Rath and Storm

by Peter Archer (ed) (retail) (epub)

  “Hello, Karn. Remember me?” he asked, blowing a stream of dust from the silver collar. “I’m the kid that got you into all of this.” The man placed a hand on the Touchstone. It shimmered, huge in the lantern light of the hold. Gerrard, trained in magic by the maro-sorcerer Multani, put forward what power he possessed, focusing on the Touchstone, knowing the trick of the thing, positioning it to reactivate the golem.

  Metal shuddered as life surged back in. Joints creaked and limbs moved, trailing great curtains of grit.

  “Wake up. I’ve come back to get you out.”

  “Gerrard,” Karn said. His voice sounded metallic and hollow after so many years of silence, but there was a world of feeling in that one word. “I’m supposed to rescue you.”

  “Yes, my friend, but sometimes flesh is stronger than metal.”

  * * *

  —

  “Wake up. I’ve come to get you out.” It was not Gerrard who spoke this time, but a Phyrexian guard, a creature whose flesh was stretched and hypertropic beneath webworks of steel and bone.

  Karn shifted, his gaze swinging toward the hideous figure in the open doorway of his cell. The woman’s bald skull terminated in a jag-tipped sagittal crest, and the base of her chin sported a bare jutting bone. Karn had seen this guard before, had seen her chin-horn strike daggerlike into Tahngarth as she escorted him to his cell. The edge of the mutated bone was still stained with the minotaur’s blood.

  “Where are we going?” Karn asked dully.

  The woman’s lips drew back from filed teeth, and an expression that could not be called a smile stretched her neck muscles like steel cables. “It’s torture time.”

  After his long stillness, Karn’s body felt profoundly heavy. With an effort of will, he took a step back and turned around. “I must request mercy for my comrade, the minotaur,” Karn began, his metallic voice tremulous. “He is captive only because of my—”

  “Too late,” the guard said curtly. She gestured toward the corridor outside, where three more Phyrexians and a passel of shoving, chattering mogg goblins clustered. “We’ve already moved him. If you’d like to see him, to give him a word of encouragement….”

  “I would very much appreciate that.”

  “I’ll take you past his torture cell…on the way to yours.”

  Karn moved out among the clutching goblins and wondered what other torments awaited. Watching his friend’s suffering and death would be the worst torture Karn could think of, but Phyrexians were artists of pain, and their violent imaginations were boundless.

  The group escorted Karn into a dank and tortuous tangle of passageways, as rank as the bowels of a leviathan. Karn reflected that this was, in fact, a kind of digestive system for the empire. Each cell along the twisted hall contained a creature that had been swallowed by the vast war machine, and thereafter subjected to knives, teeth, acids, and fire and slowly dissolved away, the components of his flesh and fragments of his mind and rags of his pain borne outward to nourish the ravenous Beast. The same end would come to Tahngarth, too. His body and soul would go to power the mustering monster of Phyrexia. His flesh would be food to them, his agony would be their wine.

  The procession of goblins and Phyrexian guards came to a halt, and Karn drew himself from his reverie. The guard with the sagittal crest gestured to a stout, round door of flowstone, bolted tight to the curving walls. Crimson and hot, the door seemed a valve leading into another organ of the leviathan. The guard set her hand on a slide in the door and drew it back, careful to keep her eyes away from the corruscating orange light that stabbed out from the space. With the light came roars of agony and rage.

  “Tahngarth,” muttered Karn, a frisson of dread moving through him.

  The guard grabbed Karn’s hand and drew him toward the slot. “You had something to tell your friend?”

  Karn leaned inward. The light that glowed across his eyes seared like flame.

  The chamber within seemed a smooth-walled, high-ceilinged oven. It was bathed in a fiery glow that originated from a single, dancing beam of light that stabbed down from the ceiling. Wherever the ray passed, it blistered the flowstone floors and walls.

  Tahngarth fled that stabbing light. He leapt up a sloping wall to escape its stabbing ray. The beam swept just beneath his hooves, melting and scarring the flowstone. Tahngarth slid back to the floor, gathered his feet beneath him, and dived from the returning shaft. It struck him even so, in a diagonal line from hip to shoulder. The flesh caught in the wake of the beam mounded and roiled. Tawny fur turned white.

  Tahngarth released a roar of anguish and scrambled away from the beam. He fetched up against the opposite wall and panted raggedly, his eyes glowing as he watched the beam sweep once again toward him. Launching himself along one side of the chamber, he struggled to skate past the ray, but it veered and lashed across his face. His horns, once thin and straight, began to thicken and twist. Reddish-brown eyes suddenly glowed yellow, like a pair of candle flames.

  Blinded, Tahngarth clutched his face and crumpled, his body bucking involuntarily. Another furious shriek erupted from him.

  Karn was shrieking too. He realized it only when the guards, all three, shoved him back from the doorway. He had felt each stabbing pass of that mutagenic ray as though it had struck his own body. He had twitched and swayed with each dodge and jump the minotaur took. He had screamed with every scream of Tahngarth.

  Guilt. Rage. Shame. Hatred. Fury…

  Karn’s arms trembled, aching to crush the goblins around him as if they were grapes, to paint the walls with the blood of the Phyrexian guards, to smash down that door and free Tahngarth. Yes, he would do it. The storm of desperation mounted within him. Yes, he would kill them, and then he and Tahngarth would flee through the citadel, side by side, metal and machine, slaying whatever got in their way. They would leave a trail of bodies and blood. They would die, yes, but die fighting.

  Karn’s silver hands drew into fists, and he swooned, hungry for blood.

  “I cannot blame you if you reach within me and draw forth what is yours.”

  The storm of hatred did not abate, but Karn pressed down upon it, sealing it away once again. He staggered, almost overcome, and turned to face the guard.

  “Wh-what’s happening? What are you d-doing to him?” Karn implored.

  “Improving him,” the guard replied vindictively. “He’ll have to be considerably stronger, a bit more bloodthirsty, and a damned sight more submissive before he can be Greven il-Vec’s second.”

  His second! Tahngarth’s misery was only beginning. He would not merely be turned into a hideous monster, but then also be suspended on strings, a puppet in the service of evil. It was Tahngarth’s greatest fear, realized. Greven was doing to Tahngarth what Volrath had done to him.

  “Your master’s hatred must be great to do such a thing,” Karn hissed.

  “I’ll pass along the compliment,” the guard sneered. “Let’s go.”

  As Karn pivoted to follow, a thunderous pounding came at the door.

  Tahngarth’s yellow eyes glowed feverishly on the other side, and wisps of acrid white smoke drifted up from his battered head. “Kill them, Karn! Kill them, and open this door!”

  Gazing piteously back at his friend, Karn dropped his head in sorrow.

  “Kill them! You must act, Karn! You must do something—” the shout dissolved into a shriek, and Tahngarth crumpled down, out of sight.

  “I am sorry, my friend,” Karn whispered. “Anger is fleeting; remorse is eternal.”

  One of the Phyrexian guards slid the slot closed, and the band moved their prisoner forward.

  Karn shuffled along, devastated, his hide ringing hollowly with each step. He could not imagine greater torment than what he felt now. His vow of pacifism had not only brought about Tahngarth’s capture, but had also made impossible his rescue. The minotaur would die, or he w
ould be so altered he would wish he were dead.

  What greater torment could await?

  “Here is your cell,” said the woman. She gestured toward an open doorway that led into a bare cube. There were no furnishings, no windows, no port in the ceiling for a mutagenic ray—only four red-glowing walls, a floor, and a ceiling. “Get in.”

  Karn gazed for one long moment at the blank space—his solitary hint of defiance—and then moved quietly inward. His silver shoulders scraped the door frame as he pushed past. Mogg goblins clustered about his feet, intent on herding him within. The walls gave back the echo of Karn’s ponderous tread as he marched to the center of the cell and stopped.

  “Get in there!” shouted one of the guards, and three more moggs came skidding in among the others. Then, the door slammed and locked behind them, closing nearly twenty of the despicable beasts in with Karn. The slot in the door whispered open, and Karn pivoted to see who looked in.

  “You should still be able to hear your friend’s screams here,” the woman said. A moment’s pause confirmed the prediction.

  Karn hunched down, miserable. “You torture him with action, and me with inaction. How fitting. You blaze away his body, and kill both of us in doing it. And you lock me away with these, these—” he gestured to the goblins climbing up his legs, gnawing on his fingers, fighting to scramble onto his shoulders “—reminders of the last creature I killed. You twist Tahngarth’s body, and you twist my soul.”

  The guard seemed to shrug. “You could have stopped it. You could have killed us and stopped it. You could kill these moggs even now.”

  “I want to. Believe me, I do, but then you would surely have won,” Karn said, patiently plucking away a goblin that had been playing his head like a drum. As Karn stared at the wriggling, cursing creature, the tempest of guilt and fury welled up in him again. “This way, I may be tortured, but I will not be damned. As long as I stand here and endure, I am still not yours.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. I am very good at standing and waiting. I have stood and waited while the years crawled all over me, and I can stand and wait again here, with these pests, too. I will not be goaded into violence. You cannot make me kill again.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  That was when the floor tilted, suddenly, violently. Karn was thrown off his feet amid a spinning cluster of goblins. They all simultaneously struck the tipped surface and slid quickly down to smash against one of the flowstone walls. Even as Karn’s body rang with the impact, goblin blood sprayed out from beneath him. The floor rose back to level, and Karn staggered up. Behind him, he left three broken bodies, crushed with the prints of his silver frame.

  “Damn you,” Karn growled as he stood, his feet slick with gore. It was as though the Phyrexians had read his mind. They had stolen away his last refuge against the chaos around and within him. Now he couldn’t even stand. They had taken away his one salvation. Now, his very existence meant killing. “Damn you.”

  “We’ll bring more moggs when you’ve gone through these. They breed like roaches. You’ll probably go through a hundred or so a day.” There was a vicious tightening of her eyes—that same non-smile—just before the slot slammed closed.

  And the floor toppled again.

  Here ends the Tale of Karn

  “Gods, that’s horrible!” Ilcaster stared at the librarian, appalled, his mouth open. “What a fiendish torture. How long did it go on?”

  “Long enough,” replied the old man grimly. “Long enough to almost drive both Tahngarth and the golem mad. It was the clever cruelty of Volrath to find that element in both prisoners that would be the greatest torture to them: for Karn it was the denial of his pacifism, and for Tahngarth it was the destruction of his looks.” He leaned forward and patted the boy’s shoulder. “Never mind, lad. In time I promise you they were both rescued by Gerrard and his friends.

  “And did they find her as well?” asked Ilcaster.

  “Who?”

  “Sisay, of course! After all, that’s the person they came to Rath to find.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, as you’ve already seen, lad, the search was not simple. But yes, eventually they found her.”

  “Good. I was worried she’d be dead by the time they got to her. Or worse.”

  “No, Sisay was alive. But Gerrard was forced to wonder if finding her hadn’t somehow been part of Volrath’s plan.

  “After they left the map room, Gerrard, Starke, Mirri, and Crovax continued on their way, climbing ever higher in the Stronghold. They found it increasingly necessary to cross bridges and walkways formed of flowstone. At last they came to a tower that Starke identified for them as the prison tower. There were no guards about it, but it could only be reached by a long, narrow flowstone bridge without rail. Below was only blackness; Gerrard knew that somewhere down there Weatherlight waited for him.

  “Gerrard, ordering the others to stay behind a moment, set one cautious foot after another on the bridge. As he did so, ropes and tentacles of stone formed and flowed toward him, seeking to ensnare the intrepid adventurer.

  “Hastily, Gerrard beat a retreat. He thought for a while, as his companions stood silent, near to their goal yet separated by an apparently unbridgeable gulf. Then, chuckling to himself, Gerrard disappeared back into the tower as the others stood wondering. He reappeared in a few minutes, bearing with him the body of the shapeshifting creature killed by Crovax. When he hurled it onto the bridge, the ropes and tentacles rushed at it, and as they were busy crushing it and pulling it to pieces, Gerrard and his friends quickly crossed to the tower.

  “Within they quickly, and with little trouble, found the cell containing Karn—”

  “Good!” interrupted Ilcaster. “So they stopped the torture?”

  “Yes, of course. Those Moggs still alive within the cell fled shrieking into the darkness while Gerrard comforted his old friend.

  “Farther down the same corridor, Gerrard found and freed Tahngarth, and though the minotaur was ashamed of his newly bulked and twisted body, he joined them in their search for Sisay, the final object of their quest.

  “At length they came to a laboratory, clean, cold, and indifferent to their presence. There, at last, they saw the body of their long-sought captain, imprisoned within a strange glass cylinder. With some difficulty they freed her from the glass jail. She stared at them, seemingly unaware of their presence. Then Mirri, who was holding one of her arms, hissed in alarm.”

  “What was it?” cried the boy. “Was Volrath coming?”

  The master shook his head. “No, something much worse. Before their horrified eyes, the body of Sisay swayed and changed into an armored guard.”

  Ilcaster brought his hand down on a small table, raising a cloud of brown dust from its surface that floated in the yellow candlelight. “Then it wasn’t Sisay at all!”

  “No,” agreed the librarian. “Just one of Volrath’s many tricks. The guard fled the laboratory, and the companions were left alone again.

  “Now, bewildered, they agreed to Starke’s suggestions to search for the Dream Halls. But since the way led back across the flowstone bridge they’d crossed earlier, Gerrard suggested they should seek a different path. And so they did.”

  This is Crovax’s tale, though he is not the one who tells it.

  But there is no one else who will tell it, and so it is left to me, Orim, to make sense of what has happened to him. My people believe that each life is a tale, and further, that to tell the story of a life properly would take as long as the life itself. And so we do not often tell stories of this sort. And yet there are lives that should be recorded. Crovax’s is one of them, though his tale is not finished yet.

  Like all tales of this sort, the story is as much about me as about Crovax. For this I must crave the indulgence of my listener. Mine is an unimportant story. Listen and think only of Crovax and his guardian
angel.

  * * *

  —

  We came to Rath willingly but reluctantly, each of us for our own reason: rescue, loyalty, anger. I came because Weatherlight was my ship. Sisay captained it and then Gerrard; and Hanna understood the alien clockworks of the ship itself better than any of us. But a ship’s heart is its people, and I was the one who kept them well and listened to their secret hurts when they felt inclined to speak of them.

  Crovax came for the angel Selenia, walking already under a shadow I could not see. He held his secrets closer than a lover, but even he spoke sometimes, to me or to Gerrard. Selenia was a construct, a thing of raw mana and spells, created from an artifact to watch over his family. The brother had used some sort of artifact to craft her. When we found Crovax, the angel was long gone, perhaps captured by Volrath. In her absence, his family had been destroyed by Volrath’s people. Perhaps revenge drove him to Rath, but strangely, he never spoke of this, only of Selenia, his guardian angel, trapped by Volrath for unknown reasons.

  Rath was a horrifying place. I am used to the many forms life takes in our world, but Rath was horrible—a place where rock flowed like tortured boneless flesh, or heaved like a beached cuttlefish dragging itself back to water.

  The sky was no infinite space of air and light over our heads; it was low and heavy, sullen blues and purples that heaved less like clouds than like restless magma. Having gotten to Rath, we were unsure exactly where to go next, and so Weatherlight drifted high over a strange choppy sea of purple-black waters, along a coastline shrouded in misshapen trees. I went below to my cabin. I had one small porthole, and my possessions, my journals and medical books: Rath would not seem so overwhelming there.

  To distract myself, I read an old herbalist’s manual I had acquired in Jamuraa, trying not to think about the gray-purple tone of the light that seeped in through the porthole. From the corner of my eye, I caught a flicker of brown and white and black, of feathers and steel. I glanced up, but it was already gone. Odd, I thought. We had seen no birds or flying things in the hostile skies of Rath, and whatever it was I had seen did not linger in my memory as something easily dropped into a familiar category: bird or bat or drake or great insect. I frowned, trying to reconstruct what I had glimpsed.