Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Malzra ended the staring match. His eyes flashed as he marked the Ghitu woman. She was dressed in her formal academy robe, the one she wore when inducted into the ranks of his senior students.

  “Confess to what?”

  “I am to blame for all this,” Jhoira said evenly. “I am the reason Teferi was outside the walls last night.”

  The young man goggled for a moment at her and then jumped in. “She dared me.” All eyes in the room turned quizzically on him. “I’m always trying to impress her, but she thinks I’m too young for her. Finally, she said she didn’t want to talk to me again until I did something brave and grown-up.”

  “That’s not what—” Jhoira began.

  “You thought sneaking out of the academy would be grown-up?” Malzra demanded.

  “I thought if I could get out into the woods at night, I could maybe catch a night loon. They have a beautiful song. They sing to the Glimmer Moon. I made those mechanical birds to impress her—she’s not interested in my magic, and I wanted to show her I was an artificer too—but she said only, ‘they’re fake, just like you.’ So I thought, if I caught a real bird, a rare nighttime songbird, and did it without magic, did it by going myself—”

  “To catch a loon?” Barrin asked, astonished.

  “I had a little chain with a metal collar. I was going to clip it around the bird’s leg and put a hood on his head, but they got knocked out of my pocket when the guard tackled me.”

  “A night loon?” Barrin repeated, incredulous. He turned to Malzra. “I don’t believe him. Malzra, I think in this case we could suspend the school’s moratorium against mind probes. I could cast a truth spell on him—”

  “No—” Something had changed in Malzra’s eyes, not a softening, but a hardening, a keen calculation. “No, this was no crime great enough to warrant such drastic measures.” A guilty look passed between him and Teferi. “He found a night loon all right, himself, but I daresay this stunt wasn’t enough to impress Jhoira. It was not brave or grown-up. It was foolhardy and stupid.”

  Teferi swallowed and bowed his head. “Yes, sir.”

  Stunned, Jhoira realized her mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out.

  “What do you have to say, Jhoira?” Malzra asked. “Are you impressed by such exploits?”

  She took a deep breath and said, “Well, in a way, yes.”

  * * *

  After the students and the silver man had left, Barrin lurked among the book shadows of Urza’s library. For his part, the planeswalker sat, silent and brooding, at the blackwood desk.

  How to say this, wondered Barrin, how to say any of this? “There’s more to this, Urza. You know that.”

  “I know,” came the calm response.

  “You shouldn’t allow the truth of Teferi’s words—all that business about genius and madness and paranoia—to distract you from the fact that he was outside the school for more than night loons.”

  “Yes,” agreed Urza wearily. He drew a long, conscious breath, not something he needed to do to live, being a creature of pure energy. Simple acts such as breathing brought him an invaluable connection to the world around him. “There is a Phyrexian in the school. I smell it. It is warded, shielded, wary. Its smell is faint and diffuse, but it is here. A Phyrexian in Tolaria.”

  * * *

  The ruby light of the time-travel portal pulsed around Karn. He saw none of it. His mind’s eye was turned inward, to the confrontation among Malzra, Teferi, Barrin, and Jhoira. The outcome of that episode a week ago still boggled him. Kerrick should have been exposed, Jhoira and Teferi reprimanded and expelled, and the animosity between them become an unbreachable wall. Instead, the castaway had gained access to the academy by way of the secret passage, Jhoira and Teferi had only risen in Malzra’s estimation, and the young prodigy had won respect in the eyes of the woman he always sought to impress. How any of this had transpired, Karn still didn’t understand. He had the distinct sense that much of what had taken place in that strange meeting lay in words unspoken and deeds undone.

  Time slowed and stopped. Malzra and Barrin stood statue-still at their consoles. The whine of the machine reached a peak. Beyond was dead calm. Then the turbines of time reversed and began rolling backward. It was a dreadful instant, and in it Karn always felt utterly alone. With slow deliberation, Malzra and Barrin moved again, their hands withdrawing along the consoles, undoing all they had done and powering down the machine. The light deepened around Karn. This time, the pool did not shift. Malzra had achieved proficiency in spatial displacement—he seemed to have an especial grasp of that arcane endeavor—and so had set it aside to try to push the temporal envelope. With this trial, all the power of the machine was shunted to the temporal vector.

  It began, the dizzy spooling of time. Karn had gotten used to seeing himself withdraw from the pool of light and slump along backward, listen attentively to the two men, and retreat through the door. In the time prior to that, Malzra and Barrin were often busy, breaking down portions of the time machine, removing shiny new components and replacing them with burnt-out hunks of metal and glass. One day, their alterations would reshape this machine so that it could carry Karn back centuries or millennia….

  He let his mind drift. On that journey, he would see his own creation and the dead pile of plates and cogs he had been before. He would pass through the time when Barrin was young, was a baby, was in the body of his mother, was nothing at all. It would be a longer journey back to Malzra’s beginnings, of course. How much longer, Karn could not have guessed. En route, he would see the man being disassembled piece by piece, just like the time machine before him. He would see each component removed from Malzra—his mania, his paranoia, his obsession, his brilliance, his constant abiding regret and misery. Some of it was part of his original design, perhaps. Much of it, though, the worst of it, must have come from suffering, centuries of it.

  The laboratory grew dark. Barrin retreated around it. He drew from each light orb the enchantment that made it shine. He backed out the door, closed it, and locked it. Then came a period of deepening darkness. Karn could almost feel the sun diving silently below the world, a leviathan swimming backward beneath the sea.

  It was twenty-two hours now, the extent of their previous success.

  In the dead of that recoiling night, someone entered the laboratory. It was not Barrin or Malzra. Whoever it was neither cast light spells nor lit the mundane oil tapers around the walls. There were workers assigned to cleaning the labs, but who would clean in the dark? The intruder moved along the wall of plans, studying them as though he could see without light. He sorted briefly among the piles of parts and drew from his pockets glimmering stones to lay among the others.

  A thief.

  Karn almost stepped from the circle of light but remembered Malzra’s instructions—to travel back in time until his frame neared the melting point. He was nowhere near that now, and in moments, the figure was gone. He thought he glimpsed, in the gray wedge of hallway light, golden curls.

  Evening came, in the form of an unnatural dawn. The regression accelerated. Karn waited through the spooling hours as students and tutors jittered through the space, bees in a hive. Morning came. Shadows lengthened and puddled into vast pools of darkness. It was night again.

  Karn’s hide heated until it steamed.

  The thief returned.

  It was forty-six hours into the past. Long enough. Karn stepped from the ruby light. His frame fairly sizzled as the silver plates met the air of the former time. The man who had been opening the door closed it. The silver golem made a rapid and quiet passage to the door and eased it open. He peered out, seeing Kerrick withdraw beyond a corner of the corridor.

  Kerrick. Jhoira had allowed him into the school, and he was stealing from Master Malzra. There would he more powerstones or plans or parts in his pockets. What use did a castaway have for artifact technology? He must
have been delivering these items to someone else. To whom?

  There are evils at the door, Karn, evils beyond anything you can imagine.

  Karn pursued. He would be out of phase and invisible only so long, and his metallic footsteps would soon give him away. If he didn’t catch the thief soon, he never would.

  Kerrick fled down a series of curving corridors. At the end of the snaking route lay the Hall of Artifact Creatures. Perhaps he planned on stealing one of the devices in it or copying its design. He slipped the latch and entered the chamber.

  Karn hurried to catch the door before it swung closed. He eased inward. His quarry darted away among a cluster of dog-headed Yotian warriors. The silver man followed. His frame was already slipping into phase—he was fading into being. He made his way forward under cover of the mechanical menagerie.

  He crouched beside a delver. Its sloping backbone was a vast conveyor designed to bear ores up from mines. Beyond it stood a weathercock topped with a collection of whirring instrumentation—anemometer, thermometer, barometer, cyclonometer. The next beast was wiry and configured like a hunting dog, with long thin legs, a sleek head, and a whiplike tail. Adjacent to it, su-chi lifters crouched in their backward-kneed massiveness. It was unsettling to stalk among these metallic brothers, deactivated and nearly discarded, made to stand like statues in this mausoleum. Karn wondered if he would one day be among them, when Malzra’s mania had turned to some pursuit other than time travel, or when he had made a better probe to do it.

  He was only halfway across the chamber when Kerrick slipped away through the far door, toward Jhoira’s secret passage. Karn could not have followed through the tight duct work, but perhaps he could intercept the thief beyond the wall.

  Turning, Karn headed for a different door, one that led to the courtyard. He slid the bolt, eased it open, and scanned the yard. Beyond lay a hot and windy night. The Glimmer Moon was a cataracted eye burning behind sultry clouds. Karn was hotter still, his frame smoldering with heat stress. He emerged and stole across the courtyard. Malzra might recall him at any moment. Karn reached the western wall and climbed the inner buttresses. He rose to the battlements.

  Beside the turrets, guards stood in lazy clumps. A pair of clockwork watchers perched on adjacent towers, their optics turning in slow fans along the outer wall.

  Deep darkness swathed the wall’s footing. The grate at the end of Jhoira’s passage lay halfway between the mechanical guards, obscured by tall grasses. Metal shifted slightly in the murk. A glint of hair like gold coins showed beneath.

  Above, the guards still lounged, conversing in their quiet knot.

  Kerrick slipped from the grate. He scrambled up the weedy embankment and entered the thick wall of jungle beyond. He had not been seen.

  Silver skin sizzling with heat, Karn rose to crouch on the battlements and hurled himself into the wheeling night air. He dropped and landed with a thud that brought the heads of the guards around. Karn crouched, half-visible in the silvery moonlight. In time, the guards’ attention turned elsewhere. Masked by a rising wind, Karn ambled quietly up into the woods, after Kerrick.

  More noises came, necessarily, ahead—the thrash of leaves, the crackle of sticks, the hiss of dew on red-hot silver. Karn feared to alert Kerrick, but speed was the thing. The thief had moved quickly and soundlessly over Jhoira’s path, taking with him whatever plans or powerstones or artifacts he had stolen.

  Karn followed. His energy stores were taxed by the rapid movements. Heat stress made his joints grind, but anger lent him strength. He topped a rise just as light from the Glimmer Moon lanced through a patch of cloud. Kerrick and two strangers stood beyond. Karn paused, attuning his ears to the whispered conversation.

  The golden-haired young man held out a large roll of paper and pointed, saying, “The passage is here. Bring the full company of negators. I will be sure the way is open. I will be sure the guards on the wall are dead—”

  That was all Karn heard or saw.

  Malzra’s machine reached back through time and laid hold of him—every smoldering mote of his being—and dragged him forward. In angry whips of red energy, the jagging light whirred into a solid cone of radiation. The hillside vanished and with it Kerrick and his conspirators. Only the lurid light remained. Roaring in frustration, Karn waited to reemerge in the time stream. Eventually the fabric of the future formed itself around Karn. The cone whirred once more, winked, and was gone.

  Smoldering and red-hot, Karn stood in the midst of Malzra’s time laboratory. The master looked up from his console. He and Barrin both wore expressions of awe, their eyes tracing the tendrils of smoke that snaked up from the massive metal man and tangled themselves hotly around the time machine. Its own fuselage streamed gray soot and crackled fragilely as it cooled.

  Karn stepped out of the transport circle. It was a breach of protocol: he was supposed to wait until Master Malzra summoned him. He further offended by speaking before being spoken to.

  “There is an invasion coming.”

  Barrin approached and gestured the silver man back. “There is a danger of contamination if you step out of the ring—”

  “What sort of invasion?” Malzra asked from the console.

  “I do not know. I did not see who he spoke to, but he talked of negators—”

  “Phyrexians,” Malzra replied in grim confirmation.

  The mage asked, “Who spoke of negators?”

  “Kerrick,” Karn said. In that moment, he realized he must betray Jhoira’s secret, for the safety of the whole academy and her safety as well. Still, the necessity of the crime made it no easier to commit. “He is a castaway, washed up on shore nearly a year ago. Jhoira found him and saved his life. He has discovered a way into the academy and now has taken floor plans of the academy to whoever is in charge of these negators.”

  Malzra began pacing again, the old fury resurfacing. “They must have a portal to a nearby island or perhaps merely a Sargasso or boat. They knew I would have defenses against portals directly into Tolaria. They are massing somewhere for this attack.”

  “How do you know all this?” Barrin asked Karn.

  “I followed him out of the academy, out of this very room. He took the plans from here,” Karn reported. “Beyond the wall, he met with two figures. They talked of the negators.”

  Malzra was reeling, his face livid. “Damn. Then they know of my time tampering. They could not have chosen a more crucial time to attack.”

  “When did this Kerrick hand off the plans? How far back did you go?”

  “Forty-six hours.”

  “They could be arriving any moment,” Barrin said. “I will alert the guard.” He rushed for the door and down the hall.

  “It’s too late,” Malzra said quietly, breathing for the first time in perhaps hours. He caught a whiff of the air that wafted from the open door. “They are already here.”

  Still sizzling, Karn charged for the door and bolted into the corridor. It was empty and silent, but a smell of oil and metal and death tinged the air. He thought but one thought—Jhoira—and hurled himself down the clattering hall. Malzra called out, but Karn paid no heed. Down a set of stairs, around a long slow bend, and up a rise, he reached the small, round-topped door to Jhoira’s room.

  He tried the handle, but it was locked. He pounded. The wood jumped in its frame. He bellowed a call, but no answer came from within. Lifting a massive foot, Karn kicked the splintering mass inward and, turning sideways, won through.

  There was blood everywhere.

  Jhoira had struggled, that much was clear. Now the struggle was done forever. She lay facedown in the center of the floor, and a red pool extended from her matted hair out to the edges of the room. Her sodden robe rested over a body that was half the size it should have been.

  There were footprints in the blood, iron shod and spike toed. One led into the wardrobe where Jhoira’s rob
es hung. The door was slightly ajar, and from the darkness within peered a feverishly glowing eye.

  Monologue

  He is not mad. I should never have doubted him. The madness is what he knows is coming, is what is already here. It surrounds me. Its fangs sink into me. Its claws rend my guts. I can somehow feel the warmth of them splatter my feet in the moment before I die.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  The creature in the wardrobe flung back the bone-inlaid doors, ripping them from their hinges, and emerged.

  It was a huge thing, in general configuration human, though with its armor implants, protruding bone spikes, and barb-edged legs, it seemed almost an insect. A pair of steel struts extended its lower jaw, which was tipped with glimmering metal tusks that dripped Jhoira’s blood. Its nose had been replaced with another spike, the task of breathing being accomplished through a series of holes bored through the creature’s sternum and directly into its bronchia. Its eyes seemed to glow, bedded deep in mirrored sockets, and its horn-studded brow ridge rose into a sagittal crest that also ran with blood. Sharpened tips of bone protruded from shoulders, elbows, fingertips, knees, and toes.

  The creature rasped, “Disarm and deactivate yourself, and you will be taken intact. Otherwise, you will be destroyed.”

  Karn answered by hurling himself at the thing. It was fast, sliding from beneath his descending bulk with all the speed of a snake. Karn clutched one shoulder, but the creature melted away.

  It was suddenly on his back. Its scissor-fingers jabbed beneath Karn’s headpiece. He remembered how easily Malzra had flung back his skull and removed the powerstone within—

  Karn pivoted and toppled, hoping to smash the bug between the hammer of his frame and the anvil of the floor. The monster shifted again, elusive as water, and landed atop him. A red spray went up from the puddle of blood where Karn landed. Gore sizzled on his hot skin. He brought his fists together, pounding the invader’s sides.