It was a glorious charge. These hundred warriors and two score machines were cut off from the main army, yes, but they tore the belly out of the Phyrexian lines. They each killed hundreds. Every slain Phyrexian brought them ten running paces nearer to the Caves of Koilos.
There, the Phyrexian command center lay. In those tight confines, a hundred Metathran would be equal to ten thousand Phyrexians. Thaddeus and his troops would plunge through to the command core, slay the land-army's leaders, and press on to shut down the portal. This bloody business could be concluded in the next few days.
"To the caves!" Thaddeus shouted, lifting high one of the swords he held. "Break through to the caves!" His forces took up the call.
A wave of Phyrexians swept toward them, perhaps five hundred strong. Falcon engines screamed into their midst, impaling one in five. They flopped to ground as their innards were ground away. Four hundred more rushed onward. Grenadiers hurled their bombs in great overhead arcs. The crude devices fell in the midst of the running wave. Gray smoke belched out, shrapnel tearing through the Phyrexian lines. Many fell in pieces. Others struggled on with stumps of leg or arm streaming golden. Two hundred more came, unaffected.
So, it would be two to one. Thaddeus smiled. His teeth were limned in vermilion. It was for fights like this that he bore two swords.
The first blade struck a charging bloodstock. Thaddeus sidestepped the attack. His sword lanced with the precision of a marksman's arrow. It clove between flattened ribs and speared through the bloodstock's heart. The beast opened its mouth to scream. Only blood emerged. It pitched forward, dead as it ran. Its mechanical forelegs did not need a heart to live, and they struggled on. The bloodstock's head dragged on the ground, battered bloody by its own thudding hooves.
The other sword tangled with that of a Phyrexian trooper. Slower, more humanlike, this vat-grown fighter was cunning, trained in the arts of sword work. Blades clanged. Horned shoulders crashed. Both warriors halted in their charge, unable to win past. Steel raked steel. With depthless snake eyes, the infantryman studied its foe. Through a segmented mouth, it hissed. Something that smelled like creosote oozed from chitinous lips.
Thaddeus flung the thing back with one sword and brought the other to bear. The Phyrexian blocked the attack with a quick backhand parry. Thaddeus followed the block with a stab that should have eviscerated the beast. It spun easily aside. Thaddeus plunged forward, catching himself. The Phyrexian turned, sword high, and brought it down to cleave Thaddeus. Twin swords caught the blade in air and hurled it away. The two blades fell in a scissoring motion, catching either side of the creature's neck and slicing through. The monster's head bounded free.
Thaddeus drove onward. He had fallen back in his column.
They carved through the wave of death, near to breaking through. Thaddeus ached to be in the vanguard.
Vaulting the dead, he shouted again, "To the caves! To the caves!"
Atop the Caves of Koilos, Tsabo Tavoc had arranged a kind of tea party. There was no such thing as tea among Phyrexians, of course, and no notion of a party-which was why the spider woman had to borrow a human term for this experience. To sit on this high spot-breathing the fetor of battle, seeing compound deaths in compound eyes, witnessing the killings by her children and the murders of them-it was a banquet of sensations that could only have been akin to fine tea and pleasant banter.
That one, there-Tsabo Tavoc had thought, gazing down on the speckled blades as they rose and fell in the opening attack-that man-monster Thaddeus, he gives me greater diversion than any of you, my children. I would like him to come to me. I would like him to win his way to the caves.
A simple wish, it was. For Tsabo Tavoc, wishes became realities. Her will went out to her children, her killers. They held Commander Agnate and his contingent to a single plot of land, hurling themselves suicidally into that meat grinder just to keep the meat grinder in place. Before Thaddeus, though, Phyrexians melted, their will bowing to the will of Tsabo Tavoc. They fought as they fought because they wanted what she wanted.
He came. Mustering five score of his warriors, he broke through and charged, just as she wished.
Tsabo Tavoc felt every blow of his swords. Her consciousness lurked within each of those bashed-out brains. She fled away in the dying moments, only to surge up again in another warrior. He killed her countless times, each death freshly excruciating. Normally, Tsabo Tavoc enjoyed the anguish of others, the killing, but with this one she enjoyed the dying. Her mind swept out through her folk like a wave, crashing whitely against Thaddeus and his warriors and then retreating before him. She channeled him inward. Each loud assault was followed by an inexorable undertow that dragged him deeper.
There was such pleasure in the battle. Tsabo Tavoc was awash in regret as she pulled her mind away from the carnage.
Why draw the fly in unless the web is ready?
My children. I call to you.
Their response came in a quickening of pulses, in deep breaths in deep caverns. Her minions at the portal lifted their heads. Tsabo Tavoc saw what they saw-the wide, dark portal chamber. It centered on a pediment stone that shone like a mirror. The gleaming pediment radiated wires to the ceiling. Mechanisms it had powered six thousand years ago still huddled in the dark reaches.
This site was devised by the Ineffable himself in ancient days, when he was not yet a god but only a Thran. On one side of the shiny pediment, the darkness was filled with Phyrexian troops in rank and file. They marched toward the ascents and the battle. On the other side yawned a wide portal. Phyrexia lay there, beautiful and verdant beneath a blazing sky. Fields of metallic grass held great armies.
Tsabo Tavoc sought no warriors just now. She wanted more powerful denizens. Her will crowded through the streaming portal and sank down through the ground. She wanted creatures that lived deep in the Fourth Sphere of Phyrexia, amid mile-high furnaces and belching fire. She spotted them.
They were unnaturally tall, unnaturally thin, their flesh clinging like old paper to their bones. In red robes, the creatures walked metal causeways. They dipped long poles into pits and poured jerkied flesh into vats, feeding overlarge fish. These were vat priests. They compleated every newt, making it a perfect war machine.
Spheres and worlds away, Tsabo Tavoc smiled.
Her vat priests lifted their heads.
It was simply enough done. She needed only place the image of Thaddeus in their minds. She felt the saliva run along their withered jaws. They would obey her summons. The vat priests would send their most sanguine minds to Koilos to have a look at Thaddeus.
Satisfied, Tsabo Tavoc's consciousness sifted back upward. Her mind withdrew into the Caves of Koilos. When the Ineffable had walked the world as a Thran, these had been called the Caves of the Damned. As she returned to the delicious battle, Tsabo Tavoc thought how right that name had been.
Certainly for Thaddeus, they would once again be the Caves of the Damned.
My sword unmakes another. I see the tip chop through the thing's belly. It splits wide like a shirt ripping. Out spill strange, dark, wet shapes. The monster comes to pieces. It seems not even to have the will to live.
They cannot kill me. It is almost brutal to slay this way. They are no match for me and mine. It is like cutting grain to kill these Phyrexians. It is like chopping wildflowers, except that these flowers shriek and gush.