“Your orders are simple, my Creator, simple enough for Malil to understand. There will be more of my children. Armies born of a single thought.”
“Orders, master?” Malil asked, more than a little awestruck by the forces that the Guardian had handed to him.
“Yes, great Karn, simple is best. He has not yet touched the faces of gods.” The master began to mumble and hum, then whirled on Malil. “Malil shall find the elf girl and return her to me. Surely this is simple enough for the first order.”
“She will be yours,” Malil finally replied. “And what else do you-does the Creator ask of the Guardian’s army?”
The master laughed like a cawraptor about to make a kill. “Malil is going to retrieve all of the soul traps and return them to me. Then he shall take the surface world in the name of Memnarch.”
CHAPTER 11
Bruenna, Glissa, and Lyese rode golden zauks over the glittering fields of razorgrass. The leonin domesticated the large flightless birds as mounts. After years of breeding the creatures were incredibly tough, agile, fast, and most of all versatile. They could outpace a flying pteron over open ground, climb vertical cliffs with their foot-long, hooked claws, and swim a mile underwater without taking a breath. Odd, Glissa thought, that with all that, these birds still couldn’t fly.
Still, the three of them needed fast transportation that wouldn’t waste magical energy or give them away to anyone watching the skies. The zauks had been one of Raksha’s gifts. Considering the jobs he was asking them to perform for him, it was the least the Kha could do, in Glissa’s opinion.
Fortunately, Raksha Golden Cub was not the sort to do the least of anything. Though far from Taj Nar, he allowed them to choose armor, weapons, and other gear from his personal supplies. The trio had found complete sets of fine pteron-bone armor, enchanted to improve the wearer’s swordsmanship, prompting Lyese to cast her Tel-Jilad armor aside, adding she wasn’t working for Yulyn anymore. The armor was accompanied by polished helms that carried no magical enhancements, but were remarkable lightweight and exceedingly durable.
Naturally, Glissa found herself most impressed by the weapons. Silver longbows now hung from the saddles of each elf, while Bruenna had passed over the unfamiliar bow for a bandolier full of knives. Raksha had told her they had been blessed by Great Dakan himself, and could not miss their target. Lyese had been awestruck that the Kha had let her take a short sword engraved with an image of the Golden Cub and encrusted with protective crystals. Glissa reminded herself that for all her protestations, her sister was still a youth in many ways. Glissa also suspected her sister was beginning to develop a bit of a crush on the leonin Kha.
Glissa was stunned to find a flawlessly preserved elven longsword among the weaponry on hand, and Raksha had insisted she take it. He claimed it had been a gift to Great Dakan from the elves of old. Glissa didn’t bother to point out that a lot of the elves of old were still in the Tangle, they just forgot everything once in a while. The sword was perfectly balanced. Glissa even used it to disarm Raksha during a brief sparring match.
A wave of vertigo made Glissa list in her saddle, and she let out an involuntary groan as flashing lights and stabbing pain erupted in her temple. She saw shadowy shapes, Bruenna and Lyese, whirl on their mounts in alarm, but could not make out what they were saying. Her ears felt filled with quicksilver, and a dull roar was increasing in pitch somewhere in the back of her head.
Then Mirrodin was gone, and Glissa floated in a cold, empty, utterly silent void. She realized she was moving through the inky black when a tiny pinprick of light appeared up ahead. Glissa felt herself moving more quickly, and the light steadily grew, gradually gaining definition. The light became a sphere, the sphere a world, familiar features became clearer. Glissa flew through the shadows toward Mirrodin.
There were the glittering hexagonal plates that covered the Glimmervoid and provided purchase for dozens of different species of razor grass, running to the edge of jagged, rusty scabs that could only be the Oxidda mountain range, whence came Slobad and his goblin kin. The Tangle she felt in her bones before she saw it, the forests pulsing with the magical energies to which she was most closely attuned. From this distance, it looked like an especially large hunk of moss clinging to a tarnished silver ball. The Quicksilver Sea shone like a glittering mirror, reflecting the light of the moons, while the dark stain of the Mephidross seemed to devour the glow of four satellites-the green moon was absent-spewing a huge cloud of brownish-green ochre into the atmosphere. From her godlike point of view, Glissa could see that those fumes spread much farther than anyone below suspected, dissipating across the plane in a thin haze.
And they were moons, not suns. She saw that now, there could be no doubt. Four glowing balls of energy, each spinning around the hollow world that spawned them, twirling in a complicated, unpredictable dance. Mirrodin reflected and absorbed the energy the orbs projected.
She wondered if this was what it really looked like when one flew through the heavens, or if this was the best her imagination could muster. She was beginning to suspect this was more vivid hallucination than flare, for this was not a vision of the past. There were simply too many moons.
Glissa felt an unbidden urge to swoop down close to the Tangle. The forests of home rapidly grew before her into a rich carpet of green, then crystallized into the familiar verdigris foliage she’d hunted for decades. There was something there she needed to find, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Something she’d lost, or maybe something that had lost her. Or someone. She pulled her focus down and watched the world move by below her, scanning the ground. She became a moon of Mirrodin herself, soaring around and around the great metallic sphere in an expanding orbit, taking in the entire surface. And everywhere she went, everywhere she looked, whether skimming the Quicksilver Sea or knifing through the thickets of the Tangle, she noticed one thing was absent from this living metal world.
There were no people. Every settlement, from Taj Nar to the Vault of Whispers, from Lumengrid to Viridia, was completely devoid of anything walking on two feet.
No, there was one thing. A small silver dot that ambled over the dream-Mirrodin on four legs, like a crab. Memnarch walked the surface of the metal world, and he was utterly alone.
Glissa felt a pang of sympathy, then quickly buried it. Served the twisted monster right. Alone on an empty world, with no one to worship him as a god, not even his favored vedalken. The metal monster’s face turned up to stare at her with six glittering eyes, and he opened his mouth as if screaming, yet Glissa could not hear.
The globe below her began to visibly shake, vibrating impossibly fast as Memnarch’s wail reached into the heavens, eventually striking Glissa’s keen ears. What appeared to be simple vibration from her vantage point became massive tectonic quakes on the surface as the hollow sphere began to crack. And still Memnarch screamed, as white light sliced through the widening crevices in Mirrodin’s skin, raw magic that erupted violently now.