The Moons of Mirrodin (34 page)

She took a breath and followed the fire tube into the quicksilver. She had to push her body into the viscous liquid. It enveloped her like water and pushed against her like a stiff wind. The sensation was far more intense than the sudden rush of air from Bruenna’s spell. Her entire body felt compressed by quicksilver. Glissa fought back an urge to gasp for air. Her ears felt as if they would pop. Her chest tightened.

She focused on the eels and the monster. The fire tube cut an ashen swath through the quicksilver in front of her, melting any eels that dared swim near. She could feel Bosh kicking and punching inside the beast but knew the golem’s attacks were having no effect on the monster. It simply stretched and reformed after each assault. The monster was just a few feet farther, but Glissa was moving in slow motion. The creature stayed just out of reach. The elf began to drift up away from the sea bottom as swirling currents pushed her body around.

She tried to swim forward, waving her arms and kicking her legs in the quicksilver, but all that did was create an intricate pattern of ash with the fire tube. The current seemed to have a mind of its own. It shifted Glissa back and forth and turned her around. She twisted back around, then concentrated on the currents between her and the monster. She could sense it ahead of her. The sea floor was close beneath.

Glissa shoved her legs out to push against the sea floor. She jetted up a few feet into a current she detected above her. The current swept her along toward the monster. She lifted the fire tube above her head and pointed her toes as she approached. The current dragged her deadly fire across the shoulder of the beast. The quicksilver quaked as the monster screamed in pain. Glissa heard the scream more inside her head than through her ears. The vibrations resounded through the sea.

The current threatened to sweep her past the monster. Glissa reached out and grabbed a silver tentacle. Glissa could sense where the sea ended and the beast began. It had a solidity of being the amorphous sea lacked. She held on and brought the fire tube back around to drive it into the monster. It howled again. Glissa’s head began to ache from the pounding echo of the monster’s wailing and the lack of oxygen.

The quicksilver monster spat out Bosh and poured quicksilver into a dozen tentacles. Arms flailed at Glissa through the sea. With her enhanced senses, Glissa saw the monster’s attack almost before it came. She swung the fire tube in a slow arc through the quicksilver and cut off three tentacles before they reached her, but she was too slow in the thick liquid to bring the fire back around, and the other tentacles wrapped around her.

She bounced off Bosh. The golem grabbed at Glissa, but she knocked his hand away. They couldn’t escape the beast, not in its element. She had to kill it. She had to do it now. She allowed herself to be drawn toward the beast’s silver body.

The monster squeezed her mercilessly, constricting her chest and forcing the air from her lungs. Bubbles escaped from Glissa’s mouth and combined around her head in a small pocket of air. The beast squeezed even tighter, making it impossible for Glissa to draw another breath, and pulled Glissa closer.

Now was her chance. Glissa fought to bring her arm up. Tentacles slid, little by little, up her body. She got her elbow free and jammed the fire tube deep into the chest of the monster. The creature screamed and tightened its grip around Glissa. The pressure in her chest mounted, while the creature’s screaming pounded in her head. The monster tried to slide its body away from the fire. Glissa pushed back. She held her hand—and the fire tube—inside the beast.

The melting fire spread through the beast’s body. Glissa watched the beast’s torso turn to black ash. The Quicksilver Sea flowed in to displace the ash. The creature’s head soon followed, which finally silenced its head-splitting wail. The fire spread into the tentacles last, which dissolved around Glissa, releasing their hold on her.

With the pressure gone from her chest, Glissa’s instincts betrayed her. She immediately tried to draw in a breath of air. Instead, she drew quicksilver into her lungs. She choked uncontrollably. Every choke ended in a gasp, forcing more liquid into her lungs. She dropped the fire tube and grabbed her neck. But there was nothing she could do. Glissa’s enhanced senses closed down around her. The world began to go black. The last thing she saw was a looming dark form above her.

LUMENGRID

Glissa walked through the forest, basking in the warmth of bright sunshine filtering through the leaves. A squirrel skittered up a tree as she passed and shouted at her from the lowest bough. She felt free and alive. The morning dew squirted through her toes as she walked, barefoot, through the grass and moss
.

Rays of light glinted off dew-moistened flowers, turning into rainbows that jumped from blossom to blossom. Her life was perfect. The forest provided everything the elves needed and protected them from the wars and ravages of men and gods. Her people existed to protect the forest. She knew that now. When had she forgotten? The forest existed to protect the elves. It was a truly symbiotic relationship. The elves would have it no other way
.

A cloud drifted across the sky, blocking the sun and casting a shadow over the forest. She glanced up to watch for the warm light to return, but the cloud darkened and began to grow. Soon a charcoal mass of roiling storm clouds threatened to blot out the entire sky. Lightning played across the bottom of the turbulent cloud. The air became charged with raw power and lightning crackled across the sky. Glissa could feel the forest’s energy surge as the storm built. Was the storm feeding on the mana of the forest or bleeding off excess energy into the forest? She didn’t know
.

A bolt of lightning shot down from the cloud into the forest ahead of her. The thunder deafened Glissa, and the force of the shock wave knocked her to the ground. She jumped to her feet and ran toward the impact. Lightning often brought fire to the trees. The forest must be protected. That was the law of the elves. Nothing else mattered
.

She ran through the dark forest. No rain fell from the storm clouds, and the lightning seemed content to stay in the sky for now. Glissa smelled something burning ahead of her, but the odor was not wood turning to charcoal. It was more primal, more powerful. She broke into the clearing where the lighting had struck and was surprised to see a large body of elves already gathered there, as if they had all been drawn to this spot by the lightning
.

In the center of the clearing, Glissa saw a black patch of grass at least twenty feet across that had been turned to ash by the lightning. A glowing sphere of energy hovered above the ash. The elves who crowded around seemed to be hypnotized by the sphere. They didn’t move closer to investigate, but neither did they make any attempt to flee from it. She wanted to look away from the sphere and knew she would be lost if she didn’t escape the clearing, but she couldn’t make her body move
.

The sphere flashed, engulfing the gathered elves in a bright white light. Glissa screamed. It felt like her skin was burning, as if the light was consuming her. She fell but didn’t hit the ground. She couldn’t see anything but light and sparkling motes flying past her eyes as she fell into a white nothingness. Then she was on the ground, crumpled into a fetal ball, hugging her knees to her chest. Her eyes were closed, and there was a blessed darkness behind her eyelids
.

After a time, Glissa dared to open her eyes. She expected to find black stalks where the trees had once stood. She feared there would be dozens of burnt and misshapen corpses surrounding her
.
She wondered whether she was truly still alive or had passed onto Gaea’s reward. Nothing she could have imagined, though, prepared the elf for what she saw when she opened her eyes
.

Elves lay all around her. Most curled up as she had been. None were burnt or scarred from the flash. A few had pushed themselves up off the ground or sat and surveyed the damage to the forest. But the forest was gone. The trees, the flowers, the sun, even the black cloud had all disappeared. Glissa looked down to see bare metal beneath her. She looked up and saw great towers of twisted metal surrounding the elves. In the sky, there was nothing but stars, but even those were unfamiliar
.

Glissa felt sick inside. The metal world swirled around her as she tried to get to her feet. A wave of nausea overtook the elf. She rested on her hands and knees, and closed her eyes to make the world stop spinning around her. She hoped it was all a dream that would be gone when she opened her eyes. The elf looked again, but the metal world was still there. She dropped her head down between her arms and vomited
.

*   *   *   *   *

Glissa kneeled on the bottom of the diver, puking. Her chest and neck convulsed as a torrent of silver liquid erupted from her stomach and lungs. The spasms stopped a few moments after the last drops of quicksilver dribbled from her mouth and nose. She stayed there, hunched over a silver puddle, and just breathed, spitting excess quicksilver into the puddle every so often. Finally she crawled toward the front of the diver, feeling her way along the invisible metal, and sat down.

“I think that’s the last of it,” she said as she wiped her mouth and nose. “What happened?”

“You tell us, huh?” said Slobad. “Bosh dump you in diver. Think it was Bosh. Couldn’t see him. You not breathing. Not
breathing at all. Human make spell and you start hacking. Spit up entire sea, huh?”

Glissa looked back at Bruenna. The mage was still concentrating on her air spell. “You saved me?” she asked.

“I put air in your body,” said Bruenna. “Bosh saved you.”

“Thank you,” said Glissa. She looked around. “Where’s Bosh?”

“Out there,” said Slobad. He pointed past Glissa. “Pulling to Lumengrid, huh? Just start pulling again like nothing happen, huh?”

Glissa looked out the front of the diver. She could see the severed ends of the ropes hanging over the sea floor, right above Bosh’s muck-covered feet, which continued to trudge through the sea.

“Any sign of eels or other monsters?” asked Glissa.

Slobad shook his head.

“We are near Lumengrid,” said Bruenna. “I feel it.”

Glissa nodded. There was nothing to do now but wait. She sat and thought about the flare she had experienced while she was … dead. It had been so intense, so real. She had seen things she’d never seen before. Had the serum opened up her mind to a different time and place? Or was it just a hallucination caused by flirting with death? With Chunth dead, her only chance to find out the truth was the Pool of Knowledge, and now she had no serum to activate it.

Her musings were cut short by a loud clang from ahead of them. Glissa looked around to see what happened, and was worried when she saw the ropes floating down to the bottom of the sea. But then she noticed the golem’s feet trudging back toward the diver. The feet banged into the side of the invisible diver, then climbed the side, leaving muddy smears behind. The elf heard Bosh’s voice boom from above her. He must have climbed up the iron tube and stuck his head through the opening.

“I am glad you have recovered, Glissa,” said the golem’s disembodied voice.

“Thank you, Bosh,” said Glissa. “I owe you my life.”

“As I owe you. I believe we have arrived. I have struck a metal wall. How shall I proceed, Bruenna?”

“Pull us around the base,” said Bruenna. “You will see a tube. Take us in there.”

“How will he be able to see the tube?” asked Glissa.

“Good question,” said the human mage. “I haven’t worked out all the problems with the diver yet.”

The two women looked at each other blankly.

“Why not use air bubble, huh?” said Slobad finally. “Like before. Saw metal monster past golem.”

Glissa nodded. “Good idea, Slobad.” She turned to Bruenna. “Can you control the size of the invisibility bubble?”

Bruenna moved her hands through their spell dance. “How much control are you talking about?”

“Collapse the invisibility bubble to just around the diver and extend the air bubble out past Bosh’s ropes. Then we can see him and he can see the fortress wall.”

“I can do that. I do not know how long I will be able to hold it, though.”

“Just do your best.”

Glissa watched as Bruenna muttered a few words and changed the pattern that her hands followed. The quicksilver rushed toward them for a moment, and Glissa gasped, then the air pressure dropped and the quicksilver washed away from them past the ends of the ropes. A silver wall appeared in the bubble, extending out past the edges and down into the mud.

Glissa heard Bosh climb off the diver then saw him appear in front of the transparent wall of the diver. He picked up the ropes and began moving around the edge of Lumengrid. Glissa watched the walls slip past them. She was amazed at the size of the place. She could only see a small part of the vedalken fortress at the edge of the bubble, but it seemed to go on forever.

She looked back at Bruenna. Bruenna’s hands were a blur. Her face had turned red and sweat dripped off her chin. Finally Glissa saw the tube Bruenna had mentioned. It was enormous. Only the bottom of the tube was visible within the air bubble. It curved up at the edges and disappeared into the silver curtain around them.