Time Streams

by J. Robert King

* * *

  The tide had turned. Most of the falcons were spent. Many Phyrexian negators remained. Urza’s enchantments were used up. The artifact creatures he had summoned were being dismantled in the claws and fangs of his foes. Over grisly steppes of dead, K’rrik’s nation converged on the center of the arena to slay Urza.

  He could perhaps muster the strength to planeswalk, though the trip would merely take him to some other dark corner of the time rift. There he would die when K’rrik returned. Better to fight now and decimate his forces.

  Suddenly, into the bleeding, black arena came a silver figure—Karn. He advanced in his slow and ceaseless way, casually tearing arms and stingers and tails from his assailants and continuing on. They swarmed him, but he carved a path through them. They piled on him, but he dug his way out.

  An infernal court came with him. Smoke bombs struck among the advancing circle of Phyrexians. Shrapnel sprayed out in a killing ring. More glistening oil mixed with what already painted the seats, and here and there it caught fire.

  Urza gazed up through the rising ring of sulfur smoke. There frozen in time above the gorge was the figure of an ornithopter. It hovered low over the temporal envelop. Urza thought he could make out the shadowy figure of its pilot. Better still, uncoiling in silvery promise from the craft came a slender metal cord. It looped down into the time rent, unwrapped, and swayed within paces of Urza.

  Suddenly, the silver man was there, too. He clasped the strand in one powerful arm and caught up his master in the other.

  How slowly they rose above the shrieking hordes. Thrown scythes and arrows pinged from Karn’s skin or buried themselves in Urza until he could will them outward again. Soon, though, they were beyond reach of any thrown weapons, and then beyond even the few ballistae that were still operational. They took one final glance at the shrinking city of devils, littered with the remains of his falcon engines.

  “I’ve only given them more metal…more powerstones…to fight us,” Urza gasped out grimly.

  Then the coruscating edge of the rift enveloped them.

  Monologue

  Even as I flew them from that vile gorge, I knew this meant full-scale war. We would have ten or twenty years to ready our arsenal. K’rrik would have one or two centuries. But all-out war would certainly come.

  And this time, the battlefield would be all Tolaria.

  —Barrin, Mage Master of Tolaria

  It was a decade later when Malzra called them together in the new Hall of Artifact Creatures.

  This hall was no mausoleum and no mere museum. It was a working laboratory, a robotics infirmary, an assembly line, a military staging ground, and a tutorial hall that offered instruction to humans and artifacts alike. Karn’s touches were apparent throughout the place. No machines were interred here. The exhibits contained only living, active mechanisms, which spent periods of voluntary deactivation on view. The plans of the various inventions were stored in an archive along one end of the huge chamber, available to scholars, students, and artifacts themselves.

  The command center for Malzra’s island defense lay here as well. As a result, the place bustled even in the depths of night. Some of Malzra’s runners and scorpions were stationed here permanently, and a puma reported in each afternoon, but the main body of machine defenders was stationed remotely around the island. A hundred of the troops were posted in fast-time curtains around the academy. They could leap from cover even before an assault could commence. These machines were rotated into and out of service every day, due to the ravages of fast time. Another hundred served in slow-time curtains—the long-term defenses. They were rotated into and out of service twice a year.

  “Between them and our corps of sorcerers, led by Mage Master Barrin, the island’s defenses are complete,” Malzra said as he paced before the wall of schematics. Mechanical and biological troops were laid out in ink and paper in this private corner of the Hall of Artifacts. “Five hundred large-scale artifact creatures, seven hundred and fifty new falcon engines, a fleet of thirty ornithopters, and even a new dirigible.”

  Barrin, Jhoira, Teferi, a handful of senior scholars, and Karn sat in the tutorial space and studied the layouts, though the island’s defensive systems were well known to all of them. Malzra’s presentation was quickly becoming a tedious review.

  “In the past five years, we have repelled five Phyrexian incursions and slain over a thousand negators.”

  “We know,” Jhoira reminded him impatiently. “We were the ones who fought those battles.”

  Malzra turned from his pacing and glanced up, blinking. “There will be more. The creatures will be deadlier and more numerous. With ingenuity, foresight, and grit, the systems we have developed should be enough to repel these attacks. For the time being, the island is safe—”

  “Master Malzra,” Jhoira interrupted, “we know all this.”

  “I hope so, since I am going away,” the man said quietly.

  That brought back the attention of everyone but Barrin. The mage master leaned back in his seat in appraisal, watching the response of the others.

  Jhoira stood, alarm in her voice and on her face. “You’re leaving? Again? What about the Phyrexian gorge? What about concluding all the business of the academy?”

  Barrin rose as well. “He is going on academy business. As to the Phyrexian gorge, Malzra has spent the last half hour reviewing the defenses and our tasks in maintaining and upgrading them.”

  “That’s not what I am talking about,” Jhoira said, crossing arms over her chest. “He has unfinished business—”

  “Our senior student is reminding me of the ‘children of fury,’” Malzra said, cutting through Jhoira’s objections and Barrin’s apologies. “She is reminding me of my pledge to clean up the messes of my past—chief of which would seem to be this time-torn isle and the monsters I brought here—”

  “And the children you brought here—”

  “And,” added Karn quietly, “the machines you brought here—”

  “Thank you,” Malzra said not unkindly to the added comments, “but in the way of young folk, you have underestimated my capacity for pernicious destruction. No, the ills I have done here are nothing next to the ills I have done elsewhere, in the world at large.”

  He walked back to the drawings, reached up with hands that seemed almost to glow in that dark corner of the Hall of Artifacts, and drew down a large pallet. Behind it lay a map of the Phyrexian gorge. Lines of lead detailed the woundlike fissure—dark and narrow, overrun with evil.

  “This is our most up-to-date rendering of the gorge.” With a sword-sized pointer, Malzra gestured at the drawing. “Here is the gladiatorial arena, and here, the palace of K’rrik, and here, the breeding laboratories. In these hovels beside and beneath the water, K’rrik’s minions dwell, nearly a thousand strong, the number growing by ten each day. Unless extinguished, they are fomenting a threat that will one day overrun the whole island.”

  With a swift and fierce gesture, Malzra tore down the map, revealing beneath it a much larger schematic—what looked like a series of nesting dolls in cross section.

  “This is Phyrexia—nine stacked planes, one within another. This top layer is the only one where a human might survive, for a few hours. It is inhabited by dragon engines, some five hundred feet in length, and creatures discarded as useless, creatures that would make our runners and pumas and scorpions seem like mechanical fleas. The dense forests in this region are made of semimetallic plants—poisonous, with razor-edged leaves—that grow in the light of the ceaseless lightning storms that fill the soot-black sky. Each layer downward grows worse—with mutilated priests, demon hordes, witch engines, titanic worms, poison and acid and fire. At the base of it all, there is a figure deeper, darker, more hideous than any Dominaria has ever known.”

  To himself, Barrin whispered a name. None heard that name, but the look of solemn dread on his face made
the others wince.

  “I have awakened this creature. I have drawn him here. That is how deep and ancient my mistakes are. I am responsible for the plague of Tolaria, yes, but also for the gradual collapse of a realm of angels, the long ice age of this world, the destruction of Argoth, and the very introduction of evil into the world. That is the scale of my failures. All of that is what I strive to undo. K’rrik is a nightmare, yes, but one man’s nightmare. K’rrik’s lord is the nightmare of a whole world—a corporate, unconscious, and universal terror. As certainly as K’rrik is arming himself to take over this isle, the creature I will not name is arming himself to take over our whole world.”

  There were no interruptions now, only sober eyes.

  “To fight such a creature and his millions of minions, I need…we need a much different arsenal. I go to begin work on it,” Malzra said.

  At last, Jhoira had regained her voice. “How can you be responsible for all that? How could anyone be responsible for all that? Even if you were responsible, how could you—or any mortal man—hope to undo all those evils? You would have to be Urza Planeswalker to have any hope of—” She broke off mid-sentence, her horrified glare of comprehension bringing paralysis to her whole being.

  “Nevertheless, I must go,” Malzra said, “and I go alone, for now. It is a very dangerous place I am going. In time, if I am successful, I will bring all of you with me to help.”

  Trembling, Jhoira had regained her seat. “You’re not going…you’re not going to Phyrexia.”

  “No,” said Malzra fondly.

  He crossed to Karn and reached out toward his neck. For a moment, the silver man withdrew as if fearing the master would unlatch his skull piece and deactivate him. Instead Malzra lifted a pendant from the golem’s neck and held it out before them all. A lizard-shaped trinket of very hard metal dangled, glinting, in the dark air.

  “Not Phyrexia. I’m going to your homeland, Jhoira. I’m going to Shiv.”

  * * *

  Urza descended. It felt nice not to have to walk. It felt nice to indulge himself in the luxuries of being a planeswalker, to forget about the worrisome business of feigning breath and blinking, of being asked to join in dinners. For him, eating was only a nuisance. Despite his many almost limitless powers—stepping plane to plane with little more than a thought, casting all colors of magic at high levels, living beyond the terrors of ravaging time, seeing to the essence of things, smelling Phyrexian blood at a hundred paces—portraying a convincing human was a task that was at once vexing in its minutiae and exhausting in its limitations. It was a small and tedious job, but a necessary one.

  Except in times like these.

  Urza descended past great rafts of sulfuric cloud and banks of rusty steam. His ceremonial robes shrank inward about him, becoming a suit marked with drake-feather pads to deflect the volcanic heat of the landscape. His sandals transformed into thick leather boots that laced to the knee. Hair braided itself tightly to his head, proof against stray fingers of flame. He needn’t enter a landscape this way, dropping from such a height, but he wanted to survey this land before alighting upon it. And, frankly, he enjoyed the ride.

  Urza had descended once before this way, returning to the ancient, ruined wasteland where he and Mishra had first discovered the Thran site of Koilos. That landscape, blasted by a force that sank continents and brought a millennium of winter to the world, could not have been more tortured than this one.

  Backlit mountains jutted in a devilish ring against the sooty horizon. At their tilted tops, steamy lakes glowed evilly in haloes of brimstone. Twisted piles of rock slumped down the sides of these silent sentinels, and rivers of stone pulsed and glowed like arteries. Among them, black courses formed networks of cool veins. Black and red alike, the rivers plunged into a great steaming ocean of bubbling lava, beside which sat twisted columns of stone like dejected statues. The magma vented gasses in mile high jets, rock-spitting coronas, and foamy, belching chunks that sizzled nastily along the shore.

  Urza descended. He landed atop a knob of stone that overhung this seething sea of fire. Beneath his feet, the rock was maroon and warm and rumpled, like a glob of blood pudding. All around him, the air was hot and thick with noxious fumes. Urza breathed and reminded himself what a good thing it was to be immortal.

  He lifted his gaze. There, above him, magnificent in the dead glare of the place and the roiling gloom of the sky, was what he had come to see: the mana rig.

  It crouched on a massif of basalt, vulturelike on broad talons of stone and cast clay. These talons ended in myriad claws that reached in a webwork down the rock face to the boiling caldera below. The extrusion looked like a gigantic heart, and once it had functioned that way. In ancient times, the tubes that crisscrossed it drew lava up from the boiling pit and pumped it into the immense facility above.

  The rig was a thing to behold. At either end of it, a pair of bowl-shaped heat shields each held aloft a great city. One, tucked back from the ocean of fire, was an ancient monastery, its conic temples and towers stacked in a decorous hive into the sky. The other, hanging out over the brimstone sea, was a colossal forge of Thran design. It was from here that the incredibly hard Thran metal had come. Urza had arrived in Shiv to explore this site. Between the two cities extended a long storage and production facility with high, cathedrallike walls and tapered archways. In that spot, Urza would begin to assemble the weapon that would turn back the Phyrexians forever.

  Jagged script crawled along the base of the bowl-shaped heat shields. Within the structure would be more script, perhaps undisturbed libraries of it. The rooms and halls, the mechanisms and walls themselves would be chronicles in metal and stone of the minds of the builders. He would learn to forge Thran metal, yes, but more, he would plumb secrets of the greatest artificers the world had ever known—secrets that had made them into the very enemies he now faced.

  Urza strode from the warm shoulder of stone, making his way past ropy lines of cooled magma. His gemstone eyes scanned the eroded edges of the volcano. He would have to circle north and east, past a giant steaming fissure and a pair of twin cliffs washed by tides of superheated rock. It would be a five-mile walk to reach a structure one mile away—an uncomfortable walk. He was immune to the destruction of fire and poison but not inured to the pain they would cause.

  To his clothing, Urza imagined a silver-gilt wrap that flung back the red heat assailing him on all sides. The wrap took form, and he felt his other clothes cool and sigh, venting heat. A veil of fine-ringed metal mesh assembled itself before his face. Thus garbed, Urza climbed the difficult mountain passes.

  Of course, he could simply have wished himself into the structure, but to walk a land was to know it. Geography would force him to trace the same paths as generations of others, perhaps as the Thran themselves. He would approach the rig as they had, would see it the way they had. It was much like holding a book upright when learning to read, though it is perfectly possible to read upside down and backward.

  Already the alien script of this place was beginning to resolve into meaningful words. There were trails here—broad, smooth, patient trails. The stone over which they ran was etched with claw marks. Paths led to various prominent points—lookout posts. If they were currently manned, Urza could see no sign of it. Whoever used these trails moved in the open and at a measured pace. They were man-sized creatures. They ruled this place and routinely defended it. Urza lifted the pendant about his neck and stared at the robed lizard dangling there.

  Other creatures frequented the hillsides too. They had made various rank nests beneath tilted stones and within lava tubes. Though hidden from sight, these spots reeked of furtive movements, worry, and quick death. Spies. Some of the sites were burned out from within. The bones of their inhabitants lay in ruin at their entrances in warning to others. Other spots, invisible to mortal eyes but plain to Urza’s all-seeing gaze, were yet occupied. Tiny eyes gleamed, ratlike
and blinking, beneath dark brows of stone.

  Goblins. Urza smiled gently. Poor, wretched monsters, vermin more accursed than rats. Once he had taken hold of the facility, he could bring a few dozen scorpion engines to clear out the infestation.

  Until then, he had a long walk. Unless a goblin emerged to bar his way—and descending from the clouds had probably done much to convince all watchers to merely watch—Urza would not engage any of the beasts.

  He entered a vast defile and wandered the length of it. In blackeyed cave mouths, goblins crouched. They whispered to each other and blinked in resentful appraisal but did not emerge. Urza’s instinctual mind marked their positions while his higher mind analyzed the structure that hung overhead.

  A third part of his psyche roamed a different defile, one glimpsed long years before. In it, two vast armies engaged in a death match. Urza had believed the vision to show the Thran driving the Phyrexians from the world. It took him millennia to realize the Thran had willingly become the Phyrexians, that Mishra had willingly transformed himself too. Only in that bitter realization had Urza begun to regain his sanity, to recognize the enemy in himself.

  Something emerged from the lip of stone at the mouth of the defile. Many somethings. Their rust-red robes melded so naturally with the cliff sides that Urza had not seen them until they were rising from every crevice and stearn vent across the stone. They moved with a silent, sinewy grace. Some slid out on all fours, clutching the ground with four-clawed hands and feet. Others strode out on hind legs and brandished thin, wickedly barbed polearms. They posted themselves in Urza’s path and planted muscular tails behind them. The nearest ones drew back mottled hoods from their heads. They were reptiles, lizard men, with short, toothy snouts, small, bright eyes, and craggy skulls. Their scaly skin gleamed gray-green and red in the fiery light of the caldera.

  Jhoira had called them Viashino.