Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  The crowd shrieked. Delight raked the heavens. It reverberated through the arena, channeled by concentric circles of stone. This was what the gladiators needed—not rest, not health, not hope, not blood, but bloodlust. Shouts, hoots, bellows carried a mad, almost worshiping desire. It infused the two fighters. It became their blood. It amalgamated organs, knitted muscles, and patched skin. More than that—it made the two men want to fight. It was a contagious and irresistible thirst to kill.

  Smiling, Gerrard hefted the hammer and stalked forward. A sanguine line wormed down his brow, dangerously near one eye. He shook his head, flinging spray. It formed circles in the sand. A roar answered from the crowd. He drank in the bitter sound. It roiled in his belly and burned in his muscles. The hammer rose of its own will. Gerrard barged toward Urza, along the wall.

  The planeswalker’s shoulder had healed considerably under the ovations of the crowd, but bone fragments still jutted from it. The arm was unusable. Stitches of pain puckered the old man’s neck. He had no weapons. They lay behind Gerrard, on the dais at the center of the arena. Urza had no means to block that hammer, nor had he any escape. If he leaped, the blow would smash his ribs. If he ducked, it would stave his skull.

  Gerrard’s hammer muscled a silver arc through the sky. It fell on the trapped planeswalker.

  Urza charged beneath the descending hammer. His ruined shoulder crashed into Gerrard’s gut. Bone fragments cut through fabric and spiked skin. The hammer traced out its inevitable path, down to smash on the ground and send sand spraying. Urza bulled across the sand, carrying his foe. This sudden blow yanked the hammer from Gerrard’s hand. Urza’s feet pounded the ground. He shoved his protégé over to land flat on his back. Urza stood over him and roared. The bestial sound echoed through the stands and grew in monstrous throats.

  A ferocious, ingenious attack. Now neither combatant had a weapon.

  Urza turned and strode to the dais.

  Gerrard struggled up. He gasped for breath but could draw none. There was a moment of suffocating panic as stunned muscles remembered how to breathe. In asphyxia, bloodlust faded. Gerrard’s head was suddenly clear. The very air of the arena, the spirit of the place, was violent. To breathe was to take Yawgmoth into one’s breast.

  Still, Gerrard had to breathe. Clutching his knees, he managed an inhalation. The panic slowly faded. Fury rose in its place. Anger—vital and mad—tingled in his lungs and spread through his body. It ignited a fire in him. Muscles tightened. Legs and arms ached to fight. To toes and fingertips, he was possessed by violence. Only his mind remained clear, and that through sheer will. He would let Yawgmoth imbue his body with war, but not his mind. No longer his mind.

  Urza had reached the dais and selected a great sword, the weighty sort meant to sever horses’ legs. He swung the blade. It moved as easily as an epee. The weapon crackled like black lightning. Energy flowed down the blood groove, across the crosspiece, and into his hands. It scintillated up his arms. Dark power sewed the last hunks of flesh closed over the bones of his shoulder. Lightless sparks danced across a clenched smile.

  Only moments before, Gerrard had worn a similar expression. Violence suffused more than just the air. It filled the weapons, too. They taught their wielders to kill.

  Great sword clutched in a double grip, Urza advanced.

  Gerrard strode toward his fallen war hammer. Could he wield it, or would it wield him? Did it matter? He could no more reject a weapon than he could reject breath. Gerrard clutched the pommel.

  Power ambled spiderlike across his flesh. It nettled him. It filled him with strength even as it poisoned him. Both hands tightened on the handle while prickly magic rose up his neck. He clamped his eyes tight, struggling to stem the tide. It wrung virulent humors from his mind.

  The rapid thud of boots in sand announced Urza’s approach.

  Gerrard whirled, lifting the war hammer. The tide of bloodlust rose. Swallowing, he released the hammer. It dropped to the sand and thudded dully. The blood-tide ebbed away.

  Urza rose. He lifted the great sword high for one cleaving strike. Gerrard stood weaponless, his back to the wall, with no escape. The great sword fell. It cleft the air.

  Gerrard lunged beneath the blow. He stepped to the side of the pommel. In the same fluid motion, his fist cracked the planeswalker’s jaw. Teeth clacked together. Urza staggered back. The great sword buried its tip in the sand. Gerrard stepped on the side of the blade, forcing it to ground.

  Urza clung to the pommel, dragged down. He released it, too late.

  Gerrard kicked the man’s down-turned face. Twin trails of blood streamed from his broken nose as he fell backward. Urza landed on his back. Dust rolled up around him.

  The stands erupted. Mouth plates ground together in a cicada din. Tongues lashed, and hooves pounded. In the royal balcony, puffs of soot billowed gladly from the nostrils of the black dragon. Even Hanna seemed to take especial interest in that bold reversal.

  Gerrard cared nothing for any of their opinions. Instead, he stood tall above his foe, staring down at Urza with eyes no less strange. Gerrard’s fists circled before him.

  “Let’s do this right, Planeswalker,” he said. “Bare hands. Nothing but knuckle. If I’m going to have to kill you, I’d rather do it with my bare hands than with some hunk of cursed steel.”

  Warily eyeing his foe, Urza rose to one elbow and gathered his legs beneath him. “I have always fought with steel. From the first wars against the Fallaji to my invasion of this nested world, I have always fought with machines.” He leaped to his feet, ready to fend off another blow, but backing all the while toward the dais. “Why should I stop now?”

  With his fists lifted, Gerrard pursued. “These aren’t your machines, Urza. They are Yawgmoth’s. This whole place exists only in his mind, his imagination. We fight each other according to his whims. We are not warriors, but puppets. Oh, I will fight you, Urza Planeswalker, I will beat you, and gain my boon, but I will be the puppet of no one.”

  A hiss came from the crowd. The moments of heroic reversal were forgotten in the face of this bold blasphemy—to fight, but not on Yawgmoth’s terms.

  Gerrard advanced on Urza, swinging another punch, which darkened one eye. He grasped his foe’s cloak, hauled him close, and whispered through clenched teeth, “It’s more than that. Much more. If this place exists only in the mind of Yawgmoth, it is made of flowstone. Nanites.” That word got Urza’s attention. His struggles slackened as Gerrard elaborated. “Minute machines that cling to one another and answer the will of Yawgmoth…and Crovax…and others….”

  Angry shouts grew strident from the audience.

  “What does it matter?” Urza retorted, punctuating the comment with a blow to Gerrard’s cheek.

  The man staggered back, releasing the cloak. “Don’t you see? If Yawgmoth can shape this stuff, so can we. We must only believe it to create it.” Gerrard reached into empty air beside him. His fingers wrapped around something. They tightened and brought a weapon into existence. A quarterstaff. Gerrard whirled it expertly around one shoulder. “My weapon. My rules. I am no puppet, but a warrior!” He swung the staff in a wide and brutal sweep, smashing Urza’s head.

  The planeswalker toppled, his boots dragging sand in his wake. He crumpled to the ground, seeming as much slain by Gerrard’s ingenuity as by the staff blow.

  The anger in the stadium dissipated, replaced by a rising shout of admiration. Scabrous hands that had been empty a moment before bloomed with black roses and flung them down upon Gerrard. Thorns and desiccated petals cleaved to his bloody skin as if to regain their lost hue. Other hands in the crowd flung missiles—rotten food and vomit, organ meats and offal—down upon Urza, where he brokenly lay.

  From the high balcony, a booming voice emerged. “Well done, Master of Arms. You have learned. You have risen from the simple deadliness we have given you to new, greater deadliness. You have transformed yourself from a worthless puppet to a self-moving creature. An automaton. But you must rise
farther still before you might approach this platform and kneel.” The dragon extended its twisted claw and made a gesture toward Urza.

  Gerrard turned to see his old foe rise. Cloaked in filth and blood, he seemed no more than a pair of anguished eyes, rising from the detritus. His body took form as if constituting itself from garbage.

  As Gerrard gazed at that pathetic figure, he had the sensation he stared into a mirror—no, not a mirror, but a portrait. A mirror shows the viewer in the present time. A portrait shows the viewer in a distant past. Urza was Gerrard’s distant past, was the man primeval.

  Those eyes, the focus and locus of Urza’s life, stared at the young man with a baleful fury. He held out his hand to one side. As Gerrard had formed a staff from the clear air, so now something grew in the planeswalker’s grip. It was no simple staff. The haft of the weapon glistened with serpent scales. The head of the thing bristled with blades—glaive and axe, adz and pike, all in one. The butt of the device was perhaps most fiendish of all: a scourge. This cat-o-nine, though, consisted not of leather thongs but of snakes. The reptilian scales that covered the shaft spread into true snakeskin at the base of the device. The nine thongs slithered through the sand toward Gerrard. Their eighteen eyes fixed upon him.

  Smiling a fangy smile, Urza raised his new weapon and snapped its end. The motion riled along the snakes’ long bodies, stretching them. Cobra hoods spread. They opened their jaws. White fangs jutted outward.

  Gerrard staggered back.

  Creamy venom shot from the snakes’ fangs and crisscrossed the sand. They lunged toward him. He swung his quarterstaff, cracking their heads. The jaws of the cobras fastened about the staff. Teeth splintered wood and jetted poison into it. Gerrard released it. The quarterstaff sailed from numb fingers. It retracted with the serpents toward Urza. Enwrapped in serpents, the staff struck upon the blades of Urza’s weapon and was unmade. Cleft, chopped, sliced, and pierced, the quarterstaff became splinters in the sand.

  “My weapon,” Urza hissed, his voice matching the company of snakes. “My rules. Perhaps I am not the planeswalker here, but I am still the master artificer. There are more things in my philosophies than in heaven and hell.”

  The crowd howled with delight.

  The planeswalker advanced. He swung the serpent staff before him. Nine vipers uncoiled, reaching for Gerrard. Eighteen fangs slid out to bite into the young hero’s flesh.

  Gerrard drove away from their snapping jaws and ran alongside the blood-painted walls of the arena. He left a sanguine image of himself, stretched out and desperate before his foe. Urza had learned from his innovation and bested him. This was how the battle would go. Gerrard would innovate some new strategy, and Urza would master it. If ever Gerrard would win, he must do so by striking his opponent dead with some innovation before it became Urza’s own.

  For now though, he must only survive. The snakes snapped, catching his clothing. He reeled back. Their teeth ripped through raveling fabric. He kicked sand into their jaws.

  Gerrard ran. Some would have called it cowardice. Indeed, the pelting storm of feces from the stands told Gerrard what Yawgmoth thought of this quick retreat. Courage and cowardice were less important just now than life and death, and time to think. With each footfall, Gerrard gave himself another second.

  Urza followed him like a hound on a hare.

  Think! Gerrard commanded himself. He wanted to create some greater weapon—a flaming staff or a flame-throwing sling—but none could match the efficient deadliness that Urza bore. And surely anything Gerrard devised would be quickly topped by Urza. No, it was better to discover the new paradigm than to be outwitted in the old.

  If the world all around could by shaped into weapons, why not also into defenses? Deadly defenses.

  Gerrard’s feet struck divots in the sand, and his mind changed those circular splashes into circular traps—bear traps. Every track became one, a wide set of iron jaws spread about a broad trigger. It would take but a single incautious step to slice Urza off at the knees. He would fall face first into more devices and be chewed to pieces.

  Except that Urza was Urza. He avoided the traps across the sand, running to one side.

  Gerrard needed something more powerful.

  He found it. Why shape sand into the form of iron? Let sand be sand, with its natural strengths, and it would overwhelm whatever came against it.

  Gerrard sent out a thought. The arena hungered for ideas, and it swallowed this thought—quickening. The sand became alive, quicksand, not in the sense of a watery slough, but in the sense of an ever-shifting, ever-living stuff.

  Urza took one step upon the quicksand and sank to his knees. He took a second to catch himself and foundered to his waist. Struggling to whirl the serpent staff above the boiling ground, he buried himself deeper.

  In midstride, Gerrard whirled to see the demise of his progenitor. Already, the planeswalker was buried to his waist. Sand grasped him. Its fingers dragged his shoulders below. Gritty claws clenched his hair and beard. Particles invaded nostrils and ears. His last scream became a cloud of dust. Grains even etched those beaming eyes. Sand closed over Urza’s head, and he sank away.

  With empty hands and empty eyes, Gerrard turned toward the royal balcony. He swept one arm in toward his belly and the other out toward the mound of sand that had once been Urza Planeswalker.

  “I claim my boon, Yawgmoth. I have ascended. I have slain my rival. Now, give me Hanna.”

  The black dragon upon that exalted balcony riled like one of Urza’s snakes. “No.”

  Astonished, Gerrard shouted, “No?”

  “The battle is to the death,” came the voice, and not only from the balcony, but from all the beasts there. “You have not slain Urza, only buried him alive. Yes, you have proved yourself, risen from the ranks of puppet to warrior, and warrior to strategist. You have devised offenses and defenses, but still, you have not killed your old foe. Behold, Gerrard—Urza Planeswalker.”

  Gerrard turned toward the sand mound.

  It rose again. As Urza had lifted himself once from offal, now he rose from the ground. Those eyes led him again, bringing the rest of him into being. Sand sloughed from shoulders and arms and robes. Grit shot from nostrils and lips. Urza had left his serpent-staff beneath the ground, but he no longer needed it. His eyes brought new and sudden life to the sand. Where Gerrard had fashioned quicksand, Urza fashion golems—creatures of soil. On their foreheads was written Emeth, the ancient Thran word for truth, and they rose to pummel Gerrard.

  The crowd—Yawgmoth himself—shrieked in approval.

  Gerrard retreated. Once again, Urza had learned from his innovation and had made it exponentially more deadly.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Lonely and Glorious Thing

  Karn crouched beside Weatherlight’s massive engine. His hands jutted through twin ports in the shell of the power core. His fingers gripped the control rods within. When first Weatherlight had lifted from her Tolarian dry dock, Karn had crouched here. When she had fought in Serra’s Realm and in Rath, in Mercadia, Benalia, Llanowar, and Koilos, he had tended her from this very spot. Always, he had knelt before the great engine like a man before a great altar. He shucked his crude silver body and coursed through her every Thran-metal tissue. Weatherlight inspired, empowered, and transformed him.

  Now was different. Now he knelt like a midwife before a birthing mother, anxious to bring new life into the world. This time, it was not Karn who was inspired, empowered, and transformed. It was Weatherlight.

  The engine seemed a glowing slab of wax. Thran metal sweated and ran across it and reformed. Power channels swelled and split. Couplings merged into manifolds. Chambers within the machine widened and multiplied. Weatherlight conformed to the final ideal laid out for her in the Thran Tome—a book that was now at her heart. Already, she had doubled her intake and exhaust capacities, which would quadruple her acceleration and velocity. Weatherlight was giving birth to a wholly new ship.

  Such transfor
mations came at grave cost. Metal failed. Folds peeled up from each other. Bolts gnawed out the wood that once held them. Braces dragged from chine boards. Doorways swelled shut. The ship would either achieve her new configuration or be ripped apart trying.

  Karn could do nothing to help. Though he knelt here, feeling every shudder of the engine in his hands, the micro-filaments in his knuckles were dead. He was shut out. Always before, he moved through the ship. Always before, he had been the living spirit in the machine. Now Weatherlight had her own spirit. She no longer needed him. With the Thran Tome in her makeup, she was a thinking, feeling, living creature. Karn wished he could bear her pain, or at least share it, but he could not. He could only kneel there and mutter useless comforts and wait to discover what new creature came into being before him.

  * * *

  —

  Moving from patient to patient in the overcrowded sickbay, Orim sought the source of the agony that filled the room. It suffused her mind. She had always been empathically sensitive to others’ pain, and her natural abilities had been only heightened by Cho-Arrim water magic. Now, she wished for a little anesthesia, both for the patient and for herself.

  Orim laid dripping hands on the elbow of an ensign. The joint had been shattered during the crash landing. Though it still ached, it did so with the warm ache of healing. Water conducted the sensation into her hands and sent relief the other direction. With a silvery shimmer, Cho-Arrim magic seeped from Orim’s fingers into the man’s elbow.

  It was not he. The pain came from another.

  The next bunk held a very familiar form—Tahngarth. At last, Orim had convinced him to get aid for his burns, some of which were serious. If anyone in the sickbay had a right to be anguished, it was he, but his clear-eyed gaze told otherwise.

  “What is it, Orim?”

  She shook her head, her glance passing over the bunks along the wall. “Someone—someone’s in unbearable pain.”