The Fifth Dawn (39 page)

In a narrow draw lined with craggy ironstone walls, a wizened old goblin prophet stood between a pair of lumbering megathreshers and a few hundred of the last free people on Mirrodin. Even Vektro’s bomb had not ended the attack, and things looked grim once more. Dwugget had both hands raised, palms out, and they started to glow red. His guilt over his complicity long forgotten, if not forgiven, the goblin was determined to save those he still could.

“Hochocha!”
Dwugget cried, and twin spheroids of devastation launched from each hand. The fireball clusters engulfed the mighty constructs in flame, and after a few seconds the fire was no longer magical as the creatures’ delicate innards ignited. Black, oily smoke roiled into the sky.

Dwugget spun around to see who was still with him. He’d been fighting so long, he didn’t even know if the Khanha or Bruenna were alive. They’d left so long ago, and if the battle had reached this far, he suspected they were already dead.

Three seconds later, so was Dwugget. It was a small blessing that the long-suffering goblin didn’t see that the people he had tried to save, leonin and goblin, young and old, dropped dead at the same time. Krark-Home went from refuge to graveyard in a heartbeat.

“Lyese, I’m hit,” Bruenna said. An aerophin blast had finally scored. She whipped out an arm and blasted the flying artifact, one of the last stragglers on the field. It spiraled out of control and collided with a pile of dead nim, which burst into green flame. Bruenna listed in her saddle and nearly fell off. She placed a palm against her ribs and they came away wet and red. Blood poured from a hole in the mage’s side.

The elf girl jumped from her zauk and helped the mage dismount. Bruenna felt a wave of nausea as she saw claret running down Lyese’s forearms. She slumped into the elf girl, who gently lowered the human to the ground. “Bruenna, what can I do?”

“My belt,” Bruenna said. “There’s a vial. Just pop the top and—”

Lyese’s eyes opened wide and she threw her head back. She flopped back onto the ground as Bruenna spasmed once, coughed, and fell still.

Slobad felt fluid running from his ears, and hoped it wasn’t his brains. Despite his pathetic condition and the dark, suicidal thoughts his hidden self had entertained over the last few years, the goblin’s self-preservation instinct was very much intact. He gritted his remaining teeth and fought the urge to pass out as his hollow body bounced and jerked in the rack, muscles spasmodically twitching as a plane’s worth of mana and souls entered him, surrounded him, consumed him, and vice versa. Slobad’s body glowed with a dim white light, grew more luminous by the millisecond, and was soon almost as bright as the mana core itself.

With one last rolling boom of thunder, it was over.

Slobad gulped deep, sweet breaths of ozone-charged air. He blinked, and squinted against the unbearably bright core.

Actually, it wasn’t
that
bright. He opened his eyes a little more and stared directly into the mana core, which the book of Krark promised would burn your eyes to cinders and cause your feet to turn into hooves. He’d never understood that last part, but the first part had always made sense.

Only it didn’t hurt to look at it. Not even a little.

The goblin unbuckled the leather straps that had held him in the rack and stepped down from the device for the first time in five years. He searched, but didn’t see Glissa anywhere. Or
Memnarch. He scratched the top of his head and tried to rember the last place he had seen—

He was scratching his head. With his finger. Which was attached to his hand, leading naturally to an arm. Slobad’s eyes kept going down his body, which ended, as they once had, in a pair of short legs with wide, bare feet.

Slobad wiggled his toes and was gratified to see the toes wiggle back. Yes, those were his feet.

Magic. He’d taken the brunt of the power backlash, and somehow it had made his fondest wish come true. His body was restored.

But had that really been his fondest wish? If his wishes had come true, why wasn’t Glissa here?

“Why is she still dead?” a baritone voice asked. “She is not the only one, I am afraid.”

“Yeah, why?” Slobad pleaded. “I’ve got arms, and legs. Memnarch’s gone. But Glissa, well it’s just no—” The goblins froze and turned to face whoever had just spoken.

A gleaming golem, his shimmering body rippling like liquid quicksilver, leaped with catlike grace from atop Memnarch’s scorched hibernation chamber and landed without a sound beside Slobad.

“Hello,” the golem said amiably. The quicksilver giant extended a hand large enough to scoop Slobad up and have room for two more goblins, and Slobad cautiously extended his own. The golem gently placed his other gargantuan mitt over the goblin’s hand. “I am Karn,” the golem said.

“Karn?” Slobad said. “You mean he was—there’s a—but Menarch was—”

“He was many things,” Karn said sadly. “An explorer, a scholar, a visionary, and at one time a friend.”

“Too bad he went nuts, huh?” Slobad said as sympathetically
as he could manage. “But I guess maybe he wasn’t
that
crazy, if you’re really here. If you actually exist. Why couldn’t I see you before?”

“I was not here,” Karn said. “But Memnarch thought I was. He is a being a great power, power that I foolishly allowed him to shape on his own. His certainty—perhaps faith is a better word—was so strong, that the specter of his false Karn kept me from manifesting on this plane. He was no planeswalker, nor was he meant to be, despite his ambition. But his faith was stronger than I could ever have imagined.” The golem planeswalker sighed. “In my desire to create one like me, I gave him far too much power. A great … mistake. One of many.”

“Waitaminit—you made him, right?” Slobad growled. “You—this is all your fault!”

“Yes and no,” Karn admitted. “I created this world, and named it Argentum. I transformed the Mirari into Memnarch long ago, and left him to his own devices.”

“Mirwhoeee?

“Mirari, it is—was—will be—an artifact of great power,” Karn said. “It was also intelligent. Sentient. I charged the Mirari with collecting information on the planes of the multiverse, and when it finally returned to me, it provided me with knowledge that would have taken millennia to learn on my own. I believed the Mirari had earned the right to walk and experience the world as a living being. And I wanted—offspring isn’t the right word …”

“Kids?” Slobad offered.

“One like me, but not me,” Karn replied. “Something to go on when I am gone.”

“But you’re a big-time planeswalker, right?” Slobad asked. “Don’t you live forever?”

“It seems like it,” Karn said. “But please, I have already
gotten too far from the point. We have much to discuss, Slobad. You will need a mentor.”

“Well thanks, really,” Slobad said. “But I just want to find my friend. You’re a planeswalker, can’t you do it?”

“Planeswalkers are not gods, Slobad,” Karn said. “Do you feel like a god?”

“Me? Why, I—” What Karn had said about a mentor finally worked its way to the front of Slobad’s brain.
“Me?”

Karn smiled, and reminded Slobad of his old friend Bosh. “Yes, you,” the golem laughed. “The power had to go somewhere. Memnarch had an amazing machine here. It worked as intended, truly amazing. Living souls are not channeled lightly.”

“Hey, I know about those, huh?” Slobad said. “Had a long time to look around while your not-offspring was sleeping in that big egg. That’s how Memnarch got people from other planets—no, wait, planes? Dimensions?”

“All of those are appropriate. The mana backlash wiped the traps out. My Argentum is an empty place again. The surface is littered with the dead.”

“So if all the soul traps are gone, why am I alive?” Slobad aksed.

“Simple,” Karn said. “The spark chose you.”

“It chose me? You said the spark hit me because I was strapped to that rack!” Slobad shouted, his temper starting to flare. “I didn’t even want it, huh?”

“And yet you have it,” Karn said. “And you now have a choice. I did what I could to protect the people of Mirrodin. Though I could not return physically as long as Memnarch lived, I could send messages. Energy. Parts of myself.”

“What you talking about?” Slobad asked.

“The spark,” Karn said. “It gave me a tentative link to Glissa that allowed me to circumvent Memnarch’s interference. I sent
the flares to Glissa, to show her the world she came from. All I could do was try to guide her. I am afraid that I failed again.” The quicksilver golem bowed his head.

“Everybody dead?” Slobad whispered. He looked up at the concave surface of the interior, which looked smooth as a mirror. “Everybody? But—you’ve got to do something! And if you won’t, I will! Slobad the planeswalker, huh? Okay, so …” Slobad closed his eyes and held his hands in front of his face in a crude approximation of Bruenna’s spellcasting moves. “I summon Glissa!”

He opened his eyes and was still looking at Karn, whose face was grim.

“True reanimation is difficult, Slobad. Even I cannot return the dead to life, not in a way that recreates the original person. There are simply too many variables.”

“You just told me I’m a g—a planeswalker,” Slobad said. “What
can
I do? I don’t want to walk the monkeyverse or whatever! Just want my friend back, huh? I want everyone to be alive. I want it the way it was. Even if I have to go back to living in a cave by myself. There’s got to be something I can do. I’ll, I’ll give the souls back. Everyone better, huh?”

Karn was quiet for some time. When he spoke again, his voice was tinged with disappointment. “There is a way, perhaps. If you act soon. The souls of millions are in your veins, so to speak. They are still individuals entities, but soon they will merge into your larger self, the planeswalker Slobad. But what you ask … I feel for the dead as you do, goblin. Perhaps more, in a way you were all my children, even more than Memnarch. But you must realize what it will cost you.”

“My life?”

“Worse. The spark,” Karn said. “The spark blossoming within you is still new. It wants to return to where it came from. But it couldn’t find her, so it went into you and is beginning to take hold.
With every passing minute, you will feel your power growing. And Slobad, to have tasted that power and then …”

“Then what?”

“Then lose it,” Karn said. “To bring Glissa and the others back, you and she must
both
sacrifice the spark. We have time, Slobad, maybe an hour. In that time, I could show you worlds you’ve never imagined. Galaxies the size of a thimble, pocket universes, alternate realities, worlds shaped like perfect cubes, planes as flat as a serving dish that ride on the back of giant reptiles. You will understand that there are things greater than a single world, and they will all be open to you.”

“All right, all right! So I
won’t
see, then no problem, huh?” Slobad said. “How do I get her back, Shinypants?”

Karn smiled. “What you do, none has done before. You remind me of someone I once admired very much, in another life.”

“Goblin?”

“No,” Karn said, “A human. My … captain. Yes, that’s the word. She, too, would never hesitate to sacrifice for her friends. I had not thought I would meet her like again for several lifetimes.”

“You have to stick around, meet Glissa, huh?” Slobad said, clapping the golem on the elbow. “I mean, we’ll still be able to see you, right?”

“If it works, I shall will myself to be seen,” Karn said. “In a way.”

“Well, now we’re talking, huh?” Slobad grinned. “So what do I do first?”

“Well, first, I’ll need to take back your arms and legs,” Karn said and reached for Slobad’s hand. The goblin leaped backward and was rather surprised to see that he stood on the air, thirty feet up. Karn looked up at the goggle-eyed goblin and laughed,
a warm, gentle sound that was nothing like the raving howl of Memnarch.

“See?” Karn said. “The spark is in you. You just used it. You are still using it without thinking.”

“Get me down!”

“Get yourself down,” Karn said, and walked out onto the occultation disk toward the crackling mana core. The geodesic mesh had been vaporized. The five mighty struts that had supported it now ending in charred slag that still glowed a faint orange.