Time Streams

by J. Robert King

  The line of Tolarian runners darted across the grove, their long legs flashing like swords. Sunlight slanted through the forests to either side. The lead machine coursed along a deer path, mounted a gentle slope, and emerged onto the crest of a summit where it paused. The others loped up alongside it. Hydraulics whined as the machines turned, surveying the plains below.

  At the far end of the fields, Angelwood bristled with moving figures—Phyrexians. Fangs and claws and barbed tails flashed among the tree boles and undergrowth. Skin as pale as bone gleamed sickly. Leathery folds of hide, knobby shoulders, jagged scales, barbed manes, and eyes like slivers of midnight…they were monsters of mutation. Now some of the scavenged bits of metal from fallen falcons and runners and pumas were making their way into the beasts’ bodies. Not merely war armor, not merely body weaponry, these hunks of metal were badges of violent valor. They were kill trophies, recovered from fallen machines.

  On the fields ahead, metal troops gathered to oppose these monsters. Runners in their hundreds flooded onto the belly of the land. Pumas bounded down from treetop glades and stalked through the tall grasses that verged on the Angelwood. A large phalanx of scorpions filled out the center of the army.

  The runners on the summit creaked and moved aside, making room for a new arrival. A large runner, fitted out with saddle and control panel, vaulted into the cleared space. Its rider stood up in the saddle and lifted an olive hand to her brow, peering out across the battle.

  “Karn, get up here,” the rider called over her shoulder.

  A gleaming figure labored up the deer path behind her and stomped to a standstill.

  “I am not built for speed, Jhoira,” the golem said simply.

  Ignoring the comment, Jhoira said, “The main body is coming straight through Angelwood, as the falcon watchers reported. They must have mined their way into the cave complex on the southern edge of the forest. It’s just as well. Angelwood is a mild time slough. While most of our forces stop the advance. we’ll be able to move through the forest eaves and reach the cave mouth where they are emerging. We’ll cut off the advance and then hammer them from the rear.”

  “How will six runners, a young woman, and a silver golem stop an army of Phyrexians?” Karn asked, his metal frame whining in doubt.

  Jhoira flashed a smile over her shoulder and sent her runner bounding down the slope ahead. “You’ll see.”

  The other runners followed. They were fleet-footed, striding like ostriches. Their three-pronged feet scrambled across the shifting stones as they half-slid, half-ran from the hillside into the verges of the forest. They wove their way among great black boles and crashed through damp undergrowth. To one side, the dark dome of the Phyrexian gorge hulked. To the other, Angelwood glowed, infested with hundreds of slow-moving, shambling monsters. Ahead lay a mossy mound of stone. It was a volcanic extrusion, a wound in the earth, riddled with caves. It was through those thousand catacombs that the demonic troops had emerged into the forest.

  Jhoira directed her mount up the ancient rill and into the slow time of Angelwood. She charged up the mounded pile of stone, knowing even then that fiend hordes moved through the caverns beneath her. The other five runners bounded up behind her. Karn toiled in silvery languor at the forest’s edge. Jhoira’s runner leaped up a knob of stone and scrambled across it to the other side. Before them loomed a sheer drop into the mouth of the main cave. Jhoira halted. The five other runners bounded into position beside her, their legs whining in complaint.

  From the mossy cave mouth emerged a steady stream of Phyrexians, ambling four abreast into the hot undergrowth. The monstrous column fed the army massing on the plains. The tide could be stemmed right here.

  Wishing Karn were faster, Jhoira wrangled her mount up beside a leaning boulder and drove the machine against it. Servos realigned, and the main thrusters of the modified runner flexed. The great stone grated heavily in its cradle. It tilted. Sand sifted from beneath it and rained down over the cave mouth. With one more shove, the runner sent the stone over. Jhoira frantically brought her mount back beneath her. It regained its balance on the verge of the cliff.

  The boulder rolled out, tumbled for a moment in massive silence in midair, and smashed down atop a trio of hulking Phyrexians. The stone split like a peeled orange. Golden oil-blood, shattered bone, and pulped muscle mixed with stone shards and sand. The column of monsters behind the site drew reflexively back into the cave. They bunched up at the head of the army. It was now or never.

  Jhoira rode her runner over the edge of the cliff. It came to ground on the oily ruin of the boulder and the beasts. Beside it, five other runners dropped. They landed on wheezing legs and pivoted. Crossbow bolts, sixteen from each runner, pelted into the Phyrexians massed in the cave. The ninety-six shafts struck and stuck in meat and bone. The vanguard of the Phyrexian line crumpled, and those behind withdrew a few paces more. It was enough.

  Jhoira led the charge into the cave with her runner. It clambered over rock shards and the bodies of Phyrexians. The five others followed. She drew the slim sword that rode at her waist and brought it slicing down through the carapaced head of a negator. It gurgled but flung out its massive arms to drag her down. Leaving the blade in the thing’s head, Jhoira vaulted from the saddle. Her mount charged on, out from under her, and swung its scythe blades to engage the fiend. To either side of it, the other runners latched onto their quarry. Ten blades swept out and caught five beasts.

  Jhoira, meanwhile, ran toward the cave mouth. It would take only moments before the self-destruct mechanisms activated….

  The first, biggest blast came from her own mount. It macerated the beast that it held and sent Jhoira’s sword flinging up into the ceiling of the cave. Bits of gore spattered the walls. The blast threw Jhoira free. She crashed among dewy leaves as the other five bombs ignited.

  Fire and smoke, bone and stone, waves of belching sulfur…with a great, roaring rumble, the top of the cave went to pieces. It collapsed, slowly and magnificently, across the army of fiends, mashing them. Rubble sealed the passageway, mortaring it with glistening oil. The shattered hillside slumped downward in a vast landslide, and like a figure out of a dream, the silver man solemnly rode that slide down to ground.

  He clambered from among the tumbled stones and charged to Jhoira’s side, drawing her up in concern. “Are you all right?’

  The woman smiled tightly, bloody scrapes across her face. “Well, we sealed off the advance.”

  Karn raised his head and stared warily into the forest.

  Many of the lumbering monsters that had emerged ahead of the blast had turned at the sound of it. They converged in a fierce semi-circle on the silver man and his friend.

  “Yes, we sealed off the advance. Now we can attack them from behind like you said.”

  Jhoira staggered weakly to her feet and saw the approaching hordes. She sighed in resignation. “I don’t imagine you could pick me up and outrun them—”

  “I’m not built for speed,” Karn answered sensibly.

  A solemn nod was Jhoira’s reply. “We didn’t get rid of K’rrik, you know.”

  Karn seemed to consider. “We fought. That is all anyone could expect.”

  Jhoira looked up sadly at the golem and saw, reflected in his silvery hide, the hundred fiends tightening their circle. Some had teeth as long as swords. Others clawed their way forward on limbs as gnarled, strong, and numerous as mangrove roots. Lupine heads and barbed hackles, coiled stingers and bone-studded jaws, naked haunches and cloven hooves, pulsing poison sacs and pulsing brain sacs….

  “It has been a pleasure being your friend, Jhoira of the Ghitu,” Karn said with elaborate solemnity.

  She smiled brightly. “If I have to die—and all of us have to—I am glad I die beside you.”

  With an ululating cry, the monsters rushed in upon the pair. A forest of fangs and claws and stingers converged. Karn shield
ed Jhoira with his silver bulk.

  There was only shrieking and blood and limbs flung outward to thrash the trees. Amid talons and teeth came blue flares of magic. Some coalesced into dagger swarms that buzzed like bees through the melee. Others spattered eyes and woke in them cannibal rage. Still others melted tooth and bone into chalky pools. Growls and gurgling. Blood and burning. Death and dismemberment. In moments, the furious carnage spent itself.

  The forest grew still again.

  Karn turned, confused. Jhoira emerged from the haven of his arms. There was someone else beside them suddenly, a blue-robed man with gray-brown hair. He brushed his hands together as though he had just closed a rather dusty door and then withdrew his fingers into sleeves designed for spell battle.

  “Ah, here you are,” Barrin said matter-of-factly. “The main battle is going well. When I heard the explosion here, I thought it must have been the work of you two.”

  Jhoira breathlessly surveyed the killing grounds. The forest reeked like an abattoir. “The fiends. You killed them. You cast a spell.”

  “A series of sorceries,” Barrin replied. “Some of my best summonations and enchantments. They were well spent, though, and I can get them back. That’s what libraries are for. I couldn’t have gotten you two back.”

  “Gotten us b-back…” Jhoira repeated absently.

  “Urza needs you in Shiv,” Barrin said.

  The master had been gone for a few months, and in the escalating Phyrexian war, Jhoira and Karn hadn’t had much time to wonder about the success of the mission for Thran metal.

  “I summoned him to aid with the battle—one of the reasons it is going well. Anyway, he says he’s struck a deal with the Viashino. He needs you to be a liaison with them. He needs you and Teferi and a number of other students and scholars to help run things with the lizard men. I will stay behind with most of the academy. We will carry on this war until you return.”

  “And me?” Karn asked. “Does he need me?”

  “Yes,” Barrin said, his expression darkening. “Yes, Karn, he needs you perhaps most of all.”

  * * *

  “No, the gray lever, not the red one,” shouted Jhoira down the line of steaming pipe-work. Remembering herself, she repeated the instruction in Viashino.

  Her dialect of the language was, of course, Ghitu and therefore somewhat difficult for the lizard men to understand. Even so, after half a year of working daily with lizard men, Jhoira was the only human who could speak Viashino at all. Urza couldn’t exactly be called human. Just now, the creatures she spoke to cast quizzical looks up the foggy line of pipes.

  “Gray, you know—the color of your blood. Red is the color of mine.” Jhoira was almost frustrated enough to bite her own hand to demonstrate what she meant.

  One of the younger lizards, a Diago Deerv, gestured emphatically at the appropriate lever. The scaly imbecile to his left grabbed the red lever anyway. Diago dealt a slap of his webbed hand—a bit of correction used by many members of Viashino society—reached over, himself, and drew the right lever.

  A blast of steam came from the pipe stack behind Jhoira, venting into the black heights of the cavernous room. The stench of sulfur and superheated rock permeated the place. It boiled across the unseen vault, jiggling loose the condensation clinging there.

  Hot drops pelted across her sweating back. Jhoira drew up a cloak of drake feathers, standard issue for workers in the lava pits. The feathers were proof against even the hottest temperatures, and yet they wicked sweat and heat away from the skin. Beneath the cloak, she wore only a loose, light shift of linen and similarly loose pantaloons. Her feet were shod with drake-feather slippers, and she had matching gloves in case she needed to handle any of the red-hot controls.

  The vitreous pipes began to glow as lava came pumping up them. The heat of the chamber redoubled. In a few minutes, it would be a veritable oven.

  “Let’s get up to the blast furnaces,” Jhoira instructed.

  The scales of the lizard men prickled from faces, arms, and tails, struggling to bleed heat into the air. Wide-eyed and panting, the Viashino nodded their eagerness. It was one gesture they had picked up from their human colleagues.

  “Good. Follow me.”

  Climbing over a jumble of dark tubes, unused and cracked from centuries of neglect, Jhoira led her contingent to the wooden ladder. Its iron rails would be too hot to touch, and even the wood was bearable only with drake-feather gloves. Jhoira ascended. Diago Deerv followed. His comrades came in his wake. Jhoira reached the hatch above, turned the thick metal wheel that disengaged the locking mechanism, and flung back the hasp. Hot air roared up around her as she clambered from the shaft.

  Those in the chamber above—a bright, airy, space filled with giant, fat-walled furnaces and great slag buckets—turned to watch the sooty and sweating creatures emerge from their infernal underworld.

  Among the workers in the furnace room was Teferi. The young man had traded impish games for a keen forcefulness of will and a relentless search for knowledge. Tall, lean, and wiry, Teferi was handsome and clear-eyed. His dark skin was yet unmarked by the care wrinkles of age, but his brown eyes held an amazingly intense focus. Though chronologically he was one-third Jhoira’s age, they seemed physical as well as metaphysical twins now.

  “Jhoira,” he said, approaching her. The mage and the artificer were equal partners in this endeavor, overseeing the full deployment of the mana rig. “How many conduits do you have working now?”

  “Twenty-five, if this one holds,” Jhoira responded.

  “That should be enough to fire all five furnaces,” Teferi noted with approval. He flashed her an appreciative and dazzling smile.

  “It’s only a tenth of the major pipe ways,” Jhoira replied. “I still can’t get it out of my head there should be a lot more to this facility than making metal. The power this place could draw from the volcano would be sufficient to run fifty furnaces, but there aren’t fifty here. They must have used the power for something else.”

  Teferi moved in close to her, and a hint of his old capriciousness glinted in his eyes. He was still arrogant enough to use magic to enhance the twinkle in his eyes.

  “I tell you, the answer lies in the taboo halls. I’ve been begging you for months to explore the place with me—”

  “And jeopardize the alliance?” Jhoira hissed.

  “As long as the drake Gherridarigaaz lives, the alliance will not be broken,” Teferi said. “Come on. Say you’ll come with me.”

  Jhoira sighed in resignation. “Once the metal works are fully operational. Until then, we have no time for messing around.”

  “That could be years,” Teferi pressed.

  “Well, make years into months, and you won’t have to wait so long.”

  * * *

  The approach to Gherridarigaaz’s aerie was forbidding in the extreme. The lands in a ten-mile radius were goblin territory, and in it the voracious creatures were as thick as maggots on a carcass. In a two-mile radius, the dragon’s nest was surrounded by a boiling sea of lava. The aerie itself perched atop a jagged pinnacle of stone that stood like a crooked finger in the center of the caldera. Other tumbled monoliths lay in the bubbling basin. They were spaced just far enough apart that no terrestrial creature in its right mind would try jumping stone to stone to reach the nest.

  Neither Urza nor Karn were known for being in their right minds. Neither were they exactly terrestrial. They stood silently on the rocky verge of the magma pit. They had been in Shiv for over a year and still felt they walked the surface of an alien world. The audible shuffling of goblin feet, furtive and feral, in the wastelands behind them only added to the impression.

  Urza stared for some time at the distant drake’s nest, a huge encrustation of tree boughs woven together with black pitch and fired clay. He stooped, picked up a large stone, and hurled it with incredible force across the s
urface of the caldera. The stone skipped twelve times before melting away into nothing.

  “We are, each of us, capable of leaping stone to stone to get there.” Urza said idly.

  “Yes,” Karn replied.

  Urza nodded, his nostrils flaring. Any living creature would have been poisoned by the gasses venting in twisted columns past them.

  “I could cast a sorcery allowing us to lava-walk or to fly.”

  “Yes,” Karn said.

  Urza stooped to lift another stone, but thought better of it and squatted for some time, watching ghosts of steam promenade across the lava.

  “I could conjure my own fire drakes and send them to slay this one.”

  “Yes,” Karn said laconically. “You are Urza Planeswalker. You can do anything. You can wish us into the nest and wish Gherridarigaaz from existence. You can do anything you want. You are Urza Planeswalker.”

  It was Urza’s turn to be laconic. “Yes.”

  Karn turned toward the scintillating man. “You can do anything, so why did you trade me away for an army of Thran-metal artifacts?”

  The planeswalker’s eyes hardened. “You answer your own question. Why wouldn’t I trade one silver golem for an army of Thran-metal men? There is a great war coming. We must all make sacrifices.”

  “But you sacrifice me.”

  He had hardly spoken the words when, with a sudden, vertiginous whirl of movement, the cliff top melted away. The scarlet sea and sooty sky disappeared as well.

  Karn stood still. Urza was planeswalking them into the aerie. A human could survive that trip only by being carried in a protective embolism, or turned to stone, or made a flat creature of immutable geometry. Karn merely rode as he was. Urza had sent him on more troubling journeys.

  They arrived. The sooty sky remained above. The rest of the world was replaced by a vast, woven bowl of wood and clay, the lair of the fire drake. One corner was filled with a midden of bones, bleached and bare in the brimstone breezes. Beside it lay the half-eaten hulk of a small whale. It had apparently been plucked from the water like a herring caught by a kingfisher. The reek of the rotting sea creature was borne outward on clouds of flies. It mixed with the stench of sulfur and another smell—savage and salty and keen-edged like wood smoke—