Not in this battle. A greater mind interposed itself between them. Agnate could only batter his thoughts against that solid and seamless presence.
Tsabo Tavoc wants him… Tsabo Tavoc gets him…
He fights beautifully, magnificently. He fights like a lion.
Tsabo Tavoc took a deep, satisfied breath. Lids closed over compound eyes. She had no desire to see the cave that ensconced her. It was the battle beyond that she watched with inner eyes. Distally, she experienced the slaughter of thousands of Metathran and felt the murder of thousands of her own children. Proximally, she sensed armies of warriors arriving even then through the portal, red-robed vat priests among them. In the middle distance, she felt Thaddeus.
He kills with such grim pleasure.
Tsabo Tavoc shifted her legs. A tremor of ecstasy moved through the mechanisms as Thaddeus clove the head of a gargantua. She had not intended to sacrifice that one. Gargantuas were hunched things of gray muscle, their feet as wide and rooted as trees. Flesh like rhino hide plated their torsos. Scythe claws could divide a man into five sections. Grotesque swells of bone covered their bulbous heads. Within lurked brains built for bloodlust and obedience. It took a century to grow a gargantua-a century and implants from ten separate species. Thaddeus had killed it in a moment. That was a costly loss-and yet all the more piquant because of it.
Thaddeus and his forty stormed the cave mouth. The gate guard lined up before them, claws and teeth at the ready. She would not thin their blood. If Thaddeus were to gain his way within, he would need to gain it honestly.
Tsabo Tavoc propelled another gargantua up before Thaddeus.
It raked its claws outward and caught Thaddeus as though he were a grasshopper. One simple squeeze and-
Tsabo Tavoc took a shuddering breath as she felt Thaddeus's sword slice the tendons of the beasts wrist. Flexors balled up beneath the elbow and extensors, splaying the claws uselessly back. It was a glorious strike. The pain was exquisite.
Thaddeus dropped to the ground.
The gargantua had another arm. It grabbed Thaddeus. It clenched its fist. There would be a brief spray and the gurgle of meat between claws-
Except that two of those claws were lopped off by the Metathran. He vaulted through the bloody space and ran up the gargantua's scaly arm.
Tsabo Tavoc smiled. He was good. What would it be next? Heart? Spine? Throat? Brain?
The gargantua's dead claws flailed at Thaddeus. They cut shallowly into him.
He reached the beast's shoulder. There was something in his hand-long, white, and curved. It shone point-on for a moment before the tooth plunged into the gargantua's eye. It sank through cornea and humors, up the optic nerve. The tooth bit into brain, cracking out the top of the skull.
Tsabo Tavoc did not withdraw from the gargantua as it slumped down in death. She wanted to feel that tooth through her mind, that black welling tide of death in every tissue. She wanted to suffer Thaddeus's victory. It would make her own triumph all the more sweet.
Thaddeus was inside the cave. He and twenty of his warriors had fought their way in. They would strike for the command core. They would all die but one. Thaddeus would be hers.
Ah, war is a glorious enterprise.
Tsabo Tavoc opened her compound eyes. She stood on eager legs and ambled out into the cavern beyond.
The gargantuas were fearsome beasts, but they died as had the sand worms, spinal centipedes, Metathran zombies, scuta, blood-stocks, and shock troops. Thaddeus's hundred had been winnowed to a simple score, but they had carved their way into the Phyrexian fortress. Now it was only a matter of discovering the fortress's heart, and tearing it out, and feasting on it.
"Gather up!" he shouted. The Caves of Koilos picked up his voice and hollered it back at him. Thaddeus smiled. The sound was good.
As they advanced, the twenty warriors converged on Thaddeus. "We drive for the portal. Once it is closed, we'll clear out the command center. How many pikes remain?" Four of the warriors lifted high their pikes. "Good. Take the vanguard. Axes take the rear. Swords take the flanks. Slay only those beasts who give battle. This is their beachhead. They will defend it furiously. Don't be drawn away from the main group and the main objective-the portal. How many grenades?"
Eighteen of the twenty had bandoleers.
"Excellent. That will bury the mirror podium in a halfmile of rock. Downward."
The final word was not spoken before pikes bristled across the vanguard and axes gleamed at the rear. Thaddeus himself took to the right flank, knowing the first turn would cast him in a blind corner. Muscular and vicious, the strike force rushed to the gap. Pikes rounded the corner, intent on whatever lay beyond.
Flesh lay beyond-flesh and horns and fangs. Pikes sank into the shrieking wall of monsters. Impaled, they came on.
Jaws as large as a bear trap clamped the head of one pikeman. Triangular teeth converged, closing in an inescapable bite. With a crunch, they severed the man's spine. His body dropped away, hands yet holding the haft.
A man in the vanguard released his pike, drew his sword, and stabbed. The blade buried itself in a beast's belly. It sliced through scales and muscles and plunged into some black organ beneath. The Phyrexian shrieked. Acids sprayed from its stomach. They ate away the man's hand and arm to the elbow. He died beneath his falling foe.
The tumbling monster dropped sideways, crushing the third pikeman.
The fourth vaulted up the beast and drove his sword into the head of another. Steel cracked bone and brain. The monster- what seemed a giant ground sloth but could have been almost anything in that murk-was unimpressed. Its fist pounded its own head, crushing the pikeman and driving the sword deeper.
The vanguard was gone, and only ten feet gained into the cave.
"Forward!" Thaddeus commanded, taking the van.
His sword cut between two huge eyes. They peeled back on opposite sides of a split visage. Thaddeus kicked a foothold in the bisected sinus cavities and vaulted atop the hissing beast. He climbed the thing.
"Forward!"
Thaddeus's sword hewed a path through beasts. Slick with glistening-oil, his boots reached ground. He advanced into the dark.
Battle sounds suddenly hushed. Thaddeus whirled. Even the light of the entrance was lost. It was as though a door had slid silently closed behind him.
Thaddeus kept his sword at the ready. He reached to his belt, grabbed a flare, and broke the thing in half. A red flame shot from each edge. The light gleamed dimly off walls of smooth stone.
How did I get separated?
He spun, glimpsing movement out of the corner of his eye. Turning fully around, he watched for shadows against the dark wall. No one was there.
He should have looked up.
A metallic spider leg knocked his sword away. Crushing weight flung him to his back. His flare skipped angrily across the floor. Thaddeus struggled to grab a grenade. It was no good. His hands were pinned. He was trapped.
In the sulfuric half-light, a voice spoke. It was as omnipresent and alien as a cicada chorus: "Tsabo Tavoc wants you. Tsabo Tavoc will have you."
Chapter 27
Where once rot and death had filled the treetops, now music and life reigned.
Of course, the ravages of war remained-whole crowns had been eaten away, whole villages destroyed, whole families wiped from the face of Dominaria. The heights of Llanowar were gashed open to the skies. It would never be the same. Even after suckers grew to twigs and branches to boughs, the forest would forever bear the taste of glistening-oil. It was the curse of the cure.