Planeshift

Chapter 28

Never before had the armies of Keld retreated. When overmatched, Keldon warlords descended bravely into death, grinding away at their foes all the while. Any adversary who would dominate the Keldons would pay for victory in blood, oceans of it. Superior forces often surrendered to Keld for this very reason. The wisest enemies avoided war altogether, knowing they would face an all-out and endless battle. This adversary was no rival nation. Who can battle a glacier? Who can war with a volcano? Who can stand against the coming of Twilight, the night of wrath?

The Keldons had stood as long as they could. Here was the culmination of history. Millennia of battles since the descent from Parma had led to this moment, this blasphemous moment. Twilight had come. The honored dead of Keld had returned to life. They had emerged from the Necropolis only to join armies of Phyrexians. Dead Keldons had slaughtered live ones. Keldon history had bowed in service to a foreign god. Still, living Keldons had battled bravely on.

Then the very world turned on them.

Beneath the army's feet, ice turned to water. Around their shoulders, water turned to steam. The Keldons in their hundreds of thousands descended through ice and fire into the heart of the world.

Only a single scant legion escaped. They had been farthest out from the fighting-young camp runners and old warriors cursed to survive their battle careers. All of them fled. There was no honor in this retreat, but there was less honor in letting the flood claim them. Keld needed warriors, even if they be only whelps and curs.

Across disintegrating ice, the army retreated. Their colos leaped over widening crevasses. Infantry splashed through new warm streams. Warriors struggled to navigate the calving ice cliffs. They rushed toward the black basalt mountain on one side of the terminal glacier. Even when they reached that rock-solid ground, it too shuddered under them. It was as if the fire gods below pounded the over world with massive hammers.

Now the survivors of the Battle of Twilight camped on a chill ridge of black stone. It was a defensible spot-no Keldon would camp anywhere else-though no Phyrexian foe remained. Alt had died in the world conflagration. The only foe was the flood itself.

At first, the towering terminus had sprouted countless jets across its surface. Water that had fought through twisted passages shot in straight lines from the glacier. Pressurized streams widened and joined. Centuries of centuries of water burst out into a gray river. Enormous hunks of ice bounded free. They bobbed through deeper stretches and rolled among rapids. The serpent of Twilight muscled its way toward the sea.

The flesh of that serpent was filled with bodies. Keldon, Phyrexian, elf, colos all tumbled in a confused mass. The wurm had swallowed them. A Phyrexian's spikes impaled a Keldon's back, and the two bodies formed a new creature. An elf was tangled in the reins of his colos, and with six legs and two arms and two heads, they floated together.

Dead fingers clung to shattered rams and hunks of mast. In places, the bodies had gathered in a ghastly Sargasso.

The Keldon survivors looked down with solemn despair. These dead were the finest warriors in the land, slain not by swords but by fire and ice. Every camp runner and warlord felt instinctually that he should have tumbled in that flood with them.

They did their best to make amends. Warriors stood at the edge of the flood and reached in with polearms to snag whatever soldiers they could. They lifted Keldons and elves out and laid them in orderly rows below the camp. They dragged Phyrexians free and tossed them into bonfires. Even so, most of the corpses were out of reach, even out of sight, schooling along beneath the waves. For every body they hauled from the river, fifty others bobbed past. Even so, the dead below the camp outnumbered the living in it.

"There will have to be a new Necropolis," said camp runner Stokken to himself.

Doyen Lairsen stood nearby, watching the awful tide. His plaited hair and beard were pitted with soot where smoke sticks had burned to their nubs. ' "Why? What is the point?"

The young man was startled by his doyen's jaded assessment. "To honor the dead, of course. To renew our hopes for Twilight-"

"Twilight has come and gone," snapped Doyen Lairsen. His hands gripped the hilts of his brutal swords. "It has turned daylight to darkness. What is the point in hoping for another Twilight?"

Blinking incredulously, Stokken said, "The fire of Keld has burned brightly throughout the day. How much more must we stoke it to make it last the night?"

"Youth!" Lairsen spat angrily. The word was a curse. "Hope is the delusion of the young."

In a low voice, Stokken murmured, "And despair is the delusion of the old."

"What was that!" Lairsen barked, drawing steel. A moment later, the sword was returned to its sheath, and blood wept from a long gash on Stokken's face. The slash was so quick, the sword so sharp, that Stokken did not even feel the attack until his neck grew warm. Doyen Lairsen repeated, "What was that?"

Stokken bowed deeply, dropping to one knee. "I have spoken out of turn, Doyen. Forgive me. I was not responsible for my words, deluded, as I was, by hope."

Lairsen's brow furrowed. The implication was clear- the doyen had done himself a dishonor by striking a deluded man. Still, if he admitted Stokken was not deluded, the doyen would have lost the previous argument. This young man bore watching.

"A delusional man should not bear a sword. Surrender yours to me." Doyen Lairsen smiled, knowing he had won.

Stokken was wise enough not to resist. Even a word at this juncture could be construed as a refusal, as grounds for summary execution. He slowly slid his sword from his shoulder harness.

Receiving the blade, Doyen Lairsen gritted his teeth viciously. "Next you will be seeing visions-the army resurrected beneath a midnight sun-" The grin melted from his face, replaced by a strange golden glow.

Stokken studied his doyen's scarred face some moments before turning to gaze where he did. Forgetting his penance, Stokken rose to stare.

Aback the gray serpent of Twilight rode a dreaming thing. Its hull gleamed golden. Its masts were full-rigged in white-bellied sails. It was queer and glorious and unbelievable, the Golden Argosy from the Necropolis.

Could it be that the ship had tumbled with the rest of the destroyed citadel? Could it be that like its people, the ship had been dragged into the boiling maelstrom? It seemed impossible that the Golden Argosy could ride now, whole and beaming upon the serpentine tides. And who did she bear upon her crowded decks?

"What is this delusion?" Doyen Lairsen wondered aloud before he could stop himself.

"Hope," breathed camp runner Stokken, taking back his sword. "That delusion is hope."

Eladamri had never seen so beautiful a sky. After three days in the bowels of a glacier, any sky would have been splendid. But this boreal blue, with its ranges of cloud above a tossing sea, this was magnificent. Its glory was second only to that of the Golden Argosy herself.

She was a strange ship, stranger even than Weatherlight. There was not a stick of furniture in her, no stores, no ballast, no heads, no crew. There was not even a helm. The ship sailed according to her own will. Indeed, she had a will. She had navigated the tight confines of the glacier with an expert rudder, sliding through impossible spaces. Her masts never ground upon the ceiling, her gunwales never scraped the walls. She made sail and reefed sail not according to the torrents of wind beneath the ice but according to the winds of another world. Always, she found the fastest path. Always, she drew up the thousands upon thousands of Keldons and elves who survived beneath the ice. Though her hull was commodious, it could not truly have held this many, and yet each new arrival found room among his or her fellows. Within her hull, they were warm and dry, neither hungering nor thirsting-healed of all they lacked, clothed and rested, even given to understand the speech of each other.

She was an odd ship, constructed not from material but from ideal. She did not sail true seas but rather the seas of dream.

Amid impossible thousands of others, Eladamri and Liin Sivi stood on deck as the Argosy emerged from beneath the ice. Together they saw the aching blue sky. The sun broke upon the two of them but cast down a single shadow.

"Once again among the living," Eladamri said gladly.

"Once again," Liin Sivi echoed. Her hand found his, and she slid her fingers between his. "I hadn't doubted it, not from the moment I saw this ship."

Drawing a deep breath of the bright air-no more the wet chill murk-Eladamri replied, "Oh, I doubted. I thought we would never see daylight again. I thought the ship itself a dream. I am not certain it is not."

"They are not a dream," Liin Sivi said, pointing to a nearby shoulder of stone. A Keldon camp perched there. Warlords and lackeys crowded the cliff, gazing in wonderment. "Nor is Port Bay a dream." She gestured toward the great Keldon city, its domes and spires jagged against the sparkling sea. "How can this be a dream?"

"This is a dream," came a voice in High Keldon, though both Eladamri and Liin Sivi could understand. They turned to see Doyenne Tajamin, Keeper of the Book of Keld. "But this dream is more true than truth."

"More prophecies from your ancestral cudgel?" Liin Sivi asked.

Tajamin shook her head slowly. Her eyes were twin embers, and her teeth gleamed in a scarred smile.

"No, these words are written nowhere except on my soul. I have learned the power-and the limits-of written revelation. It can be misquoted as easily as quoted. The truth of figures is always figurative truth."

The doyenne's smile spread to Eladamri. "These are strange words from the Keeper of the Book of Keld."

"These are strange times," she replied. "It was written that the true heroes of Keld would descend from the Necropolis to fight the true foes of the land. I had always believed that this meant the honored dead would join us against the Phyrexians. In fact, the dead are the dead. They are closer allies to Phyrexia than to us.

"But that does not mean the prophecies are false. The Golden Argosy has descended from the Necropolis, gathering the true heroes of Keld to fight the true foes of the land," the doyenne said, fire shining in her eyes.

Eladamri's eyes narrowed. "Our fight has only begun, then?"

She nodded with deep certainty. "The fate of Keld, and all the world, is being decided across the sea. The Battle of Keld is won. Every last soldier who fought was dragged down to death. Only we-the true heroes of Keld-rose again." There seemed nothing more to say.

The Golden Argosy breasted the gray waves with the same divine grace she had exhibited in the glacier. The thousands in her hull felt only gladness as she bore them through the tide. On the banks of the flood stood their folk-Keldon and elf-staring. All wore the blank and blind and somewhat worried aspect of sleepwalkers. They could not understand what they saw. It was a spectacle, a phantasm.

To those aboard the Golden Argosy, it was more real than real. Eladamri, Liin Sivi, and Tajamin stood in company with two hundred Skyshroud and Steel Leaf elves. Nearby, Doyen Olvresk and his ten "fists" watched among the rest of his war band. Even Warlord Astor had survived the icy torrents. He shouted a greeting to the Keldons on the bank but got no response.

"They cannot understand you," Tajamin called to him. "They are in a mortal place. We are in a divine one. They are subject to want, to hunger, to fear, to confusion. We are not. They are sleepwalkers, only half aware of eternal things. We will return among them and be like them- some of us."

Eladamri was honestly surprised by this. "Return among them? What of the great battle that awaits us? What of the battle across the sea?"

"It is a battle for some of us but not all," Doyenne Tajamin replied. "The Battle of Keld may be done, but there is much to rebuild-whole societies. We have not won back our land only to abandon it. Some of the heroes of Keld must fight our battles here, at hearth and fire. Many of your folk must remain as well." She moved toward the rail and gripped it with powerful fists.

Suddenly understanding, Eladamri came up beside her. "You cannot leap from the ship. The icy flood will kill you."

Tajamin did not smile, but her teeth made a hopeful line. "No. It did not kill me before and will not kill me now. I must plunge into the waters as a sleeper into dream. I will rise on the far bank remembering this ship as if it were but a delusion-I and the thousands with me. We will climb, muddy and shivering, from the flood, and we will turn around to glimpse this ship. We will see it with the same unbelieving eyes as those on shore."

Staring levelly at her, Eladamri said, "If you cannot remember anything else, Doyen Tajamin, remember this. The folk of the Skyshroud are your allies, now and forever."

"Yes, Eladamri, Uniter of Keld," the doyenne said formally, "I will remember."

With that she hurled herself over the rail. She dropped away into the gray flood and was swallowed up. After her went another and a third. Warlord Astor soon followed, and Doyen Olvresk as well, and then more than Eladamri could count. Each one disappeared in the bow waves, each reappeared, drenched and struggling in the cold tide at the ship's stern. All swam for shore and for their folk, who waded in to bring them back to the land of the living.

Eladamri rode on. He, Liin Sivi, some hundred elves, and some ten thousand Keldons rode on. From the banks, their companions watched with bald disbelief.

Only Doyenne Tajamin wore a different look. The forgetful tide had not washed away one memory. She knew.

The sight of it in her eyes gave Eladamri great comfort. His people had found a home in this land. He smiled as the Golden Argosy bore him and the heroes of Keld out into the churning sea.