Liin Sivi heard. She drove her steed up the talus slope. Phyrexians tumbled like scree beneath her Kavu's hooves. Her toten-vec flew and sang with the fury of each strike.

"Do you recognize it, Eladamri?"

Dragging his sword tip from the vitreous humor of a bloodstock, Eladamri replied, "Recognize what?"

"The gateway." She needed say no more. He understood.

It was unmistakable, with its tall walls of poured lime, its wide-paved staging grounds, its guard towers and trenches- even the garrisons that stood to either side of the entryway.

Eladamri's stomach soured. "The main entrance to the Stronghold. I already gained that spot once in battle. Must I do it again?"

"We must to win this war," replied Liin Sivi. "We must to capture the Stronghold." For these two Rathi, there was no more enticing possibility than capturing the Stronghold. Such a victory would banish every terror of the Skyshroud elves, the Dal, Vec, and Kor. It would fulfill the prophecies of the Korvecdal, the Uniter who was to come and destroy the heart of evil. "Life will be worth living if we win this war."

Eladamri gritted his teeth and shot a glance over his shoulder. Below lay Weatherlight-untouched. She was in ruins, but her crew survived, and they were the scrappiest fighters Eladamri had ever encountered. Above him yawned that black gash in the mountainside, streaming Phyrexians onto the world. Yes, he had gained that gate once. Had he shut it down before, he would not be staring at it again now. It was the gate then. Victory or death.

"Get up there," Eladamri barked at his steed. The greater Kavu leaped eagerly, charging with Liin Sivi's mount. A third beast joined them. Commander Grizzlegom clambered up its side.

"What's the game?" asked the minotaur as he dragged his bloodied legs up to straddle the lizard's neck.

"We'll close the gate," replied Eladamri. He rode on. His Kavu crunched beasts beneath its feet. A creature with the mouth of a leech scaled the lizard's flank. Eladamri lanced his sword through the mouth. He lifted an oily blade upward to point at the gateway above. "We'll stem the flood of monsters then kill those that have already emerged."

Grizzlegom's lips drew back from bloody teeth. "It's a fight. That's all I need-a fight." He skewered a shock trooper through the heart. His Kavu crashed upward aback a platoon of scuta. Only broken shells and white muck remained. Whistling shrilly, he waved the troops forward.

They came. Minotaur and Metathran, Benalish and elf, Keldon and Kavu, the army followed. It clove through the swarming Phyrexians.

Liin Sivi was the edge of that cleaver. She drove the beast over a way paved with monstrous heads. Dozens of the creatures died with each footfall. Dozens more were unmade by the vicious whirl of her toten-vec. She would reach the objective, yes-the gate in the side of the volcano-but she would also enjoy the journey.

Eladamri rode up beside her. A sweeping stroke of his sword hewed heads from a Phyrexian phalanx. On her side, Liin Sivi drove her Kavu against Eladamri's. The two beasts smashed together and killed whatever was between. Their feet rubbed up against each other.

They made their way-Eladamri who was dreamed into being by Gaea, and Liin Sivi who was dreamed into being by Eladamri. The truth of those dreams would be proved ahead. If Eladamri were the true Uniter, he would prevail at the main gate. If Liin Sivi were his true soul-mate, she would prevail as well. Neither could succeed unless they both did. They were no longer two separate creatures, but the beginning and the end of a single dream.

They topped a wide-spreading plateau, a great shelf of obsidian, black and smooth. Razor striations radiated from the main entryway.

The first ranks of Phyrexians fell swiftly and helplessly to the thundering Kavu. Behind the three steeds of the commanders came a hundred more beasts. Many bore riders.

Others bore only fury. They stomped scuta and bloodstocks and shock troops to puddings.

Less helpless beasts approached ahead-monsters so eager to reach battle that they galloped over their own people. They were as large as Kavu, though they strode on two talonlike legs. Their arms ended in grasping claws that could segment a rhino in a single squeeze. With a bone-dense head, scimitar teeth, a barrel chest, and a leather hide, each Phyrexian gargantua fought like a whole army.

One beast vaulted across the obsidian ground just before Eladamri. With a scream, it hurled itself into Eladamri's Kavu. It grappled the lizard in a headlock. The arms of the monster wrapped the spine of the steed. Gargantua nostrils sucked a deep breath as its fangs sank into the Kavu's throat. Claws dug through scales. Reptilian blood welled from the wounds.

The Kavu released its own scream. It reared up on four hind legs, lifting the gargantua into the air.

Tenacious, the monster sank its teeth only deeper. It seemed a bulldog on a bull's throat.

The Kavu flailed, struggling to break the beast's hold. All its fighting only deepened the wounds on the Kavu's neck.

Eladamri climbed from the beast's back. Reaching one of the gargantua's claws, he dug footholds for his boots. With two hands on his sword, he swung the blade in a great overhand chop. The strike severed two fingers from the gargantua's claw. The digits tumbled away. Twin wounds poured oil-blood across the Kavu's shoulder. With another hack, Eladamri removed the two other claws, leaving the gargantua only a stump.

It shrieked, its teeth releasing the Kavu's shoulder. Rearing back, the gargantua opened its mouth to swallow Eladamri whole. It lunged. Its jaws snapped.

Eladamri was too fast. He leaped away and landed on the snout of the monster. He'd been watching that horrid, wet spot, sucking air and flopping. It was the only part of the monster's skull that was devoid of bone. Eladamri tested his theory by ramming his sword up the thing's nostril and into its brain. There came a pop as the tip pierced some sack of fluids, and then a horrible gray gush.

The gargantua sagged. Its eyes spun crazily in its bony head as the beast shuddered toward the ground. A whoosh of vile gasses escaped the settling corpse.

Giving an elven victory cry, Eladamri raised his sword skyward. Only then did he see that his own mount lay, dead already, beneath the dying bulk of the gargantua. Eladamri blinked, unbelieving. It had been a greater Kavu, an ancient creature, dead in a matter of moments.

"Climb up!" came a shout from above. Liin Sivi, mounted on a Kavu, extended her hand toward him.

Nodding, the elf commander strode up the scaly leg of her steed and swung into place behind her. "I hope I don't cramp your fighting style."

Her only response was a lightning-fast strike against a bloodstock. Her toten-vec darted out, slew the monster, and returned to her hand before it had ceased ringing. It had been too fast even to gather glistening oil.

"You're in fine form."

"The fight's up there," she replied, pointing ahead. The rest of the coalition army had flooded up past them while Eladamri had paused to engage the gargantua. Now, Keldons and Metathran and minotaurs fought a pitched battle, hand to hand, on the obsidian fields.

Despite its tremendous size, the Kavu stepped gingerly among its own troops, careful not to crush them. Its clawed feet came to ground kitten soft, though it drove like a bull toward the front lines.

The mountain suddenly leaped.

"What was that?" asked Liin Sivi.

Eladamri lifted a hand to his ear. The mountain leaped again. "It's almost like a heartbeat. It's almost as if the volcano were alive."

"Perhaps it's nearing eruption," Liin Sivi responded. The mountain joked a third time. "Volcanism? Or some Phyrexian plot?" "We won't know until we take the gate," Eladamri said. "Forward." Already the Kavu had reached the front. Already sword and toten-vec were whirling in a steely cloud.

Chapter 4.

A Steely Cloud.

Blood painted the arena, the blood of immortal Urza and all-too-mortal Gerrard. Too much blood. Had this been Tolaria or Benalia, each man would have been dead ten times over. This was Phyrexia. Here, Mishra had lain for four thousand years beneath a flesh shredder. Here, Yawgmoth had lain for nine thousand years, transforming from a man into a monstrous god. Here too, Gerrard and Urza could bleed buckets and yet fight on. They had painted the arena like saturated brushes. In slick fingers, Gerrard clutched a war hammer and swung it overhead in a braining blow. The hammer crashed through a late parry. It bashed aside Urza's sword. He winced to one side. The maul slammed into his shoulder. Bones cracked. Muscle slumped above a ruined joint. The sword jangled free. Urza recoiled, staggered against the wall, and added figures to the red mural.

The crowd shrieked. Delight raked the heavens. It reverberated through the arena, channeled by concentric circles of stone. This was what the gladiators needed-not rest, not health, not hope, not blood, but bloodlust. Shouts, hoots, bellows carried a mad, almost worshiping desire. It infused the two fighters. It became their blood. It amalgamated organs, knitted muscles, and patched skin. More than that-it made the two men want to fight. It was a contagious and irresistible thirst to kill.

Smiling, Gerrard hefted the hammer and stalked forward. A sanguine line wormed down his brow, dangerously near one eye. He shook his head, flinging spray. It formed circles in the sand. A roar answered from the crowd. He drank in the bitter sound. It roiled in his belly and burned in his muscles. The hammer rose of its own will. Gerrard barged toward Urza, along the wall.

The planeswalker's shoulder had healed considerably under the ovations of the crowd, but bone fragments still jutted from it. The arm was unusable. Stitches of pain puckered the old man's neck. He had no weapons. They lay behind Gerrard, on the dais at the center of the arena. Urza had no means to block that hammer, nor had he any escape. If he leaped, the blow would smash his ribs. If he ducked, it would stave his skull.

Gerrard's hammer muscled a silver arc through the sky. It fell on the trapped planeswalker.

Urza charged beneath the descending hammer. His ruined shoulder crashed into Gerrard's gut. Bone fragments cut through fabric and spiked skin. The hammer traced out its inevitable path, down to smash on the ground and send sand spraying. Urza bulled across the sand, carrying his foe. This sudden blow yanked the hammer from Gerrard's hand. Urza's feet pounded the ground. He shoved his protege over to land flat on his back. Urza stood over him and roared. The bestial sound echoed through the stands and grew in monstrous throats.

A ferocious, ingenious attack. Now neither combatant had a weapon.

Urza turned and strode to the dais.

Gerrard struggled up. He gasped for breath but could draw none. There was a moment of suffocating panic as stunned muscles remembered how to breathe. In asphyxia, bloodlust faded. Gerrard's head was suddenly clear. The very air of the arena, the spirit of the place, was violent. To breathe was to take Yawgmoth into one's breast.

Still, Gerrard had to breathe. Clutching his knees, he managed an inhalation. The panic slowly faded. Fury rose in its place. Anger-vital and mad-tingled in his lungs and spread through his body. It ignited a fire in him. Muscles tightened. Legs and arms ached to fight. To toes and fingertips, he was possessed by violence. Only his mind remained clear, and that through sheer will. He would let Yawgmoth imbue his body with war, but not his mind. No longer his mind.

Urza had reached the dais and selected a great sword, the weighty sort meant to sever horses' legs. He swung the blade. It moved as easily as an epee. The weapon crackled like black lightning. Energy flowed down the blood groove, across the crosspiece, and into his hands. It scintillated up his arms. Dark power sewed the last hunks of flesh closed over the bones of his shoulder. Lightless sparks danced across a clenched smile.

Only moments before, Gerrard had worn a similar expression. Violence suffused more than just the air. It filled the weapons, too. They taught their wielders to kill.

Great sword clutched in a double grip, Urza advanced.

Gerrard strode toward his fallen war hammer. Could he wield it, or would it wield him? Did it matter? He could no more reject a weapon than he could reject breath. Gerrard clutched the pommel.

Power ambled spiderlike across his flesh. It nettled him. It filled him with strength even as it poisoned him. Both hands tightened on the handle while prickly magic rose up his neck. He clamped his eyes tight, struggling to stem the tide. It wrung virulent humors from his mind.

The rapid thud of boots in sand announced Urza's approach.

Gerrard whirled, lifting the war hammer. The tide of blood-lust rose. Swallowing, he released the hammer. It dropped to the sand and thudded dully. The blood-tide ebbed away.

Urza rose. He lifted the great sword high for one cleaving strike. Gerrard stood weaponless, his back to the wall, with no escape. The great sword fell. It cleft the air.

Gerrard lunged beneath the blow. He stepped to the side of the pommel. In the same fluid motion, his fist cracked the planeswalker's jaw. Teeth clacked together. Urza staggered back. The great sword buried its tip in the sand. Gerrard stepped on the side of the blade, forcing it to ground.

Urza clung to the pommel, dragged down. He released it, too late.

Gerrard kicked the man's down-turned face. Twin trails of blood streamed from his broken nose as he fell backward. Urza landed on his back. Dust rolled up around him.

The stands erupted. Mouth plates ground together in a cicada din. Tongues lashed, and hooves pounded. In the royal balcony, puffs of soot billowed gladly from the nostrils of the black dragon. Even Hanna seemed to take especial interest in that bold reversal.

Gerrard cared nothing for any of their opinions. Instead, he stood tall above his foe, staring down at Urza with eyes no less strange. Gerrard's fists circled before him.

"Let's do this right, Planeswalker," he said. "Bare hands. Nothing but knuckle. If I'm going to have to kill you, I'd rather do it with my bare hands than with some hunk of cursed steel."

Warily eyeing his foe, Urza rose to one elbow and gathered his legs beneath him. "I have always fought with steel. From the first wars against the Fallaji to my invasion of this nested world, I have always fought with machines."

He leaped to his feet, ready to fend off another blow, but backing all the while toward the dais. "Why should I stop now?"

With his fists lifted, Gerrard pursued. "These aren't your machines, Urza. They are Yawgmoth's. This whole place exists only in his mind, his imagination. We fight each other according to his whims. We are not warriors, but puppets. Oh, I will fight you, Urza Planeswalker, I will beat you, and gain my boon, but I will be the puppet of no one."

A hiss came from the crowd. The moments of heroic reversal were forgotten in the face of this bold blasphemy- to fight, but not on Yawgmoth's terms.

Gerrard advanced on Urza, swinging another punch, which darkened one eye. He grasped his foe's cloak, hauled him close, and whispered through clenched teeth, "It's more than that. Much more. If this place exists only in the mind of Yawgmoth, it is made of flowstone. Nanites." That word got Urza's attention. His struggles slackened as Gerrard elaborated. "Minute machines that cling to one another and answer the will of Yawgmoth ... and Crovax ... and others .. .."

Angry shouts grew strident from the audience.

"What does it matter?" Urza retorted, punctuating the comment with a blow to Gerrard's cheek.

The man staggered back, releasing the cloak. "Don't you see? If Yawgmoth can shape this stuff, so can we. We must only believe it to create it." Gerrard reached into empty air beside him. His fingers wrapped around something. They tightened and brought a weapon into existence. A quarterstaff. Gerrard whirled it expertly around one shoulder. "My weapon. My rules. I am no puppet, but a warrior!" He swung the staff in a wide and brutal sweep, smashing Urza's head.

The planeswalker toppled, his boots dragging sand in his wake. He crumpled to the ground, seeming as much slain by Gerrard's ingenuity as by the staff blow.

The anger in the stadium dissipated, replaced by a rising shout of admiration. Scabrous hands that had been empty a moment before bloomed with black roses and flung them down upon Gerrard. Thorns and desiccated petals cleaved to his bloody skin as if to regain their lost hue. Other hands in the crowd flung missiles-rotten food and vomit, organ meats and offal-down upon Urza, where he brokenly lay.

From the high balcony, a booming voice emerged. "Well done, Master of Arms. You have learned. You have risen from the simple deadliness we have given you to new, greater deadliness. You have transformed yourself from a worthless puppet to a self-moving creature. An automaton. But you must rise farther still before you might approach this platform and kneel." The dragon extended its twisted claw and made a gesture toward Urza.

Gerrard turned to see his old foe rise. Cloaked in filth and blood, he seemed no more than a pair of anguished eyes, rising from the detritus. His body took form as if constituting itself from garbage.

As Gerrard gazed at that pathetic figure, he had the sensation he stared into a mirror-no, not a mirror, but a portrait. A mirror shows the viewer in the present time. A portrait shows the viewer in a distant past. Urza was Gerrard's distant past, was the man primeval.

Those eyes, the focus and locus of Urza's life, stared at the young man with a baleful fury. He held out his hand to one side. As Gerrard had formed a staff from the clear air, so now something grew in the planeswalker's grip. It was no simple staff. The haft of the weapon glistened with serpent scales. The head of the thing bristled with blades-glaive and axe, adz and pike, all in one. The butt of the device was perhaps most fiendish of all: a scourge. This cat-o-nine, though, consisted not of leather thongs but of snakes. The reptilian scales that covered the shaft spread into true snakeskin at the base of the device. The nine thongs slithered through the sand toward Gerrard. Their eighteen eyes fixed upon him.

Smiling a fangy smile, Urza raised his new weapon and snapped its end. The motion riled along the snakes' long bodies, stretching them. Cobra hoods spread. They opened their jaws. White fangs jutted outward.

Gerrard staggered back.

Creamy venom shot from the snakes' fangs and crisscrossed the sand. They lunged toward him. He swung his quarterstaff, cracking their heads. The jaws of the cobras fastened about the staff. Teeth splintered wood and jetted poison into it. Gerrard released it. The quarterstaff sailed from numb fingers. It retracted with the serpents toward Urza. Enwrapped in serpents, the staff struck upon the blades of Urza's weapon and was unmade. Cleft, chopped, sliced, and pierced, the quarterstaff became splinters in the sand.

"My weapon," Urza hissed, his voice matching the company of snakes. "My rules. Perhaps I am not the planeswalker here, but I am still the master artificer. There are more things in my philosophies than in heaven and hell."

The crowd howled with delight.

The planeswalker advanced. He swung the serpent staff before him. Nine vipers uncoiled, reaching for Gerrard. Eighteen fangs slid out to bite into the young hero's flesh.

Gerrard drove away from their snapping jaws and ran alongside the blood-painted walls of the arena. He left a sanguine image of himself, stretched out and desperate before his foe. Urza had learned from his innovation and bested him. This was how the battle would go. Gerrard would innovate some new strategy, and Urza would master it. If ever Gerrard would win, he must do so by striking his opponent dead with some innovation before it became Urza's own.

For now though, he must only survive. The snakes snapped, catching his clothing. He reeled back. Their teeth ripped through raveling fabric. He kicked sand into their jaws.

Gerrard ran. Some would have called it cowardice. Indeed, the pelting storm of feces from the stands told Gerrard what Yawgmoth thought of this quick retreat. Courage and cowardice were less important just now than life and death, and time to think. With each footfall, Gerrard gave himself another second.

Urza followed him like a hound on a hare.

Think! Gerrard commanded himself. He wanted to create some greater weapon-a flaming staff or a flame-throwing sling-but none could match the efficient deadliness that Urza bore. And surely anything Gerrard devised would be quickly topped by Urza. No, it was better to discover the new paradigm than to be outwitted in the old.

If the world all around could by shaped into weapons, why not also into defenses? Deadly defenses.

Gerrard's feet struck divots in the sand, and his mind changed those circular splashes into circular traps-bear traps. Every track became one, a wide set of iron jaws spread about a broad trigger. It would take but a single incautious step to slice Urza off at the knees. He would fall face first into more devices and be chewed to pieces.

Except that Urza was Urza. He avoided the traps across the sand, running to one side.

Gerrard needed something more powerful.

He found it. Why shape sand into the form of iron? Let sand be sand, with its natural strengths, and it would overwhelm whatever came against it.

Gerrard sent out a thought. The arena hungered for ideas, and it swallowed this thought-quickening. The sand became alive, quicksand, not in the sense of a watery slough, but in the sense of an ever-shifting, ever-living stuff.