Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Jhoira watched the faces of Malzra, Barrin, Karn, and the older students and scholars, looking for recognition. They stared bleakly for some time, their minds unraveling the mystery before them.

  At last, Karn breathed the name: “Teferi.”

  “Yes. He was caught in flames when the blast occurred. Only a moment of time has passed for him in these ten years. When I discovered him here seven years ago, I fetched a heavy cloak, soaked it in water, and flung it into the air to engulf him. In another few years—a split second of his time—he will be wrapped in it, his burning robes extinguished. Perhaps a few years later, he will tumble to the ground. Perhaps in ten years, he will see the New Tolaria and strive to reach it. Then, of course, he will be torn to pieces.” Her face hardened. She gnawed at one lip. “That damned cloak is all I can do for him. I’ve studied the time fissure, performed experiments, tried everything I could imagine, but he’s caught and cannot be saved.”

  Stunned silence followed this revelation. Fifty sets of eyes traced out the doomed figure, frozen in fire, unreachable, but only an arm’s length away.

  At last, Malzra spoke words that comforted them all. “The first area of study for our new academy will be techniques to rescue this young man.”

  Jhoira wore a grim expression as she turned away. She led onward at a stern pace. The young students, some only children of twelve or thirteen, followed close behind. Older marchers paused at Teferi’s Shrine, as some were already calling it. Master Malzra, Barrin, and Karn themselves brought up the rear of the procession.

  The marchers felt their sunken spirits and slowed hearts rise again as they climbed the headlands on the southern verge of the ruins. Beyond lay a wide, level place covered with tall, dry grass. The parched blades made a familiar and soothing noise in the warm afternoon winds.

  Despite Jhoira’s steady pace, evening deepened across the hilltop by the time Malzra, Barrin, and Karn reached the summit. There the master looked about with his piercing eyes. He marked the closeness of Old Tolaria, of the Curtains of Eternity, and beyond it the Phyrexian canyon where his foes, even then, multiplied.

  “You were right, Jhoira,” he said simply. “This is just the place.” He walked to the pack of one of his young, tired hikers, drew a tent spike from the gear stowed there, and, with the sheer force of his hand, drove it deep in the dry ground. “Just here, we will build our new academy.”

  Monologue

  I was bone-weary and soul-weary that first night when, by lantern light, we erected our tent city. We cleared fire circles, set stones to hem them in, gathered firewood and water for the evening, and sat down to dried meat, press-bread, and a little hot broth. I had been the one all along telling Urza he must return to Tolaria, must rectify his past mistakes and embrace the children of fury. But in glimpsing those children for the first time—whether the tribal folk of the Hive, the unseeable Phyrexian hordes in the gorge, or the ghosts of the dead that almost palpably haunt the ruins of the academy—I fear I was perhaps wrong.

  Forgetting the past, fleeing the death it holds, shrugging off the wounds—this is the way mortals live. Yesterdays are supposed to remain dead. It is the gift of time. Each new generation is supposed to be born ignorant of the horrors that came before. How else can any of us live?

  And, yet, perhaps I was right after all. Urza is not mortal. He cannot afford to forget, any more than time can afford to forget. The world is not large enough to let him go from mistake to mistake, leaving destruction in his path. He has to clean up after himself. In a way, his mania to return in time was a desire to remember, to own up to the past. He likely would have come to this conclusion with or without me. Of course, now that Urza has decided, we might as well assist his every endeavor, for he won’t change his mind for another millennium or so.

  I only hope, after all this temporal fiddling, I have the blessing of dying after a normal human span—not before and certainly not after.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  The heavy wooden case Malzra had borne on his back turned out to be an elaborate desk. He unfolded it next morning to the surprise and delight of the breakfasting students. The surface of the thing was smooth ebony composed of various panels. Each black wood panel slid out of the main compartments on hidden joints and fused seamlessly with its counterparts. The end result was an extensive, smooth tabletop, as wide as Malzra’s arm span and twice as long. The work surface rested on cabinets with many small drawers and compartments. By some ingenious trick, the whole thing—cabinets and drawers and all—had collapsed easily into a compact box. More marvelous than even these capacities: no sooner was the desk fully set up, than Malzra drew open drawer after drawer, producing styluses, spanners, rule rods, compasses, protractors, a set of angle edges, and roll after roll of plans. He smoothed the last down atop the workspace, struggling to get them to lie flat until Barrin set a stone on each comer of the sheets.

  Barrin and Malzra stepped back, allowing the gathering crowd of students to look on grand vistas in lead and ink. There was a soaring central hall, with room to seat four hundred students and scholars, a series of balconies overlooking the grand space, and an empyrean vault open on one side to show the dense forest canopy. There were fanciful towers, rounded and lean like exotic gourds, some topped with guard stations, others with fire towers, and others still with observatories that bristled with optical paraphernalia. The outer wall was an enormous bulwark of earth and stone, with a notable absence of sewage grates and duct work. Long, curved corridors, great hanks of jeweled-glass windows, an aviary, aerial docks, a gymnasium, a large, rock-lined pond, gardens and groves. The dormitories provided private rooms that were bright and open—no longer the cells of the previous prison. Every aspect of the design was marked with imaginative ornamentation—octopodal figures, fantastical sea prawns, Tolarian drake-head appointments, four-winds motifs, devices drawn from the naval architecture of New Tolaria, gulls and kingfishers, anvil-headed storm clouds, tridents and coral and nautilus shells.

  This was not the stern infirmary of the previous Tolaria. This was not a prison. Asceticism had given way to aestheticism, strict artifice to fanciful art.

  “Of course,” Malzra said to no one and everyone at once, “we will have to move the eastern gate from there—” he pointed to a place on the plans, and the corresponding location on the topography before them, “—to there, allowing easier access to the safe path and Angelwood beyond.”

  Barrin assessed his friend. “I’m glad to see you’ve not turned the school into a fortification after seeing the Phyrexian rift.”

  Malzra smiled tightly, drawing a new plan to the fore. “They are the ones to be imprisoned, not us. Look, here. This is the first building. It will be everything to us to start with—great hall and sleeping quarters and tutorial space. In time it will be my private lab.” He indicated a large lodge with walls of stone rubble and a peaked roof held up by tree boles felled and lashed together. According to the schematics, the initial roof would be thatch, but in time it could be converted to shake and eventually to slate. “It will stand there, on that rocky ridge at the edge of the tent city. We start building it today.”

  Breakfasts were forgotten in the ink-and-parchment visions of a bold, bright future. The whole encampment gathered around to hear their assignments.

  One ensign and his contingent were given guard of the camp, charged with setting up posts, building palisades, organizing a day-and-night patrol schedule, and assembling an arsenal. The guard group’s duties would include the investigation and marking of temporal danger zones, as well as exploration into techniques for rescuing Teferi from his pillar of frozen time.

  Another ensign and her team were sent out to thoroughly survey the ruins of the old academy, cataloguing whatever could be salvaged—block and brick, wood and steel, furnishings and artifacts. She was also charged with making recommendations for a site and structure that would be a memorial to
the students and scholars who had died in the blast. Barrin volunteered to join this group, as he was keenly interested in the proper disposition of any remains the group might encounter.

  A third group—called the food commission—was sent out with Jhoira. They sought glades where they could set rabbit snares, ponds in which to string lines for fish, and verdant fields for planting. Malzra urged Jhoira to make the best use of mild fast-time areas, where hares and fish and crops could mature in weeks instead of months.

  Another team took up picks, shovels, levels, stakes, and twine. They began clearing the location of the new lodge and excavating a foundation per Malzra’s plans and elevations. Karn accompanied this group, intent on lending his strength to the earth-moving tasks.

  The last group accompanied Malzra himself on a return trip to the Giant’s Pate. There they initiated further study of the Phyrexian gorge and suggested strategies and devices for the extermination of their century-old foes. Malzra spoke of an ancient and minute device, a tiny crystal attuned to the Glimmer Moon and suspended like a lodestone in a drop of water. When the moon rose, the crystals were drawn upright and emitted a high-pitched tone that dismantled Phyrexian blood, breaking glistening oil to its component parts. By mass-producing these “spiders,” as he called them, and introducing them into the gorge though one of the rivers that flowed into it, they could hope to slay the whole army of Phyrexians before any of them knew what had happened.

  With the quiet and determined efficiency of refugee ants digging a new hill, Malzra’s company marched out across the strange and hostile hillsides of Old Tolaria. The tents that had sheltered them the night before fluttered, empty and clean, in the hot, shifting air of summer. The columns of fire that had held up the black vault of night now smoldered in gray slumber. There was a sense of expectant hope in the air. Around axe-wielding arms and bent shoulders and shovel-prodding feet, there arose the airy vision of a new academy taking shape all around them.

  * * *

  As the last sharpened logs were set in place about the tent camp and the foundations of the new lodge, a cool breeze moved through the surrounding forest. The summer’s labors were done. Autumn had arrived. Workers paused. They breathed deeply, straightened their tired backs, and lifted grimy, streaming faces toward the sun. Life at sea had been no idle existence for the crew of New Tolaria, but at least it had not held the daily back breaking task of wrestling the earth—piercing it, digging it, lifting it, hauling it, dumping it, compacting it. The grit at sea had been largely salt, which washed easily enough away and provided the skin certain natural protections against insects. This grit was good, black earth. It coated everything evenly, never completely washed away, and smudged the books and scrolls that the scholars and students studied in their off-hours. They were a brawny, tanned, industrious lot after their long months of labor, starting to look like Jhoira, like natives of the island.

  The cool breeze riffled tents where students rested or studied. It fanned flames where a midday meal of fresh-water fish sizzled. It kicked up dust from wheeled litters that dragged dressed tree boles into place for the lodge’s nearly complete vault. It rattled the roll of animal skins that would, when complete, become a great dirigible to lift Malzra’s Phyrexian war machine. The breezes seemed all too eager to bear the dismantled machine into the air. Most of all, the refreshing wind buoyed heat-weary workers, promising of cooler days and more rain.

  Barrin drank in the air as he marched up the hill that led into the palisades. Autumn would mean tall, dry grasses, ready to be scythed and sheaved and draped into a roof for the lodge. The place would be warmer and drier than the tents and more resistant to mosquitoes and snakes. The prospects of real beds and real pallets was enticing, too.

  Even so, Barrin’s uplifted mood came not from hopes of future comfort but from the completion of long labors. The ruins were fully scavenged. Every bit of useable stone had been hauled to the site of the new academy, many of the rougher pieces already incorporated in the mortared lower walls of the lodge. Barrin’s team had also discovered the wreck of the Hall of Artifact Creatures and rescued from that shattered place many operable pieces of machinery. These Urza had used to construct five su-chi lifters, units designed to perform the heavy tasks of the construction projects.

  The most important result of these scavenging efforts culminated today, though, and Barrin had climbed into the encampment to gather Urza, Karn, Jhoira, and any others not immediately employed to come see the result.

  “It’s finished,” Barrin said simply, brushing dust from his hands as he stood before Urza.

  The planeswalker glanced up distractedly from the plans for his war machine, nodded, and gestured to a pair of students to remove the face plate they had just attached to the metal framework. One of the young men gave him a look of consternation, to which Urza replied sternly, “We have to deepen the belly of that piece or the incendiary devices won’t slide smoothly from the payload chamber. They might get jammed, they might explode within the superstructure.

  “Now do it!”

  As the students set to work, Barrin repeated, “It’s finished. I’d like you to come see it.”

  Urza turned back toward his plans, which showed a fuselage of thinly tapped metal. The device, shaped like a horseshoe crab, hung beneath a great sack of heated gasses.

  “I’m in the middle of something. Can’t it wait? Schedule a formal ceremony. I’ll attend.”

  Barrin’s eyes hardened slightly. “Two hundred students and scholars died in that blast, Urza. Another twenty have worked long and hard among the ghosts of those two hundred, trying to find a way to honor them and remember them. If you won’t come for my sake, come for theirs.”

  “While you are mucking about in the past,” Urza snapped, flinging a hand out toward the half-built war machine, “I have been devising a means to save the future. Just this morning we learned why the spiders didn’t work—not enough moonlight in the cleft to activate them. This is our only hope. I have to complete this machine, or your monument might stand for all of us. I’m thinking about our future.”

  In a gesture he rarely made, Barrin took hold of the master’s arm. He felt the hot surge of power beneath the man’s skin. “Come see the memorial. It is why we are working for the future.”

  Urza took one more exasperated look at the fuselage, where the students swore quietly over their turning wrenches. He waved them off.

  “Come along, you two. Set those tools aside, and come along. We are going to look into the past.”

  They stared at him for one uncertain instant before his stormy brows convinced them to drop their wrenches in the dirt and rise to follow.

  Urza issued a similar command to all the students and scholars he and Barrin passed on their way out of the encampment. Scores of tasks were abandoned half finished, and the folk of Tolaria flocked up behind their two masters. They had specialized in those long, hot months of summer, the guards different in dress and demeanor from the gardeners and hunters, who were different in turn from the artificers working on Urza’s war machine, and so forth. In that spontaneous parade down into the time-slough of Old Tolaria, all the scholars and students were one again, as on the day they had marched into the island. Jokes and laughter flowed out in the stern-faced master’s wake, the sound of it not deadened or dragged down by the steady decrescendo of time.

  Barrin wondered about this happy spirit. He and his scavengers had always adopted a solemn demeanor among the ruins, not that much ruin remained. Despite the short days in that slow-time spot—Barrin and his crew had only ten hours of sunlight during the sixteen-hour summer days—they had been diligent. The foundations of most of the buildings were still there, rectilinear crazings of stone moving through the hard-packed earth. Rainwater had gathered in the exposed basements of a number of buildings. Grasses had volunteered in many of the cleared areas. A few short walls remained intact, but most of the structures that had
survived had been reverently pulled down. The cut stones were carefully sorted and stacked for use in the new buildings. Even the field-stone rubble lay in piles in the new camp. As a result, the old school now seemed almost a parkland, with quiet meadows, wandering paths of stone, and placid pools. The ruins were ruins no longer. Barrin’s mood, too, lifted as he felt the final leveling of the temporal descent, and the parade wound its way into the heart of the place.

  A plaza had been laid, dressed stones set into an even mosaic between the two stunning sights there. On one side was Teferi, mouth still gaping and eyes still screwed tight, the eternal flames of his robes enveloping him, and the wet cloak descended only a finger’s-breadth. The leaning corner of a building remained behind Teferi, helping to shield him from the intense sunlight.

  As Urza and Barrin paused beside this living shrine, Jhoira emerged from the throng. She stepped up beside them and stared bleakly at her imprisoned friend.

  “He is trapped, like me. Alone. Abandoned. Neither dead nor alive.”

  “We’ll save him, Jhoira,” Barrin assured. “We’ll find a way.

  “He can’t reach us. We can’t reach him.” Her voice held desperate anger. “If he tries to emerge, he will die.”

  “Yes. We must save him before then,” Barrin replied.

  “Every night I wrack my brain. I can’t sleep, thinking about him. There must be a way,” she insisted. A trembling hand traced across her jaw.