Invasion

Chapter 18

That first moment after the plague machine rocketed into Staprion Palace, the court of Llanowar was paralyzed. Their chief was dead. Their savior was accused of fakery. A strange green man had formed, screaming of fiends from the sky. Then came the plague spores, spilling out on the air.

Only Liin Sivi kept her head. She was used to the solitude of decision. It was a simple thing, really. Rushing the chief's throne, she dragged her toten-vec from her belt. One foot landed on the chair arm and the next on the chair back. She vaulted up the wall. A final toehold on a knothole sent her high enough to hurl out the toten-vec. Chain paid out smoothly, and the blade cut the top corner of an ancient tapestry. The corner plunged beneath her. Liin Sivi rode it like some thief in the Mirage Wars. She kicked the fringe out ahead of her. The carpet spread with beautiful precision over the hole in the wall. It covered the spot, temporarily trapping the plague-spore cloud.

Of course, no plan is utterly perfect. The contagion that had already seeped into the palace was flung outward. It swept across elves. It rolled over Liin Sivi too, though this was an elf plague. While it stung her skin, it melted theirs. Virulence sank into their pores. Flesh reddened and turned gelatinous. Elves melted like wax creatures. They oozed together across the marble floor. Those behind scrambled back and away, trampling others in their haste to escape.

Outside, plague bombs tore through the treetops.

"Flee downward!" Liin Sivi shouted. She saw that her own skin prickled with rash. Striding toward them, she bellowed, "Follow Eladamri downward!"

The green-man shucked quosumic leaves to slip free of the guards that held him. He turned, barging a wooden shoulder against a tall set of double doors. They flung back, barking against the walls of a dark chamber beyond.

"Here, the royal stair! It winds down within the quosumic. It is the safest way."

A guard roared, ramming his spear through the greenman's belly-as useless as stabbing a bush. "Only the king and his guard may descend there."

Eladamri yanked the spear from Multani's gut and bowled the guard over. "The king is dead. We will be as well lest you follow me downward. Come! Swiftly." Spear raised high, he strode through the doorway and down into the lantern-lit gloom beyond.

Still, the folk hesitated.

Liin Sivi snarled, "You heard him!" She whirled her toten-vec.

The crowd surged toward the door. They followed Eladamri.

Liin Sivi spotted a shimmering shield hung upon the wall-the enchanted coat of arms of the Staprion royal house. She strode to a chandelier tie-down cord, grabbed the line, and sliced it. A massive chandelier in the center of the chamber plunged. The rope yanked her up along the wall. With one hand Liin Sivi held to the cord as her feet ran up the smooth face. She snatched the shield from its mount. Brandishing the thing overhead, she continued to run up the wall. The rope hurled her to the rafters. Liin Sivi leaped onto a hammer beam and released the cord. A terrible crash came below. The chandelier shattered before the throne. Giving no heed, Liin Sivi climbed the black beams, reaching the thatch. Three chops of her toten-vec opened a hole large enough to crawl through. A fourth allowed the shield to come after her.

Liin Sivi climbed onto the green roof. It was sharply pitched, on all sides merging with the canopy of leaves. Above the shaggy peak, the blue sky was crowded with small portals opening and closing.

As each gate would swell into being, a plague machine would plunge through. No sooner had the bulk cleared the device than it would slam shut again. All across Llanowar, plague machines fell from the skies. They whined in air and crashed through treetops and hammered the boles of the ancient forest. After they struck, plague clouds hissed out on the wind.

Liin Sivi sniffed in annoyance. The gods-damned Phyrexians did not even want to take this forest, only destroy it. Typical. She'd lived her whole life in the shadow of those heartless, mindless, soulless roaches. She knew how they swarmed, and she knew how to stomp them.

One plague machine dropped free of its portal and plunged straight for the rooftop.

With another snort, Liin Sivi rushed up the green slope, shield in hand. If that machine entered the throne room, thousands would die. A direct hit could tear through thick wood, but what of a glancing blow? Staring upward, she vaulted to the peak of the roof. For a moment, she lost the plunging machine in the sun. Lifting her hand to block the light, she still could not make out the death sphere. Its whine grew to a deafening shriek. Only the device's growing shadow told her she stood in the right place. She swung the shield to one side and braced on the king beam of the palace.

A clang like a giant bell sounded. Liin Sivi was crushed flat against the rooftop. The sphere cracked away, whirling to impact a nearby tree.

Rising tremulously, Liin Sivi dragged numb fingers from the shield's handles and shook them out.

Another scream mounted-another sphere plunged. Squinting up into the sky to find her target, Liin Sivi ambled toward the site. "Damned Phyrexians."

"Damned Phyrexians!" Takara hissed.

She dragged an elf away from the bloody slough where his friends lay-red gelatin and bone. The elf's own legs dribbled away to nothing. Arteries emptied behind him. His eyes rolled one last time-eyes that had seen hundreds of years of peace in Llanowar. They died seeing this.

Releasing him, Takara breathed raggedly. Her fiery hair was pasted to her forehead, and her back ached excruciatingly.

This plague was the worst she had seen, faster, more virulent than other strains. No doubt this contagion had been developed in experimentation on countless Skyshroud elves. Takara herself had been a test subject for the human plague. These tiny motes of elf-virus prickled the large, gray infection across her back.

Yes, Takara was dying of the plague. She had been dying when Eladamri and Liin Sivi had rescued her from Rath. Her companions knew but no one else. They had treated the sore every night, sterilizing it with rye spirits and soothing its ache with aloe. Still, it had spread.

When the bomb hit, Takara's first impulse had been to flee downward with the others. But why? She was doomed one way or another. Up here, she could help a few people before she was eaten away to nothing. Takara wasn't being noble. She wasn't so much saving elves as choosing her own time to go.

Scrambling across the body-strewn floor, she caught up an elf child. The little girl, perhaps no more than two, stood just beyond the shouldering multitude. She screamed. Tears streaked her white cheeks. Takara lifted the girl in her arms and held her tight, whispering comforts into her ears. She did not know this dialect of Elvish but consolation sounded the same in any language.

How like this child she had been. Her father had been a grotesque little servant of evil. Her home had been redskied Rath. She had not been alive for even two decades before she was dying of plague-a child screaming in chaos all her life.

"Take her!" Takara demanded, grabbing an elf man who pushed among the throng. "Take her!"

He began to plead, his old eyes filled with mortal fear. This was an elder elf, perhaps a millennial elf, long beyond his century of child-rearing. Still, he reached out for the girl. He cooed, patting her sobbing back. With new purpose, the old elf shoved his way into the crowd.

Through her pain, Takara smiled. If this child was her miniature likeness-screaming in chaos all her life-then saving her was as close as Takara would ever come to saving herself.

She moved back out among the wounded. Any moment another bomb would hit. Then she and everybody left in the chamber would die.

Takara realized with surprise that she would miss Eladamri and Liin Sivi. The three had made a fair team. More surprising, still, she hoped they would miss her too.

Liin Sivi was too slow to deflect the fifth plague bomb. It plunged from the heart of the sun. She knew of it only by the whistle that became a whine and a shriek. The sun was blinding. The shadow of the bomb jittered across the sloped roof. Liin Sivi flung herself beneath that shadow and braced the shield over her head.

The plague bomb struck to one side. It tore through the thatch as if it were air. It smashed the king beam. The roof slumped massively beneath Liin Sivi's feet. A thunderous boom came below, with a brittle, crackling sound. The hiss of the plague spores was unmistakable. So were the shouts of the elves.

The plague hadn't time to kill them, though. One wall of the high court caved and fell inward. A hundred tons of wood toppled in giant killing sheets. Dagger-splinters stabbed down afterward.

The roof buckled and failed. It crashed like a bellying wave.

Liin Sivi rode the green tide. She could do nothing else. Timbers crashed to the floor. Giant knots fell in blood puddings that once had been elves. White, killing spores seeped smoky through every crack. Liin Sivi fell to her knees on the shuddering thatch and braced herself.

The far wall crumpled under the roof's plunging weight. Beams roared as they tumbled over each other. In four sections, the thatch crashed to the floor of the ruined high court.

A sudden quiet filled the air. No more crashing. No more screams. Before Liin Sivi stood the tall doorway where even now the last of the refugees fled. Behind her lay the silent wreck of the high court. Not a single moan came from the tumbled ruin. All the elves had been eaten by plague. There were no humans except-

There she lay, red hair tangled amid thatch. A cracked rafter had run her through, spearing the gray rot that filled her back.

Liin Sivi bowed her head. Takara had been a worthy companion. To die this way, twice killed, in the midst of strangers… She'd chosen her time.

"Good-bye, Takara," Liin Sivi said. "You will be missed."

Another whistling shriek mounted above.

Drawing a ragged breath, Liin Sivi strode to the giant doors and entered the resinous darkness within. They made not a sound as they closed over the bright world. Liin Sivi set the bolt and descended after the refugee crews. She descended after Eladamri.

Eladamri led the refugees down the royal passage. No king had been this deep in centuries. No lamps lit the way except those torn from walls higher up. The ragged stairs, carved from dead heart-wood, spiraled down around a vast emptiness. A fall would bring death by lance-long slivers on the way down. It was a certainty… proven many times over already.

Screaming began above. The refugees knew what that meant. They pressed up miserably against the walls and waited for the body to plunge past. It did, narrowly missing an elf woman and her son. Into the dark pit the man fell. His screams grew hollow. They were interrupted by glancing impacts and ended at last by death.

"Downward," Eladamri commanded softly, leading the way.

In time he reached a region where giant webs had caught a number of the bodies. Eladamri advanced, cutting the gruesome figures free, lest their presence bring hungry spiders.

"What am I doing here?" he wondered under his breath, holding a flickering lantern high to stare at one of the bloodied victims. "Why am I leading these people?"

More screams above interrupted his thoughts. He glared up, clutching the wall. Lanterns showed the spiraling ascent. They lifted to see what came down the shaft. Voices joined themselves to the rolling scream. Something pounded one wall, ricocheted off, descended across the emptiness, and impacted the opposite wall. It struck the folk there, seemed to stick a moment on pulverized bodies, and tumbled downward again.

"A plague bomb!" Eladamri hissed in dread realization.

Once it came to a stop, its panels would open and spew contagion. It would contaminate them all and even the caves below, where they had hoped to shelter. All was lost, unless the contagion could be contained…

Dropping his lantern to the stair, Eladamri swung his sword along the stairway. The blade cut through fat cobwebs. He gathered them in a net in his free hand. Once there were enough strands, he sheathed his sword and experimentally spread the web. His timing would have to be perfect.

If only he were the perfect man he was believed to be.

The plague pod bounded down, followed by a flurry of tumbling bodies.

Eladamri gritted his teeth and flung the net outward. It enveloped the globe. Its sticky bands wrapped around the spore panels in the side of it. The sphere tore past. Eladamri released it, though the clinging strands yanked jealously at his hand. He hunkered down to keep from getting hurled into the void. The racing ball almost ripped his hand off before the strands tore free. Beyond the edge of the stair, Eladamri glimpsed the ball as it plunged away through webs and darkness.

Perhaps the strands would hold. Perhaps the spores would not emerge. Eladamri had done all he could, and it would have to be enough.

Bodies fell past in a wet, conglomerate paste.

Eladamri snatched up his lantern and picked his way farther down the spiraling stair. "What am I doing here?"

Multani moved through Llanowar, awakening great tree spiders. Their webs would save the wood. Their webs and the ingenuity of this Eladamri. There was more to this elf than the man himself realized.

As Multani rushed from tree to tree, mustering the defenders of Llanowar, he felt new power surge into him. It was Molimo. In his reticent and reluctant way, the spirit of Llanowar lent his strength to this foreign spirit. Multani smiled with mushroom teeth. The forest needed champions, mortal and immortal, and it was making them-Eladamri and Multani both.