The Fifth Dawn (8 page)

The elf girl returned her attention to her flight path, the construct army still clacking and rumbling along after her. The slagwurm trail had grown fresher over the last few minutes, and Glissa realized that this might work even better than she’d planned. A slagwurm could inflict some real damage on the leveler army. The mammoth, legless monsters spent most of their lives underground—well, underground depending on your point of view, she supposed, remembering the dazzling interior of the world—and only ventured onto the surface when hunger drove them to it. If this slagwurm was still above ground, it could prove a potent, if unwilling, ally. She didn’t see it on the trail ahead, but it could easily be concealed under the thick Tangle canopy. She hoped it was. With her spark-driven power apparently drained, she needed every advantage she could get.

Glissa glanced down. The levelers were still keeping pace, scattering stunned fauna and flattening inconvenient flora. Slobad passed languidly by and rolled so he faced upward. “So where we goin’ huh?”

“Slobad!” Glissa blinked. “How long have you been following me? I told you to go to Taj Nar!”

“What?” Slobad replied. “Hard to hear up here, huh? Where we goin’?”

“You—I said you should—”

“Yeah, thinking you want excuse to go back down that lacuna, huh?” Slobad continued. “Need someone who knows what’s going on, huh? Who knows better than Slobad?”

“Slobad, you might get killed,” Glissa said bluntly. “Especially if you don’t fly a little higher.” She nodded, indicating a wobbling tower of stacked levelers that snapped at the goblin’s feet. “Please, go back,” she said, gripping Slobad’s shoulder as he rose. “I’m not losing you, too. And they can’t find the den without you.”

Slobad just stared, and folded his stubby, clawed arms across his chest. “Got far enough to give directions. Wasn’t easy to convince sister elf, but Bruenna helped.”

“Look,” Glissa said. “This might not kill me. It’s dangerous, but I’m not suicidal. And I need you to look after Lyese. Slobad, you’re the only one I trust. Don’t you know that?”

“What about Bruenna? She big-time mage, huh?”

“Right,” Glissa agreed. “She also worked for the vedalken for a long time, and she’s just lost all of her people. She seems fine, but I’m not sure she’s stable. Please, Slobad.”

“Only if you say you come back, huh? Not going to let Slobad be a ball of string for Kha?”

“Okay, I’m coming back,” Glissa said. “Now go, will you? This enchantment won’t last all day.”

“But—okay,” the goblin sighed. “See you soon, huh?” Slobad added, veering off toward Taj Nar. Glissa watched him go for a precious pair of seconds, then continued on course. She glanced down to check on the levelers.

The constructs had completely stopped. Glissa was alarmed to see that many of them seemed to be watching a tiny, flying speck of goblin soar overhead. Once Slobad had passed the chittering levelers, something even stranger happened.

Half of the levelers followed Slobad. The other half continued to chase Glissa.

“Flare,” Glissa swore as she headed back after Slobad, half-expecting to drop out of the sky at any second. “What do you want with him?” Her voice raised to a shout as she closed in on the goblin. “Slobad! Wait! Come back!”

Slobad came to an immediate halt, turned, and headed back toward her.

“Hey, what they want with Slobad?” he asked when he got within earshot.

“That’s what I want to know. But we don’t have time to find out,” Glissa said. “You’re just going to have to come with me. You were right. I’m going back inside.”

“Slobad knew it!” the goblin barked.

“But first, we’re going to get that to help us,” she said, pointing at a large shape that had burst through the treetops just ahead.

“A slagwurm!” Slobad shouted at Glissa as the wind whistled past the elf’s pointed ears. “How you gonna talk to a slagwurm, huh? They’re monsters.”

“I know,” Glissa said, getting a good look at the thick, legless reptilian wurm as it whipped its toothy maw in the air, letting loose a keening screech that rang inside her head even at this distance. “But this one’s hungry. Hear that? It’s calling for its kin.”

“That’s how it says ‘soup’s on,’ huh?” Slobad asked, natural curiosity overcoming fear. Glissa knew that Slobad was fascinated with big things, though usually he reserved his adoration for large machinery. Like golems.

“Yes,” Glissa said and pointed at the swarm of levelers tracking them on the ground. “But it’s not getting another wurm for dinner this time. Look past the wurm,” Glissa said. “What do you see?”

“Trees, sky, a big … round … clearing. The lacuna!” Slobad exclaimed. “Wait, that full of monsters too, huh? Giant rats? Big bugs? Ring a bell?”

“You’re the one who said I was crazy,” Glissa said. “Now stay with me—we’re going to get close.” She explained what she had in mind then peeled off toward the writhing slagwurm.

Slagwurms were probably the largest creatures on Mirrodin, by simple virtue of the fact that they never stopped growing.
Glissa had learned about their life cycle as a youth. They were not truly reptiles, despite their thick scales and plates of metallic armor. Slagwurms actually began life as foot-long grubs that hatched from egg clusters laid by the hermaphrodite parent.

They were also cannibals. The strongest, or sometimes simply the first, slaggrub would wait for the others to hatch then consume its kin ruthlessly as their writhing mouths broke through the rubbery shells. Each egg cluster generally produced a single wurm that reached maturity in under a week, though fortunately slagwurms laid them only once a year.

Slagwurms never lost the taste for the flesh of their sibling, and that was the only reason their populations hadn’t taken over all of Mirrodin. For the most part, the only thing that could kill a slagwurm was a bigger slagwurm.

This one had the rusty coloring of a mountain variety. It must have burrowed into the ground under the Tangle, and surfaced only recently. Glissa was sure she would have noticed the monster’s path on their recent walk from the lacuna to Viridia. As they drew closer, she could make out the patterns that covered the wurm’s armor plates, and smell the sulphurous odor of the enormous annelid.

“You remember what to do?” Glissa asked.

“Yep!” Slobad nodded.

“Go!” Glissa shouted, and the pair dived straight for the writhing torso of the towering slagwurm. Please, Glissa thought, stay in the air. Keep screeching. Keep your head up, you big ugly wurm. Don’t drop just yet….

Just before the elf and the goblin would have collided with the wurm’s armored hide, they split, peeling off in opposite directions, missing the wurm by inches. Glissa reached out with one hand and caught the lip of one armored plate, then swung herself around and grabbed hold with the second, which left her
half-hanging, half-floating two hundred feet in the air. She heard Slobad squeal as he did the same.

“Here they come!” Glissa shouted. “Wait for it!”

The single-minded levelers treated the slagwurm as if it was just another part of the landscape, something to be overcome on the way to their prey. The levelers began to climb the mammoth annelid, jamming their sharp claws into the wurm’s side. So far, the creature was paying the levelers no more heed than it had Glissa and Slobad, but the elf knew it would have to notice the extra weight soon. Just then, the slagwurm screeched and started to wave more vigorously against the sky.

“That’s it, Slobad! It feels them! Let’s get out of here!”

“Don’t need to tell Slobad twice, huh?” the goblin shouted from the other side of the slagwurm. The pair continued on at top speed to the still-smoldering hole in the ground that would lead them to their enemy—and would hopefully lead their enemy’s minions to their doom.

Behind them, the wurm screeched again, a sound now filled with pain. The creature’s death scream was soon followed by a tremendous crash as its massive bulk flopped back to the ground like a heavy chain. Glissa checked back over her shoulder. The wurm was thrashing in the midst of the swarm, tossing silver bits of levelers and a growing spray of its own ochre blood all over the forest. She felt a pang of regret that the majestic wurm was going to die—she had held out a faint hope that the creature might be able to take on all the constructs, at first—but in its death throes the slagwurm had cut the number of levelers by a third.

She silently thanked the wurm and pressed on. Pitting the monster against the levelers had been a trick of opportunity. Her real goal was just ahead.

The lacuna looked even bigger from above. Surrounded by
trees and foliage knocked flat by the shockwave of mana that had launched the new moon into orbit, the hole that led to the center of Mirrodin resemble an enormous pressed bladeflower.

Glissa was gratified to see—and feel—that the residue left by the passing of the moon still pulsed with magic. Giant vorracs snuffled around the lacuna’s edge, baffled at what from their perspective must have been a suddenly shrunken world. Massive porcine djeeruks scampered over the wrecked trees, shattering any semblance of calm with the thunderous crash of cracking metal. Here and there, patches of debris had woven themselves together into shambling parodies of magical walls, covered in thousands of skittering stinger monkeys picking for tasty needlebugs. The average pack of stingers numbered around a dozen.

Slobad pulled up alongside Glissa and looked down. “Huh,” he commented. “Why can’t Slobad see all the way to the center?”

“That little point of light—I think that’s the end,” Glissa said. “We’ll be there soon enough. You ready?”

“Ready,” Slobad replied. Glissa checked on the levelers, which had left the twitching wurm behind, its corpse oozing ichor into the forest floor. But many had been destroyed, and with luck, the lacuna would take care of the rest.

“Okay. Try not to lose sight of me.”

“You sure this work, huh?”

“Of course not. I just couldn’t think of anything else.”

As if on cue, Bruenna’s flight spell finally gave out, and the pair dropped like stones into the lacuna.

“Good plan!” Slobad shouted as they plummeted into the lacuna’s maw.

“In the plan, I was—ow!” Glissa yelped as a wiry, melted
treeroot hanging from the inside wall of the lacuna smacked her in the shoulder. “I was alone, and I had time—oof—to call on the energy here!” She flailed, trying without much luck to get a grip on the lacuna wall. The walls were smooth and freshly polished by the heat of an erupting moon, but her claws did come back with a few splinters.

Glissa could make out screams and howls from above as the levelers reached the clearing and cut into the many hapless creatures that had been drawn to the magical energies. The animals reacted as any animals would—by fleeing or fighting back. The result was that many of them were tumbling down the lacuna as well, along with wrecked or unbalanced levelers.

“So? We’re still here, huh?” Slobad shouted. “Give a try!”

The goblin had a point, Glissa realized. She was in the heart of the magical field, which was just where she wanted to be. She kicked at the nearby wall, pushed herself closer to the center point of the lacuna, and closed her eyes. This time, instead of imagining the end result of her attack, she focused inward. She visualized the power flow from the spark into her bones, down her arms, to the tips of her claws, the raw energy of the lacuna …

Glissa felt flickers of energy crackle down her arm, and opened her eyes in time to see green-white flame erupt from her hands and shoot straight upward. The destructive blast richocheted off the smooth walls of the lacuna, crashing back into itself and creating a maelstrom so bright that anything on the other side was lost. Glissa held her arms upward, ignoring the effect the massive output of magic was having on her rate of speed, rocketing her downward.

The energy was going to carry her past Slobad, but she managed to hook the toe of her boot in his tunic as she blasted downward. The goblin grabbed onto Glissa’s shin for dear life as
they shot toward the center of the world on a rising plume of fire.

Glissa felt the levelers dying above her, both in the circular tunnel and on the rapidly receding surface. Surrounded by the greenish glow of intense mana residue, the experience made her feel more like a conduit than a destroyer. She felt as if all the magic in the Tangle flowed through a central point in her chest, filtering through her willpower to become ribbons of light that cut into wriggling segmented torsos and slashing, scythe-like blades. She struggled to maintain control.