As Crovax rose, so did Gerrard. Light returned to his eyes. He gasped, arched his back, clutched his throat, and sat up slowly. Gerrard fixed his foe with a bleary look that turned to sharp focus.

Crovax meanwhile dragged his feet free of the stony morass. He groped his way along the console of his organ, wanting to get fully clear of the spot. He snatched up a poleaxe from a fallen il-Vec warrior and spun, panting, to face his foe.

Gerrard was no longer where he had been. He seemed nowhere at all. The throne room was empty. The floor had swallowed the vampire hounds and moggs and il-Dal. But where was Gerrard? He might have melted into the wall with his power over flowstone. He might just now be swimming through the floor under Crovax's feet.

Like a man stepping lightly through a swarm of rats, Crovax made his way to the massive throne in the center of the room. He leaped onto the slick seat, simultaneously kicking the head of Urza to the floor. At least if Gerrard came up through the throne, Crovax would have a moment's warning. From this lofty height, too, he could see every approach. And the back of the throne was true obsidian, impervious to the workings of the usurper's mind. As long as he remained here, Gerrard could not surprise him unless he dropped from the ceiling- Crovax looked up too late. He glimpsed only Gerrard's halberd blade and his plunging smile.

Whatta bastard, thought Squee as he stood up in the black cloud. Whatta stink!

Squee had long ago learned about gas on a ship. You didn't let a stink bomb just anywhere, like not in the captain's study while everybody's standing around talking about strategy, and not in the forecastle with everybody trying to get to sleep, and definitely not when your ray cannon's sparking just before discharge. Squee'd blown out a new pair of pants that way. Mostly, though, the problem with gas on a ship was in sealed compartments, where everybody had to smell it. And this cloud, what a bad case of gas!

Squee took a step, took a breath, and fell down dead.

Not gonna breathe like dat again, dat's sure, thought Squee as he stood up again in the cloud. Jus' hafta walk outta here. Stink can't be everywhere.

He walked, feeling his way forward in the dark hallway.

Of course, he was fooling himself, and he knew it. Quite often when he'd made a stink on Weatherlight, it filled the place for days-like the time they wanted him to cook human food instead of grubs. Grubs fry up nice and clean. They don't send black smoke into the air and cause grease fires, the way cheese does. And when they told him to cut the fat off the steaks, they never said to cook the meat instead of the fat. Why, they never told him anything until it was too late- A wicked metal corner rammed Squee's toe, which hurt mightily, and he gasped a breath, which killed him.

Bein' dead ain't so bad, Squee thought. There's a bright red light and a friendly voice say in' "eat up!" and a banquet of wigglies. What sucks is the hand dat grabs Squee and yanks Squee back to life. It always yanks Squee back to life.

No breathin', no stubbed toes, none of dat, Squee told himself as he stood for the third time. Squee'll hold his breath till he dies, if dat's what he's gotta do to live.

He walked. He felt his way past numerous corners and switchbacks. The air in his lungs grew stale. He desperately wanted to breathe. Hurrying through the cloud only made his chest ache more. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to take a breath and die again. He'd have another look at the bug banquet, and then another go at getting through this cloud.

No, he told himself. Squee gotta get back to the throne room and save Gerrard's butt. He pressed on.

Luckily, the cloud died out before Squee did. Unluckily, Squee didn't realize he still lived. He rounded a corner to stand in a long, straight hallway with a bright red light at the end.

"Dammit!" Squee growled. "Squee not breathe! Squee hold breath perfect. Now Gerrard loses butt because Squee die again. Double dammit! Dammit to hell!" The goblin's eyes grew wide, fearing he had just sentenced himself to a less-than-pleasant afterlife. Still, the bright red light shone ahead. There would be a banquet table within, and bugs aplenty. Squee nodded his rumpled head, flung out his hands in resignation, and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go toward de light. Squee know."

It really was a nice light, bright and powerful, and in its glow was always such a banquet of bugs. Maybe Squee would actually get to bite one of them before the hand came. Maybe if he hurried, he could get two bites. Squee trotted forward. The light intensified. It cast all into shadow. There was nothing now but Squee and that welcoming light. His claws carried him up the metal grating and through a glorious doorway. The room beyond was flooded with light. The very air swam. As always, directly beneath the luminescence lay a great table and upon that table a buggy feast.

Squee blinked. Usually, the feast consisted of thousands of insects, some fried, some baked, some raw, and some alive. This time, though, the banquet was a single, huge bug. It lay on its back, long hind legs extended down like a grasshopper's and two sets of forelegs curled up above its knobby thorax. It was an ugly bug-and that was saying something-with a shaggy crest on its head, glassy eyes, and a twisted little mouth. What a bug looked like, though, mattered little. Walking sticks were cute but bitter. Slugs were ugly but luscious. Perhaps this ghastly thing would be the tastiest bug in the world. What would it hurt to find out? The thing was obviously dead.

Squee approached the table, expecting any moment to be yanked back into life. No hand came. He reached the side of the table. The light was blinding. It prickled from every surface and made the bug seem fuzzy all over. Squee rubbed his hands avidly. Where to begin? There was a tender looking curl on the side of the bug's head. Squee could nibble it.

He bent over the table. The beaming glow engulfed him. It felt wonderful and a little painful. He reached out to the little curl of flesh. Razor-sharp teeth parted and then snapped together.

Squee stood back up, chewing. It was chewy. Really chewy. And bland. Not the sort of bug one would expect to banquet on.

The creature moved. It had not been dead after all, though it was sluggish with the light. One of its legs rose idly to prod at its head, where Squee had nipped off his first bite.

This made things more interesting. Live bugs always tasted better than dead ones. Squee spit out that first disappointing mouthful and leaned in to take a big bite of bug face. With his mouth open wide and his teeth dripping spittle, Squee loomed over the bug's face.

When his shadow fell across the face, he recognized the bug. Ertai! He must have died in the gas attack, too, and gone to the same light as Squee, and eaten all the bugs, and lain down for a nap.

Squee closed his mouth and stared in irritation at the man. How rude, he thought. Damn bastard didn't leave Squee nothin' to eat but a little bit of ear. Ear! Squee eated Ertai's ear! He spat again. Serves him right. Eat all dem bugs, like he was the only hungry dead guy.

Then one of Ertai's eyes opened. His pupil narrowed to a pinpoint, and his claws, sluggish no longer, reached out to grab Squee.

The goblin lunged backward. Gerrard had taught him that move. There'd been plenty of times he'd had to lunge backward from Gerrard. This time he did it so well and so fast that he rammed up against the back wall of the chamber and his head hit on a bar-not a solid bar, but a lever-type thing that slid up its groove and brought a big groan from the machine it was part of.

Ertai began to scramble up on the table, but then the light changed. It flared brighter than bright, so bright that when Squee clamped his eyelids closed he could see straight through them and see Ertai riling like a real bug this time as his flesh burned down to the bone.

Panicked, Squee turned around and fumbled to find the lever, and he yanked it down.

The light went out. Totally out. Everything was black and still except Squee, who shivered and whimpered beneath the lever.

When at last his eyes had adjusted enough to see again, Squee stood up. He was in that strange room with that strange table, but instead of Ertai there was only a pile of ash in the shape of Ertai.

Squee shrugged. "Serves you right. Next time you die, leave some bugs for Squee."

Halberd clutched in his fists, Gerrard plunged from amid the stalactites. It had been easy enough to leap up there and cling above the throne, waiting for his chance. Now, it would be easy enough to split Crovax's skull- Except that he looked up. He couldn't raise the blade of his axe in time, but he could raise the haft.

Gerrard's halberd clove through the shaft, but the impact flung Crovax out of the way. He crashed to the floor on one side of the throne.

Gerrard smashed down on the other. He would have been killed had the axe haft not absorbed much of his momentum- and had he remained a mere man. Instead, Gerrard rolled and came up swinging. He bounded at his foe.

Crovax unleashed a quick spell. Fire jabbed from his claws. It roared toward Gerrard's face.

He interposed the halberd blade, a shield against the blaze. Flames splashed against it and spread above and below. They singed Gerrard's hands and lit his waistcoat but did not stop him. Gerrard took two more running steps and swung the halberd in a moaning arc overhead. The blade fell. It chopped deeply into Crovax's shoulder, cleaving his metal armor and cutting through to bone.

The evincar reeled back.

Gerrard stalked him, ruthless. As he raised his bloodied blade for another strike, he said, "You promised me Hanna if I joined you." The halberd dropped again. It bit into the evincar's other shoulder, making his arm go limp.

Crovax gabbled stupidly as twin cascades of glistening oil bubbled from his wounds. He took another numb step back.

The halberd rose a final time and anointed Gerrard's head with the life of his enemy. "You revoked your bargain-I revoke mine."

The last blow struck the evincar's brow and cleft straight down the spine. It emerged at last from a severed pelvis.

Gerrard turned away as the two halves of Crovax slid separately to the floor. He panted heavily.

Crovax was dead. The slayer of millions had paid with his own life. Still, it felt empty. Crovax had once been a comrade, a friend. He was as much a victim of Yawgmoth as any other.

White motion caught Gerrard's eye, and he spun about, his halberd at the ready. He didn't need it.

From the black vault above, a gossamer spirit descended. White pinions, slender limbs, flowing hair of gold, and inestimably sad eyes-it was Selenia, Crovax's erstwhile angel. As she sank to the ground, she grew more substantial. When at last she knelt beside the riven form of her love, she was corporeal enough that his blood stained her knees.

Weeping, she bent over him and slid her amis beneath his body. When she rose, though, his body did not lift off the floor. Instead, a ghostly image was in her arms, what seemed a young man.

Gerrard's eyes narrowed in realization. It was Crovax before all this. It was Crovax as he had been when first he lived on Urborg.

Rising, Selenia stroked her wings once. She lifted her young love into the air with her. They had not risen halfway to the vault before they both were insubstantial. Their spirit forms twined about each other and were gone.

Gerrard sighed wearily. Perhaps there was redemption for even the blackest of hearts.

More movement came, this time a scrabbling of claws accompanied by a familiar gibbering, "Dere you are, loungin' while Squee kill Ertai all by hisself." The goblin rushed through the throne room's doorway and headed for the commander.

As he arrived, Gerrard smiled grimly and nodded toward Crovax's sundered form.

Squee said only, "Oh."

There was no time for more. The entrance suddenly disgorged warrior after hypertrophied warrior. Il-Vec and il-Dal monstrosities.

Snorting gustily, Gerrard scooped up the head of Urza Planeswalker. "Here we go again."

Chapter 22.

The Gutting of Phyrexia.

Four planeswalkers stood on the first sphere of Phyrexia. They had stripped away their thick suits and all-encompassing vines. The air blew sweet here. Grass waved in rolling hills to the distant low mountains. Dense forests bristled down to a wide plain. None of the planeswalkers needed environmental defenses here in the first sphere of Yawgmoth's metallic paradise. Bo Levar's wide-brimmed pirate hat had vanished, releasing tawny hair to his shoulders. His greatcoat had become a waistcoat once again. He had taken the opportunity to light a cigar and stood with it clenched in his teeth. Smoke billowed from his mouth, through mustache and goatee, and out into the rolling air.

Just above him in the air hovered Freyalise. Slender and blonde and wrapped in her own downy nimbus, the forest lady floated just off the ground. The impenetrable riot of vines that had guarded her from Phyrexia's worst environs had retreated into slender garments of green. She, like all of them, was eager to set off the final bombs and quit this place.

In her shadow stood Lord Windgrace, again in man-panther form. His silken coat had returned, replacing the thick mat of fur, but beneath his coat, the heart of Taysir remained encased beside his own. Throughout all the bombing missions below, he had carried it dutifully. Even now beneath his pads, he felt the deep concussions of those explosions rip through the world.

Commodore Guff had doffed his thick rubbers and donned his red waistcoat and breaches. With one hand, he idly twirled his mustaches. With the other, he held open a broad history written by King Famebraught the Ninth. The ancient dwarf king was one of the few outsiders who had ever returned from a journey into Phyrexia. As the commodore read with his monocled eye, his other eye stared beyond the gutter of the book to gaze at the city on the plains below.

It seemed a mushroom garden, overspread with gigantic fungi of every shape and size. Pale domes with irregular contours joined one upon the other in infinite combination.

Commodore Guff read: " 'And when Emperor Yawgmoth had opened the gateway to Phyrexia, he founded a city there, and he named the city Gamalgoth, which in the tongue of the Thran means "Creature Garden," for here he proposed to bring whole new races into being. And he enlisted the great architect Rebbec and her husband, the great artificer Glacian, to design and build him Gamalgoth. It was a city of wonders, tucked beyond our world, a high heaven created within a deep and hellish hole. This was before the great war, and the eradication of the Thran. And should any of their kind survive, they survive in Gamalgoth.' "

Guff closed the book. His chameleon eyes aligned and shone with uncommon clarity. "This city is among the most ancient in the multiverse-nine thousand years of continuous occupation. And we are about to destroy the damned thing."

Lord Windgrace nodded grimly. "It is a terrible war."

"Nine thousand years, destroyed in a moment," Bo Levar agreed.

Freyalise spoke with no compassion, no compunction. "Nine thousand years of vile monstrosity ended in a moment-I will be glad of it."

That was the end of that. Yes, Gamalgoth would go down to oblivion with all the rest of Phyrexia.

"This will be our greatest fight," Bo Levar said. "They have had a month to work over the bomb clusters, to realize they cannot diffuse or remove them without setting them off, and then to fortify against our return."

"Yes," confirmed Lord Windgrace. "I have scouted. They've buried the bombs beneath a half-mile dome of concrete, hoping to dull the impact and keep us at bay."

Freyalise wore a wry look. "We need only chisel down through that dome, and when our labors grow near enough, they will set off the cluster."

Again, Lord Windgrace confirmed. "Yes."

"Then let's go. I'm ready to be shut of this place," said Freyalise, and she planeswalked, disappearing from their midst.

Lord Windgrace gathered his leg muscles, sprang into the air, and was gone as well.

Commodore Guff shoved the big book into an impossibly small waistcoat pocket, where the tome vanished utterly. "It's been a rum go. Let's close this chapter." He pushed his hand deeper into the pocket, up to the elbow, and then to the shoulder. His head followed next, and his other shoulder. He even kicked up his legs, rammed them into the pocket and, before his rump could tumble to the ground, popped out of existence.

"A rum go," Bo Levar echoed, thinking instead of a tall ship filled with casks of liquor. He smiled and followed. His smartly cut clothes seemed to fold in upon themselves, and he slid into the cracks of reality.

Though they had left one at a time, the four planeswalkers reappeared simultaneously in a floating ring above the concrete dome. It stretched across the heart of the city, engulfing many ancient buildings but protecting others from the inevitable blast. Even now through the streets below, Phyrexians trooped like black ants and climbed the rooflines to their ray-cannon nests.

Take those out, Bo Levar mind-sent to his comrades, flashing them a mental image of the guns that wheeled upon them. I'll begin with the dome.

The thought was not even complete when Freyalise hurled her hands down toward two of the cannon bunkers. From her fingertips stretched coils of green force that struck the stony embrasures and erupted in tangled vines. The thorny thicket crawled vengefully over every inch of the gun and its crew and pierced the beasts in a thousand places.

Lord Windgrace meanwhile had swept his clawed hand down before him, creating a veil of magic across his form. Scintillating energy sank into every crease and follicle and pore. He gripped this shimmering mantle, ripped it free from his body, and hurled it down into a second gun bunker. There, it became a simulacrum of himself, built on mana energy alone. The simulacrum landed, snarling, on the gun crew and began to rip them apart. Lord Windgrace meanwhile cast the spell again, preparing another spectral warrior.

Commodore Guff's technique was stranger still but no less effective. He skipped across the sky like a maiden across a field. Where she would reach into a basket of flowers and fling them gladly in her wake, the commodore instead reached into another book-a dull and overwritten and worthless book-and yanked out pages by the handful. He hurled the crumpled sheets down in rattling flurries within the gun embrasures, the streets, the windows .. .. His propaganda leaflets were, in a word, haphazard. They were also lethal. Creatures angrily snatched those pages from the air and peered down at the writing there. Those who glimpsed a single word fell asleep. Those who glimpsed more died on the spot. It truly was a horrid book, and like all such books, its pages were endless.

While the other three planeswalkers incapacitated the guns, Bo Levar turned his attention on the dome itself. He had no intention of chiseling down through a half-mile of cement. His blue mana magic suggested better options. Cement, especially new cement, contained lots of water. His mind tapped its potential, quickening it. Water shimmered and shook, breaking the bonds of lime that it had set.

The dome's peak began to run. Crisp cement became liquid again. Bo Levar deepened his focus. More water awoke. Gray rivulets turned to cascades. Days of labor poured away in moments. A moat of sludge formed around the dome and spread outward. It engulfed Phyrexians running to defend their city. It churned down adjacent streets. The mound flattened and sank.

A few minutes, and the bomb cluster will be exposed, Bo Levar mind-sent to his comrades. Hold them off until then.

An answering yelp came from Commodore Guff. A ray-cannon bolt had leaped up from a hidden embrasure, struck the upraised book in his hand, and vaporized every last, wretched word. It also had taken off the commodore's hand at the wrist. His face flashed as red as his waistcoat, and in sheer fury he regrew the missing hand. With that new appendage, he reached up, snatched the monocle from his eye, and whirled it down at the offending gun. The little lens spun through the air, widening as it went and gaining a silver sheen. As if on invisible lines, the monocle slid down to clamp onto the muzzle of the ray cannon.

It barked, hurling another beam. The light struck the mirrored disk and bounced back down the throat of the gun. The mechanism exploded, and the barrel curled like the peel of a banana.

In an adjacent gun nest, where four cannons roosted in a long row, a mana projection of Lord Windgrace sent its claws through the neck of a Phyrexian gunner. Flesh sloughed from energy. The panther simulacrum leaped to the gun controls. It grasped a metal crank and spun it with preternatural speed. The cannon rotated laterally. The panther creature spun another wheel, bringing the barrel down to aim straight at the other cannons. It took only the quick squeeze of a trigger, and red rays bounded down the line.

The first gun split. Its molten ends dropped away from each other. Rays shot through the gap to strike the next gun. It got off two more rounds before its bore melted shut. Its next bolt exploded within and threw molten metal in a wide sphere.

The last gun spun about and drew a bead on the rebel cannon. Phyrexian crews unleashed a blistering salvo that pulverized the simulacrum's cannon. Roaring their victory, the Phyrexians never noticed the ghostly outline of the simulacrum as it bounded from the destroyed gun to land among them.

The mana creature slew the main gunner first. It rammed his body against the charge mechanism. A rising whine told of the energy building within, and of the inevitable explosion when no one remained to trigger its release. In moments, the panther's claws made sure no one remained. It bounded away even as the device went critical.

Watching the explosion, Bo Levar smiled. His expression only deepened as the tide of cement flooded the final two gun nests. It would be considerably easier to complete this task without having to worry about ray cannon bolts- Dragon engines! mind-sent Freyalise. With the words came an image-four black shapes jagging down from the mountains at the edge of the world. The mechanical creatures flew with amazing speed, outrunning even the war-shrieks from their gaping mouths. One for each of us. She whirled in the air like dandelion down and wafted out toward the dragon onslaught.

While her hands began an intricate dance, her mind reached into the mana beneath her floating feet. Yes, Phyrexia was rich in the blackest of mana, but there was green here too. The metallic plants that proliferated across the first sphere partook in both colors, a fusion of antagonists that occurred nowhere else. If Yawgmoth could make metal grow, so could Freyalise.