Planar Chaos

by Timothy Sanders

  As he gathered his strength to stand again, Venser heard a subtle hissing. It was hard to pinpoint the sound, but it seemed to be rising from the ground directly beneath his face.

  Sleep now, a serpentine whisper said. Rest.

  A pungent odor rose to his nostrils, and Venser’s vision fogged. The voice and the scent seemed reptilian to him, cold-blooded and razor-scaled. He had been beset by serpents too often of late, from Madaran cat-dragons to Nicol Bolas to Shiv’s rabid viashino. Snakes, dragons, and lizards were common in the swamps he called home, but they were the norm in this blasted place.

  Sleep now. Rest.

  Venser started. He was back in Madara, on the shores overlooking the Talon Gates. The dragon Bolas was there, incorporeal but deadlier than an exploding star. Bolas had swayed Venser with magic and sheer force of personality. Bolas had lulled him with honeyed words, then used Venser as both door and doormat, tearing through his body like a boulder through a garden hose without a single thought to the damage being done.

  This new sinister, soothing voice did not weaken Venser’s resolve or his concentration but sharpened it. He was a native of Urborg, he reminded himself, where black magic was plentiful and mindwalking villains whispered nightly their poison promises in the dreams of the unwary. He had a deep-seated dread of telepathic communication, for in the fens a disembodied voice was more dangerous than an arrow in flight.

  Venser opened his eyes. His vision cleared. He was still crouched on all fours, his chin almost touching the ground. Before him, a small, scaled creature rose up from the sand, no longer than Venser’s hand. A proud crest of fibrous scales crowned the tiny monster’s head, a vivid cockscomb that Venser recognized all too well.

  Venser shut his eyes immediately before they met the basilisk’s. The creatures were deadly, even at this size. The slightest touch, the briefest glance would mean the end of him. He pitched himself backward, preferring to break his own clumsy neck rather than harden into stone or dissolve into rot where he stood. He was lucky in that he was able to roll away from the creature, turning a backward somersault and kicking up a spray of stinging sand.

  “Venser?” Jhoira called. He waved her away and threw himself back again, completing another backward somersault as he shouted, “Stay back! Basilisk!”

  “Venser?”

  Lightning tore through him, searing his nerves as they radiated out from his spine. Thunder rumbled in his skull, and for a strange, blissful second, the heat and the sand and the stench of Shiv disappeared. Venser felt himself floating once more, only this was a truly physical sensation as well as fatigue-based delirium. Then Venser was back, his knees and palms plowing down into the loose sand.

  “Venser!” Jhoira’s voice was still distant. But now it was to his left and in front of him rather than behind to his right. His heart pounding, Venser forgot about exhaustion and thirst for the first time in over a day, and he saw Shiv as clearly as if he’d just woken from an afternoon nap. Teferi and Jhoira were now in front of him, both watching him with something like amazement.

  “Get away,” he said. He jumped up. “Don’t even look. There’s a basilisk in the sand. It tried to hypnotize me.”

  But Jhoira was not interested in the basilisk. Her face was fixed on Venser, now many yards away, and her expression was a strange fusion of shock and exhilaration.

  “Tell me if it moves,” she said. Without turning from Venser, Jhoira carefully unwound a length of her robes. She twisted the end and popped it in her mouth, somehow moistening it with her saliva. Venser experienced a momentary pang of jealousy amid his panic—he didn’t have enough spit to dampen a cotton swab—but he held perfectly still and watched the basilisk from the corner of his eye as Jhoira wound the cloth into a tight, needle-sharp spiral.

  Still fixed on Venser, Jhoira pricked up her ears, paused, and cracked the twisted piece of cloth like a whip. Venser saw a puff of sand and heard a short, pained hiss. Jhoira instantly jerked her makeshift whip back to her side, casting two tiny scaled legs and a bleeding cockscomb high into the air.

  “That was impressive,” Teferi said, but as soon as he did his attention drifted off into the sky.

  “I tumbled.” Venser shrugged at Jhoira helplessly. “Is that how Shivans deal with venomous reptiles?”

  The Ghitu beauty smiled, her brilliant white teeth gleaming. “Since I was young,” she said. “You learn to strike without looking.” She shook out the cloth and redraped it across her shoulders.

  “So,” she said, her eyes bright. “How did you get way over there?”

  Venser started to answer, to tell Jhoira he had no idea, but a shrill call floated over the dunes from the west. It sounded like yet another war cry, an announcement that more hostility was headed their way.

  Venser turned. Sure enough, there on the dunes to the west stood a dozen or more Ghitu warriors. They were dressed in brilliant, red cloth and each carried hand-tooled weapons of wood and metal. Their dark skin made them ominous, featureless shadows in the fading sunlight, but Venser could see they each bore goatskins and clay bottles on their belts.

  “Water,” he whispered. Momentarily forgotten, the exhaustion and fatigue came back fivefold, and Venser’s knees almost buckled.

  Jhoira called out in her native language, her joy evident in every syllable. The dour troop did not respond at all to her greeting. Doubt crept across her face, and she glanced at Venser.

  A burly Ghitu man stepped forward with a sicklelike blade in his hand. He extended the blade over his head and shouted, and it burst into flame. In response, the entire squadron also drew their weapons. Swords, daggers, batons, all of their tools were raised high and ignited.

  The leader growled something to Jhoira. She straightened, fixed him with a withering glare, and replied with a long, eloquent series of words that ended with her own name.

  The man hesitated. The others with him muttered. Finally, the leader replied, though less forcefully, and Venser recognized the word “Phyrexian.”

  Jhoira laughed. “Phyrexian?” she said. She crossed her arms and shook her scolding head. She threw her arm out toward the bald wizard and said something in Ghitu that ended with a specially emphasized word.

  “Teferi,” she said. Then she crouched, scooped up a half-handful of sand, and held it out so the grains ran through her clenched fist.

  “Shiv,” she said, and she slipped her free hand under the stream to catch it in her upturned palm. With an exaggerated flourish, Jhoira slipped the handful of sand into her sleeve, then immediately brought her hand out empty.

  “Planeswalker.” Jhoira drew her empty hand into her sleeve, paused, and brought out a handful of sand.

  The Ghitu warriors began to chatter among themselves. Venser didn’t think they were impressed by Jhoira’s sleight of hand so much as with the story she told. Their leader certainly didn’t enjoy being treated like a child, but even he seemed to be weighing the information Jhoira provided.

  She turned to Venser. “They thought we were Phyrexian infiltrators.” She smiled, expressing all the ease and confidence Venser wished he felt. “I’ve just told them the war is over.”

  Jhoira’s name was on the warrior’s lips, and it quickly spread through their ranks. Her name became a question and an answer, rapidly achieving the rhythm of a chant. They called for her, shouted her name, and howled with the delight of soldiers relieved of duty after a long campaign. The leader scowled at Jhoira, but he raised his weapon, barked out her name, and dropped to one knee.

  The rest of his tribe quickly followed so that only Jhoira, Venser, and Teferi remained upright, though Venser wasn’t sure how much longer he would remain that way.

  “We made it,” Jhoira called. She took several steps closer to Venser, scanning his face. “You need water and about five hours of uninterrupted sleep before we can get started.”

  Venser smiled weakly. “Started on what?”

  “Your machine,” she said. Her eyes were wide and vibrant. “We Ghitu are b
uilders. And we’re going to help you rebuild your ambulator.”

  * * *

  —

  Some time later, a second basilisk came across the remains of its cousin, which Jhoira had killed. Familial relations were not warm among these miserable little beasts, and it was more than happy to consume the edible remains of its distant relative.

  The ground sizzled under the tiny lizard’s claws. It knew it had to keep moving or the sand beneath its feet would liquefy. It skittered across the surface of the dunes, leaving strange scratches in the sand. As it approached the ragged cockscomb and a bit of tail, it lashed at the morsels with its spiky tongue.

  The basilisk went rigid as its appendage brushed against its intended meal. A thin veneer of frost raced up its tongue and flowed over the length of its entire body, encasing the monster in a sheathe of frozen dust.

  The last thing the basilisk heard was a breathy, almost giddy voice that seemed to vibrate up from the scavenged remains.

  Almost, the voice said. But not enough. No worries, though, eh? We’ll try again…won’t we, my little friends? We’ll have to try again. We’ll have to try again soon.

  The frozen basilisks remained silent and powder white until morning, when the first rays of sunrise turned the frost straight into steam.

  The next few weeks were one of the most productive and rewarding periods in Jhoira’s long, storied life. At last she was back among her people and surrounded by the familiar sights, sounds, and practices of an active Ghitu society. She saw whole families, alive and unaffected by either Phyrexian plague or three centuries of desperate subsistence living. She toured working forges and foundries, consulted her elders and peers among the tribe’s elite artificers, and dined on the robust food and drink her extended family had wrung from Shiv’s hard, unforgiving soil. For the first time since the Phyrexian Invasion, Jhoira allowed herself the luxury of believing she and Teferi had done the right thing. Removing a portion of Shiv to protect it had worked, at least for the Shivans who came with it. The evidence was alive and thriving all around her.

  Jhoira did not revel in this partial success but rather let it inspire her to do more. She had not helped preserve this community from one global catastrophe to let it fall to another, more universal one.

  The local tribe that took them in were excellent hosts. After centuries in this brutal environment, they had mastered the art of resurrecting the desert’s victims. Venser and Teferi were both ministered to by the tribe’s healers and shaman, and it only took a few days in bed and a steady diet of a thick, herbal broth to get the rest of her party back on their feet.

  Once the immediate danger had passed, Jhoira threw herself into her work. She pushed Venser and the elders to collaborate on the only project that made sense: rebuilding Venser’s teleportation device. They had too much ground to cover by any available physical or magical means. With a working ambulator they could continue their survey of the time rift phenomena and execute whatever strategy they came up with.

  There was resistance to her idea, both from the elders and Venser. The Ghitu argued about what that strategy would be and if they should have it in place before they committed to the labor. It was also difficult getting the elders to abandon Teferi as an option—the planeswalker still commanded a great deal of respect from the tribe.

  Jhoira knew it was her reputation that swayed them as much as much as the strength of her opinions. The Ghitu valued knowledge and prided themselves on sharing it with each other through their rich oral histories. Jhoira was one of their own, only with a thousand years more experience and learning. She also knew the time-honored histories better than they did and could recite them as perfectly as a master storyteller by a roaring fire. Between Jhoira’s arguments and Teferi’s continuing detachment and semidazed state, the elders relented, and the project was soon underway.

  Venser provided a different kind of challenge. The Urborg artificer was visibly uncomfortable sharing his secrets, which had required decades of trial and error development to unlock. To Venser, who had always worked alone, the Ghitu style of close, personal collaboration was completely alien, even uncomfortable. Jhoira’s energy and encouragement quickly overwhelmed his hermetic leanings, however, and she prodded him to expound on his essential design theories at length in front of the stone-faced elder council. Later, after Venser saw the elders’ genuine and immediate enthusiasm, he told her she must have translated his theories and presented them far more eloquently than he ever had.

  Jhoira put him straight to work, sitting him down with some of the keenest minds and quickest hands the tribe had to offer. They spent a week debating, drafting, and finalizing a blueprint that filtered Venser’s machine through the local resources and the Ghitu’s long history of elegant design and efficient function. Venser came to her again after this artificers’ summit and confessed that his machine had taken huge strides forward just from the collaboration so far. He also admitted he felt like a fraud whenever he issued instructions, a gifted novice in the company of serious, experienced masters.

  Next, Jhoira organized a small team of smiths and metalworkers to assist Venser. During these first stages of construction she served as both interpreter and forewoman, communicating Venser’s directions and making sure they were executed to his satisfaction. They spent the better part of a week at a combined mine and foundry, the very site the tribe had originally gathered to protect from Phyrexia. Now Ghitu mages put down their weapons and picked up their tools. They focused the heat and pressure of Shiv’s violently volcanic roots, then applied them to the exotic ores they had already taken from its rocky foundation.

  Jhoira was gratified to see Venser’s awe at Ghitu metalcraft. It reflected her own pleasant astonishment at the speed and quality of the smiths’ progress. She had spent the first ten years of her life tending her father’s forge, and as Venser’s team shaped broad, metal plates for the device’s foundation she realized she had been away from the fire for far too long.

  They spent another two days cooling and tempering the plates with tribal magic. They expertly assembled the ambulator’s frame and foundation platform, then built the housing for the allimportant powerstones. Less than two weeks after Venser went to work, they had a Ghitu version of his teleportation chair ready for testing.

  They had kept Venser’s initial design conceit of a chair at the center, as the machine’s operator would need to be strapped in and stable during each interspatial journey. Apart from that, the new ambulator was a very different machine. The original had been cobbled together from whatever spare parts Venser could scavenge so that its form scarcely matched its function, but the Ghitu variant had been designed and shaped as a coherent whole.

  Where the first ambulator was little more than a square metal seat on a boxlike platform, the new version was more like a throne, complete with a dais and stairs from which the seated king’s court could attend him. Instead of the harsh lines and jagged edges of Phyrexian castoffs, the new ambulator curved up gracefully on either side of the operator, arcing up behind and on each side. Instead of a stubby, awkward column and a panel of makeshift knobs and levers, the new controls were housed in the arms of the throne and only required a finger flick to maneuver. Gone were the cumbersome cables and sooty energy exchangers that converted powerstone mana into arcane mechanical energy. They had been replaced with a thin tube of cold, blue light that covered the machine’s internal walls like a glowing network of veins and arteries.

  Venser’s appreciation of Ghitu artifice faltered when Jhoira presented him with the control rig. The device fit over Venser’s head and rested on his shoulders like a knight’s armored epaulets. It was made of metal but was no heavier than a cold-weather cloak. The rig served multiple purposes, but its primary function was to allow Venser to operate the machine with his fingertips, magically amplifying the strength and clarity of his control over its many complicated functions.

  Jhoira took special pride in the device, as she had built it herself and
managed to keep it hidden from Venser until the main unit was ready. She had vast experience with reclusive tinkerers, and correctly predicted Venser’s objections. He balked at wearing the cumbersome-seeming device, likening it to a ox’s yoke. He complained she was adding yet another set of new controls for him to learn when he already had so much to contend with. He muttered about the wisdom of taxing an already overtaxed pilot when the stakes were so high.

  Jhoira eroded his resistance, of course. She did so with the strength of her arguments but more importantly with the rig itself, for she had laced the device with Thran metal, one of the Ghitu’s proudest achievements and most closely guarded secrets. No Ghitu artificer could claim the title of master without producing a single, pure ingot of the rare and exotic alloy. It was her people’s crowning achievement as metalsmiths.

  Thran metal was strong, lightweight, versatile, and possessed of near-mystical qualities. It grew, for one, replacing worn edges and filling in damaged or missing sections. It also behaved differently in different applications, tempering harder and stronger when intended for armor, lighter and more malleable for delicate internal clockwork. To the Ghitu, Thran metal was nothing less than sacrament. To Venser, it was a lure too tempting to resist. He relented and wore the rig—though he always looked uncomfortable in it.

  The team was helping him into the rig now for the last in a series of adjustments before the first test jaunt. Jhoira watched Venser scowling as he was jostled by the rig and the Ghitu workers. She hadn’t had a single personal conversation with Venser since they arrived. It had been easier than she expected, as they were both so consumed by their work. Now that the work was wrapping up, now that her plan was in place and ready, she would have to sit Venser down and tell him all of it.

  When the artificer glanced over and met her eyes, Jhoira smiled encouragingly. Then she turned away. Time and enthusiasm had maintained her momentum thus far, but now she had to dredge up the will to continue. Before she could talk with Venser, she must first talk to Teferi.