Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  Barrin took her hand and led her away from the spot. “Come. I have something else to show you.”

  On the opposite side of the courtyard stood the memorial to the others slain in the blast. The base of the monument was the old foundation stone of the former academy. Urza had wanted the stone brought to the new school, but Barrin was adamant. He said it should mark the beginning and the end of what came before. The side of the giant block of stone bore both its original inscription—Academy Tolaria, Established 3285 AR—a new inscription—Destroyed 3307 AR. The front of the block bore the names of the dead. On the other side was an inscription in the ancient tongue of Yotia, which meant in translation:

  The souls of a man who dies

  Standing in the teeth of fate

  Are the souls of all men,

  Gone on ahead that we may remain.

  The hollow interior of the stone held all the bones unearthed by Barrin and his team, interred as they lived and died—together.

  The stone was surmounted by a sculpture from the sketchbook of old Darrob—Jhoira’s final companion in the months before Urza’s return. Though his mind had been too fragmented to allow him to communicate well in words, Darrob was an accomplished artist. Perhaps the most common image in his drawings was a seeking figure, gaunt and wind-torn, holding out a lantern and peering toward the future with eyes like twin, hopeless pits in his skull. Barrin had taken the metal remnants of ruined artifact creatures and welded them, one to another, into a statue of that bleak, searching soul, leaning ever against a ceaseless and silent gale.

  Jhoira stared sadly. Barrin stood beside her still holding her hand. Urza took in the whole sight at once. The long caravan behind spread out in a semicircle to either side. All of them—student and scholar, artificer and guard—grew silent as they studied the memorial. Soon, only the wind spoke.

  Barrin stood in that awed hush and felt an emotion swell through him, something that was as much joy as it was despair, something that darkened his eyes and made his lips clamp in a tight line.

  “On behalf of all of us left here after the blast, Master Malzra,” Jhoira said at last. “I want to thank you for this. It is right that this is the first finished building of the new school.”

  “Yes,” replied Urza with a decisive nod, “yes, it is right.”

  * * *

  The new lodge was completed just before the wet drear of winter, and the embers in its two great fireplaces did not go out until spring was warm on the hillsides. Though better than the tents, the accommodations were still tight. The finished fuselage of Urza’s flying war engine took up one corner, sitting atop the rolled animal-skin balloon that was to haul it into the sky. The nighttime floor beyond it was filled to its edges with sleeping mats and the daytime floor with tables of food being prepared and eaten. Books and plans were crammed into cobbled nooks in one corner, and artifact experiments crowded another. So cramped were these accommodations that Jhoira and her food-gatherers chose to sleep and eat on New Tolaria, where hammocks and bolt-head meals seemed almost luxuriant. Aboard the ship, she also had more room to pace the nights away, designing and discarding means of saving Teferi. It was a long, wet winter, and the only saving grace of it was the drive of Urza and Barrin to push forward all of the projects begun.

  By the first breezes of spring, a second building was half completed—a round-walled dormitory with each room opening outward to the forest splendors of Tolaria and inward to a central courtyard. Even without doors on the rooms and shutters on the windows, many of the scholars and students opted to move into the structure and brave the first days of spring. By the middle of that season, most artifact study had migrated to the central courtyard of the dormitory, and there was room for all in the lodge.

  Today the winds were right. Mild and even, they flowed from the east, past the harbored New Tolaria up the very path they had taken back into Tolaria. Breezes coursed over the Giant’s Pate and straight out above the Phyrexian gorge.

  “Ten years have passed in that gorge since our enemies first saw us, our return.” said Urza, sniffing the sea breeze as it breathed through the new academy. “Surely they have not been idle in that time. They are tenfold stronger than they were on that first day and perhaps twice as numerous. Every day we wait gives them another week to prepare. It is time.”

  He spoke these words to Barrin, but everyone who took breakfast in the lodge that morning heard him, and they all knew what he meant.

  “Today, we attack,” Urza said.

  Most of those breakfasts went unfinished. Students rushed to their posts, excited and terrified by what the day might bring.

  Moments after this announcement, crews hoisted the balloon of animal skin and the metal fuselage from the corner and bore them up toward the crest of the Giant’s Pate. Behind them went more workers with massive bellows hooked to specially designed forges meant to heat air. Ropes borrowed from the docked New Tolaria followed in their turn, and crates of dark orbs carried gingerly by pairs of workers.

  “It is crude, I know,” Urza said with chagrin as he sat across from Barrin, who was rapidly filling his mouth with too-hot forkfuls of fried loon eggs, “but until we have full laboratory capacity, I am not willing to cobble together an ornithopter. Besides, this floating behemoth can hold one hundred times the number of powder bombs as an ornithopter.”

  “Even four thousand bombs may not be enough to destroy them. And if any Phyrexians remain in the gorge, we will be in grave danger,” Barrin pointed out, hissing between scalding sips of tea.

  “They are working on something, Barrin, a way to escape,” Urza replied. “They’ve been searching for an escape for a hundred ten years of their time. They mustn’t have the metals or powerstones for anything but a few crude artifact creatures, or they would be sending them out after us. They must be developing some new mutation, some new strain of Phyrexian that can escape their time rift. If one of the four thousand bombs penetrates to their bio-labs and destroys generations of research, we will have bought ourselves another few years.”

  “Yes,” Barrin agreed. He brushed off his hands and rose. “Yes, today is a good day for this. I’ll go brief the flight team.”

  Urza caught the man’s shoulder and shook his head. “No, let me do it. I’ll be the one on board with them.”

  * * *

  By midmorning, the great war machine of skin and metal was fully inflated atop the Giant’s Pate. Its air-bag shone in the sunlight gold and brown, crossed in a thousand places with sewn seams. Beneath, the metal fuselage gleamed, its base spotted with dew from its early morning trek. Strong winds up from the bay tugged and teased the dirigible, and its anchor lines moaned. The ground team worked busily among these ropes as well as the three long tethers that would guide the machine out over the rift. Barrin led the team through checks of the capstans bolted into the stone. Karn was there as well, prepared to lend his titanic strength to haul on the lines.

  Meanwhile, the flight team of five was receiving its final instructions from Master Malzra. One team member was assigned to each vector of the balloon’s movement—an officer of altitude, another of radius, and a third of tangent. Through a system of signals, these officers would instruct the ground team to accomplish the desired movement through a combination of rope trim and wind utilization. As Malzra’s most accomplished artificer, Jhoira was made officer of altitude, in charge of the elaborate onboard forge bellows that provided the machine its lift. The final two fliers, a scholar and her protégé, were the school’s best cartographers. They would lie prone in belly-holds on opposite ends of the device and would each make maps of what they saw. Their work would prove invaluable in determining what sites to bomb, what resources the Phyrexians likely had, and what strategy to use in future strikes against the stronghold. Malzra, the final member of the team, was captain. Receiving information from the mappers, he would send instructions to the flight officers to position
the machine and, at the precise moment, release salvos of incendiary devices.

  “The sixth bay is full, Master Malzra,” reported a dark-haired, young woman, breaking in to Master Malzra’s briefing. “Five hundred powder bombs. Two more bays. and the full complement of four thousand will be loaded.”

  “Good,” Malzra responded. His eyes seemed especially dark this morning in the gleaming sunlight. With a nod, he dismissed the woman and turned back to his anxious team. “Jhoira, remember, at all times we must remain at least a thousand feet above the top of the gorge—at the same height as the Giant’s Pate. Even there some Phyrexian projectiles might be able to reach us. Fifteen hundred feet will be safer. The bomb bays and mapper bays are shielded, but projectile penetration is possible and could cause a chain of explosions that would destroy the machine.”

  The crew had known all these facts before, but their repetition in the shadow of the leaning, leaping device widened eyes and brought uncomfortable gulps.

  “If a projectile pierces the air sac, we will release all bombs and ballast and signal to be brought back. Escape will be impossible until we reach the Giant’s Pate. Any who fall atop the time rift will die immediately. The scarp below the Giant’s Pate is too sheer and littered with fallen trees to allow any safe landing,” Malzra said. He studied the grave young faces arrayed around him. “I hope you have said your good-byes, should we not return. If not, I have brought a messenger.” He indicated a fleet-footed girl, who obligingly tapped a shoulder satchel with quills and parchment. “Avail yourselves in the next moments. We must be aboard once the final bomb bays are full.”

  Four of the five crew members turned quickly to the girl, selecting quills and nibs and beginning to scrawl what might be their last words.

  Only Jhoira stood, resolute and ready. “Karn is here, and we have already spoken,” she said by way of explanation to Malzra. “The only other person I would send a note to is Teferi. Of course, any note to him would burn up before he could read it.”

  Malzra’s eyes narrowed in assessment of the young woman. “You must concentrate on the task at hand, Jhoira.”

  “Teferi never leaves my mind,” she replied. “If I could trade places with him, I would. We needn’t both be forever alone. He saved me once, you know.”

  “I did not. But if you cannot maintain focus, I shall have to find a different officer of altitude—”

  She dropped her gaze. “I’ll fight all the harder, thinking of him.”

  “Good,” he replied. “Let’s take our positions.”

  Malzra laid a hand lightly on her shoulder, directing her with him toward the waiting craft. His touch felt almost searing.

  Jhoira walked beside him.

  Shiny and glowing in the morning, the craft loomed up before them. It bucked slightly under the restless winds. Reaching the machine, Mama drew back a rope slung across the doorway. He gestured inward and gave a gentle bow.

  Jhoira preceded him into the vessel. She crouched as she scuttled down the tight passage. Her feet made small pings on the plate armor below. The bomb bays crowded either side of the passage. Ahead, the tangent-officer’s crawlways cut across the main corridor. The radius-officer would remain in a seat on one side of the craft, monitoring the lengths of rope anchoring them to the Giant’s Pate. Jhoira’s post was in the exact center of the vessel at the juncture between the fuselage and the balloon. She had sight lines in every direction and had memorized the height of the various landmarks. She also had an open shaft downward for a visual check of the ground position. A harness of hemp held her suspended in this empty column of air. The rig was designed to pivot in a complete circle but otherwise provide a stable base. To one side of it was the forge bellows that Jhoira would stoke and tend to keep the machine aloft. To the other side were a set of instruments—anemometers, barometers, compasses, spyglasses…Jhoira climbed into the seat and strapped herself in.

  Malzra, in a similar rig in the belly of the craft, ordered through the speaking tube, “Stoke the forge for liftoff.”

  “Aye.” Jhoira complied, feeling small shudders in the fuselage as the other team members clambered into their positions.

  She faintly heard instructions spoken into tubes that went elsewhere. Beyond the superstructure, anchor lines were one by one drawn loose, and the ground crew took up the three lines that snaked around the capstans.

  “Cast off,” came the order in all the speaking tubes.

  The craft lurched up from the rock. The nervous chitter of metal against stone was gone and the rattling resistance with it. Jhoira pumped the bellows before her, fueling the fire in the black box. A hiss of red air roared up from the forge. The vessel rose farther, heeling away from the stone. Beyond snapping lines and stretched skins, the bright brow of the hill retreated. The folk clustered thickly atop it, toiling at the capstans, were diminished. Soon their faces were only knots of exertion. Then there were no features at all, only bent backs and sinewy arms like extensions of the stout ropes themselves. A shadow-painted face of stone slid by below, descending suddenly into vast distance. An immense bowl of land opened up. The Giant’s Pate became only a ground-down prominence on one edge of the basin. Lines that had once seemed massive now looked all too thin, stretched across the plummeting spaces.

  “Take us up three hundred feet to thirteen hundred,” Malzra’s voice came. “Let’s come in from above, give us time to survey the pit and choose our targets.”

  “Aye,” Jhoira responded.

  She slid back the door to the coal chute, allowing a few more shards into the firebox. A lever spread the black stones across the embers. She pumped repeatedly on the bellows. Hot air jetted into the vast air sac above, and more tepid air spilled from the lips of the balloon. Impatient, the machine rose higher, its lines tugging it in an arc back toward the Giant’s Pate.

  Malzra issued course adjustments, signaled to ground crews by the tangent and radius officers. The tethers slackened, and the machine swooped out on new winds over the black wound of the Phyrexian pit.

  “We’re getting clear visuals,” the map scholar said into her speaking tube. “A main fortification at the center of the cleft, perhaps a hundred yards square, with many turrets and towers, elevated battlements, and scores of heavy ballistae, each targeted on the rim of the gorge.”

  “Thirty-three ballistae, by my count,” the student broke in.

  Jhoira peered down the shaft. She could make out the black form of the main structure and the bristling array of spear throwers atop the towers and rooftops. Even as she watched, the long shafts foreshortened.

  “They are redirecting them at us,” she noted urgently.

  “Maintain altitude,” Malzra ordered. “Remember, they have ten seconds to our every one. They can respond, regroup, and regear quickly.”

  “The main fortress seems to be perched on a rock prominence in the center of a deep lake. I cannot make out the contours of the bottom,” the chief cartographer reported. “I’m surprised by all that water. Fast-time rifts tend to have little water. It looks as though numerous streams empty into the gorge.”

  “Any sign of structures that might be laboratories?” Urza asked. “I’m looking specifically for spawning facilities.”

  “There seem to be fish hatcheries in various places in the lake,” replied the mapper. “I can make out figures moving among the sluices and nets. As to laboratory structures, I could not begin to guess.”

  The assistant cartographer said, “There are various caves and what might be mines in the walls of the gorge—”

  He broke off as the tip-tilted ballistae flickered in sudden, violent motion. Before any of the crew could blink, a flight of thirty-three massive shafts leaped into being twelve hundred feet below. They raced up with preternatural speed, going from being wickedly barbed jags to being large as lightning. They rose to within a hundred feet of the ship’s belly before slowing and curving
off. The ballistae bolts lingered a moment on the winds and then tumbled. Their heavy heads drew them quickly back downward, and they sank toward the temporal envelop where the Phyrexians were trapped. Striking the verge of the fast-time gorge, the bolts accelerated to blinding speed.

  The crack of those thirty-three shafts smashing through rooftops was like manifold thunder. A cheer went up from the flight and the ground crews.

  “Excellent,” Malzra said. “Maintain tangent, radius, and altitude. Stay directly above them. They’ll think twice before sending another salvo. I am dropping the payload of bomb bay five.”

  There came a great ratcheting sound as the doors of the bay swung slowly downward. Out tumbled the powder bombs. Just such devices had been employed with devastating effect at Koilos three millennia before, though they had been dropped in tens on marching troops instead of in hundreds on a stationary fortification. Now the black objects, which seemed merely tumbling stones, rolled slowly in their swarm, gathered speed, and pelted down into the fast-time rift. They struck the envelop en masse, making a distant, ominous patter. Accelerating to the speed of the rift, they struck.

  Light leaped from the cleft. Orange flares in their hundreds illuminated the previously veiled depths. Jagged rooflines and battlements shone in sudden relief. The cartographers scribbled frantically. Then smoke obscured everything in a deeper shroud, and blackness settled again.

  The sound of the attack lagged a moment behind this brief, pure flash, but when it came, the roar was amplified by the basalt fort, the glassy water beneath it, and the rocky cliff faces all around. It seemed a great beast had awakened, furious, from sleep. The noise filled the air for some moments, and then all was silent. Smoke—gray and white and black in curdled rills—bled from the gap.

  “That got their attention,” Jhoira shouted, giving a whoop.

  “Cartographers,” came Malzra’s call, “target acquisition?”