He spoke too soon. The beasts might not have airships, but they had brought cannons. Fire spat from entrenched batteries. Crimson and black, rays roared skyward.
One bolt struck a falling stream of goblin bombs. It ignited them. In midair, they detonated. Each new explosion triggered a second and third. Like a fuse, the line of bombs carried their explosions up toward the stem of the bomber. Shrapnel tore into the fuselage. The detonations went to completion. A white blaze erupted around the ship. A thousand explosions roared out. Hunks of ship cascaded down.
Another beam rippled through a line of fighters. One after another, they flew into the radiance and were cloven in two. Halves spiraled down in fiery wreckage.
A third bolt-this placed best of all-smashed into Weatherlight's port airfoil. The spars lit with fire. The canvas flashed away to nothing. Weatherlight listed hard to port and began to roll over.
"Take her up!" Gerrard cried even as his latest shot raked the enemy lines.
"I know! I know!" Sisay shouted back through the speaking tube.
The starboard airfoil slapped closed, and the ship's engines roared. Weatherlight lolled upright and rocketed heavenward.
"Signal the fleet! Break off the assault!" Gerrard ordered. He braced himself against the hot casing of the gun. Weatherlight jigged up through a rack of clouds. "Rendezvous at the Metathran camp. Land and repair!"
He had breath for little more. The ship ascended like a comet. Gerrard and his crew and their fugitive armies held tight to the meteoric craft. It vaulted just ahead of the cannon fire, outpacing killing heads of flame. The Benalish armada straggled upward in the great ship's wake.
In canyons of concealing cloud, Weatherlight leveled out. Gerrard gave a gusty sigh.
"Let's hope for a better reception from the Metathran."
Within his tent, Commander Agnate stared bleakly at the tactical maps of Koilos. They lay in a sloppy stack across his field table. Once, they had been neatly stored, each in its own tube. Once, Thaddeus and Agnate had strolled their compasses easily across lines of topography. Now, the maps bore the fretful, fruitless scribbles of a commander in a hopeless engagement.
Agnate was trapped. His forces had been winnowed horribly by the last, disastrous assault. Fifty thousand Metathran had marched into battle behind him, and twenty thousand had fled. They had made camp here, twenty miles beyond the caves-out of reach of the monsters. Members of Thaddeus's army slowly joined them. The field was lost. The Metathran were in full rout. Thaddeus's force was equally reduced. Thirty thousand of them remained, but they had lost their commander.
Thaddeus was easily worth ten thousand troops.
He is worth more than that, Agnate mused bitterly. Thaddeus was the other half of his mind. Even distance could not block their shared thoughts-until Tsabo Tavoc. She knew of their bond and targeted it. She tore the point from the compass, leaving only a lead nib to turn, hopelessly alone.
Agnate could not think without Thaddeus. Together, they had planned an assault of a hundred thousand Metathran on a hundred thousand Phyrexians. The Metathran ranks had been halved, and the Phyrexian ranks had doubled. Agnate had positioned paper troops in various arrangements throughout the broad plain. Even with a four-to-one kill ratio, no Metathran would remain to possess the field. It would be suicide to attack now and swifter and surer suicide with every passing hour.
A sound intruded on Agnate's bleak reverie. He had blocked out camp sounds-crackling fires, conversation, strummed lyres- and so the slow-mounting roar startled him alert. Lurching up from his camp stool, Agnate caught his head in the peak of the man-sized tent. With a growl, he ducked and emerged. The flaps slapped angrily together behind him.
Mounting thunder filled the dusty sky. It was unmistakable- the approach of airships. The Phyrexians were bringing sky machines to destroy them.
Agnate shook his head grimly. I couldn't make a damned decision myself, and now they have decided for me.
All around, Agnate's troops stood stunned, staring upward. His indecision had infected even them.
"To arms! To arms!" Agnate bellowed. "Train the guns! Wake! It's time to die."
Soldiers snatched up their swords and pikes. They cranked crossbows. They scrambled to rip covers from cannons and wheel them about. Blocks of powder slid down the barrels of bombards. Powerstone charges mounted within ray cannons. Shouts filled the air. It was a sound that heartened Agnate after days of silent fear and indecision.
"You might not want to fire on these," came a voice abruptly at his side. "These are your reinforcements."
Agnate whirled, sword raking out, and found himself staring at the grim visage of Urza Planeswalker. The man's face was battle weary. His ash-blond hair was disheveled and singed-though only a moment's attention would make it perfect. Urza had not had a moment to spare.
"Master," Agnate said breathlessly, dropping to one knee.
"Call off your gunners!" Urza replied with quiet urgency.
"Gunners, stand down!" Agnate commanded without standing. His call went down the lines. To Urza, he said, "Reinforcements?"
"Coalition forces. Airships, a Benalish army, an elf strike force, and a replacement for Thaddeus," Urza said simply.
"There will never be a replacement for Thaddeus."
"We will see."
Suddenly, the sky was split by a hurtling ship. The vessel clove the air into canyons of white exhaust. The ship was sleek and large, unmistakable to any Metathran's eye. This was Weatherlight-Urza's angel. Her lines were etched into the dream minds of all Urza's children. Her lines meant salvation.
It was a ragged salvation. One airfoil had burned away, and the other was folded like a praying hand. Burns scored her hull. Frightened faces crowded her rail. In the ship's rocketing wake came an even less impressive swarm of vessels. All were small. Some gave out puffs of smoke. Others whined gnatlike.
Weatherlight cut her starboard thrust and spread her remaining airfoil. She slowed and banked, beginning a long circle around the Metathran camp. If she could land without crashing, it would be a miracle. Metathran were raised to believe in miracles from Weatherlight,
Rising to his feet, Agnate watched the wounded war bird and her fledglings circle. "Who is this replacement for Thaddeus?"
"His name is Eladamri. He is a Skyshroud elf from Rath. He is the Seed of Freyalise."
"What is a Freyalise?"
"He is my choice to replace Thaddeus."
"He is not my choice, nor the choice of Thaddeus's troops," Agnate replied quietly. "He is no good until we have chosen him."
"I know."
"And if he fails the test?"
"Then Koilos is lost."
Weatherlight's landing would have been better described as a controlled crash. It was controlled in the sense that Sisay was at the helm, and she was among the best fliers in the multiverse. Also, its engines took orders from a silver golem-undoubtedly the best engineer anywhere. The rest of the crew did all they could- which meant tying themselves to something that would not move and informing their gods they might soon need afterlife accommodations. Aside from these efforts, the landing was simply a crash.
Weatherlight's landing spines sliced into a sand dune. They flung up grit as if it were water. The hull smashed to ground. It groaned under its own weight and bounced briefly aloft again. Sand streamed from a mangled spine. The ship smacked the top of the next dune and knocked the peak off. The keel sawed through packed dust before hanging up on a layer of gravel. Weatherlight pitched forward. She slid down the far side of the dune. Sand shoved her sideways. Flinging a blanket of the stuff, Weatherlight came to rest on the side of a natural bowl in the desert.
Panting in his gunner's rig, Gerrard spat grit from his teeth and said, "That wasn't so bad."