge and undulated inside. The line of constructs was close enough to reach out and touch, yet as Raksha had predicted, they completely ignored the elf and the leonin. The lacuna rang with thousands of tinny metal footsteps.
Bruenna whirled in mid-air, catching a trio of shriekers with a series of rapidfire spells. A cloud of shrapnel materialized in the nims’ flight path, launched into the shriekers, and tore their abdomens out. Fetid guts spilled out and poured down on the ground, followed a few seconds later by the nim themselves.
She shot a salute to a skyhunter who soared by overhead. Fewer than two dozen of the female warriors remained, but they were holding their own against the swarms. Four times as many trained, riderless pterons engaged the attackers in vicious dogfights, but these proved easier pickings for ’phin energy bolts and shrieker claws.
Bruenna felt a surge of magic disrupt the flow of mana directly beneath her and jinked to one side just in time to avoid a fireball. The sphere slammed into a wolfpack of heavily armed aerophins she hadn’t heard approaching. Dwugget waved from below.
“Thanks,” Bruenna mouthed.
Bruenna scanned the horizon, seeking the telltale glow of aerophin power sources and felt suddenly dizzy, terrified, and exhilarated all at once. Victory suddenly seemed possible again. On the horizon, five soft halos of diffuse pre-dawn glow played at the edges of night. The colors matched the stones mounted on the Miracore.
“I hope you’re paying attention down there, Glissa,” Bruenna whispered, and drove her sword through the torso of a buzzing aerophin, which sparked and spit black smoke before it plummeted from the sky. “It’s almost showtime.”
“Raksha, it’s almost dawn,” Glissa said.
“How do you know?” Raksha asked.
Glissa considered. “I’m not sure how,” she said, “But I am sure I’m right. I can feel the moons moving. Rolling into place.” The elf girl patted her breastplate and added, “I feel it in here. I think it’s the spark.”
The steel centipedes had given way to a wave of spider-like constructs covered in blue and purple crystalline eyes, followed by a detachment of leonin-sized scorpionoids with blast-cylinder stingers. Now they endured the indignity of hiding as thousands of silver frog-things with wide, toothy mouths and long hooks at the end of their forelimbs hopped past. None of the constructs had paid the pair any heed. Memnarch had to know Glissa was coming. Why hadn’t he sent even a scout? She’d expected a brutal fight. Being ignored when she knew she was expected was much worse. It meant Memnarch no longer thought her a threat.
Glissa was about to make sure he remembered how much of a threat she could be. She held out her wrist, the blue stone facing up. “It’s time,” the elf girl said. “I have to get to that platform. He’s up there.”
“A sound judgment,” Raksha replied. He placed a finger alongside the blue stone, and Glissa did the same.
As they emerged from the lacuna, a cacophony of clattering feet, clicking pincers, and strange, mechanical chittering broke out all around them, joined by a chorus of whining cries.
“They’re awake, Glissa,” Geth’s head said.
“Careful what you wish for,” she muttered and placed a hand on her sword hilt. The cries of a million tinny voices reverberated through the interior of Mirrodin, and soon it sounded as if every last construct—with the exception of the strange automatons—was sounding the alarm, chirping and singing like frog mites on a cold night. So much for being ignored. But despite the noise, not one of the constructs made an aggressive move. “Raksha,” she asked over the din, “does this seem a little too easy?”
“Glissa!” Raksha shouted and slammed into her with his shoulder as a silver flash streaked past, missing them both by inches.
BORROWED TIME
For the first time in living memory, humans, leonin, goblins, and elves saw the suns of Mirrodin rise at exactly the same time. Each of the five spheres glowed more brightly than Bruenna had ever seen, and five distinct colors light streamed into the sky from all directions. They blended into a blinding white glare over the Krark-Home battlefield.
The Neurok mage had never been so exhausted. She’d just gone to the well too many times, and her system refused to take it anymore. The quicksilver energy that powered Bruenna’s magic felt very far away, and she had been forced to the ground. She wanted to sleep for a week, but drew her sword anyway and joined the retreating ground troops on the mountain.
The last skyhunter had fallen, and with Bruenna’s power sapped the air was enemy territory. Wolfpacks of aerophins and a wide variety of the fierce-looking asymmetrical winged construct beasts—each as large as as a five aerophins put together—blasted the ground behind the defenders. Shriekers swooped and divebombed at odd intervals as the lumbering nim drove the leonin and goblin inexorably back.
Bruenna shielded her eyes as four goblin fighters were vaporized right next to her, peppering her forearms with shards of hot iron and molten blood. She stumbled blindly sideways and by sheer luck avoided a small avalanche of ironstone rubble the constructs’ shots had knocked loose from the cliffs above.
Bruenna raised her sword to deflect a swinging nim claw and jumped back, slamming into something armored that snarled. She swung her sword around blindly, but her blade connected with another.
“Careful, mage,” Yshkar growled. He lowered his longknife and guided Bruenna’s blade tip away from his left eye. “Someone could get hurt.”
“Look out!” Bruenna cried, and shoved the Kha aside as an energy bolt blasted the ground nearby and tore a scorched scar up the cliff wall, igniting a few of the scrub trees that still clung to the high reaches. “My Kha, you’ve got to call a full retreat, or you’re not going to have any subjects left tomorrow. We don’t have the strength to hold them here. We have to close up Krark-Home and save as many lives as we can.”
“Retreat? Tuck our tails, run, and hope Glissa will succeed?” Yshkar roared. “Look around you, Neurok. She has failed. And we will face our death on our—”
The leonin paused in midsentence and stared down at his chest with a look of faint surprise. A thin, blood-coated silver blade emerged from the center of Yshkar’s b
reastplate and glittered in the glare of the five suns. With a sickening slurp, the blade disappeared back into his chest and the leonin dropped dead at the mage’s feet.
The lithe figure behind him danced back a step and twirled her bloody blade.
“I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to gut that fool,” Lyese said.
Glissa followed the silver blur as it skimmed the surface of the interior and swooped back up for another pass. Behind her, Raksha bellowed, “Another one—move!” A second silver shape dove straight between them, missing Glissa but apparently striking a glancing blow at Geth’s head, which yelped.
“What are those things?” Glissa shouted over the dull roar of billions of hand-sized metal insects having a collective fit. “They’re too fast!”
“I don’t—”
A third silver blur appeared, and this time Raksha couldn’t dodge in time. “Ooof!” the leonin managed as the flying object carried him away. Glissa didn’t get a chance to follow, because the original flyer was on the way back up. She finally got a good look at the silver blur as it rapidly accelerated toward her. At the last second, she launched herself backward and dodged the ascending hovercraft. The elf girl was so surprised when she finally identified the rider that the second caught her a glancing blow on the boot as it swooped up beside its duplicate.
The identity of the first rider had been unmistakable. So had the second. He had a few more pink blotches of flesh marring his perfect silver skin, but the cruel, angular face had been burned into her mind. It was the face of a dead metal man she’d killed herself.
Without waiting for the first two to come at her another time, Glissa gave chase to the third identical copy of Malil, the one that had grabbed Raksha. She glanced back but didn’t spot either of the other two attackers.
“They’re following, but holding back,” Geth’s head shouted. “They obviously fear my power!”