Time Spiral

by Scott McGough

  “I’m going with her,” Dassene said. She endured their stunned looks and went on, “I should have died battling the fiend who killed my caste-brother. Radha didn’t allow it. My life is hers now, and I will give it willingly at her order.”

  “Dassene, wait,” Jhoira said. “You aren’t thinking clearly. Aprem wouldn’t want this. The tribal elders—”

  “Aprem is dead,” Dassene said brusquely. She gestured with her head toward Teferi. “I have lost what little faith I had in this operation. I no longer wish to follow his orders, and he has released me from his service.” She shrugged, her blackened eyes flat and lifeless. “I’m leaving.”

  “Me too,” Skive said. Corus hissed angrily, but the smaller viashino stepped away and fell in beside Radha. “I’m an infantry grunt,” Skive said. He lifted the mana star pendant from his chest and held it in his fist. “I don’t even use magic, not really. I don’t know what use I’m going to be when this large-scale mystical event happens.” With a sharp jerk, Skive snapped the chain around his neck.

  “I’ve been in a Keldon warhost before. I liked it.”

  Corus’s tongue lashed angrily through his clenched teeth. “You’re going to quit? This close to our ancestral land’s return?”

  Skive hissed in exasperation. “That presumes they’ll ever get here. I agree with the Ghitu: following Teferi means spending half your time waiting for him to figure out which way he wants to go. I’d rather spend my last two days killing berserkers than watching him meditate, especially if we’re all going to die afterwards anyway.”

  Corus glared over at Radha. “She bit me,” he groused.

  “I know. To tell you the truth, that was kind of impressive.”

  Both viashino fell silent but for the scrape of their tongues against their teeth. They all stood now not as one group, but two. Radha, Dassene, and Skive stood facing Jhoira, Venser, and Corus, with Teferi in the center.

  Jhoira thought her friend had never looked so crestfallen yet so euphoric. He seemed a man who had gotten what he wanted but lost what he had. When he spoke, his voice was warm and patient. “Has everyone said their piece?”

  No one replied.

  Teferi said, “Then we are truly done here.” He extended his arms wide and the curved spine-staff appeared in his hand. “Gather round, my friends and colleagues. We go back to Keld, to Skyshroud, but only for a moment.” He nodded at Radha.

  “And then,” he continued. “At long last, we go to Shiv.”

  Teferi had all but mastered the delicate art of planeswalking in close proximity to the rifts. He left Radha, Corus, and Dassene near the edge of Skyshroud, and though Freyalise did not present herself, Teferi still felt her eyes and her disapproval upon him.

  There were few good-byes exchanged at the parting. There were no well-wishings, either, but quite a few angry glances.

  He ’walked the remains of the group into the flushed-pink sky over Shiv, closely approximating the view they enjoyed on their trip through the rift network. The unnaturally precise arc of the coastline was exactly as they had seen it, a straight-edged scoop of land and sea. After a touch of Teferi’s magic, the time rift above the sheer vertical rocks also appeared as it had before, an angry crimson window that revealed an alternate Shiv choked with mana-processors and smoke.

  As he floated his team down to the searing sand, Teferi took a deep, long look into the Shivan rift. Jhoira and the others surely noticed the alternate Shiv was complete, the missing section either safely restored or never removed in the first place. With his special interest in time and the power of a planeswalker, Teferi still could not tell if the images he saw were from the future, the past, or nowhere at all. If only he knew: did a complete Shiv evidence the success of his present venture, or demonstrate a fate the nation would have suffered had Teferi left it alone?

  A darker thought occurred. Was he actually seeing a Shiv from so far in the future that it negated any success he might have here today? Was Shiv destined lose all its rough natural beauty and raw strength in order to become an endless field of industrialized blight?

  The permutations were overwhelming, but Teferi shook his mind clear. His plan could still work. He just had to wait for Shiv’s actual return to begin before he could gauge how best to minimize the impact.

  These were the lies he told himself so that he could tell them to Jhoira if she asked. Otherwise, he would never be able to see it through.

  Jhoira and Corus reacted immediately upon touching the ground. First exhaling warmly as if settling into a favorite comfortable chair, their pleasure quickly turned to irritation, or at least, disappointment. It reminded Teferi of his first taste of vanilla extract, which his mother distilled from beans she grew herself. The thick, viscous liquid smelled like paradise, sweet and delicious. Touch a drop to your tongue, however, and the strong bitter taste ripped you right out of any reverie created by the scent.

  Jhoira began to cough painfully and Venser stumbled. Teferi quickly cast a protection spell to preserve them from Shiv’s heat and toxic fumes. Corus did not seem too adversely affected by the landscape, but Teferi included him nonetheless.

  Jhoira soon recovered her breath. “This isn’t Shiv,” she said curtly. Before Teferi could argue, she turned to him and said anxiously, “Not anymore. We have to bring it back.”

  “We will.”

  “Excuse me?” Venser was the only one not consumed with memories of the place. He had slipped the collar of his tunic up over his nose to filter out the stale smell of volcanic gas, but the pungent stuff still brought water to his eyes. “I think I see people. Or … something. There.”

  Jhoira and Corus both focused on where Venser was pointing. Jhoira’s eyes were as hindered as Venser’s, but Corus closed his inner eyelids and fixed on a small spot among the waves of heat distortion and choking vapor.

  “Fiers’ teeth,” he said softly.

  Teferi looked more closely, seeing the ragged pack of strangers clearly and in detail. It was awful, to be sure, but it was not a complete surprise.

  “Are they human?” Venser said hopefully.

  “Not at all,” Teferi said. “No human could survive here long enough to digest a meal, much less establish a tribe. No, I make it about a half-dozen viashino and twenty, maybe thirty goblins.” He peered closer. “And three or four orcs.”

  “Goblins? Orcs?” Venser was more curious than frightened. Orcs and goblins were not a common feature in the swamps of Urborg, so perhaps Venser didn’t know enough to be afraid.

  “Shiv never had orcs before.” Still unable to see clearly, Jhoira kept peering out into the heat. She asked, “Are the others all in one group? Goblins and viashino working together?” She turned to Corus. “Maybe the harsh climate encouraged them to cooperate.”

  “The harsh climate has done more than that,” Corus said. “I don’t know orcs, but those are no viashino I recognize. The goblins are different, too.”

  Teferi agreed, but he was hesitant to do so out loud. Better to wait a few more moments until the local Shivans drew close enough for Jhoira to see. Teferi did not relish the look on her face when she saw the state of her countrymen, but he relished describing them to her even less.

  The goblins were not too far removed from the ugly little vermin they had been since the dawn of time. They were stunted, misshapen, squat little humanoids with muted green skin. Their pointed ears flapped as they marched and their huge noses drooped almost down to their chests. Goblins were the butt of every joke when it came to war stories and soldier’s gossip, but anyone who’d met them on the battlefield knew not to take them lightly once the fighting started. They were vicious, tenacious creatures, and they were far stronger than they appeared. They did not hesitate to bite, scratch, and gouge with their crooked teeth and their ghastly long fingernails. When they carried weapons, the blades were invariably rusty, chipped, and coated with grime, and the war clubs were always improvised from random pieces of wood or discarded bones.

  These go
blins were slightly bigger than the norm, though they all had the same desiccated look as the elves of Skyshroud. Where the elves seemed lean and willowy, the goblins were stubby and dense, their skin pulled tight around their bones to reveal every joint, tendon, and muscle.

  The larger orcs were similar in appearance to the goblins, but each stood over eight feet tall. They all had huge, hunched shoulders, sunken chests, and protruding bellies. The orcs’ snarling jaws were lined with jagged, misaligned fangs. Though they were dressed in rags and appeared even more primal and savage than their goblin cousins, the orcs were actually smarter, though also more subject to uncontrollable fits of rage.

  It wasn’t the goblins or the orcs that startled Corus and made Teferi hold his tongue. The viashino who now approached were some of the most dangerous and feral reptilians Teferi had ever seen. Modern viashino had clearly evolved during the three hundred years since Teferi phased out Shiv. Many of these had foot-long spines along their backs and tails, others bore them on their elbows and arms. Two of the warriors near the front had wide, flat face plates with spines jutting out from their eyebrows, cheekbones, and chins. All of the viashino spines were hollow and Teferi noted drops of a cloudy liquid trembling on each razor-sharp tip. Like Corus and Skive, they were all tall and broad but moved quickly, especially through loose sand, employing an efficient half-walk, half-skate across the acrid ground.

  The noise of the goblin’s clumsy cadence reached them while the Shivan mob was still hundreds of feet away. The savage gang was now close enough for even Jhoira and Venser to see in detail.

  “They don’t look friendly,” Venser said.

  “I will explain who we are,” Corus said, “and why we have come.” The big viashino slid forward across the sand, thick muscles rippling under his scales.

  “I can protect us,” Teferi said. “I have a barrier that will keep them and the environment safely at bay while I make my preparations.”

  Corus stopped, sneering angrily over his shoulder. “These are my people,” Corus said. “We don’t need protection from them.”

  Teferi turned to Jhoira as Corus went out to meet the inheritors of Shiv. “Is he right?”

  Jhoira still seemed dazed by all that new Shiv had shown her. “I don’t know.”

  Teferi huffed, slightly annoyed. “Will he live?”

  “Definitely. Corus is one of the toughest creatures I’ve ever known. If things go badly, he’ll disappear below the sand and emerge here,” she pointed alongside Teferi. “His size actually makes him faster at sand-swimming since he can shift more of it with each stroke.”

  The mob slowed as Corus approached. All of the modern viashino came to the front of the pack, creating a line of reptilian bodies between Corus and the goblins, with the orcs still bringing up the rear.

  “What are they saying?” Jhoira asked.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Teferi said. He was squinting hard and concentrating. “Corus has hailed them, but their tongue is rough and unfamiliar. I can work it out if I have more time and they keep talking.”

  “What about Corus?”

  “He seems to understand them well enough.”

  “Do they understand him?”

  Teferi jabbed the end of his staff into the hot ground. “We shall see.”

  One of the plate-faced viashino slid up to Corus. He was nowhere near as broad or as solid as Corus but he was as tall. They eyed each other and exchanged long hisses as their tails lashed patterns in the sand.

  The conversation grew heated. The plated lizard spat and lunged forward, grasping for Corus’s mana star pendant. The bigger viashino caught the errant hand and held it tight.

  Tighter still, Teferi thought, as the plated lizard suddenly dropped to his knees in pain. Corus continued to crush the sharp, skeletal hand as he opened his mouth wide. His long, forked tongue squirmed among rows of sharp white teeth and Corus let out a small roar to keep the rest of the mob at bay. Then he hauled the plated lizard forward, lowered his open jaws, and bit the other viashino’s arm off at the elbow.

  Chaos erupted so that even Teferi lost sight of what was going on. Several spiked viashino threw themselves at Corus, the goblin horde surged forward, and the orcs roared and pounded the ground. A cloud of sand and noise rose up around the combatants, completely obscuring them from view. A goblin and a spiked lizard came hurtling out from the cloud, arcing high over the desert in opposite directions. They stayed where they landed, neither moving nor breathing.

  Something moved quickly and Teferi oriented on a ripple in the sand that seemed to be rolling their way. The mob still wallowed in angry confusion back where the fight had started, but the small hump of sand quickly slid up beside Teferi.

  Corus stood up from under the sand as if he’d been buried there for hours. He shook some of the grit from his scales and exhaled angrily through his nose.

  “They’re beasts,” he said. “I told them who we were. They said, ‘you’ve got mana.’ I told them what we were here to do. They said, ‘give us that necklace.’ I told them that Shiv would soon be whole again, and that flat-faced skink put his hands on me.” He spat a mouthful of cold greenish blood to the ground and looked at Jhoira. “I’m sorry, Lady, but right now they only see us as prey.”

  Jhoira nodded. “Teferi,” she said. “You mentioned a barrier. I think we need it now.”

  “Done,” Teferi said. His head and hands were surrounded by a flash of white light that slowly radiated off in every direction. The noise from the mob and the caustic breeze were both suddenly muted, though there was no visible change in the area surrounding them. The only proof that Teferi had done anything was overhead, where the wind-driven sand and the choking haze both barked up against something invisible and bubble-shaped.

  “That should hold,” Teferi said, “for now.”

  “They won’t go away,” Corus said. “If anything, they’ll send for reinforcements and try to siege us out of here.”

  “Two days is all we need,” Teferi said. “I’m confident we can survive a two-day siege.”

  Corus nodded, unconvinced. “What if they bring enough force to break through your barrier?”

  “I’ll strengthen it,” Teferi said. His eyes flashed blue. “Or I’ll send the entire population to the far side of the world. For now, however”—he turned his back to the mob—“I’d like to prepare. Venser? Jhoira? If you would assist me?”

  “Of course,” Jhoira said.

  Venser nodded. “Just tell me how.”

  “Stay close by, my friend. When I’m ready, I’ll show you things and ask you what you think of them. All you need to do is answer.”

  Teferi looked up to the great red window overhead. He closed his eyes and his ears and let his other ascended senses reach out to the time rift.

  Tell me your secrets, O Shiv, he thought, and I will make you whole.

  Freyalise appeared moments after Teferi and the others disappeared. Radha had expected the patron of Skyshroud to summon her to the center of the forest, to make her crawl and beg for an audience. She had not expected Freyalise to come to her with every able-bodied ranger in the forest.

  Freyalise was ethereal and imposing as she faded into view. “You have returned, Daughter of Skyshroud.”

  “I have,” Radha said. “Along with these others.”

  Freyalise turned her sharp face toward Skive and Dassene. “They may not set foot in the forest.”

  “Suits me,” Skive said.

  “And me,” Radha said. She stepped between Freyalise and the Shivans. “Greht and the Gathans are out there, in Keld proper. I didn’t bring these people back to battle saprolings and slivers.”

  “Hold your tongue,” Freyalise said sternly. “I have endured your impertinence and your disobedience for almost a century, but no longer. The time has come for you to prove your worth to your brothers and sisters. The forest is beset on all sides. Seek you conflict with the Gathans? Travel to any other spot on our border and you will find them, busy with axe
s and saw blades. Lead my Skyshroud Rangers and drive the berserkers from our home.”

  Radha shook her head. “The fight isn’t here; it’s at the mountain.”

  “Your fight is in Skyshroud,” Freyalise said imperiously, “and Skyshroud is here.”

  Radha hesitated. “So your battle plan is to drive the Gathans away from the forest. How far? We can drive them to the sea if you like and they’ll be back in a week.”

  “Don’t scoff at me, child. I have been winning wars since before the first Keldon came down from Parma.”

  “My plan,” Radha said, “is to challenge Greht. Killing him will end the degradation of Skyshroud, and the act of fighting him will draw every Gathan within shouting distance.” She stepped forward and locked eyes with the planeswalker. “If they’re watching me beat him, they can’t be here taking trees.

  “Let me go, Freyalise,” she said. “My companions and I … plus any of your rangers who can still fight … will be sure to attract Greht’s attention. He will know we’re coming, and he will assemble the largest ’host he can to greet us, to watch us fail. There won’t be enough of them to raid Skyshroud’s timber until my duel with Greht is complete.”

  Freyalise held Radha’s eyes without wavering. Slowly, so Radha would understand that it was not a matter of her yielding, the patron of Skyshroud craned her head to inspect Skive and Dassene. Then she turned back toward the throng of rangers, over two hundred strong.

  “No,” she said. She turned away, casually adding, “Come with me now to the far edge of the forest. We have work to do. Your friends can stay here, or circle around to meet us, or they can swim home to Shiv for all I care. So long as they do not set foot in Skyshroud, I have no interest in them.”

  Radha felt pure berserker bloodlust rising in her. She slid her fingers around the handle of Astor’s dagger, remembering the feel as it punched up through Teferi’s skull. Freyalise would never leave herself open and vulnerable as Teferi had, but Radha still ached to see if the patron of Skyshroud bled.