The Fifth Dawn

CHAPTER 10

Every bone in Slobad’s body ached. It was a mixed blessing that he was in too much agony to care much about something as minor as aches.

He didn’t know what was worse-being captured by Memnarch, or watching helplessly as Glissa plummeted to her doom. At least she was getting some peace. Slobad wished he’d been able to follow her on that last adventure, and while he mourned his only friend, he also envied her. Death would be preferable to his current predicament. But the goblin’s fierce survival instinct was still keeping him alive in spite of himself. Instinct, and Memnarch’s twisted form of “mercy.”

Now he was on his own again. No one for Slobad to rely on but Slobad. And this time that probably wouldn’t be enough.

The goblin hung spread-eagled in an iron torture rack of some kind mounted on one inner wall of what had once been the Panopticon. The rack had obviously been designed with larger victims in mind. The thing was big enough to hold a vedalken-one of the new, augmented vedalken big enough to go toe-to-toe with a golem. Short chains shackled Slobad’s wrists to the top of the rack, while his feet were bound to either corner. He was left swinging lazily in the chains like a fly in a spider’s web. He’d been stripped of possessions and clothing.

Before him, the Guardian of Mirrodin paced, displaying great agitation. The bulbous serum tanks strapped to his carapace sloshed noisily, only half full. Slobad noted with bitter pleasure that Memnarch limped and still wore silver bandages over patches of new flesh. Two of his eyes looked milky and half formed.

“It thinks it can resist us, my Creator,” Memnarch said to the sky. “It has much to learn. Malil will show it the error of resistance to the inevitable.” The Guardian’s six eyes-including the two fresh ones-flashed with hatred, and instantly a second metal man stepped into the chamber from the shadows. Slobad recognized this one, too. Memnarch clackety-clacked away, giving his lieutenant room to work. Slobad saw that the smaller of the pair also bore scars of new flesh.

“Goblin,” Malil said, “you will tell me what I wish to know. The whereabouts of Glissa, please.” Without warning, he slammed a cruel backhand across Slobad’s face.

Slobad couldn’t understand what they hoped to achieve, let alone why Memnarch seemed to be having a conversation with an invisible ‘creator,’ but the goblin wasn’t about to dishonor Glissa’s memory with betrayal. He spat warm blood and a rusty tooth at Malil’s feet, and raised his head to meet the metal man eye-to-eye. “You outh of your mind,” he groaned. “Glitha’th dead. You looth. No big thpark for you, huh?” Slobad chuckled, and winced. He had two fat lips, and at least one broken rib. Stupid vedalken, with their stupid gigantic hands. No finesse at all. Finesse was important. If not for finesse with machines, Slobad would have been dead long ago.

“Yes, we should have increased the safeguards, kept this goblin filth clear of the perfect world, my Creator,” Memnarch said, continuing his apparently one-sided conversation. “They are rather disgusting, and obviously only capable of imitating sentience. Mountain vermin.” The Guardian laughed at something only he could hear.

“The elf girl,” Malil snapped again.

“I know tho many, huh?” Slobad said through his battered mouth. “Those elfth girlth lovfe goblinth, huh? Whith one ya want?” He closed his eyes and awaited the next blow.

The blow never came. Instead, Malil turned the crank attached to the rack one full revolution.

Slobad screamed as he felt the sickening snaps of his right, then his left shoulder forcibly separating from the sockets. He felt something pop in each knee, and his lower legs went mercifully numb. If they were still attached, he thought. Through the blinding agony, the gears of Slobad’s unusually analytical mind-unusual for a goblin-continued to turn. It dawned on him with sickening certainty that the only thing holding him in one piece was his skin and muscles, stretched almost to the breaking point themselves.

His cries reverberated inside the indestructible Eye, ringing back into Slobad’s bleeding ears.

After what felt like hours but was probably only a few seconds, Malil released the cranks, which let a little slack return to the chains that suspended the goblin. Slobad whimpered. “Wathtin’…time,” he coughed. “You can’t get her. You only got Thlobad, huh? Believfe me. Glitha outh ofth your reaf now.”

“I assure you she is alive,” Malil said simply. “Do you doubt the Guardian?” The metal man followed the question with a punch to the belly, which made Slobad lose what was left of his last meal in a green spray that spattered Malil’s gleaming exterior.

“That’th what-urp-I thinkth of the Thaurdian, thuh?” Slobad said, and passed out.

“Strange little vermin,” Malil said. “But highly resistant to torture.”

“This one is different, my Creator,” Memnarch said. “You have sent him to us, as you sent the elf girl. We shall make good use of him. Once Malil has his fun.”

“Fun? I merely-”

“It denies, denies, denies the cruel streak,” Memnarch said. “But not matter, my Creator. As you say, we do not really need any information from the mountain vermin.”

“His perceptions are ours to control?” Malil asked. It was difficult trying to speak to the master sometimes. More accurately, all the time.

“The device is truly wondrous in design, Karn,” Memnarch said. “The goblin will serve its purpose perfectly.”

“But master, I do not understand the purpose,” Malil confessed.

Memnarch locked the goblin into the device, sending thousands of tiny needles tipped with a quicksilver anesthetic solution into Slobad’s skin. Perhaps it was overkill, Malil supposed, but his master was not about to let this prisoner escape. The Guardian then stepped into a teleportation circle recessed into a far corner of the chamber and disappeared.

Malil took another long look at the goblin. The repulsive creature drew slow, shallow breaths, but was stable. He felt a brief twinge of something his analytical mind identified as jealousy. This ridiculous thing, no more than an animal, really, was more crucial to his master’s plan than Malil himself. Memnarch had made it plain that Malil was expendable, beneath notice, yet had taken extraordinary measures to ensure he possessed this goblin, alive. The Guardian had even deigned to personally seal the creature in the torture device.

Malil could not understand it. Nor could he understand why he adjusted the restrictive, hypodermic-lined braces that held the goblin fast, pressing the needles another half-inch into its rusty green hide. Slobad moaned in pain, even in his comatose state.

Malil smiled. He felt better. Curious. There had to be a word for such a feeling of cruel joy at the suffering of one he despised, but he couldn’t think of it.

The metal man stepped into the circle and recited the exact incantation Memnarch had used with mechanical precision.

Malil felt a brief hiccup of nonexistence and reappeared on the edge of the green lacuna, beneath the rebuilt Panopticon. The darksteel frame of the structure had protected them both when the green lacuna was bored out, but he doubted the Panopticon could ever again be the mathematically perfect creation it had once been.

Memnarch stood a few feet away, staring into the long, dark tunnel that led to the forests the elf girl called home. Malil noted that his master locked two of his eyes on his lieutenant as soon as the latter appeared.

“It must learn part of your grand plan, my Creator,” the Guardian said, beckoning Malil but still looking down the lacuna. This was as close as Memnarch would get to telling his lieutenant to listen. “Malil has a destiny to fulfill, as do I. Malil will make my destiny possible. And Malil will die, along with everything on this world. When the time is right.”

Malil looked at Memnarch impassively. “I have never expected to die anywhere but in your service.”

“Will it miss its life, do you suppose?” Memnarch asked the absent Karn. Malil was a bit taken aback at the question.

“My life? My life is yours to do with as you please, master. How could it be anything else?” Malil dodged. He had not taken a vial of serum with him, and now that his supply was a mile in the air over his head, he found he was unable to concentrate on anything else. Of course I’ll miss my life, Memnarch, he thought. You can’t drink the serum when you’re dead. He felt the patches of skin on his face and arms begin to sweat.

“As it should be.” Memnarch scuttled sideways and finally gave Malil his full attention. “Life should not be on this world, I am convinced of this now, Karn. You left this world pure, and despite my efforts, it became tainted with the flesh. As have I. I shall make this right when I ascend. And the removal of life from this sphere shall be a glorious cleansing.” Memnarch rocked his head slowly right and then left, and shivered as serum pulsed into his system from the massive tanks on his back. The Guardian’s gaze lifted to the mana core. “Malil shall lead the armies that I have created as you instructed, Karn, and take control of the surface world.”

“Master? I do not understand. The elf girl has devastated the leveler ranks, and-”

“The magic! I have bathed in its power, as you surely intended, my Creator,” Memnarch said. “Behold.”

The Guardian spread his silver, humanoid arms wide, and all six of his eyes took on an emerald sheen. A glossy silver field enveloped Memnarch, who clenched both hands into fists. The Guardian’s veins bulged along his forearms and temple, and Malil saw spots or reddish blood seeping onto his master’s bandages.

“The army shall rise!” Memnarch cried, and swept his arms to the sky. The silver glow grew into a translucent sphere then rapidly grew, dissipating into the surrounding interior of the plane like ripples on a quicksilver pond. Malil’s sharp eyes-mercifully as yet untouched by the spore-followed the edge of the shockwave until it completely disappeared over a mile away.

The ground swirled like quicksilver seen through fogged glass, then burst to life. Thousands of small, segmented creatures that hadn’t been there before simply grew from the metallic ground.

Malil saw myr, some as small as a goblin, others that would tower over the heads of the cursed golem that had fought at the elf girl’s side. Wicked levelers of cruel design, their whirling rotary chopping blades sending an eerie buzz echoing through the interior, grew to mammoth size within seconds. Arachnoid constructs armed with spiked clubs and scythe blades clanged noisily against the ground, the mycosynth spires, and each other. Sleek, predatory ebony shapes that vaguely resembled the beetle-like nim shambled among them, taking wide swipes with hooked talons at the air and filling the interior with a chorus of low, metallic growls that echoed weirdly off the inside of the great sphere. Lupine creations with tusks sharpened to a molecule’s width were covered in metal fur lined with barbs. A sterling airborn serpent with iridescent platinum scales swooped low over the growing crowd of bizarre constructs, hissing like shattered glass. Mycosynth dust swirled up in clouds as the artificial reptile flapped lustrous wings of membranous silver and joined its brethren.

“Your orders are simple, my Creator, simple enough for Malil to understand. There will be more of my children. Armies born of a single thought.”

“Orders, master?” Malil asked, more than a little awestruck by the forces that the Guardian had handed to him.

“Yes, great Karn, simple is best. He has not yet touched the faces of gods.” The master began to mumble and hum, then whirled on Malil. “Malil shall find the elf girl and return her to me. Surely this is simple enough for the first order.”

“She will be yours,” Malil finally replied. “And what else do you-does the Creator ask of the Guardian’s army?”

The master laughed like a cawraptor about to make a kill. “Malil is going to retrieve all of the soul traps and return them to me. Then he shall take the surface world in the name of Memnarch.”