Planeshift

by J. Robert King

  “Not afraid of it, but neither am I eager for it.”

  “It’s time somebody brought death to account,” Gerrard said, as he faced forward. “I’m that somebody.”

  The distant figures swelled. Wings of leather tore the air. Living metal flashed amid clouds. Eyes glowed lanternlike. Mouths gaped with fang and fire.

  Gerrard brought the crosshairs to the tongue of one beast and squeezed off a shot. Energy rushed from the nozzle. It crossed the reeling distances between ship and dragon and found its mark. The bolt splashed against that steely tongue and rammed down the beast’s throat. The dragon’s neck dissolved. Its head hung for a moment on the beam before melting in a metallic rain. The body lasted only a heartbeat longer. It exploded.

  Tahngarth’s shot was not as precise but twice as deadly. It swept through two dragon engines. The first was cross-sectioned, its chest and belly neatly sliced away from its back and wings. Sparks leaped across the severed vitals of the beast. Both hunks plunged. The second dragon dived aside to avoid the fate of its comrade. Instead of ripping through its torso, the bolt vaporized one wing. The dragon fell twisting from the sky.

  That was three beasts out of twenty. The seventeen others closed on Weatherlight.

  “Fold the airfoils!” Gerrard shouted.

  With a snap, Karn complied. Weatherlight no longer soared on the air but rocketed through it.

  Gerrard managed one more shot. It bounded free of the cannon, dead on for a dragon engine. Before it struck, though, the beast’s own incendiary weapon vaulted out. Black mana met red plasma. The opposing energies ate each other away.

  More black mana belched in a killing cloud before the dragons. Tahngarth and Gerrard unloaded their cannons into the deadly stuff. A thin corridor opened.

  At the helm, Sisay steered into the slim passage. The Gaea figurehead plunged through clear sky. Whips of black power scourged the keel and hull. It ate the wood away in moments.

  Multani surged to the affected sites and awoke new life in them.

  One tendril slipped past the rail and slapped Tahngarth’s arm. His white fur melted immediately. Corruption ate into skin and muscle. With a roar the minotaur flung the stuff away.

  “Orim! Get up here!” Gerrard ordered.

  Weatherlight punched through the black mantle and was suddenly among the roaring throng of dragons.

  Gaea destroyed the first beast herself. Her hardwood brow smashed into the horned head of a dragon. Normally the titanium crest of the serpent would have shattered wood, but Multani was in the figurehead. He bore the braining blow as an attack on his own being. He held the wood together, diamond hard.

  The dragon’s skull buckled over its biomechanical brain. Shards of metal cut wires and optic fibers. The dragon went limp in flight.

  Even the corpse of the thing was deadly. It folded up before the surging ship and struck it like a hammer.

  Gerrard and Tahngarth unleashed twin beams that vaporized much of the body. The rest grated away beneath the compromised keel.

  Intent on preventing the keel from giving way, Multani drained from the figurehead down along the line of damage. Green wood swelled out where he went. He did not merely replace what had been destroyed but made it stronger, sharper. He grew a knife-edged spine directly before the keel. It proved its worth a moment later, lancing through a dragon engine and splitting it in half. The segments tumbled to either side of the keel.

  “Good work, Multani!” shouted Gerrard. “Sisay, make good use of that spike.”

  “Way ahead of you, Commander,” Sisay replied.

  The prow rose suddenly, slicing the blade through the neck of a dragon engine. Its head flung over the bow rail and impacted the forecastle. Its severed neck followed, spitting sparks as it whipped past Gerrard. Head and neck bounded away. Its body meanwhile slumped brokenly off the racing hull. Three more shuddering thumps announced the deaths of three more dragon engines, chopped as if by a cleaver.

  Weatherlight shot out beyond the pack of beasts. Sisay brought her hard about. Air spilled over the rail as she turned. The dragons were turning too, the eleven that remained. Weatherlight leaped eagerly toward the swarm.

  Gerrard sprayed the heavens with ray cannon blasts. A beam struck a nearby dragon and burst over its metallic scales. Energy sank within and melted through flesh. The dragon held together one moment more before the blast dismantled it. Only wings and legs, head and tail remained to find their separate ways to ground.

  Another bolt pierced a great black machine. The dragon’s core went critical. Seams of white fire opened across its frame, turning it to shrapnel. The pieces tore outward to strip the scales from serpents nearby. Three more beasts spun crazily, tumbling for the ground.

  “Think you’re death incarnate, aye?” growled Gerrard over the roar of the falling beasts. “Well, Death, you’ve met your match.”

  He swung his cannon down and shot away the black mana breath of another beast. Energies ate each other. Gerrard followed up the shot with another. It scoured a dragon’s head down to the metallic skull. Another beast lost its wings in a flare of cannon heat.

  “You see that one?” Gerrard shouted over his shoulder to Tahngarth.

  The minotaur stood with hooves spread on the deck, one arm deftly wielding the ray cannon and the other extended for Orim to bandage. Almost casually, he triggered a bolt of energy. It swatted a dragon engine from the air.

  Weatherlight listed suddenly toward port, as if dragged down by a huge weight. The jolt swung Gerrard around. Just before him, gripping the forecastle rail, were a pair of huge metal talons. The wingless creature clutched the hull of Weatherlight. There was no way to blast those talons without damaging the ship herself.

  Cursing, Gerrard pulled free of the gunnery traces. He raked out his sword and strode toward the spot. He would hew the conduits buried beneath those claws….

  The dragon lifted its head above the rail. It reeked, this metallic beast. Its enormous fangs gaped wide, and it lunged toward Gerrard. Black, tarry mana flooded up the neck to spew out.

  Roaring, Gerrard rammed his blade at the scaly jaw of the beast. The sword drove through flesh and tongue and up into the creature’s ribbed pallet. It pinned the mouth closed. Black mana oozed between its teeth. Ducking beneath the gush, Gerrard jammed the sword higher, into the neural core of the beast.

  It pulled back. Gerrard went with it, still gripping his sword. His boots left the deck. The dragon engine arched its head, intent on hurling him away.

  Gerrard swung out into the reeling sky. He held on tightly. Clouds tore around him and the impaled serpent. Below, Urborg rattled past in black quagmires. The only thing that kept Gerrard from falling was the monster he was trying to kill.

  “Let’s do it!” he shouted, releasing his sword and clawing his way up the dragon engine’s horn-studded muzzle. He rammed his fist in its eye. Glass lenses shattered. Knuckles smudged blood across mirror arrays. “Let’s go down together!”

  The beast’s struggles grew frantic. It pitched its head back and forth, struggling to shake off its tormentor.

  “I’ve got a friend I want to see,” Gerrard yelled as his fingers slid into the housing of the beast’s other eye. “I’ve got things to sort out.” He yanked the whole orb from its socket. Its demon glow faded to darkness. Into the dragon engine’s ear, Gerrard shouted, “You could broker the deal!”

  Beneath his feet, cables went slack. Scales slumped. Will left the beast. Its claws slid from the scarred rail. With an irresistible motion, the monster dropped out of the bright sky toward the blackness below.

  Gerrard felt the beast pull away beneath him. He held on tight. Dead trees and stagnant waters flashed in his wide eyes. “Let’s do this.”

  Something struck his shoulder, something that burned like cold iron in his back and burst in a bloody rose out his front. Barbs spread, gripping flesh and
muscle and bone. Gerrard roared, his hands releasing the dragon engine and gripping the end of the impaling thing. It yanked brutally on him. He rose, away from the plunging carcass.

  The dragon fell to the treetops. A cypress speared the body. It broke free and rolled, flinging water. Limbs, head, and tail were all uniformly crushed around it.

  Gerrard saw no more. The weapon that had torn through his shoulder was attached to one of Weatherlight’s lines. Gerrard had been hooked like a fish. Winds shoved him up beneath the ship’s hull, near her saw-toothed keel. It didn’t matter. He was prepared to die. He was eager to appear before whatever lord ruled the dead and join his love, his Hanna.

  The rope dragged him fore. Someone had other plans for him.

  Thumping against the gunwales, Gerrard left crimson spots on the boards. His hands hung limply at his sides. The rope tugged. He slid up alongside the massive figurehead of Gaea. Hair mantled her shoulders and her ancient face. Her body was both maidenly and matronly. Out of hardwood eyes gazed a sad and familiar countenance.

  The figurehead spoke, “What are you trying to do, Gerrard?”

  “Multani,” the man gasped through gritted teeth. Once this nature spirit had instructed him in maro-sorcery.

  “Are you trying to kill yourself?” the voice asked.

  The rope yanked him higher. Gerrard’s back arched in agony, and his shoulder traced a bloody line across Gaea’s face.

  “No,” he managed. “I’m defying death. I’m cheating it. I’m beating it. I’m showing it I am a forced to be reckoned with.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I can beat it, I can win Hanna back.”

  The conversation ended with a rough tug of the line. Gerrard surged up over the rail and landed on his side on the forecastle planks.

  Above him towered Tahngarth, who was wrapped in rope like a living capstan. Even with one arm injured, he’d had the strength to hurl a harpoon, hold its line, and draw Gerrard in by winding the rope about himself.

  Orim was there too. The healer knelt above him. The coins in her hair flashed above worried eyes.

  “You boys and your rescues,” she said. Expert fingers worked the harpoon head from its shaft. With one mercifully fast motion, she pulled the head through the gouge. “One of these days, I’ll not be able to patch you back up.” Her hands settled on the wound, and silver fire awoke.

  Tahngarth shrugged out of his rope wrappings, his own arm bandaged beneath. He lifted an eloquent eyebrow.

  “If I remember, Commander, you saved me in much the same way from Tsabo Tavoc.” He reached up to his own shoulder and tapped a star-shaped scar. “We’re blood brothers now. Whatever happens to you happens to me.”

  Gerrard wore a grim expression. “You’ve gotten the worse end of that deal, I fear.”

  CHAPTER 8

  In Company of Titans

  The others were supposed to be here. The instructions had been simple: Deliver the armies where they were to go—Urborg, Keld, Shiv—and then report to Tolaria. Still, Urza, in his titan engine, was the only one who had arrived.

  On a smooth ridge of stone, the engine stood like a dejected boy. Its three-toed feet fidgeted. Hydraulic muscles moaned. Metallic hands, with their ray cannons and flame throwers, hung limp beside massive hip joints. The thousand weapons that bristled across the torso of the titan suit were still and silent. Even the engine’s shoulders—large enough to hoist a hillside—slumped. The command pod was darkest of all. In it, Urza sat. He stared at his ruined home.

  Tolaria had once been beautiful. In his mind’s eye, Urza could still see it. Blue-tiled roofs blended with the sky. Domed observatories stood above K’rrik’s rift. Crowded dormitories spread out beneath a canopy of leaves. Laboratories and lecture halls, archives and artifact museums—it had been quite a place.

  Now all of it was gone. Urza had melted down the old engines, had burned the old plans, had shipped away all the students and scholars he could. He had given the place over to the Phyrexians. It was a diversion to keep them busy while he won the war elsewhere.

  Mage Master Barrin had not given it over. Barrin, who for a thousand years had been Urza’s associate and only true friend, had always been sentimental. Tolaria held the grave of his wife, Rayne, and his daughter, Hanna. It was hallowed ground, worth defending to the death. Tolaria had became his grave as well.

  He had destroyed it all. He had cast a spell to shatter plague engines and kill every Phyrexian on the isle. The sorcery also had leveled forests and razed buildings and melted mountains. It had destroyed the elaborate network of time rifts and covered the whole of the island in a molten cap. Barrin had used himself to power that spell. He who had spent his life humanizing the planeswalker died in a spell that mimicked Urza’s atrocity at Argoth.

  “Oh, Barrin,” Urza said. His breath wisped out within the pilot bulb of his titan engine. He did not have to breathe. His body was only a locus of his mind, a convenience that anchored his spirit, but mention of that name, Barrin, cut all anchors on Urza’s soul.

  He was outside his titan suit without having consciously willed it. Urza sat on the foot of the engine. The salt air was hot in his lungs. Without trees or hills to stop it, ocean winds tore across the isle. They rifled through Urza’s war robes and tossed his ash-blond hair.

  “Barrin.”

  Suddenly another titan engine stood before him. It was a green and riotous thing, designed in part by Multani and further modified by its occupant. She had made it a veritable garden, planting countless living components within its metallic structure. The asymmetric machine held an asymmetric soul.

  “Hello, Urza,” said Freyalise, materializing beside him.

  She wore her usual getup, savage-shorn blonde hair, a half-goggle over one eye, a floral tattoo over the other, and a shift of twining vines. Her slender legs hovered just above the ground, which was how she preferred it. Freyalise and Urza were utter opposites. The Ice Age begun by Urza’s sylex blast was ended by Freyalise’s World-Spell—just as catastrophically. These two planeswalkers were so opposite, they were nearly the same.

  Eschewing both her floating stance and her longtime antagonism toward Urza, Freyalise seated herself beside her brooding comrade.

  “Nice place you’ve got here, Planeswalker.”

  “Has Eladamri rejoined his Skyshroud elves?”

  She nodded, a lock of blonde hair raking across her eyes. “I even saved the forest from icy Keld.” She examined her nails and rubbed them on her shift. “He’s one lucky elfchild.”

  Urza nodded absently. “What of the Keldons?”

  She shrugged. “They made a couple assaults on the forest and figured out it was warded. They called for parley with ‘the King of Elves.’ Parley for Keldons means a fight. You know their motto—’prove it.’ ”

  “Yes. Barrin had had quite a time winning their trust—especially after kicking them out of Jamuraa.” He shook his head, smiling bleakly at the memory.

  Freyalise stared levelly at Urza. “So that’s what this mood is all about?”

  “How did Eladamri fare?” Urza said, changing the subject.

  Lifting her eyebrows, Freyalise said, “Eladamri acquitted himself well. Of course it helped when I showed up in my titan engine. The Keldons have a big thing for titans. It’s part of their Twilight mythology.”

  Before Urza could form a response, another titan engine appeared.

  This one seemed a dignified statue in white. Tall, stately, and decorous, the Thran-metal frame of the engine was covered in smooth shields. They could deflect gouts of mana, plague winds, and plasma blasts. Within those shields lurked subtle deadliness—ray cannon slots and rocket launchers. The control dome had a white sheen as well, like a cataractous eye, and the figure within the shell shuddered in irritation as he released his straps. Steam shushed from air brakes, and the engine settled angrily.
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br />   The planeswalker pilot emerged—Commodore Guff. He wore a crimson waistcoat and slim knickers above creamy stockings. His hair and beard were a red that perfectly matched the clothes he wore, and a foggy monocle was clutched in one eye. He stared at a book—Urza’s instruction manual for his titan engine.

  “Where’s the blasted exhaust system for the pilot capsule?” He paged through the book. “I’m fogged in! Give me a touch of the wind, and I’d damn well be doomed!”

  “Page sixteen-B,” Urza replied.

  “Is that the entry for wind or for exhaust?” Freyalise asked.

  “What’s the difference?” Urza muttered.

  “And what’s this sixteen-B, sixteen-C business?” huffed Commodore Guff. His monocle dropped from his eye and swayed on its chain. The condensation on the lens wiped on his waistcoat. “You know, I have ten hundred trillion histories in my personal collection, and not a one of them has a sixteen-B?”

  “I’m an artificer, not a writer,” Urza said wearily. “Ten hundred trillion? Haven’t you ever had to number them with As and Bs?”

  Commodore Guff spluttered. “No need to number them.” He jabbed a finger to his rumpled temple. “Encyclopedic, my lad. Encyclopedic.” He blinked, seeming to realize that his monocle was gone. He patted the pockets of his waistcoat and began swearing violently. “Must’ve fallen out in damned Urborg. Filthy rutting lich lord bastards.”

  “Rutting lich lord bastards?” echoed Freyalise.

  Commodore Guff found the monocle dangling before his knickers and lifted it to his eye. “Has Bo Levar arrived yet?”

  “My Lady,” Bo Levar said, appearing out of nowhere to bow before Freyalise. He was a sandy-haired young pirate with a mustache and goatee and a dangerous twinkle in his eyes. Clenched in white teeth was a fine cigar, emitting a thin blue coil of smoke. He managed to smile around it. “Gents?” Instead of bowing to Urza and Commodore Guff, he tapped the breast pocket of his tunic where a few more smokes waited.