"An elaborate foe," Grizzlegom replied. "Will you do it?"

"We are yours to command-"

"I don't mean as subordinates," Grizzlegom interrupted. "I mean as warriors. Will you do what must be done? Already tonight, I have slain a n.o.ble comrade. I slew him twice. It was no easy thing, but it had to be done. Now we must slay an ally. I don't want soldiers following orders. I want heroes who believe in each stroke of their blades. If you do not believe, we will die tonight. If you do believe, we will live. So, how say you? Will you do this thing?"

Before they could answer, a voice came from the guards at the head of the tent. "Announcing Lich Lord Dralnu." The flaps drew back, and the beast himself entered.

In bright armor, the lich lord was an amazing sight. He might have been a living man. Gleaming boots drummed to a halt. Cuisses glinted beneath the silk ta.s.sels of his tabard. Only his head rose free of the pristine armor-his scabrous and horrid head. The lines of n.o.bility remained in his high cheeks, though here and there the flesh split to show bones. The once-aquiline nose was sunken. Desiccated lips parted above teeth like dry corn. Only the eyes lived, and they burned with anger.

"There is an a.s.sa.s.sin in the camp," Lich Lord Dralnu said.

The other three warriors had risen. Rilgesh stared in mute frustration at his weapons, lying out of reach on the floor.

It was Grizzlegom who spoke, "What? An a.s.sa.s.sin?"

Dralnu's eyes were unblinking-his lids long since gone. "I just went to visit Commander Agnate in his tent, and when I got there-" he paused, seeming to eye the minotaur's axe-"I found Agnate slain."

Grizzlegom feigned surprise. "Slain! In his own tent! What of the guard?"

"Yes," Dralnu continued, watching closely. "What of the guard? He would not allow me near the tent. He tried to force me away. I slew him, entered, and found Commander Agnate lying there, his head in pieces."

The two Metathran shifted their gazes from the lich lord to the minotaur.

Dralnu continued. "There was a minotaur wrapping the body. He said he was a healer, though there was no hope of healing Commander Agnate. I ordered him away from the body, but he would not relinquish Agnate to me. I accused him of the murder, and he attacked me. I killed him as well."

Grizzlegom's hackles rose. "It sounds as though you have found your a.s.sa.s.sins."

"Two of them, but the axe that slew Agnate was nowhere to be found. There must have been a third."

The Metathran gazed at the axe.

Grizzlegom gritted his teeth. "You mean an axe like this?" He drew the weapon with a sudden, angry movement. "A minotaur's axe, with a broad enough curve to cleave a man from pate to throat?"

The lich lord warily watched the blade. "Yes. That sort of blade exactly."

Grizzlegom continued. "Good. Means and opportunity link me to the death of Commander Agnate. Perhaps even witnesses, for you have the power to question the dead."

"I am questioning you, Commander Grizzlegom."

"All that remains is motive, yes? Motive is what makes a killing an a.s.sa.s.sination or a murder or the normal course of war-or perhaps even a matter of honor."

"There was no honor in this killing. You slew him in order to take command of his troops," the lich lord hissed.

"Are those my motives or yours?" Grizzlegom asked, studying the notched blade. "Your gangrene slew him, not my axe." "You have as much as admitted your guilt." "As have you!" the minotaur retorted. "But we argue because we each need these men-Agnate's men. They are our judges. Let them judge. Let them strip away our arms. Let them shackle us in iron-for even a lich lord cannot escape iron. Let them hood our heads, and once we are incapable of striking back, let them choose which they believe and which they kill."

Through rictus lips, the lich lord said, "Why should I submit to such a disgraceful act?"

"If you speak the truth, you have nothing to fear." "I speak the truth. It was your axe that slew the commander." Grizzlegom dropped his axe. It clattered to the ground beside General Rilgesh's own weapons. He drew his arms behind him, presenting them for the shackles.

Simultaneously, Dralnu drew the gauntlets from his emaciated hands and positioned them at his back.

The iron bands locked simultaneously in place. The two commanders were turned to face one another. Hatred sparked between them.

"These warriors are honorable," Dralnu said. "They will not believe the murderer of Agnate." "That is my hope."

Thick woven silk descended over their heads. It wrapped them tightly in blackness. Though he could see nothing, Grizzlegom could hear the guard captain's sword grate from its sheath. Metal clanged as the general retrieved his blade from the floor. One of the Metathran positioned himself behind Dralnu, and the other behind Grizzlegom.

The lich lord whispered, "Fool, they will kill us both, but I am lord of the dead."

Steel whirled. It sliced through silk and skin and skull and brain. A second blade crashed down atop an armored breastplate, shattering the stones inset there. Lich Lord Dralnu had not even struck the ground before his black heart was impaled.

Shaking the wrap from his head, Grizzlegom joined his horns to the gruesome work. Each shattered crystal blazed with searing fire. The lich's sacklike belly held a score of them. They spilled out on the ground like obscene eggs. Dralnu had hoped to hatch himself again and again and again.

When the first rays of sunlight raked across the undead that morning, they knew their master was gone. Without Dralnu, sunlight was a searing thing. In camp, a trump heralded the dawn.

Like minions of that hated morn, Metathran and minotaurs charged suddenly from their tents, their eyes ablaze.

The undead fled. They wished for pits and grottoes and sloughs, but here on the volcano there were none. There was only the beaming sun and the cold blue of Metathran steel and the hot red of minotaur eyes. Commander Grizzlegom led the charge.

The living betrayed the dead. They fought with vicious fury. They sent their onetime colleagues down to the second death.

Chapter 30.

The Soul Bomb.

The Steam Beast was a crude nightmare, ten times the size of a t.i.tan engine. Driven by coal and oil, it streamed soot from a thousand k.n.o.bby joints. Pistons shot explosively from pressure chambers. Drive shafts propelled the monster on six enormous legs. Its central body was a framework packed with hissing boilers. Foot-thick armor guarded the power plants from attack. The beast had no head but shoulders that sported hundreds of reaching arms. Each was tipped in huge t.i.tanium shears. Each could dart from the beast to rip apart whatever challenged it.

Urza and his five remaining t.i.tans-Taysir, Freyalise, Bo Levar, Windgrace, and Guff-challenged it. They seemed badgers before a bear, except that this bear had hundreds of arms.

Rockets blazed from Urza's wrists. They shot toward the beast, cracked off its armor, and spiraled away. Trailing gray smoke, the rockets rose into the murk of Phyrexia's fourth sphere. One by one, they impacted the pipe-lined ceiling and exploded. Oil and fire rained down.

The Steam Beast's shears lashed out. Blades gnawed one leg of Urza's t.i.tan engine and cut through its power conduit.

Growling, Urza invoked a distortion field. Blue magic crackled from his fingertips to trace along the nearest shears. Energy mapped them, lines on a schematic. Urza twisted the lines. Metal shrieked and bent. Blades ground against each other. Joints failed. Bolts popped. A dozen metal arms clattered to the ground.

Still, there were hundreds more. Shears etched scars on Commodore Guff's piloting bulb. They worried Taysir's powerstones. They gripped Lord Windgrace's foreleg.

Urza planeswalked from the battleground and instantly reappeared. His t.i.tan feet came down on the back of the Steam Beast.

The iron armor was soot black and slick with oil. Urza's engine lost its footing. He slipped and fell to one knee. The fall saved him, for scores of scissor-tipped arms snapped overhead.

Urza rammed one fist down into the superstructure. Boilers crowded below, organs in the monster's torso. Blistering heat peeled from them. Urza spread his mechanical fingers. Sorceries sprang from the ends of them and fanned out through the beast. The spells struck adjacent boilers and bored through their thick metal. Steam shot angrily from each hole, and then fire. Metal bounded out, swelling before breaking.

Urza yanked his arm back as shrapnel flew. He crouched upon the greasy back plate, saved a second time. Hurtling hunks of boiler rang the armor like a gong. Anything within the beast's torso was doomed.

Shrapnel penetrated adjacent boilers, setting off a chain reaction. The beast rattled and boomed. Its arms trembled and went slack. Creaking, it tipped forward and collapsed to the ground. Steam poured in a storm cloud from it.

Urza rode the beast to ground. Once it was still, he caught his breath and stood, wreathed in mist. It parted, showing him to the other five t.i.tans. They stared in amazement.

There will be more, Urza told them. His mind worked to fuse the severed conduits in his leg. Make what repairs you can immediately, and then fan out around the vat yards. Watch for dragon engines. I will meanwhile plant the last soul bomb in the reactor at its center.

Bo Levar snorted, flinging away the arm that had almost shattered his helm, Great. I'm sick of this place. What's the fifth sphere like?

Huffing in his pilot bulb, Commodore Guff paged through a book. A nasty sphere, by all accounts.

Shocking! replied Bo Levar in imitation of the commodore.

Ignoring him, Guff said, A great sea of boiling oil, thickening below to sludge and then to rock. The firmament is more pipe work, with large ports that suck.

The sky sucks, the ground sucks ... sounds like all the other spheres, Bo Levar griped.

Are you a vacuous idiot? raged Urza. The blank looks on his companions' faces only spurred him on. Are you all so soulless that you cannot marvel at mile-high furnaces and steam-powered magnabeasts? At living metal and mechanisms that reproduce and grow? At the absolute blend of biology and physics, artifice and magic?

Bo Levar had about enough. You speak as though you love this place-and here we are to destroy it.

Yes, we will destroy it, Urza agreed, but we are destroying a masterpiece. You must understand that.

None of us understands that, Urza. To us, this place is a living h.e.l.l. We can't understand why you think it's a heaven or why, in thinking what you do, that you still want to destroy it. We figured it was just another part of your whacked-out mind-the same part that made you love Mishra and destroy him, and love Xantcha and destroy her, and love Barrin and destroy him. The one thing we do understand is that Phyrexia's got to go, and you're the only one who knows and loves it well enough to destroy it.

That's it. That's the totality of our agreement. We're not on board with your perverse little pleasures. We're not on board with your sacrificing planeswalkers. We're not on board with any of this except destroying Phyrexia.

Freyalise, Taysir, Windgrace, and Guff nodded.

Urza felt a stab of panic. Why had he put his trust in such worthless comrades? Why had he brought them to this jewel box, swine to trammel treasure? Wallowing beasts. They could think of nothing but the mud of Dominaria. If they could only follow their brains and eyes and hearts, they would know the glory of this place. They were pigs in a temple.

At last, Urza said, Are you ... turning on me?

Waving a damaged arm outward, Bo Levar said, Just plant your d.a.m.n bomb and take us to the fifth sphere.

We'll skip the fifth, going straight to the sixth- Whatever, Bo Levar interrupted. Just go. We'll hold the perimeter.

Nodding numbly, Urza turned.

His t.i.tan suit trembled. It was no longer the power conduit that caused the weakness. It was uncertainty. Ever since the death of Barrin, there had been a creeping weakness in him. It had grown more pervasive each day. It jangled his fingers and hands, and now his whole being.

They would betray him, these five. They had come along to advance their own aims, with no true interest in the fate of Phyrexia. What a fool he had been! Of course, when they rebelled, he could kill them. It was just that he had not planned on killing them. He had not planned on descending to the ninth sphere alone.

The thought was like a fresh breeze. It calmed him, stilled the center of his being. The creeping weakness solidified into something new. Descend to the ninth sphere alone. That would be glorious, to stand there before Yawgmoth, to slay him, to see Phyrexia as Yawgmoth saw it.

Under Urza's t.i.tanic tread, gla.s.s shattered. Oil gushed. Naked creatures thrashed. Newts. Phyrexian newts. Urza had reached the vat fields without even realizing it. He lifted his foot. Oil and gla.s.s dripped away. Creatures writhed. Before him, to the distant horizon, vats extended in golden rows. Causeways topped them, and vat priests ran atop the causeways.

Urza smiled. He took another step. Catwalks buckled under his weight. Vats cracked. Oil burst out across the ground. Newts died in tens and twenties. He stepped again. It was like splashing through rainwater. It was like playing in a golden brook.

Ahead, the rows converged on a large central structure in a huge circular well. Radiance flooded out of that pit. Power held aloft the main reactor core. It seemed a beehive, its globular outer walls filled with openings. Raw energy swarmed it. White-hot tracers buzzed up from the well and entered the reactor holes.

A single soul bomb positioned at the edge of that energy storm would unbalance the core and send it toppling into the pit. It would unleash the native power of Phyrexia and gut much of the fourth sphere.

Urza approached the pit and knelt. The knees of his t.i.tan engine drove gla.s.s spikes through the newts beneath him.

He took another fortifying breath. This destruction. This mad destruction. What could justify it? Fear? Fear that Yawgmoth would do to Dominaria what he had done to Phyrexia? Urza would have been glad to see such magnificent living machines roaming the planet. It would have been like the dragon epoch, an age of power and physics, before humans had muddled everything with their metaphysics, their morals.

Reaching down, Urza cracked loose one of the vats. It came away intact, like a crystal goblet. Urza lifted the vat up before his piloting bulb. He peered out of his gla.s.s bubble at the naked creature in the vat.

Urza saw himself. He was that formless newt, pathetic and pitiable. He was the weak raw material from which Yawgmoth would make something powerful. The premonition faded, and Urza was again in his t.i.tan suit.

The newt convulsed impotently in the tank of golden oil. It could sense its imminent demise.

Urza slid the tips of his claws through the top of the vat. Gently, he clutched the newt's head and lifted it free. It seemed a sardine in his fingers, flapping back and forth and flinging oil.

Urza laid the creature in the metallic palm of his t.i.tan suit. It gulped helplessly. Urza prodded it.

Here was the weakness at the heart of strength-this unformed pupae, this human.

It died in his hand, suffocated. The sardine-man lay still. It was just as well. All these newts would die in the blast. Urza hurled the thing out toward the beaming pit. The body caught fire even before it struck the mantle of energy. Then it was gone-a better fate than lingering in that helpless putrescence-though not as good as final compleation.

Urza unshipped the last soul bomb from its armored compartment. The device shimmered. The stone at its center glowed with the life force of Tevash Szat. Urza kicked clean the edge of the pit. A few blasts of the ray cannons on his hand vaporized the oil. Pivoting the spikes from the side of the device, Urza pressed it into the ground. The spikes sank away and clamped on. It would take a hundred Phyrexians a whole week to dig it out. By then, there would be no Phyrexians left at all.

What am I doing? Urza wondered suddenly, staring at the sun-bright blaze before him. Why am I destroying this masterpiece? His metallic digits turned the top of the soul bomb, setting the charge. Now the device would be triggered with all the rest. Nothing could disarm it, not even Urza Planeswalker.

The sound of distant battle came to his ears. The others must have been fending off an attack. They had slain the Steam Beast. Perhaps now they fought the Walker. They acted like big game hunters gathering trophies.

Urza's t.i.tan engine rose from its knees. Gla.s.s and oil dripped from him. He turned on his own path-"repented" was the word the ancients would have used. There before him, he saw his trail of destruction. While vats glowed in a golden garden all around, where he had walked was only ruin.

It wasn't too late to end this destruction. It wasn't too late to join the quest for perfection.

Chapter 31.

Before the Throne of Crovax.

Gerrard whipped his head around and glimpsed angry, haunted eyes.