Planar Chaos

by Timothy Sanders

  Freyalise inspected the mirror in the air. She called it to her hand, examined it up close, and tucked it into the sash of her elegant dress. “As always,” she said, “you presume too much. Were I willing to cast another World Spell, this trinket would be of no use at all.”

  Jhoira spoke up, “If that is true, why keep it?”

  “Freyalise.” Jodah stretched his neck forward. “I’ve come to help you. I brought you the mirror so that the sheer magnitude of your effort to save Skyshroud doesn’t raze the forest to the ground and burn alive every elf in it. If you refuse this help, I will question whether you are unwilling to do what needs be done,” Jodah said, “or simply unable.”

  The planeswalker’s face soured. She glanced over to Jhoira before she muttered, “You may question any thrice-damned thing you like, and the world will keep turning.” Then, louder, she said, “Able, Archmage? I am able. Barely, I’ll admit. And the fact that I am barely able obviates the need for your mirror. To channel and redirect my power through it would diminish the spell to the point of uselessness. What I gained in control I would lose in strength tenfold. No, whatever I do must be done directly with an effort unrestrained.”

  “So,” Jodah said, “you’re going to follow Teferi’s advice after all?”

  “Certainly not,” Freyalise said. “Have you gone mad? Why would you entertain such a thought?”

  “Because you are already following Teferi’s example,” Jhoira said.

  The patron of Skyshroud turned, her face flooding crimson. “Explain yourself.”

  “He, too, mapped out his strategy far in advance. He kept it to himself and hid it from others, because it was too terrible to contemplate openly. He created a situation for himself that only he could address and only with gargantuan sacrifice on his part.”

  Freyalise glowered. “I did not create this,” she said. “And do not speak of sacrifice to me, Ghitu. There is nothing I would not do to ensure the survival of my people.”

  “Then ensure it,” Jodah said. “Do something.”

  “I have done. I am doing. I will do more.”

  Jodah met Jhoira’s eyes. The Ghitu nodded, and they both said, “Let us help you.”

  The scarlet tint of Freyalise’s face paled. Weary, she shrugged and made a slapping gesture with her hand. The cloud around Jodah dissipated, and the archmage landed awkwardly on his feet.

  “Most of my elves are already gone,” she said. She turned her back on Jodah and spoke to Jhoira. “He would be a good companion for your journey north. If you will have him, I will send him with you.”

  Relief lit up Jhoira’s face. “Yes,” she said. “Please allow him to accompany me.”

  Freyalise turned her head toward the archmage. She narrowed her eye, and her metal patch started to glow. “I regret my bad temper,” she said. Freyalise nodded and a new surge of greenish mist rose up around Jodah. He braced himself to be hurled about again, but instead of lifting him this spell settled over him like dew.

  Jodah felt a rush of strength. His entire body tingled. The soreness in his arms vanished, and he felt his swollen features returning to normal. In a matter of seconds he was restored. Shortly after that, he felt better off physically than he had in years.

  “Go with Jhoira,” Freyalise said. “Send word to my champion.” Freyalise turned away. “Then come no more to Skyshroud.” The planeswalker rose into the air.

  She had risen only a few yards when the gold-yellow sphere appeared. Freyalise stopped where she was, aggressive fire mana sparking from her hands, but Jodah guessed this was no new danger. He had given up on Venser when the beacon box shattered, but it seemed the Urborg artificer had come through after all.

  The ambulator took shape inside the sphere of energy. Jodah saw Venser’s lanky form seated in the device’s control seat. He stole a glance at Jhoira, noting the effect Venser’s arrival had on her mood and posture. The archmage took some small satisfaction from the knowledge he had done the right thing—Jhoira might not have needed the ambulator to complete her task in Skyshroud, but she definitely needed to see Venser intact and in front of her before she pressed on.

  Jodah dimly registered that Freyalise did not share their joy at seeing Venser. The planeswalker still had her spells ready to cast, and she stared angrily at the artificer as if she expected him to attack.

  The golden glow rolled back to reveal Venser at the center of his steaming machine. He quickly stood and stepped down onto the ambulator’s dais, careful to keep a watchful eye on Freyalise.

  The planeswalker spoke sternly, her voice strong. “What is that?”

  “That’s the artificer from Urborg,” Jodah said. “You saw him last at Windgrace’s side.”

  Freyalise spat. “Not the boy,” she said. “That.”

  Venser hesitated in his confusion. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead of sound, a gauzy, silver stream emerged, a development that shocked no one more than Venser himself. The stream continued until the tail end of the phantasm cleared the artificer’s jaw. The ectoplasmic apparition briefly took on a humanoid shape, becoming a long, sinewy figure with a great wild tangle of bushy, orange braids. Then the delirious laughter began, and Jodah’s stomach fell. To his right, Freyalise’s skin turned red, as thunder clapped above her.

  Hello, hello, hello! the Weaver King cried. He maintained his human outline inside the smoky, silver substance, and he tossed his head gaily as he spoke, facing them all in turn. I’m so pleased you invited me to see you at home. So many things to see, so many people to meet. It’s cold here, too, isn’t it? I like the cold. It’s bracing and it helps me think clearly.

  Freyalise unleashed a blast of fire at the Weaver King. He laughed as it passed cleanly through him, but Venser lost some hair to the flames before he was able to dive clear.

  The Weaver King’s mirth stopped short. His ghostly form still wore a smile, but his eyes were cold, hard, and empty. You’re like him, he said, like Windgrace. You don’t want me to have any fun.

  “There is no joy for you here, parasite.” Freyalise clenched two fists of fire and prepared to strike again.

  Oh, but there is. The bugs here are fascinating. We have some in Urborg, of course, but yours are so much more…diverse. The Weaver King’s body had started to drift apart, wafting away in the evening breeze.

  “Stay and fight,” Freyalise said. “You will suffer if I have to hunt you down.”

  Suffering is good for the soul. At least, that’s what I always tell people. A roaring wave of sound rose up from the trees. Jodah stepped back, tilting his head to follow the thick stream of wedge-shaped monsters swirling up from the forest.

  “Stop.” Freyalise’s anguish was in her voice and in the renewed blast of fire magic she unleashed on the Weaver King. Neither worked to good effect on the sliver swarm or the Weaver King’s raucous laughter.

  Rest now, the Weaver King said. I’ll need some time to get acquainted with my new army…but I’ll be back soon.

  Shrieks of laughter mixed with the high-pitched keen of a thousand frenzied slivers. The smoke that housed the Weaver King’s form dissipated, but Jodah could see his malign presence surging among the tide of insect monsters. The slivers quickly burrowed into the deeper woods, leaving Jhoira, Jodah, Venser, and Freyalise at the forest’s edge.

  Freyalise’s entire body was tense, clenched like a fist. She turned to Jhoira and said, “What was that?” The planeswalker turned to Venser. “And why did you bring it here?”

  “That was the Weaver King,” Jodah said, eager to cut in before Freyalise began brutalizing Venser. “A mind raider and puppet maker. He escaped from the Stronghold in Urborg a short time ago. Now it seems he has followed Venser here.”

  Freyalise rose up, her feet several feet off the ground. She rotated slowly, casting her dire eyes on the other three.

  “Urborg’s problem is now Skyshroud’s,” she said. “And if this petty king has taken control of my slivers, there may be no hope for my children at all.”
>
  The Weaver King was ecstatic. He had never had subjects like the Skyshroud slivers, never had so many oddly powerful creatures so fully under his control. He didn’t know or care if they were naturally hive-minded, if their insect brains responded to his commands more naturally than animal ones, or if the slivers were simply too primitive to offer resistance. Whatever the reason, he allowed himself to run rampant on the backs of the chittering horde.

  They streamed through the forest by the thousand, whittling the tallest trees off at the base with their pointed feet and sharp-edged shells. Their roars and screeches filled the woods with the ravening sound of scavengers gorging themselves on fresh carrion. They were innumerable, indistinguishable as individuals, and yet this was not a burden to him. In fact, their numbers somehow made them easier to command and more susceptible to his direct control.

  He congratulated himself on discovering a wholly new type of stimulation. In his dealings with higher animals, he preferred to nudge their own darker inclinations and let the subject provide the entertainment. It was completely different with these alien insects, more like controlling one huge body with a thousand responsive parts.

  The Weaver King cackled. He had not fully inhabited a physical body for quite some time, but they were his body now, a vast and complicated body capable of truly wonderful feats. He felt their abilities move and mingle amid the swarm, expanding and extending across the whole like shared body heat. Sending a flight of slivers into the air was akin to raising his arm in a friendly greeting. Igniting two or three dozen to leave flash fires in their path was no more challenging than brushing his long hair out of his eyes had been back on Rath. His swarm rippled and changed as they coursed through Skyshroud, horns and wings and poison-tipped spikes emerging from their hard backs only to soften and merge back into the shells that spawned them.

  The swarm poured into a clearing, and a galvanic thrill ran through the Weaver King. Four elf warriors (rangers, their thoughts told him, Freyalise’s Skyshroud rangers) stood rooted and wide-eyed in shock as an avalanche of skittering bodies covered them. It was over quickly, almost too quickly, but the Weaver King was too deep in his private joy to quibble over such details. In the past he had enjoyed the process of sending four or six or eight of his subjects against one another in a grand free-for-all, but this was far more engaging. This was his will enacted on a large scale, a veritable army that moved, killed, and feasted in immediate response to his slightest passing fancy.

  The slivers moved on, leaving a pile of slick elf bones scattered in the dirty snow. Had there been more victims for the swarm, the Weaver King might have spent hours running them down. The forest was almost empty, however, and though the slivers showed no signs of fatigue, the Weaver King’s own energy soon began to ebb.

  He kept them moving even as he considered his next diversion. He could reverse their course and descend upon the others at the forest edge. He was unwilling to risk losing Venser in the melee, however, and he wanted to spend a lot more time with Jhoira and Jodah before he finished with them.

  Freyalise was also a problem. Like Windgrace, she was too formidable to attack directly, her mind proof against his magic. The forest witch was also steeped in the same limitless power Windgrace had, making a face-to-face confrontation dangerous. If there was to be unpredictability in his daily routine, he preferred to be the source of it. There was too much about Freyalise he didn’t know, too much she could do if he troubled her. Better to wait, to strengthen his hold on the slivers and master their natural arsenal. Freyalise would fall to a coordinated sliver swarm, or her heart would break when she was forced to destroy them. Either option appealed to him, and he spurred his horde on to another mad rush through the trees. I will put my new body through its paces, he thought, before I send it against a planeswalker.

  The leading edge of the sliver mass broke out into another small clearing. This one was also occupied, but not by Skyshroud elves. The Weaver King recognized cold, steel Phyrexians from the same force that emerged from the Stronghold and was invading Urborg. This unit numbered but a dozen, perhaps a scouting party for a larger phalanx.

  The Phyrexians did not attack but circled themselves facing outward to beat back the slivers if they came too close. On a hunch, the Weaver King sent his minions circling around the metallic warriors, keeping the bugs a safe distance from the Phyrexians’ keen-edged limbs and their toxic ranged weaponry. Controlling the slivers was so effortless that he had the attention to spare on the Phyrexians, and so it was that the Weaver King realized something wonderful.

  Collectively, the cold Phyrexians were remarkably similar to the slivers. They were essentially drones, lethally powerful drones who had been created to follow a dominant leader. There were no more heroes in the Phyrexian band than there were in the sliver horde, no charismatic leaders or gifted tacticians that stood out from the crowd. A brilliant battlefield general like Windgrace would always defeat them, as their only method seemed to be charging at the enemy head-on. They were all simply cannon fodder, grunt soldiers who either lacked the capacity for strong thinking or had seen that capacity beaten out of them. They were followers in dire need of a leader—and the Weaver King was ready to lead.

  He sent a strong, straight thread directly into the mind of the largest Phyrexian. The monster’s psyche was stunted and half-complete, filled with thoughts and passions that he could not decode. It was a living mind, however, capable of accepting rudimentary commands and making basic decisions within the limits of a large-scale bloodbath. The Weaver King was pleased.

  The Phyrexian’s mind was also rife with dark passions and violent impulses, and this was a language the Weaver King spoke fluently. The mechanical man was totally loyal and subservient to his Machine God, that half-glimpsed and completely misunderstood creator who had woven himself through every fiber of the Phyrexian soldier’s being. That entity had foolishly never bothered to personally imprint on such lowly members of his army. Perhaps his forces were too numerous, or such advanced treatment was not available to the infantry that rolled off his assembly lines. Whatever the case, whatever the cause, these cold-weather horrors were designed to follow orders and destroy the enemy without the capacity for questioning who gave those orders or against whom they fought.

  The Weaver King had appeared to Venser as that strange, silver planeswalker to break Windgrace’s hold on the artificer. Now he attempted to appear to the Phyrexians as the voice of their lord and master, the ineffable demon who had given them life and charged their oily blood with magic and bloodlust.

  The Phyrexian’s head clicked and whirred. It rotated its face to where the Weaver King hovered, invisible and intangible. The Weaver King sent another thread into the Phyrexian’s clockwork mind, then another.

  Bow, he told it. Bow before your master.

  The Phyrexian continued to stare through hollow, metal sockets. Then the monstrosity lowered itself to one knee and tilted its head down almost to the ground.

  The Weaver King stifled his glee. He cast threads onto the rest of the Phyrexians here, sending, The rest of you as well. Bow down and worship me, for I have come to lead you to victory. Follow me and your purpose will be fulfilled.

  Twelve Phyrexian nightmares all dutifully bent and touched their heads to the soil. The slivers clicked, mewed, and clattered all around them. The Weaver King sent out a single command to his insect horde, and they all fell silent, their staccato movements gradually giving way to complete and utter stillness.

  The Weaver King surveyed the clearing, drinking in the endless patchwork of killing machines both natural and manufactured.

  Now this is an army, he thought. He caressed the thread that connected him to Dinne and plucked it like a violin string.

  Dart tosser, he said. Dinne did not respond, but the Weaver King knew he had the raider’s full attention. Stop wasting time with that afterthought. Go out and find me the largest concentration of Phyrexians in Urborg. Keep them in sight and wait for my signal. The Weav
er King stifled another giggle, knowing that if he started it would be hours before he stopped.

  I’ll be back soon. Don’t tell Windgrace, though, as I want him to be surprised.

  The slivers began to chatter and moan. The Phyrexians rose to the sound of servo motors revving high. The Weaver King let himself go, the manic sounds of his joy echoed in the throats of his newly assembled regiment.

  * * *

  —

  Teferi sat facing the silent armored figure. He was still cross-legged on the floor of the Stronghold’s hollow interior, his staff propped up on his knees and glowing softly at the tip.

  The warrior flickered in and out like a ghost, balefully watching Teferi without ever speaking. Teferi could not place the man’s tribe, but he was almost certainly a refugee from Rath. Teferi knew a little about shadow creatures and had even encountered two or three in person, and while this creature was far more dangerous than they, he was also clearly of their ilk.

  It had been hours, and so far the warrior had made no hostile act. He was well armed and Teferi could see his body had been trained and tempered to the rigors of soldiering. He cut an odd, unsettling figure, somehow dire and ominous yet melancholy at the same time. Teferi had tried speaking to him, but the armored man was prone to vanishing and reappearing by way of a reply. He didn’t seem skittish or nervous but rather annoyed that he had been observed, a snake who has to reposition himself for a lethal strike because his prey has spotted him.

  Teferi had briefly entertained the notion that Windgrace had sent the warrior to task him, but that theory did not pan out. The man had no gladehunter mark, for one, and if he were here to test Teferi he had yet to demonstrate how. Though he did not let his guard down, Teferi had long since turned his thoughts to larger issues—the cold, the Phyrexians, and the Stronghold rift.

  Windgrace had treated him unfairly, but Teferi’s time in the Stronghold was well spent. He was close enough to the rift to maintain a clear surveillance of it, the kind of slow, methodical examination that he had not enjoyed in Shiv. The Stronghold rift contained a full slate of titanic forces, magical, spatial, and temporal. The combination of these forces facilitated the appearance of these alternate-reality Phyrexians, though Teferi knew there were other root causes at work. A planar intrusion of this magnitude would require several rift-scale phenomena all responding to the same magical stimulus, and this unnatural cold snap was caused by far more than another breach in the foundations of the multiverse. These creatures were out of time as well as place and they bore the signs of extremely potent and unstable magic.