"Good," Agnate huffed as he strode down the length of the gargantua. There was no point advancing unless the rear was secure. Flinging mud and blood from his arms, he loped forward through the marsh.
The initial fury of the charge was gone. Now all that remained was grim-jawed killing.
A Phyrexian scuta, seeming a giant horseshoe crab, scuttled through the marsh toward him. Water churned off its black skull shield. A once-human face stretched absurdly over that contorted bone. Two long, barbed legs lashed out. One grasped Agnate's thigh. It yanked, intent on pulling him beneath its shell. No man dragged there would ever emerge.
With a single swipe of his axe, Agnate severed the first limb and leaped over the other. A mud-slick boot caught on the brow ridge of the beast. Agnate vaulted to the creature's back.
He heaved the axe down overhead. It cracked the shell and bit shallowly into the brain. Agnate hauled sideways on the haft and cracked the wound wider.
The scuta bucked, struggling to throw him off.
Agnate yanked his axe free, hauled it high, and buried its head in the same wound. The cut went deep this time, severing a critical nerve nexus. The scuta slumped in the swamp.
Agnate leaped from its back. His powerstone pike was tucked under one arm, and his axe swung overhead. He ran onward. Mud sucked at his boots but couldn't slow him. No foes moved among the trees ahead. Glistening-oil gleamed in rainbows atop the swamp water, and Phyrexian corpses littered the ground. There were plenty of blue-skinned corpses there too, but the Metathran had won this swamp.
With a high-pitched whistle, Agnate signaled the merfolk to advance and hold the terrain. Meanwhile, he and his troops charged onward.
The ground rose. The dead trees fell away. Reeds crowded the banks of the wetlands. Agnate labored through them into a true jungle. Though other Metathran had gone before him, hacking at the man-sized leaves and thick green stalks, the brake was still a visual wall. The shouts and screams ahead told of a fierce battle in the wood.
At a full run, Agnate chopped away a thorn vine that barred his path. He plunged from the relative cool of the swamp into the steam heat of the jungle. His second stride flushed a swarm of mosquitoes from the undergrowth. In moments, they covered every inch of his exposed flesh. Only the mud saved him. He rubbed his face. His hand came away slick with his own blood.
Just ahead, the line of charge had stalled. The Phyrexians were making a stand-a suicidal stand against this many Metathran. They wanted to channel the advance, but why?
Whistling a complex signal to the Metathran with him, Agnate hung his battle axe on his belt and slung the powerstone pike over his shoulder. Then he took to the trees. He climbed. It was the unenviable limitation of most warriors to think only in two dimensions. Agnate and his brethren had been trained to battle in three. Like a troop of arboreal primates, they clambered up the green stalks all around.
Quickly, the roar of battle dropped away below them. The vines provided natural ropes, reaching to the first canopy. Tree to tree, the Metathran advanced. It was another world up there, a battlefield the Phyrexians had ignored. Unopposed and unnoticed, Agnate and a scant dozen others picked their way over the battle lines.
Below them, the fight was ferocious. To one side crowded the scaly and scabrous hordes of Phyrexia-to the other the blue muscles of the Metathran. Where the two sides met, blade and claw tore flesh from limbs. Bodies mounded. Already the dead lay in a broad U shape, with more and more Metathran flooding into the center.
Agnate hurled himself across empty air to a tree beyond the battle line. Scaling to its upper crotch, he ran out along a thick bough and leaped to an adjacent tree. Ahead the boles dwindled into a swamp-broader, deeper, more horrid than the first. Not even dead trees stood in the black water. Nothing wholesome could live in this slough. Nothing lived-but much had died. The air was rank with the gases of decay. Giant flies swarmed above bubbling pockets. Skeletal figures lay in the brackish water.
"Channeling us toward a swamp?" Agnate wondered to himself. Then he saw why.
In the center of that putrid swamp circled three grotesque figures. They had once been Metathran and still walked upright, but there the similarity ended. In place of feet they stood on scabby stumps. In place of hands they had vicious claws. Their heads had been flayed of skin and jutted forward on long, grotesque necks. Where the necks joined their shoulders, a great mass of pulsing matter sprouted. The stuff was barely contained within a sac of veins and membranes. Agnate had been trained to know what those globular spores were and what these creatures were bred to do.
"Plague spreaders," he hissed.
These poor souls had been turned into living colonies of contagion. Their brain stems were infected with a strain of plague that formed an unwholesome pocket of spores. Blood vessels and support structures grew to nourish the pestilence. When fully ripened, the membranes would split. Wind would carry the contagion out to slay any Metathran for miles around.
That's why Agnate's army was being channeled to this swamp-so that it could be decimated in one stroke. In moments the Metathran would break through the wall of Phyrexians and rush to their doom.
It was a clever trap, but Agnate was a clever mouse. Signaling to his troops to remain where they were, Agnate climbed down the tree. The stench of the swamp grew more potent as he descended. At ground level it was nearly unbearable. He crept to the bank of the marsh and knelt. From his belt, he produced flint and steel. They were the only weapons he needed.
Leaning above the fetid waters, he struck the metal against the stone. A single spark leaped away. It twisted in a bright spiral down toward the water. The spark grew. It ignited the thick swamp gas. Blue fire swelled outward. In a moment, the whole swamp went up. From where Agnate stood to the far shore, it all erupted in azure flame. The heat flashed away his silver hair. The roar hurled him back against a tree. He struck it and fell, but as he did, he saw the three plague spreaders riling in agony. One of the amazing properties of glistening-oil was that, when heated to a sufficient degree, it became extremely volatile.
Three blinding flashes burst into being in the center of that blue flame. In the afterimage burned into Agnate's mind, he saw the plague spreaders' skeletons still standing, all blood, all flesh, all plague burned away.
Agnate rolled to his knees, catching his breath. His folk would break through any moment. He would need to be ready to lead them on. Standing, he drew his battle axe and whistled his warriors to him.
Chapter 6
As the overlay began, Rhammidarigaaz, lord of the dragon nations, roared a warning into the charnel skies of Koilos. Phyrexians were coming. His wings spread upon the hot winds. Powerful legs hurled him aloft. Muscles surged. The great serpent rose patiently skyward. Leathery skin caught the broiling air and flung it down in twin cyclones.
The rest of the dragon nations followed. The dragons of Shiv, Darigaaz's own volcanic breed, were first to launch themselves in the wake of their lord. After them leaped the dragons of ancient Argive, alabaster creatures that were more at home among clouds than sand. Like predators after prey, the swamp dragons followed. Their black scales glimmered in the storm of dust, and their eyes gleamed blacker still. The serpents of the forest lunged upward next and spread their cobra cowls out to catch the wind. Last of all, the sea dragons, who languished in this desert heat, vaulted toward hints of blue.
It was an awesome spectacle. These thousand dragons were the greatest warriors of the wide-flung dragon nations. They spiraled into the sky above human and Metathran and elf allies, above Phyrexian foes.